Announcing Public Interest
Politics isn’t just what happens in Parliament. Public Interest is a new media platform focused on making sense of the bigger picture.
Rising prices, crumbling public services, storms that get ever more frequent, a yawning gap between the super-rich and everyone else – every day, it feels like things are spiralling out of control. How did we get here? And how do we get out of this mess?
There’s no shortage of news and commentary about politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. But much of it doesn’t help make sense of what’s really going on, let alone what we can do about it.
Part of the problem is that we often think of politics as something that happens only in Parliament – as a kind of game played on our behalf by professional politicians, which we influence only once every three years by voting at the ballot box. But actually, it’s about much more than that.
Politics happens in the tea room at work, at evening meetings in community halls, in corporate boardrooms and government departments, in the supermarket aisle and at the stock-exchange. To understand what’s going on, we need a broader view – of how the deeper forces in the economy and society shape our politics, and how politics shapes those forces in turn.
So we’ve founded Public Interest – a new, independent media organisation focused on making sense of politics, power and the economy in a time when everything feels uncertain.
We’ll be publishing interviews, panel discussions and original reporting that go beyond the churn of the news cycle to take on the big issues – from the price of milk to the rise of AI, from leaking pipes to the decline of democracy. Our goal isn’t just to keep up with events, but to understand them and to create space for conversations that don’t otherwise have a home in our media landscape.
Right now, we’re starting small.
Each fortnight, we’ll be releasing an episode of our flagship current affairs show, Undercurrents. You can find the first episode here, where we look at the historic unpopularity of Christopher Luxon’s coalition government. Soon, we’ll be releasing regular interviews with academics, journalists, organisers and activists, where we dive deeper into the stories beyond the headlines.
Our work is entirely audience-funded. If you value what we do, please consider subscribing to stay updated and supporting us financially to help build a people-powered media institution for Aotearoa that can last.
More soon.
