If you read every edition of The Bulletin this year, you have essentially read a tome the size of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Each one usually clocks in around 1,500 words and we’ve published 232 so that’s 350,000 words of news. Here’s a look at the most read Bulletins of the year, written by Anna Rawhiti-Connell.
Honestly, a bit of a surprise? But the Resource Management Act touches every aspect of our natural and built environment and though declaring it dead was a bit preemptive given it will linger on, the sentiment seemed to nail a widely-held view on the sprawling legislation.
Liz Truss resigns, reports Boris Johnson will stand
One of the best times I’ve had writing a Bulletin while watching a lettuce deteriorate. It was also one of the occasional Bulletins this year that was wholly written in the morning. We’ll never know what the subject matter of the day was going to be because I can’t remember. Political chaos will always draw eyeballs. It also brought forth the full might of the British press. The tabloids played and the more serious outlets crackled with sharp and biting commentary.
How is a white supremacist eligible to run for a school board?
Just a solid question for our times which highlights our propensity to be blindsided and underestimate corrosive forces.
National’s Sam Uffindell wants to stay on as an MP
And so he did.
Record number of new residents for NZ
Immigration settings really piqued your interest this year. They’re a very obvious marker of moving past border closures but they speak to gnarly tensions about how big we want Aotearoa to be, as well as some very big gaps in infrastructure investment. This one also exists at the axis of the dominant economic stories of the year – inflation, employment, labour shortages, wages and workers’ rights.
Looking at the first half of the year, Covid dominated the news. And then we all just wanted to come down the other side of the mountain.
Prime minister sheds some light on hate speech law reform
Did what it said on the tin on an issue that needed clarifying and one that invites passionate and polarised opinion.
The justice minister’s stacked list
This one about Kiritapu Allan having the biggest list of legislation out of all the ministers landed just before the talk about how much the government was trying to do really got going. Comparatively, the justice minister actually has a pretty good handle on this list of legislative reform, with some of it ticked off. I don’t expect to see any of it on the chopping block next year.
Low unemployment and border closures take a toll on tertiary education
A sector-specific example of this year’s challenging economic environment. Though I didn’t touch on tourism, it contained traces of some pre-pandemic questions about our reliance on certain industries that sort of fell by the wayside.
How much can the state really do?
Probably the most philosophical edition of the year that probed the expansion of the administrative state and contained murmurings of earlier National Party thinking on how to prevent crime before we pivoted hard into typical campaign crime rhetoric. It was also a question that ended up being more literally reflective.
The Bulletin takes a break now and will be back on January 16, 2023.