NEXUS: WELCOME...HOME?
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BEST Liv (and worst)
If this truly is an issue where we roll out the welcome mat to those proud, brave few that have navigated the Covid-filled airports to seek a better life here in our academic paradise then we thought we had better give you the heads up on some of the best, and worst we have to offer.
However we needed to establish some ground rules. To name just five brilliant kiwis would be doing many a disservice. For starters, if we opened the field to “of all time” we would have Rutherford, Sheppard, Hillary, Hone Heke, and Colin Meads. That hardly leaves room for a newer generation. So we made it “Living New Zealanders.” We also wanted to give ourselves some breathing room on the “Worst New Zealanders” side. Obviously there are murderers, violent sexual predators, and slum lords and comparing all of them to David Seymour would be a stretch, even for us. We also cheated a little and put a couple of and’s in there because Hills Baz is fine on her own but with John Campbell the magic happens, similarly Brian and Hannah but without magic because... witchcraft. Finally we wanted to contextualise this to your lifetime. You can make an argument as to why Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas are worse than David Seymour but most of you won’t google that. They both may still make our annual 50 worst people of 2021. Because this list doesn’t exist to talk about people who have recently done good or bad things. It is just a simple heads up. So we have cheated a lot. It’s a misleading title but largely because “seven reasonably good New Zealanders based on one opinion and seven others we could make easy jokes about who we aren’t fans of but aren’t as bad as murders and aren’t so old you need to research them” would be a horrible layout to give to a designer. Instead join us as we go full BuzzFeed on this shit.
BEST TAIKA WAITITI
No one on this list has done more to take effortless kiwi humour and approach global than Waititi (although honourable mention to Steven and Val Adams). Waititi never forgot where he came from and deserves all the success in the world. Our favourite thing though, is that Taika knows that to truly love something you have to want it to be the best version of itself and he has never stopped being critical of the problems that exist in this country.
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New Z
WORST David Seymour
Last year Nexus named Dave’o the worst person of 2020. This year he hasn’t been bad so much as inconsistent. For 12 months now Seymour has been the champion of every position on the Covid spectrum. Whether we needed to keep the borders open or close them immediately Seymour was on the news spewing it. We should open our economy like Australia was quickly followed by, we should close our borders and shut tourism down so we don’t end up like Australia. Why do we keep putting a microphone near this guy?
BEST HILLARY BARRY & JOHN CAMPBELL
Seperate from one another these two are the best we have to offer when it comes to compassion and integrity. Whether it was Campbell calling out the misogyny of correspondents on air, or Hillary telling people she will wear what she wants and she doesn’t care, they are #goals. Together though it was election night magic. They were the voice of the average kiwi and loving it. Girl Guide Biscuits and Jazz Cabbage all round.
