Adventures in Comms · Issue 01, 012000–2026Aotearoa New Zealand
Half-Life
Search 50,713 New Zealand government press releases to see
when a phrase appeared, peaked and disappeared. Each line follows one phrase from 2000
to now. Filter by rhetoric, subject, programme or person, then click any line to open
the first and most recent releases behind it.
Each line is one phrase across every press release since 2000.
Height = how often it was said that year. Left is 2000, right is now.
Red: still rising, being said right nowAmber: past its peak, fadingBlue: dead, silent for 3+ years
Click any line ↓
Field notes
Same thing, new words
Six cases where ministers moved from one term to another for much the
same thing. Grey is the older term and red its replacement. Figures are releases per
1,000 from 2000 to now.
Method. Source, every release on beehive.govt.nz, Crown copyright, reproduced under the
terms at beehive.govt.nz/copyright. Corpus assembled from the markdown export maintained by
marcus-crane/beehive-markdown.
Candidate phrases are two and three word sequences taken from release titles, then counted across
the full text of every release. Each line shows releases containing the phrase per 1,000 released
that year, so a quiet year doesn't inflate a phrase. Half-life is the number of years from
the peak until that rate falls to half. A phrase still above half its peak is marked
still rising. A phrase counts once per release however often it appears; 2026 is a part
year. The first and last examples link to the original releases. This measures how often
something was said, not what the speaker meant by it.