Electronic Media Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand (EMFANZ)

There’s a difference between loving your country and treating your fellow citizens like they’re trespassers.

If you prefer the name “New Zealand,” cool. It is the constitutional name. No one is taking it off the map. No one is banning it. No one is “silencing” you - you’re literally posting paragraphs about it.

But the moment you start talking about “people who’ve been here for five minutes,” “cultural Marxists,” and “woke views like a cancer,” you’re not defending a name - you’re policing belonging. You’re not making a point about words. You’re telling people they don’t get an equal say in the place they live, work, pay tax, raise kids, and call home.

And if you have to repeat “it’s not racist” that many times, maybe stop and ask yourself why it keeps landing the way it’s landing.

New Zealand isn’t weaker because it acknowledges Māori language and identity. It’s stronger - not because everyone agrees on everything, but because we’re grown-up enough to hold complexity without turning it into a culture-war tantrum.

The pendulum isn’t “swinging back.” The country is moving forward. The only thing swinging here is the volume when the past doesn’t get its way.

If we’re going to talk about responsibility and virtue, let’s start by modelling them - and by speaking to New Zealanders like equals, not enemies.

“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”
—
Jeremy Knowles, discusses the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)
OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.
Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.
Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because at that time there was not much exposure for women, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.
Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”
Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).
Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.
Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.
Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.
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With a career spanning more than five decades, Sam’s done it all — from his breakthrough in ‘Sleeping Dogs’ and dodging dinos in ‘Jurassic Park’ to standout performances in ‘Peaky Blinders’, ‘The Twelve’, ‘Perfect Strangers’, ‘The Piano’, and the widely celebrated ‘Untamed’, among many others.

⭐️ Before the red carpet rolls out for the NZ Screen Awards on 21 November, take a moment to celebrate his incredible career with The Sam Neill Collection. Featuring short films, documentaries, and interviews, including his full-length ScreenTalk Legends chat: https://www.nzonscreen.com/collection/sam-neill-collection