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?
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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).
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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.
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On a political level, Hipkins is a pathetic loser. On a personal level, I hate him.
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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.
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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.
Read MoreA 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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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In which Karyn Taylor-Moore express her horror, shame and disbelief at a world that seems to have gone completely stark, staring mad.
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You'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.
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Next 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.
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It 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.
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A 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.
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Israel’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.
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