This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
The following are 22 of the best-read Premium articles in 2022.
Could we have saved Cassandra?
Caroline Fausett was making dinner one night when she saw her daughter take off again.
It was just before 7pm on a Friday in May 2019. At their family’s home on a quiet, semi-rural street in South Auckland, 17-year-old Cassandra had become agitated after a conversation with her father, Steve, and stormed out through a side door. Caroline called out to her daughter to come back, but she didn’t stop.
Caroline felt a knot in her stomach. It was happening again.
“Please be safe,” Caroline texted her daughter. “Love you. Ring me when you’ve had some space and I’ll come get you.”
Cassandra — 1.6 metres tall, thin, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, usually dressed in sporty clothes — might have struck anyone who didn’t know her well as a teenager with everything going for her. Vivacious and smart, academically driven, a talented athlete. Her parents were adoring and attentive. Teachers and coaches talked about her with pride.
In the past two years, however, Cassandra had endured a catastrophic spiral into mental illness. A parade of psychiatrists had given her a long list of diagnoses that included anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anorexia, and borderline personality disorder. She had been prescribed so many medications her parents could hardly recall them all; she had spent dozens of hours in therapy. And she kept getting worse.
Why couldn’t she be saved?
Power List: The top 25 supermarket owners
Supermarket ownership is a path to wealth like few others but it’s by no means an easy ride or a given right for those who have grocery retailing in their blood. Duncan Bridgeman uncovers 25 of the top Foodstuffs owner operators and finds out what it takes to get there.
The inheritance trap
Kiwis who have fallen out with a parent and are cut out of their inheritance may not be able to contest the will under wide-ranging recommendations that will form a new Inheritance (Claims Against Estate) Act.
But some step-children may be able to claim against a step-parent’s estate; and the courts could have greater ability to recover the deceased’s assets if they fall outside the estate, for example in trusts.
The recommendations are among 140 in a report by the Law Commission, which was charged by the Government with reviewing New Zealand’s outdated inheritance laws. The review of the out-of-date and out-of-touch laws was long overdue, with many of the statutes now more than 70 years old. Among issues they fail to take into account is complex blended families as a result of re-partnering.
Police seek assets linked to Head Hunter
Members and associates of the Head Hunters give 20 per cent of their criminal earnings to the gang - a portion of which flows into the coffers of the alleged president - according to the police investigation trying to seize $10 million worth of assets.
The claim is made in the case against Wayne Doyle, whom police allege is the national president of the notorious motorcycle gang, in civil proceedings taken under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act.
Five properties across Auckland, including the gang’s Marua Rd headquarters in Ellerslie, have been frozen since September 2017, when the High Court granted restraining orders after a police investigation, Operation Coin, into his financial affairs.
While a number of senior Head Hunters have been jailed in recent years for serious methamphetamine and violence offences, Doyle - who was jailed for murder in the 1980s - has not been convicted of anything for more than 20 years.
See Jared Savage’s reporting on the court case here.
Claire Trevett: Snap election speculation
Journalists are frequently asked about rumours Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will step down before the next election, writes Claire Trevett.
“I have said it thrice, what I tell you three times is true!” says the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark as he tries to wish up a snark to hunt.
NZ First leader Winston Peters and other rivals to Labour seem to have adopted the same motto when it comes to confident predictions of those equally mythical creatures: a snap election and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern bowing out before the election.
If they say it enough, or the rumour spreads far enough, they seem to think it will happen.
Read Claire Trevett’s column on the frequent rumours surrounding the Prime Minister.
The baffling mystery of the teen who vanished
Eloi Rolland is up and about on his feet in the darkness before dawn, a solitary figure waiting at the bus stop at 87 Mokoia Rd in Birkenhead on Auckland’s North Shore. His movements will be tracked later in the police investigation Operation Cookeville – “French national, 18 years old” - but right now, on a Saturday morning in late summer, no one is watching, no one else is around.
Rolland went missing on Saturday, March 7, 2020. Two years of a massive police search, as well as a private search created by people who were moved by his disappearance; two years of a grief beyond measure for his family, stranded by Covid back in France; two years of a mystery so complete that no one has any firm idea of what happened.
All mysteries are an accumulation of possibilities and one possibility is that someone knows something and has “something to say”. It has been two years since the thin and unhappy boy from France went missing and not a single trace has been found. False leads that were a waste of time: check. Lurid theories not backed by a shred of evidence: check. But not any item of clothing, not his backpack, not one forensic sign.
The sea, the cliffs, the bush – Piha is a beautiful end of the line, a population of 900 clinging to a wild shore. Easy to go missing. But to go missing that completely, that utterly, is almost like an achievement. He created a lacuna, that soft Latin word meaning ditch, pit, gap, deficiency. Boy heads west. Boy covers a lot of ground. Boy is seen, and then the ultimate lacuna: boy vanishes.
Steve Braunias investigates the disappearance of a French teenager.
Why our kids can’t read
New Zealand children used to lead the world in reading. Now our literacy rates have fallen so sharply that almost half our students are below their expected reading level when they finish primary school and one in five 15-year-olds do not have basic reading proficiency.
Education reporter Dubby Henry asks how we got into this position - and more importantly, what are we doing to get out?
Power list: New Zealand’s top criminal barristers
Some of New Zealand’s top lawyers become household names for the high-profile cases and clients they are forever linked to in the public’s mind.
While the country’s industry is small by global standards there are still the heavy hitters who excel in the courtroom before a jury and judge.
A good defence lawyer or prosecutor can turn a case in their favour before a trial even begins and certainly before it ends.
Most of the country’s legal fraternity is based in Auckland and Wellington, where many of the country’s highest-profile criminal cases take place in the High Court.
Sam Hurley lists some of the most influential criminal prosecutors, defence lawyers and industry leaders.
See the full story here. (Since this story was originally published some individuals have changed roles).
Private School Rich List
Parents pay tens of thousands of dollars a year in private school fees, but where does the money go? And how much better resourced are private and integrated schools compared to their public peers?
Matt Nippert read hundreds of annual reports to build New Zealand’s private school rich list.
Gregor Paul: The All Blacks have lost their way
The harsh but unavoidable truth is that this All Blacks side needs a reset, wrote Gregor Paul back in July.
It will forever be known as the disaster in Dunedin. From being heroic in the first test the All Blacks were catastrophic in the second, seemingly having placed whatever incendiary device they had used to blow up Ireland in Auckland under their own bonnet to inflict terminal damage.
They would admit that for all that they huffed and puffed, they shouldn’t have been able to blow the All Blacks house down as easily as they did.
The All Blacks have been valued at $3.5bn and if they want to fulfil all their revenue growth ambitions and find the 60 million fans around the world that they say are waiting to invest in black, then they can’t get smacked around on their home patch.
Read Gregor Paul’s full column on why it’s time for a change within the All Blacks.
The mysterious disappearance of Lachie Jones
A 3-year-old boy disappears one evening in Gore. He is found face up in the small New Zealand town’s oxidation pond 1.2km away. But did he really walk there barefoot and alone over stony, prickly, dung-covered ground and drown, as police concluded? After three years of anguish and frustration, his father has called in a new lawyer and international experts to examine the case.
Herald senior journalist Kurt Bayer investigates.
The real reason Louisa Wall quit politics
Louisa Wall is grieving, there is no mistaking that.
Beneath the excited exterior about the challenge of a fresh start after she leaves Parliament is a weeping wound about how she comes to be leaving.
We are sitting on the expansive deck of the busy Auckland home she shares with her wife, Prue Kapua, looking out at giant pou in the semi-rural bush garden and talking about the future and the past.
The distant past is a source of pride, particularly the relatively smooth passage of the marriage equality bill that has defined her political career.
The recent past and her effective deselection as an electorate MP is raw. She frequently chokes back tears — which she says are for others.
But few would begrudge her some for herself as her 14 years in Parliament draws to a close.
Senior political correspondent Audrey Young sat down with Wall back in April.
What are the effects of alcohol after 40?
Fond of a drink or two in the evening? If you’re over 40, chances are you are.
With midlife-and-later drinking appearing to fuel the rise in booze consumption, it’s worth taking heed of the consistent warnings that emanate from the scientific community about the effects of alcohol.
“But why does it feel like the effects of drinking are so much worse post-40?
“The organs that metabolise alcohol such as the liver and the stomach shrink as you get older, so alcohol stays in your system longer,” says Dr Tony Rao, a consultant old age psychiatrist.
Read about why you could be doing more damage than you realise here.
Lloyd Jones: An open letter to protesters
Writer Lloyd Jones asks is freedom to do the wrong thing freedom worth having?
I watched your convoy hog the roads up and down the country. I saw you congregate in the grounds outside Parliament. I saw your vehicles parked around the cenotaph and your tents pitched across the grounds of Parliament. I wondered, who are you?
Prime Minister Ardern says you are part of New Zealand. I beg to differ.
You are of New Zealand, but no longer part of it.
You have broken ranks, broken the social contract that the rest of us have adopted. We have lined up for our vaccines, to protect ourselves, and our families, yes, but importantly to protect others from infection.
I look back across your faces and I wonder again, who are you? What on earth binds you together?
Read Lloyd Jones’ full letter here.
Paula Bennett on weight loss surgery
Paula Bennett turned 53 this year and, as she writes, has never understood people who don’t like to declare their age.
I have earned every single one of those 53 years and my wrinkles and sags and bumps and scars all tell a story of my life to date. Can’t say I love ageing and the body aching a bit more but, as they say, the alternative to ageing is worse.
A few years ago I decided I had to do something about my aches and pains. Most of them were in my knees, as I have arthritis. Most of the pain was caused by the fact that I was very overweight and I was putting a lot of pressure on my joints. So I made the huge decision to have weight loss surgery.
My body, my decision - and one I have never regretted. It was the best decision I have made.
Matthew Hooton: The wheels come off
The Government’s laziness and negligence led to New Zealand facing an Omicron crisis, Matthew Hooton wrote at the start of 2022.
The Prime Minister and her ministers told us New Zealand’s Covid response has been the best in the world.
That was true through 2020, after a bunch of bureaucrats and billionaires got together in March to pressure her to close the border, cancel her 7000-strong indoor Christchurch memorial service and start taking Covid seriously. It has not been true since.
The Government stands accused of laziness, negligence, incompetence, panicked authoritarianism and opacity over its response to Omicron.
Read Matthew Hooton’s full column here.
The Ex-Files: Dividing the family home
Jeremy Sutton looks at how to divide the family home when one person wants to stay.
My husband and I separated eight months ago. I have stayed in our family home while he’s been renting but now he wants to sell our home. I can’t afford to buy him out of the property, but I want to be able to stay here for as long as possible because it’s the only home our three children have lived in. What can I do?
See Jeremy Sutton’s full answer here.
The secret life of a Kiwi swinger
A New Zealand woman has revealed to the Herald her foray into swinging – or Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM), as is the preferred term these days. This is her recount of the “thrill”, the “female empowerment” and the jealousy sparked by months of “fantastic sex” with myriad partners outside of her marriage.
Shane Te Pou: Luxon’s troublesome interview
In April Shane Te Pou wrote of how one interview betrayed Christopher Luxon’s values and priorities.
The first in a series of troublesome interviews for Christopher Luxon over the past 10 days probably gained the least attention but remains, in my view, the most revealing.
It took place between Luxon and broadcaster and national treasure Moana Maniapoto on her weekly Māori Television chat show Te Ao with Moana. It was a probing and wide-ranging discussion that’s worth viewing in full, but there was one exchange in particular that I keep thinking about, finding myself more and more gobsmacked each time.
Read Shane Te Pou’s full column here.
The power couples of 2022
In January Spy Editor Ricardo Simich took a look at the influential Kiwi couples likely to set the agenda in business, retail, politics and media this year.
How did it stack up?
Shane Jones: Labour’s murky ploy
The Government needs to stop dragging the Treaty of Waitangi into policies where it’s of dubious nature, Shane Jones wrote back in March.
As the Covid virus continues to move through the community, another virus spreads across our political system.
Just as there is ignorance about the exact origins of Covid, the public does not recall giving the Labour Party permission to impose its Treaty of Waitangi co-governance master plan. A dogma that thrives where visibility is weak, debates are shallow and agendas are murky.
It is high time to call time on how the Treaty of Waitangi is being dragged into policy areas where it is of dubious value, alienates people, and eats away the goodwill of past decades.
Read the full column from Shane Jones here.
‘$90k the new $70k’
Brian wore his best suit for the job interview.
During a meeting with his would-be new employer, they hashed out the details of the role, with both sides trying to decide whether he’d be a cultural fit.
He was, and it didn’t take long for them to confirm they’d email him an offer. When it arrived, he did a double-take when he saw the employment contract.
The annual salary they were offering was $20,000 more than he was currently getting.
After thinking over the offer for about five minutes, he decided to tell his current employer he would be resigning. But things didn’t go to plan: his employer left the meeting and almost immediately came back with a counter-offer that matched what the other company was offering.
Brian eventually accepted the counter-offer and stayed with his employer.
When he called the executive who had tried to head-hunt him, he was expecting an angry response about time-wasting. But there was no acid in his response.
The executive chuckled and replied: “Well, at least we helped you realise what you’re worth.”
With unemployment at a record low and immigration still stifled, the labour market has shifted the balance in favour of employees willing to question what they’re actually worth.