Ready, set... vote
Spinoff writers escape our Auckland stronghold to explore the 2022 local elections
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend. The Spinoff team has been very busy this week traversing the country to write about local elections. Live updates editor Stewart Sowman-Lund has been in Waihōpai attending a debate with nine candidates and a lobster; editor-at-large Toby Manhire went to Whakatū where Nick Smith is promising to heal a toxic council culture, and then ran a very entertaining debate in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. I’ve been in the gorgeous Tāhuna where four different candidates are making big promises for change in Queenstown Lakes District Council (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend attending three mayoral events in two days, but here we are). Local elections are definitely worth getting excited about, but so are buzzy mushroom businesses (!), NZ comedy show Taskmaster, and increasing use of te reo Māori. Pour yourself some Coffee Supreme and read on.
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
Local elections are ON
If you’re enrolled to vote, you should have received voting papers in the mail yesterday. Each envelope comes with a booklet of candidate blurbs, describing who they are and what policies they support. It’s nearly as good as policy.nz! We have a guide to casting your vote here. If mayoral debates are the kind of thing that get your blood pumping (and why wouldn’t they be?) then The Spinoff has dispatches from events in Queenstown, Rotorua, Nelson, and Invercargill from the last two weeks. Our own Toby Manhire also hosted a magnificently entertaining debate in Wellington on Thursday – if you’ve ever wanted to see Tory Whanau outline her vision of Wellington to a stuffed toy, or Andy Foster read a limerick, it’s well worth a watch.
With Viv Beck’s withdrawal from the mayoral race, Toby Manhire wonders: should Auckland’s elections be less like The Hunger Games?
The businesses mushrooming everywhere
My colleague Chris Schulz has been talking about mushroom based businesses in our weekly pitch meetings for several weeks. As a mushroom fan (fungi are such a beautiful and peculiar form of life, and also totally delicious) I’m glad he’s looked into the people touting the benefits of mushrooms for health, and investigated whether those claims really stand up. “I'd never heard of things like 'Turkey Tail' and 'Lion's Mane' before, but suddenly, two years after the pandemic began, everyone seems to be talking about the health benefits of mushrooms, things like 'Chaga' and 'Cordyceps',” said Chris, when I asked him about his story. “I thought, what are they, and what do they do? So I started calling around and found several businesses all inspired to start after 2020, when health and wellness was on everyone's minds. Two years on, it's apparent the 'shroom boom is in full swing. I decided to find out if they really do work...” Read Chris’s article here.
Indecent exposure is no joke
Indecent exposure — better known as flashing — is often treated as a joke, or as little more than an inconvenience to the people, usually women, who are its targets. But when a man exposed himself to Alex Casey at the mall, she began digging into the issue and found that indecent exposure is an incredibly common crime – and just one of the many ways that women are made to feel unsafe in New Zealand. Alex interviews people about how indecent exposure has affected them and talks to experts about the wider context of flashing as a form of sexual harassment. It’s a serious story and an important one, because so often this behaviour goes unreported, and victims don’t get the support they need.
September is birthday month for The Spinoff. We’ve come a long way since 2014 and that is in no small part thanks to our members.
Their generous support underpins all our work and has meant we are able to cover more areas of life in Aotearoa, to tackle more stories about our people and issues impacting our communities. From our ongoing coverage of inequality and the cost-of-living crisis, to political reporting and our focus on te ao Māori, it’s important mahi and we can’t do it without you.
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Number of the week: 129 Taskmaster tasks
On the face of it, Taskmaster is an absurd TV show; when I started watching in the murky distant past (2020) I was initially confused by the format, despite my flatmate’s enthusiasm. But once you get it, it’s magic: five funny people do increasingly silly things to win arbitrary points. My stalwart colleagues Alex Casey, Stewart Sowman-Lund, and Chris Schulz accepted a task no-one asked them to do this week, and ranked every single task from three seasons of Taskmaster New Zealand. If you’ve been following the show, it’s a very fun read: yes, David Correos did write a rap about blood, Laura Daniel did steal everyone’s girl, and Justine Smith did throw a lot of objects at her ragdoll best friend.
Weekend watch: New season of Alice Snedden’s Bad News
What does the cost of living even mean and how do we close the wealth gap? Alice speaks to Grant Robertson, Bernard Hickey, Ngarimu Blair and Bubbah about why there hasn’t been a revolution… yet. Made with the support of NZ On Air - watch it here.
It’s worth making the effort to pronounce te reo correctly
It’s Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, a time to remember that practising and appreciating te reo should be something everyone does year-round. But the bare minimum, like saying “Ow-tearoa”, doesn’t have to be the norm, says Charlotte Muru-Lanning. She’s encouraging more people to work harder at not just using te reo, but at pronouncing words correctly. “There is nothing fundamentally wrong or shameful about fumbling kupu,” Charlotte writes. “But I get the sense that mispronunciation of te reo Māori has been so normalised that it’s almost viewed as apolitical to do so – that to aim for accurate pronunciation would be to make some sort of political statement. The thing is, making no effort makes a statement too.”
Former race relationship commissioner Joris De Bres revisits the “McMaori” saga 20 years later
Everything else
I watched the new-ish David Copperfield movie last week and really enjoyed this review of why Dickens translates well to the screen. (It’s on lots of streaming services – I’d highly recommend!)
Alice Webb-Liddall attends the netball tournament making a place for speaking te reo beyond the classroom
The “cold rush” to make refrigeration more accessible in countries with limited electricity and often-wasted food
Hopes for the next 50 years of te reo revitalisation
Two groups are making a place for indigenous excellence in the cabaret scene
The wobbly moon orbit is killing mangroves in Australia (probably)
Gone by Lunchtime visits London (not really) to discuss the monarchy
Queer Fijian influencers find a safe space online
New Zealand media is using more te reo Māori than ever before
How does the internet alter how we remember our lives?
The Friday Poem goes to Hong Kong, a reminder that part of me is always longing for big cities
Ashleigh Williams is performing in serious, confronting play The Writer. She’s also in silly reality show Heartbreak Island. Alex Casey profiles her.
One of the best things about working at The Spinoff is having a lot of colleagues who love Auckland rock band The Beths as much (or maybe more?) than I do. It’s safe to say that lots of us are pretty excited about their new album Expert in a Dying Field, which got a glowing review from NME.