Adventures in Comms — 011996–2026Aotearoa New Zealand
Half-Life
Every phrase the New Zealand government leaned on, and how long it lasted.
Each line below is one phrase across thirty years — a spike means it flared and vanished,
a plateau means it stayed. Built from 55,843 press releases.
Rhetoric is the language of persuasion — Topics are what they were
talking about, Programmes the things they named. Click any line.
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 ↓
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. This measures how often something was said, never what it meant.