Aotearoa’s economic system is broken. Wealth inequality is soaring, with the 311 wealthiest families in this country owning more wealth than nearly half of all New Zealanders. This inequality crisis got worse during the pandemic.
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Seeing liberal reporters’ indifference to their colleagues’ facilitation of racism made me wonder: what does New Zealand media think racism actually is?
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Cuts to local services hurt communities, particularly the most disadvantaged communities — those who City Vision and the Labour Party claim to represent. Selling off assets may grant a one-off dividend to Council, but in the end it amounts to selling off the family silver — it makes everyone poorer except for the wealthy few who will greedily seize on the chance to buy up an even bigger share of this vital public asset
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The role of the artist in our society is being devalued at an alarming rate, with the winds of conservatism, neoliberalism, isolation, anti-intellectualism and, yes, artificial intelligence accelerating this shift.
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An undercurrent of New Zealanders hate Taika Waititi's work, a hatred worsened by these expectations to love it
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This week, the ACT party indicated that it would like to spend $500 million to build youth detention centres. This, it says, is necessary to “hold young offenders accountable” and to stop the “tag and release” of young offenders who face no real punishment for criminal offending.
In response to this proposal, justice and penal reform advocate Sir Kim Workman said to Mike Hosking that, “it's a nice idea, but it won’t work. Just look at our history.”
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New Zealand is caught in the gyre of many crises, all of which reflect the inability of “free” markets to provide for the needs of either individuals or society as a whole. This malaise hangs over not just New Zealand, but the wider Western world.
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1 May 1889 was the first ever International Workers’ Day. For 134 years since, the labour movement across the globe has marked May Day through marches, parades and festivals, celebrating the power and solidarity of the working class of the world.
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ANZAC day is frequently presented as a day of solemn reflection and contemplation of the horrors of war. But in 2022, one service was hijacked by so-called “Sovereign Citizens”, far right conspiracy theorists who believe that the only laws that apply to them are the ones that they consent to personally.
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On Wednesday, 19 April 2023, the sister of Tangaraju s/o Suppia, a 46-year-old Tamil Singaporean, received a letter from the Singapore Prison Service: “Please be informed that the death sentence passed on your brother…will be carried out on 26 April 2023 (Wednesday)”.
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Earlier this week, Newsroom published a pro-AUKUS opinion piece, by Dr Reuben Steff of the University of Waikato. The limp case put forward by Steff - the kind of expert who informs foreign and defence ministers - can be refuted by a non-expert and a few quick google searches. Here’s what that looks like, tackling each of Steff’s paragraph’s one at a time.
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The Vaccine Is Poison, Adult Human Female, Don’t Let Them Steal Your Country. I mean, a simple response to each claim is: No it isn’t, No that’s incorrect, and No, they aren’t. But let's dig a little bit deeper into each one, let's peel off the sticker and see exactly what the glue of these ideologies are made out of.
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In the week where Posie Parker was touring Australia and then New Zealand, Aotearoa felt like it was having a sea change on transphobia. Suddenly the public was waking up to what some of us had been talking about for years—that the anti-trans movement is a fascist cause
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Austerity: the policy of cutting public spending during a time of crisis in order to “balance the books”. It is a dangerous idea with a dangerous history.
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Watching Kelly-Jane Keen Minshull head East in the last few weeks has been like a seeing stock truck coming down the highway towards you. It’s noisy and unavoidable, brings with it a brief portrait of miserable lives, and leaves behind it the stink of shit and desperation.
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Primary and secondary school teachers went on a mega-strike in 2019 during negotiations in which the Labour Government refused to pay teachers properly, address the teacher shortage, reduce class sizes, and invest enough money into our education system. Four years later, the situation is eerily familiar.
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Thousands of people across the country marched last Friday as part of the Global Climate Strike. School students were joined by adults of every generation, demanding real action to address the greatest crisis of our time — a crisis that is getting very real, very quickly in Aotearoa.
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In 2017, Jacinda Ardern declared that climate change was her generation's "nuclear free moment." This bold statement of intent spoke to the urgency of the crisis we face. But where were the policies and actions directed towards the polluting multinationals and nations determined to destroy our planet?
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Both of these incidents involve the deliberate targeting of the LGBTQi community. You would have to work pretty hard to look at these two examples and say “ah ha, but actually this is the same thing”.
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Climate change is hitting Aotearoa with force. Tāmaki Makaurau experienced the worst flooding in its recorded history in January, before Cyclone Gabrielle devastated the North Island in February. 11 people were killed, 10,000 people have been displaced, and several people are still missing, with an estimated $13 billion worth of damage done.
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