Maia Ingoe

I am a writer and journalist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand). I'm currently a journalist for Radio New Zealand; previously a co-editor of Salient Magazine and freelancer writer. 

Featured Articles

Salient Magazine •

Microforested — Salient Magazine

I breathe in and inhale the smell of dampness and cold and rot. It’s a rich smell: full of growth, moistness, and winter after rainfall. The water seeps through the trees, through the fallen leaves coating the ground, the mulch forming underneath; slinks between the soil and the granules of stone and past all of the tiny critters chewing, munching, decomposing. It runs down into the deep reservoirs and buried rivers that run beneath suburbs. I step over the leaves and keep walking.

The lichens
Salient Magazine •

Imagining a Climate-Altered Future —

“[This] is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.” - UN Secretary General António Guterres on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, 9 August 2021.

I check the news as I wake up (not doing my anxiety any favours). A ^Guardian article tells me there's a new study analysing a stack of research carried out by ExxonMobil scientists. The article reveals they predicted climate change, with striking accuracy, in t
The Spinoff •

Saving Moko - The Spinoff

It might be selfish to focus on one species when entire ecosystems are under threat. But I was worried about the Māui dolphin when I did a speech about them at intermediate school, and I’m still worried now.

Extinction is all-consuming and eternal. When an animal, plant or fungi goes extinct, an entire system changes, like how a family is never the same after the loss of a child. To my generation, extinction seems to be a cascade, an uncontrollable phenomenon we have set the trigger for. Often

Whakarongo ki te Tai Ao | Headland

My best mornings are spent on the couch squeezed onto our thin, sloping veranda. Washing hangs at eye level, paint peels from the railing, dust and grime coat the windowsills. On the blue-sky days, sunshine twists and spirals around shadows of trees stretching in the wind. Lime green and darkened emerald leaves, spindly branches patterning the sky. The buildings behind are hidden from view. If I’m lucky, a tūī might come to hop between the branches, or maybe a kererū.

Brick steps lead to our ho

Editorials - Salient Magazine

Salient Magazine •

Kiwi Kids Are Rocking It (Rocking It) — Salient Magazine

It’s been a wild ride, but we’ve finally made it to Issue 24: our final issue as editors. In this issue, we’re reminiscing on our childhoods, teens, and our years at Salient. It’s time to soak in the sappiest soppiest of nostalgia.

We all seem to be going back in time and searching for the things that gave us childhood comfort. We’re building our dream homes, and making them up to the Healthy Homes Standards, in The Sims. Bella is blasting K-pop in the office as we write this and we can’t stop
Salient Magazine •

Get Informed and VOTE, Bitches — Salient Magazine

Elections are exhausting in any old year. But in 2023, when we’ve got skyrocketing rental prices, a rapidly closing window to lower emissions and prevent climate catastrophe, rising discrimination towards our trans whānau, and at the end of it all, a choice between two cis white men named Chris for the country’s next Prime Minister, it’s especially fucking draining.

Trust us—we know how tempting it is to disengage and shut out politics. Maia would much rather be giggling at TikToks of Travis Ke
Salient Magazine •

Media is: Energy Drink Discord Bros, Tinder Fish Guys, and NPC TikTok Girlies —

You might notice something a little different about us in our editorial pic this week, and that’s because Maia and Fran have left the chat. Enter Frank, Mark, and their shared gf Alexa. Frank is a Discord bro sponsored by Monster who posts slightly concerning conspiracy rants on YouTube, Mark is your classic Tinder fish bogan who you should block at first message before he asks you out on a picnic-turned-hunting date, and Alexa, named after Amazon’s home assistant, is a TikTok girlie who makes c
Salient Magazine •

Serious Chat: Job Cuts are a Student Issue —

Fun fact: most students don’t come to university just for the fancy piece of paper. We come here to learn, grow, engage in conversation, meet people, form new ideas, begin our careers, and do what we are passionate about.


To us, university isn’t about earning money. Considering the debt we put ourselves in to just to study, it’d be pretty delusional if it was. The same can’t be said for the Vice-Chancellor and Senior Leadership Team. For them, this university isn’t about elevating the new ge
Salient Magazine •

E noho ana au ki Te Whanganui-a-Tara —

Te Taiao is the environment all around us. It’s the paths that we walk through everyday, the plant matter we interact with, and the entire ecosystem that we are an irrevocably impactful part of.


Te Taiao isn’t confined to national parks and manicured city greenspaces: it’s in our backyards, it’s the gutters next to highways, in the mushrooms growing in our flat bathrooms, in our urban streets and lichen sprinkled fences, curving coastlines, and rural farmland. It’s the whale that visited the
Salient Magazine •

The Salient Stay Home Club — Salient Magazine

Burnout is real babes. We need mental health days!

If the pandemic taught the world anything, it’s that it’s very possible to work and study from home. Lockdowns and online lecturers, for a lot of us, made getting degrees much easier. Society was starting to realise it wouldn’t collapse if someone works from their bedroom, and not from the office, and finally, a 9-5 could be doable.

But unfortunately, the ableism and ignorance so core to people in power has sprinkled its way back in. Te Hereng
Salient Magazine •

A Love Letter to the Salient Reader — Salient Magazine

You might be picking this magazine up for the first time, or this might be the 61st issue you’ve flicked through. Whether you’re a new reader of Salient, or a fan since third-year: welcome. This is our love letter to you.

Each week, we pour our hearts into producing 40 pages of content just for you. We want you to be informed, enraged, engaged, and ultimately, feel seen. We love seeing cut-up Salient pages on bedroom walls in the back of IG selfies or TikToks. We smile when we see a group readi
Salient Magazine •

Commit to the Bit — Salient Magazine

For the ‘Comedy’ issue, we ventured into the field to do some first-hand research. What makes people laugh?

Armed with free chips coated in mayonnaise, we headed into the gallery at the Michael Fowler Centre, pretending we were the eye of God to watch the Best Foods Comedy Gala. We’ll be real, it was no Met Gala. Instead of red carpet couture, it was a showcase of comedians crossing the plainly lit stage in millennial fashion and skinny jeans. And we were easily the youngest people there.

Whil
Salient Magazine •

PASS US THE AUX — Salient Magazine

Music is a core part of the Salient office. Whether it’s in our headphones during work cramming mode, or blasted throughout the office in our manic hours, it’s a constant for us. It amps us up when we need an extra boost before print, when we’re sleep deprived and Red Bull fuelled. When Maia and Bella insist on blasting The 1975 or Harry Styles, you can catch Fran knee deep in her musical guilty pleasure of study time lofi jazz. As early 2000s babies, we also love a good VUWSA van roadie sing-al
Salient Magazine •

Deconstructing Social Construction — Salient Magazine

This century is the first time we’ve been able to admire everything at our fingertips. We can collect and consume a kaleidoscope of content displaying a variety of styles, decades, cultures, possible futures, and patterns between the past and present. Our brains have become Pinterest boards filled with content, combining ideas in a new visual context like never before.

It’s overwhelming and exciting. We can now see beyond our individuality, and relate to others. Subcultures adjacent to the main

All my published work:

Salient Magazine •

How to Survive the Renting Rat Race — Salient Magazine

It’s that time of year again: hordes of freshers perform the annual ritual of scurrying to find a flat before the next academic year begins. The difficulty to even be offered a flat as a first-time renter has forced our news intern to accept a flat in the ditch of Devon Street in Aro Valley (pray for him).

To save you from the same fate, we’ve put together our top tips on finding a flat. Hit up the VUWSA Advocates, Brie Keatley and Erica Schouten (advocate@vuwsa.org.nz), for more free advice an
Salient Magazine •

Grant Robertson Votes, Eats Sausage, and Ignores Protesters on Campus — Salient Magazine

VUW has become a hotspot for politicians heading to cast their vote, with Labour’s Grant Robertson and Ibrahim Omer voting in the Hub last Wednesday, and the Greens’ Tamatha Paul and James Shaw, alongside Wellington mayor Tory Whanau, voting here last Monday. Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni showed up in support, but didn’t cast her vote.

As part of their political efforts, Grant Robertson and Wellington Central candidate Ibrahim Omer “awkwardly paraded around university, disturbing studyi
Salient Magazine •

OPINION: The VUWSA Election Gives Us No Choice —

Unless you actually have a life, you may have noticed it’s VUWSA election season—students’ yearly chance to have somewhat of a say in who makes up our student union. By the time this article is published, voting on yet another lacklustre VUWSA election with, for the most part, zero options, will have closed.

It wasn’t any surprise to anyone who the newly elected VUWSA President was when announced at the AGM on 28 September: Marcail Parkinson, a student activist well-versed in VUWSA and universi
Salient Magazine •

Candidate Kōrero: Prime Minister Chris Hipkins (Labour Party) —

We met the Prime Minister at his office in the Beehive—Chippy was 15 minutes late, largely due to a tray of sausage rolls being wheeled into his office (Fair enough).

“Hi, I’m Chris,” the PM introduced himself, chipper if not a bit clammy, fresh from National’s tax policy announcement (and Labour’s worst polling results since 2017, dipping into the 20s). We took a seat on one of the sofas in his Beehive office and wasted no time getting stuck in.

Chippy was VUWSA president in 2000 and 2001, wh
Salient Magazine •

Candidate Kōrero: Julie-Anne Genter —

Julie-Anne Genter regularly braves the cold for a swim in the South Coast’s marine reserve, Taputeranga. “It’s really magic,” she says. So it was an easy choice to film a campaign video there—until a whale visited Island Bay the day of their filming, disrupting their plans. Genter wasn’t disappointed. What a better sign, she thought, for a Green campaign than a whale visiting. She posted on Twitter: “This is basically an endorsement, right?”


A Green Party MP since 2011, this is the first time
Salient Magazine •

Cuts to Theatre: Undervaluing an Industry —

The teachers and students of the VUW Theatre programme are staring down the barrel of severe job cuts that have been described by staff and students as “blindsiding” and “tearing apart a community”.

The VUW Theatre programme is one of the only ones in the country where students are trained in a practical, multi-disciplinary way that enables students to combine Theatre with other programmes in the BA. The original job cuts proposed by the university would split the Theatre school in half—cutting
Salient Magazine •

Microforested — Salient Magazine

I breathe in and inhale the smell of dampness and cold and rot. It’s a rich smell: full of growth, moistness, and winter after rainfall. The water seeps through the trees, through the fallen leaves coating the ground, the mulch forming underneath; slinks between the soil and the granules of stone and past all of the tiny critters chewing, munching, decomposing. It runs down into the deep reservoirs and buried rivers that run beneath suburbs. I step over the leaves and keep walking.

The lichens
Salient Magazine •

OPINION: Seeking Justice for my Emotional Support Halloumi Wrap —

The LAB’s halloumi wrap was, on some days, the only reason I came to uni. I dragged myself to 9 a.m. lectures, knowing that since my disorganised ass hadn’t made lunch, my beloved halloumi wrap awaited me. At $10, it was a spicy price, but I was willing to pay for the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical support the halloumi wrap gave me. One bite into that delicious, salted, cheesy goodness mixed in with seasonal vegetables, beans, and that beautiful aioli sauce and I was insatiable.


Salient Magazine •

Stafford House Evades the Residential Tenancy Act: Payout of $4800 Ordered —

A past resident of Stafford House has been awarded $4800 in compensation and damages by the Tenancy Tribunal, in a ruling combining eight different breaches of the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 (RTA).


The resident lived at Stafford House from February to November 2022, during his first year at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, in accommodation he described as “disgusting”.


Stafford House is operated by UniLodge, who operated under agreement with VUW as a Hall of Residen
Salient Magazine •

Over Budget and Overtime: Why is Now the Time for the Living Pā? —

The building extension of Te Herenga Waka Marae, the Living Pā, is unique, ambitious, and future focused, but burdensome challenges have continued to push the project backwards.

An OIA received by Salient confirmed that a revised budget of $52 million for the project was approved in late 2022, an increase of $17m from the original budget of $35m approved in 2019.

$17.5m has been spent on the project to date. This marks a significant spend for the university in a fraught financial climate, with