bCasts

In recent weeks, the central government has pushed through numerous amendments to the Resource Management Act, in an effort to help streamline consent processes for corporations.

However, these changes— in particular ones surrounding freshwater planning and waterway pollution requirements — have been criticised especially by environmental advocates as disregarding the negative impacts to the environment and affording too much power to financial interests in the case of natural resource management.

As well, this past week Education Minister Erica Stanford announced a proposal to ban books with “too much” reo Māori in them from early learning materials in the ‘Ready to Read phonics scheme’. 

While she justifies the changes as being of genuine literary necessity for children’s learning, many have contended the changes as an act of racism against te reo Māori which asserts white supremacy in the education system.

University of Auckland’s student magazine Craccum is moving to establish independence from the Auckland University Student Association following recent proposals by the university to further cut the magazine’s funding.

Without consultation, Craccum’s budget was cut in 2025, forcing the magazine to reduce production from weekly issues to fortnightly, and occasionally even less, as well as cull their editorial team from 14 to 6 paid members, and rely on unpaid contributors for 90% of their content.

Ahead of 2026, the university is proposing a further decrease in budget of 22%, or $33,000, which would mean the removal of another six issues throughout the year.

The editorial team at Craccum are calling out to students to support them to revitalise the magazine and restore funding to the magazine which they say has been a ‘taonga’ at the university for just under 100 years

Young people are consistently painted as a group "disengaged" from news media and politics. Despite this, young people continue to post, comment, and interact on social media about political issues internationally. In this week's episode of bLine, we discuss why young people don't engage with traditional news content and what Aotearoa's media organisations are doing to combat this. 

This week, we spoke to politics reporter at The Spinoff, Lyric Waiwiri-Smith, and video journalist at Re: News, Janhavi Gosavi. 

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