Matua Kahurangi
Just a bloke sharing thoughts on New Zealand and the world beyond. No fluff, just honest takes.
Stuff has outdone itself again with another piece of gutter journalism, this time peddling a doomsday scenario about nuclear war killing 22,000 New Zealanders and costing the country $1 trillion. The article, penned by Lloyd Burr, who seems to thrive on fear and fantasy, reads more like a script for a disaster movie than anything grounded in present reality.
According to this latest serving of scaremongering, a nuclear conflict could devastate the economy, collapse the climate, and bring unimaginable destruction to our shores. The only thing unimaginable, really, is how something so far-fetched and speculative ends up being called ‘news’. If this is the headline of the day, it must be an especially slow week at Stuff.
While Burr wants us panicking about a nuclear war that hasn’t happened and likely won’t for a very long time, Māori children are actually being abused and murdered in their own homes. This is happening right now in 2025, and it gets nowhere near the same attention.
Where are the hard-hitting headlines about the state failing our most vulnerable tamariki? Where are the front-page exposés on Oranga Tamariki, on intergenerational poverty, on the repeated cycles of violence that see Māori kids buried long before their time? These are not theoretical threats. These are real victims, real families, and real communities torn apart. But apparently, they are not sensational enough to make the cut at Stuff.
It’s disgusting to see mainstream media platforms pouring time and resources into hypothetical horror stories while the horrors unfolding in our own suburbs barely rate a mention. The cold, brutal truth is that Māori children are dying, not in some imagined nuclear fallout, but in violent, meth-fueled, broken homes.
If Lloyd Burr wants to deal in tragedy, he might consider reporting on one that’s actually happening.
Until then, this is just shameless fearmongering, wrapped in pseudo-science, and completely detached from the realities that deserve our attention. Stuff should stop writing fan fiction and start holding power to account.
While Stuff chase nuclear ghosts, our children are dying in silence.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
