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.
Students and staff have concerns about the merging of the University of Auckland Faculty of Law and its proposed merger with the Faculties of Business and Economics, including the way in which the consultation process has been communicated and implemented.
Al-Haq, the oldest and most established Palestinian human rights organisation, released an important report about genocide in Gaza, but it should not be important at all. Everyone should already understand that genocide is an established fact.
Just shy of two weeks ago, the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti against the current government’s anti-Māori policies reached parliament after a much longer journey down Te Ika-a-Māui. The media has tried to downplay the number of attendees but I reckon there must have been close to 100,000.
The Broadcasting Standards Authority of NZ have, in their wisdom, ruled that TVNZ's interviews with the Israeli Ambassador & the Head of the Palestinian Delegation to NZ weren't biased or inaccurate
In which Karyn Taylor-Moore express her horror, shame and disbelief at a world that seems to have gone completely stark, staring mad.
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 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.
With Trump’s inauguration so close what did the Biden presidency offer the world and what impacts might we see under a president roundly labelled as an outright fascist? Why are all the political parties in “western democracies” so avidly breaking institutional norms for reactionary reasons?
We speak with Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab about the history of Palestine and the work of Palestinians and Palestine advocates in NZ over the last 18 months.
What are the early signs of discourse for 2025, and what might they signal in politics and culture for the year ahead?
Will the rightwing implode in 2025 or is it all theatre? What’s on the cards for Western and NZ politics as we enter a new year.
In the final(??) current events episode for the year we discuss the ways in which western politics, especially on the rightwing, is intentionally creating a policy framework to support fascism. We talk education, criminality, the alignment of capital with the far right, and try to think of some high points.
Oliver Neas spent months this year investigating and conducting interviews to reveal what happened behind the scenes before & after the Wellington council debated selling shares in their own airport. We discussed what processes & principles were at play, how the issue connects to local economy governance, and how best to treat these debates in your community.
