ARTICLES
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.
Read MorePrimary 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.
Read MoreThousands 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.
Read MoreIn 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?
Read MoreBoth 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”.
Read MoreClimate 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.
Read MoreWayne Brown faced his first major test as Mayor of Auckland at the end of January, as the city faced the worst floods in its recorded history. He failed this test spectacularly.
Read MoreToday, Ardern is widely seen as a great success story, the very image of what a progressive, empathetic leader in the 21st Century should look like. Corbyn is near-universally maligned for the alleged crime of destroying the Labour Party and dooming the UK to seven more years of Tory rule. But is that fair?
Read MoreTraditional media, because it is such an immense machine for producing and spreading stories, tends to shape the news landscape in a way that we just can’t. If you get a story placed with enough outlets at the same time, it isn’t just ‘a story posted several times at once,’ it’s current events.
Read MoreAfter a rough couple of years, it’s an absolute relief that 2022 brought with it a full slate of movies, mostly unimpeded by COVID! If you look beyond the glut of Marvels, Jurassics and Minionses, it has been a solid year for cinema with really strong Hollywood and international blockbusters, decent Oscar hopefuls and some truly astounding arthouse and genre fare.
Read MoreRight now is precisely the time when the monarchy must be challenged. To cover up the normalisation of the new monarch and the arcane traditions associated with his ascension, the royalist establishment is required to weaponise the Queen’s death and the grief many ordinary people do genuinely feel.
Read MoreYimbyism can be problematic for the pro-housing left, especially those of us who are environmentalists as much as we are leftists.
Read MoreThe current malaise around tech platforms and our democracy has come to be understood as primarily a question of disinformation. Government agencies, Silicon Valley NGOs and research centers have been crucial in channeling our disgust with unaccountable tech-oligarchs into a singular preoccupation with truth.
Read MorePeople are once again talking about the New Zealand media being broken and wondering what it will take to fix it.
Read MoreEveryone is talking about the cost of living crisis. Inflation in the first quarter of 2022 was 6.9%, up from 5.9% in the last quarter of 2021 — the highest level we have seen since 1990. The price of food, rent and, in particular, fuel is going through the roof.
Read MoreOn Friday morning, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered the Harvard University Commencement Speech. Standing before the assembled university officials and graduates, she used the platform to rally against disinformation
Read MoreInflation is hammering much of the world and working people are on the receiving end twice, both in terms of increasing costs of living and tighter monetary policy pushing up mortgage rates and the cost of commercial borrowing
Read MoreWe have been inundated lately with stories about guns, gangs, drug seizures, murders, violent robberies, and the current flavours of the month: youth crime and ram raids. Scarcely a week goes by where there aren't multiple sensational headlines making claims about some kind of crime wave.
Read MoreWith the release of quarterly figures highlighting New Zealand’s domestic version of the global cost of living crisis, a more overtly politicised tone has begun to dominate local news coverage of inflation.
Read MoreAs organisations like NZ Police, Oranga Tamariki and The Ministry of Health grapple with their own racism, the Public Service Commission has been implementing the Papa Pounamu ‘diversity and inclusion’ work programme. Priority Area 2 of Papa Pounamu: ‘Te Urupare i te Mariu | Addressing Bias’ says organisations “can and should be addressing bias and discrimination in all its forms”.
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