1. Denial has changed shape, not shrunk. What required fringe platforms three years ago now issues from sitting MPs, highly influential podcast hosts, and the incumbent government's own political messaging. The disinformation ecology, and parliamentary speech are no longer separable in any practical sense. The fringe hasn’t dissipated; the centre moved to meet it. 2. A storm that fails to produce catastrophe is weaponised against the credibility of all future warnings. The “boy who cried wolf” motif has become the central discursive device. 3. Pandemic-era distrust has proven fully portable, as the 2023 analysis warned it would. “Just like covid” now circulates as a complete argument wherever extreme weather is discussed. The epistemic damage of 2020–2022 has migrated wholesale into institutional communication on unrelated subjects, and shows no sign of waning. 4. Climate adaptation policy is now contested almost exclusively through conspiracy vocabulary. "Agenda 2030," "WEF land grab," and "fifteen-minute cities" - peripheral imports from foreign networks in 2023 - are the default lens in 2026 through which managed retreat, zoning changes, and planning decisions are discussed. Debating adaptation on its actual merits has become structurally difficult, if not near impossible amongst large swathes of New Zealand’s population. 5. The denialist dictionary has been Americanised or MAGA-fied. "Woke," "fear porn," "Jacinda's sheep," "leftist media" - the register is imported wholesale from United States culture war discourse, often without meaningful local adjustment. Local disinformation producers are increasingly indistinguishable from their American counterparts. 6. Racism, and specifically, anti-Māori racism, has migrated from the edges of post-disaster politics into the core of climate governance. Managed retreat, for example, is attacked as pro-Māori land transfers. 7. The target has shifted from individual experts to the category of expertise itself. Institutional…
Key points in the research. #nzpol
