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The BulletinJanuary 13, 2025

What will be making headlines in 2025?

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(Getty Images)

Treaty issues will dominate the first six months, but that’s not all, writes Stewart Sowman-Lund in the first Bulletin of 2025.

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Happy new year

Welcome back and happy new year to all of you. I hope you managed to have a peaceful summer break. I spent as much time as I could in the sun and with my puppy, often at the same time, and am ready to dive back into the headlines with you every morning. Today, we’re going to take a little look at some of the issues we can expect to see a lot more of over the year ahead. If you’d like some more outlandish predictions for 2025, you can find our January 1 piece here – it includes my (quite) tongue-in-cheek suggestion Winston Peters may choose not to give up the deputy prime minister’s role to David Seymour and Toby Manhire’s slightly more realistic call that incoming US president Donald Trump could make his way to New Zealand in the next 12 months. You can listen to Toby expand on that claim in a special Gone by Lunchtime here.

Speaking of Trump and New Zealand, Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva has an interesting piece looking at how our government may choose to navigate increasingly complex international issues this year.

Treaty issues to dominate first half of 2025

Unsurprisingly, race relations are going to dominate the first few months of the political year. As Toby Manhire reported last week, submissions on the controversial treaty principles bill briefly closed due to technical issues and were extended through until tomorrow afternoon. That will have pleased both sides of the debate, each seeking to prove they have the support of the general public. Ahead of the extension, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told Newstalk ZB that the technical disruption to the process had broken peoples’ “trust and confidence” in the system.

There’s still a lot of water to flow under the bridge. While the deadline for submissions is now tomorrow, those submissions still need to be heard – many of them in person. This will overlap with the traditional start of the political year: commemorations at both Rātana and Waitangi. The PM, Christopher Luxon, has already he confirmed he will not be in attendance at the latter. The Guardian’s Eva Corlett reports that record crowds are expected to gather at the treaty grounds next month.

But it’s not just the treaty bill. As Daniel Perese reported for Te Ao Māori News, consultation will also close tonight on another proposed bill that has flown somewhat under the radar: the Regulation Standards Bill. Critics claim it “threatens to entrench a framework that marginalises Māori voices and undermines Aotearoa’s founding partnership”.

Coalition tensions

It felt at times as though the treaty bill threatened to break apart the coalition in 2024. Expect those tensions to be even heightened over the next 12 months. For starters, as aforementioned, there will be a change in deputy prime minister in May. In reality, it shouldn’t mean much, but given it also signals the half way point of the government’s term in office it also means we’ll just be 18 months away from the next election. It opens up a clearer pathway to campaigning for Winston Peters, who told The Post he intended to “hit the ground running” from May. David Seymour and Act will also be jockeying for political capital. Late last year, reported RNZ’s Anneke Smith, Seymour was already arguing that his party had wielded “disproportionate” influence in government.

In an illuminating report for the Herald last year (paywalled), Claire Trevett reported on the state of the relationships between the three major party leaders. The PM, it was said, had developed a positive working relationship with Winston Peters since taking office, while his relationship with Seymour was described by one insider as “transactional”.

Local politics back in the spotlight

If you felt like you were missing something in 2024, it was probably an election. Aside from a mayoral race in Tauranga and the largely ignored Entrust election in Auckland, we weren’t given any opportunities to head to a polling booth last year. Bring on the local elections, then. In the main centres, one would think that Auckland’s Wayne Brown is likely to have a pretty clear run at this point, though we’re yet to learn whether any high profile challengers will step forward. TVNZ’s Q+A noted that the five local elections over the past 14 years of the super city have not featured an incumbent losing, only retiring.

The race with the most interest is likely to be Wellington. Mayor Tory Whanau has had a troubled time in office, with council facing the wrath of the government over the failure to approve an annual budget. In better news for the council, Whanau has welcomed the sale of the city’s Reading Cinema complex, which comes ahead of plans to revitalise Courtney Place.

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The BulletinDecember 20, 2024

The Bulletin wrapped, 2024

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The Bulletin editor Stewart Sowman-Lund reflects on the year – what you were reading and what you engaged with the most – and looks ahead to 2025.

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We’ve made it. Welcome to the final edition of The Bulletin for 2024. It has been a very long year. This morning, we’re going to take a look back at the biggest moments from this newsletter over the past 12 months – the most read pieces, the most engaged with, the topics that got the most attention. And then we’ll take a little dive into what we might be seeing more of in 2025. Hopefully we can end on a positive note, but who knows – it’s been one of those years. I’ll say up top that I’ve loved writing this newsletter every morning and appreciate all 40,000+ of you that subscribe. Thank you!

The five biggest Bulletins of 2024

While I’m proud to say that every edition of The Bulletin is well read, some pieces shoot well above the rest. The five biggest Bulletins of the year were:

The most engaged with Bulletins

Likes and comments aren’t everything, but they do give an indication of the topics of most interest (or they’re just pointing out typos and grammatical errors, also appreciated). Here are the five most engaged with Bulletins on Substack.

The biggest topics

Obviously, The Bulletin largely covers major political news as they tend to dominate the news cycle and, by design, this newsletter is a wrap of what’s making headlines. But a few key topics emerged as the most engaged with across 2024.

Healthcare: We routinely returned to the subject of health, from leaked memos, to widespread redundancies, and the $1.4bn turnaround job promised by the coalition government. There was the end of the Covid inquiry, fears of a new bird flu epidemic, and questions over why money was being given to Mike King over other mental health support providers.

The state of the nation: As noted above, you were really interested in how Labour was rebuilding itself ahead of the next election. But we also spent time looking at the GreensAct, and the late surge of Te Pāti Māori in the polls. Not to mention, local councils got a show too – from a scrapped reform of local government to the PM’s fiery directive to stop focusing on “nice to haves”.

Time for some original reporting: I’ve really enjoyed having the chance to weave some original reporting into The Bulletin this year, and the stats show you’ve enjoyed it too. There was my deep dive into the Ministry of Health’s missing puberty blockers “evidence brief”, an investigation into a mysterious new suicide prevention charity, and a look at why police had called a driver why they were still driving down the motorway.

In-depth reports: The Spinoff has published dozens upon dozens of excellent, well-researched cover stories this year – and we’ve done our best to promote those via The Bulletin. I’d like to reshare, in particular, Zeni Gibson’s remarkable and horrifying first person account (as told to Maddie Holden) of being stalked for nearly a decade, and Claire Mabey’s deep dive into Narrative Muse.

Looking ahead

While the above is of course not a scientific exercise in what’s making the news, it’s nonetheless interesting. Some of the bigger themes – healthcare, race relations, the state of the wider economy – will undoubtedly drag into the new year. This has been a tough year. We’ve lost dozens, likely hundreds, of excellent journalists. The Spinoff hasn’t been immune and as a result I’ll be scaling back my work in the new year – you might notice The Bulletin looking a little trimmer than it has been since I took over (which some of you may appreciate, let me know). That’s unfortunate, of course, but I remain optimistic (most of the time, anyway).

The Spinoff has had a big year, with over 38 million minutes spent reading our stories and close to 1.2m podcast downloads (did you listen to Juggernaut?). We’re not alone – Newsroom recently shared its report card for 2024 and Mediawatch looked back on some of the big moments from the year. Media commentator Gavin Ellis wrote this week that he refused to see the past year only in terms of what has been lost – and I applaud that approach. “Our journalists can take real pride from some of what they have done. They demonstrate they have the knowledge, talent and intellect to deliver on their solemn obligations,” he wrote.

It hasn’t all been doom and gloom, and there’s no reason next year can’t be even better. I’ll be back on January 13. See you then and have a wonderful summer wherever you are.