The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Frame for Hire: crime, astroturf, and the far right's election cycle Oct 31, 2026  Nine days before New Zealanders finished voting, digital billboards carried the faces of Chris Hipkins, Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson under three capitalised words, BACKING THE GANGS, set above the Green Party's own campaign slogan. The Sensible Sentencing Trust commissioned them and the Campaign Company, owned by Taxpayers' Union co-founder Jordan Williams, built them. Two months earlier, in the Ipsos Issues Monitor , crime sat eighth on the list of problems New Zealanders named, at 15 percent, while inflation and the cost of living stood at 63 percent. The gap between those two facts is a frame, and somebody paid for it. What the numbers say Fewer people in Aotearoa are being victimised than at any point since the Ministry of Justice began measuring it. The New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey , which interviews about 8,000 people a year and counts what happened to them whe...