With “the big squeeze” put on working people, we can see how it is not such a reach that to reduce security in the nation—as represented by the rate of unemployment rising—is to guarantee rising social and personal ills. This will naturally extend to the most extreme social problems, such as suicide. What New Zealanders must confront is how tolerant are we of the degree of precarity that exists in our nation, and if so, are we comfortable with the dark consequences?
This week a coterie of Chrises (PM Luxon, Infrastructure Minister Bishop and presumably Building Minister Penk) will be welcoming some big name investors, pension funds, and construction companies to Auckland to try and flog off some big ticket public-private partnership deals. The $10 billion Northland Expressway is top of the list (although the list is understood to be only four projects).
The most bizarre thing about this is that everyone - both in Israel and in the West - already knew the Bibas family was dead. As Owen Jones points out in a recent Substack, Hamas announced back in November 2023 that they were killed by an Israeli airstrike and offered to return their bodies but Israel said no. It is now becoming abundantly clear why.
On a political level, Hipkins is a pathetic loser. On a personal level, I hate him.
As long as Israel continues to insist on being a majority Jewish state controlling the majority of the former Mandatory Palestine they will be inimical to Palestinians. This has nothing to do with conflict, nor any action of resistance by Palestinian groups. Palestinians are enemies of the state of Israel merely by existing.
The sooner we mobilise against these acts of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction”, the fewer people will die. If it is not stopped then ultimately this phase of genocide will take more lives than the Holocaust that has just ended.
A ceasefire in Gaza does not mean the end of genocide and it does not mean the end of mass killing. The ceasefire is bringing in a new phase.
While there are many concerns that need to be addressed with PSNA’s campaign, why has the conversation stopped there? Why has the core issue of this campaign been ignored? Namely, that IDF soldiers who have committed war crimes in Gaza have been allowed into New Zealand?
Why has any discussion about Israel, its violations of international law, and the international legal expectations for third party states to hold IDF soldiers accountable not been addressed?
The people of Germany during World War II were not a different species than us and we are not immune from the same descent into inhumanity. Monsters are not born, they are made. They are made by a machine. Germany had a monster making machine, and we have our own.
We gathered, we roared our approval to a series of speakers who denounced the racist Treaty Principles Bill, and then we left. I have done this dozens of times. I want us to hold this beautiful moment of rupture in our minds, that egalitarian discharge of the mighty crowd, as we think about what is to be done. I was moved to write this article because last week, the deadline for public submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill was scheduled to close. So many of us chose to submit that Parliament’s website went down, and the deadline had to be extended.
As the Omicron wave wanes worldwide, countries have been quick to declare COVID-19 officially endemic- the pandemic we are told is over.
In the 53 years since the term entered the lexicon, the social terrain of politics has radically changed. The median voter today is very different from the median voter of 1969.
As we settle into the current Red Light setting and as the cases of Omicron climb each day, the hospitality sector in Auckland has had its life support switched off.
The centre-left will fail to deliver for working-class people if it doesn't embrace universal basic services. We can only tackle the housing, inflation and inequality crises by decommodifying and guaranteeing the essentials of life for all.
Here are the ways working-class people fought back in 2021. There are many examples, I've only picked my favourites; the thing about something like a global pandemic is it exposes how the system works and whose labour makes the world go round
I think it is fair to say that 2021, like 2020, was an awful year globally, and sadly there is no reason to believe that 2022 will be any better.
Fair Pay Agreements (FPAs) offer Labour the chance to live up to their promise of being a transformational government. It is vital they forge ahead with FPAs in spite of bad faith criticism from the right and business interests.
Listening to Christopher Luxon’s maiden speech I got the impression I had somehow discovered time travel. It appeared I had managed to go back to the halcyon days of 2007. This 2007 was very similar to the one I remembered, it was a period of business as usual.
A Common sensibility is something we’ve been thinking about since a couple years back when a group of us in the left media space met to discuss communication and direction of the broader left project.
New Zealand's success at eliminating COVID in 2020 saw the Sixth Labour government receive international praise and fanfare. In the early stages of the pandemic, our small island nation demonstrated the virtues of evidence-based governance and of listening to the science on issues.
We start with a school lunch update. The NZ Govt is trying to take back control of the economic narrative with an Infrastructure Summit, amid global trade uncertainty. The UK Labour Party is abolishing 'NHS England' and making life harder for disabled people.
As Callaghan Innovation prepares to shut up shop it’s making one last pitch - a hackathon to design a “NZ DOGE”. What the fuck does that even mean? And what is happening with the transplant of US tech culture and propaganda into the NZ discourse?
We get the chance to swing at Labour for their latest fumbled PR and what looks like a signal of further centrism. School lunches remain on the agenda as one student gets second degree burns. And multiple high profile political roles are on the way out.
We discuss the concept of genocide, tracking the history of the concept and definition into the present day.
The media/pol class are finally admitting that Luxon is not fit for purpose, while his coalition partners go from disaster to disaster, and his own Ministers propose wildly destructive policy. Meanwhile, NZ still isn’t anywhere near close to the speed of decline faced by the US.
Last weekend Destiny Church was directed by their leader, Brian Tamaki, to undertake terrorism. They duly complied, storming a library to attack a children’s story event, injuring at least one person and forcing children and caregivers to barricade themselves in a room. We discuss the conditions that led to this and the need for a strong, ongoing response in the face of a political and media climate that, at best, isn’t interested.
We discuss the destruction of public services in Education and Health and the purely extractive nature of neoliberal privatisation. We then peer through time (at the current situation in the US) to understand where these decisions by the National Party coalition government are going to end up.
We weigh in on the accelerating fascist destruction of the administrative state in the US and consider how this impacts NZ, possible steps to take, and the way that media and politics here is being set up in a way to clear the path for rabid extraction and decline, particularly via the ACT Party.
We talk education and ECE reforms, the issues with Labour alongside the role of unions, and the news about ex ACT Party President Tim Jago having name suppression lifted after 2.5 years, following his convictions for sexually abusing two teenage boys in the 1990s.
We discuss the current state of western politics, modern day fascism and its roots.
