2013 Bruce Jesson Lecture & Journalism Awards

Reducing Inequality: A Strategy for a Cause

On 30th October Sir Edmund (Ted) Thomas delivered the 2013 Bruce Jesson Lecture to a large and attentive crowd at Auckland University. This was a wide-ranging lecture that charted the catastrophic social consequences of the neo-liberal revolution, debunked the mythology surrounding it, and proposed a strategy for arresting its excesses and turning back the tide.

You can read the 2013 lecture online here or download a PDF version here.

2013 Bruce Jesson Journalism Awards

On the occasion of the 2013 Bruce Jesson lecture we announced this year's Senior and Emerging Journalism Awards.

The Senior Journalism award of $4000 went to Alister Barry, for his feature-length film documentary, Hot Air, which tells the history of the politics of climate change in New Zealand from 1988 to 2008. Alister's film will contribute to public debate on the politics of climate change in New Zealand from 1988 to 2008, and documenting ‘a political struggle over the burning of oil and coal which is causing the extinction of thousands of species’.

He has a track record of completing work that has generated public awareness and debate. His films as writer-director include Someone Else's Country (1996), In a Land of Plenty (2002) and The Hollow Men (2008), the latter adapted from the book of the same name by last year's Bruce Jesson lecturer Nicky Hager.

The Emerging Journalist award of $1000 was shared between Ruth Keber, a journalism student at Massey University, for ‘The New Maori Muslims’, North & South (March 2013) and Deena Coster, a journalism student at the Western Institute of Technology Taranaki (WITT), for a portfolio of articles in the Taranaki Daily News (June-Sept 2013).

Ruth Keber’s ‘The New Maori Muslims’, published in North & South, told the story of a young woman’s personal testimony of a flight from abuse to the embrace of Islam, then broadening into an exploration of linkages between Maori and Muslim culture and consideration of Islam and religious diversity in New Zealand.

Deena Coster’s portfolio of articles published in the Taranaki Daily News showcased a student journalist following in the tradition of the best kind of local newspaper journalism, displaying community commitment, social concern over issues like pay and housing and the initiative to dig around.

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