ARTICLES
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.
Read MoreThe 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
Read MoreIn which Karyn Taylor-Moore express her horror, shame and disbelief at a world that seems to have gone completely stark, staring mad.
Read MoreYou've probably seen the video of Te Pāti Māori leading a haka in New Zealand's Parliament by now. It's close to a billion views combined at this point, and reactionary media has been quick to jump on it as some sort of "stone age" display, as if protest has never been a part of parliamentary politics before. You might even hear people say that this is about shutting down "equal rights", and what this current government wants is just an honest discussion about what the treaty means. This is all a smokescreen for what this bill is actually about: rewriting history to protect extractive capital.
Read MoreNext Tuesday is election day in the United States of America, the land of democracy — where billionaires buy elections, where the President is not elected by popular vote, and where the nominee of the Republican Party attempted to overturn the results after he was voted out of office four years ago. Somehow, despite every crime Donald Trump has been tried and convicted for, the former President is a coin-toss away from taking back the White House.
Read MoreIt is foul fascist nonsense, this victim-blaming fiction of war. There are no half-measures left to us in response. We need to drive the genocide supporters and genocide deniers off the air and out of office. Moreover, the genocide will not end until Palestine is free.
Read MoreA year on from the 2023 general election, David Seymour responded to the latest One News-Verian poll, showing a 5% lead for the government, by gloating. "The coalition is working so much better than our enemies hoped!" Sad to say, but the ACT leader is not wrong.
Read MoreIsrael’s assault on Gaza is still seen by most Western politicians and the vast majority of the media as the inevitable, if somewhat regrettable, response to the horrors of October 7. Perhaps that response has been a little over the top, some might say. Perhaps there have been a “few too many civilian deaths” but Palestinian death doesn’t carry the same emotional charge as Israeli death so … ‘meh’. At the most we might get numbers of the dead now permanently frozen at 40,000 - but no emotion, no real human pain.
Read MoreThis did not start on October 7 last year. Israeli ethnic cleansing and apartheid has been taking place for decades, since the Nakba of 1948. It has been 76 years of Palestinians being violently separated from their land by Israel, this colonial regime that denies basic human rights to millions of Arabs under its occupation.
Read MoreA month ago I emailed my manager and his manager and told them that I was resigning. I didn’t give a reason, just the minimum amount of notice required. Now my notice period is up and I need to start writing.
My decision to quit may have been reckless but it wasn’t completely spontaneous. Things had gotten pretty unpleasant in the office and, although I found pleasure in organising alongside my colleagues, I wasn’t necessarily going to be able to continue sending impish all-staff emails forever.
Read MoreThe US's pivot to the greater Asia-Pacific region, away from the Middle East, has been the subject of much focus. Increasingly, Washington and its allies are asserting themselves again in the region as China seeks to gain more geopolitical influence. Over the past few years, the US has been re-establishing embassies, soft power organisations, and inking security agreements with countries that haven't seen much attention from the US since the Cold War wound down.
Read MoreAt the same time as we are forced to make these sacrifices the government has invested billions into ideological pet projects. There's $1.9 billion going into building a mega prison. $15 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest few. There’s money to spend on roads and boot camps. This isn’t hypocrisy however. It’s a plan.
Read MoreIsrael is using its acts of brutality to wage psychological war on Palestinians and those who oppose the violence and oppression visited upon them. These acts work on different levels and it is clear to see that currently Israel seeks to avoid publicising its acts in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, but allows acts perpetrated in Gaza and on Palestinians taken from Gaza to be seen widely. In doing so they show how little they fear losing support among the international general public. They do this all knowing that a significant minority of Westerners, mostly due to racist views about Palestinians, will never waver in their support for Israeli violence even at its most inhumane and extreme.
Read MoreRoger Douglas, the most revolutionary Finance Minister in the postwar history of Aotearoa, knew how to change more in three years than most governments do in three terms. Rogernomics transformed the structure of our economy with dizzying speed, from protectionist welfare state to neoliberal free market.
Read MoreThis whiplash is being felt by activists across Aotearoa, some of whom have spent years and others decades fighting for climate action, workers’ rights, livable incomes for all, access to decent housing, and for Te Tiriti o Waitangi to be honoured. Campaigners spent years organising and marching for a fair and sustainable future, were given crumbs by the last Labour Government, and are now watching aghast as the new government tears up the minimal progress that was made in the previous six years whilst advancing their own right-wing agenda at a breakneck speed.
Read MoreMany people reacted to the ICC’s prosecutor’s application for warrants for 2 Israeli and 3 Hamas officials as some sort of triumph, a signal moment for the growing pressure to hold Israeli leaders accountable, but it is not. People for whom I normally have utmost respect are steadfastly ignoring the ICC’s record and refusing to think through the actual ramifications of these charges. A simplistic, even childish, authoritarianism seems to grip them, leading them to the delusion that some stern authority figure will get the baddies and make everything right. Even the admirable Francesca Albanese asserted that this is a “watershed”. It is not a watershed, nor is it simply an empty gesture, it is a disaster in the making.
Read MoreWay back in early April of this year we had a rally for Palestine here in Christchurch which had as its theme the phrase ‘Unmute Gaza’.
There were three speakers that day and each of them – in their own different way - spoke of how Palestinians, and the Palestinian cause, have been silenced for over 100 years and how lethal that silencing has been for the Palestinian people.
Read MoreIt's a wild worldview that doesn't have any internal coherence (but remember, that doesn't matter any more - the incoherence is a strength) that has really come to the forefront this week as the world watched Imane Khelif in the boxing at the Olympics. Well, some of the world watched, and then people who have never watched women's sport once in their life decided it was suddenly incredibly important to make their views known.
Read MoreIn 2004, over twenty thousand people marched from the tip of Te Tai Tokerau to Parliament in protest of the Labour government’s decision to extinguish Māori customary property in the foreshore and seabed. Tariana Turei crossed the floor in response, forming Te Pāti Māori, which toppled the Labour government in the next election. Twenty years later, the National government wants to steal the foreshore from Māori again.
Read MoreIn 2024, centrist politicians attempting to uphold the status quo are like the light of stars which have already been extinguished. Support for their system is already dead. They just don’t know it yet.
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