An undercurrent of New Zealanders hate Taika Waititi's work, a hatred worsened by these expectations to love it
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This week, the ACT party indicated that it would like to spend $500 million to build youth detention centres. This, it says, is necessary to “hold young offenders accountable” and to stop the “tag and release” of young offenders who face no real punishment for criminal offending.
In response to this proposal, justice and penal reform advocate Sir Kim Workman said to Mike Hosking that, “it's a nice idea, but it won’t work. Just look at our history.”
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New Zealand is caught in the gyre of many crises, all of which reflect the inability of “free” markets to provide for the needs of either individuals or society as a whole. This malaise hangs over not just New Zealand, but the wider Western world.
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ANZAC day is frequently presented as a day of solemn reflection and contemplation of the horrors of war. But in 2022, one service was hijacked by so-called “Sovereign Citizens”, far right conspiracy theorists who believe that the only laws that apply to them are the ones that they consent to personally.
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On Wednesday, 19 April 2023, the sister of Tangaraju s/o Suppia, a 46-year-old Tamil Singaporean, received a letter from the Singapore Prison Service: “Please be informed that the death sentence passed on your brother…will be carried out on 26 April 2023 (Wednesday)”.
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Earlier this week, Newsroom published a pro-AUKUS opinion piece, by Dr Reuben Steff of the University of Waikato. The limp case put forward by Steff - the kind of expert who informs foreign and defence ministers - can be refuted by a non-expert and a few quick google searches. Here’s what that looks like, tackling each of Steff’s paragraph’s one at a time.
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The Vaccine Is Poison, Adult Human Female, Don’t Let Them Steal Your Country. I mean, a simple response to each claim is: No it isn’t, No that’s incorrect, and No, they aren’t. But let's dig a little bit deeper into each one, let's peel off the sticker and see exactly what the glue of these ideologies are made out of.
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In the week where Posie Parker was touring Australia and then New Zealand, Aotearoa felt like it was having a sea change on transphobia. Suddenly the public was waking up to what some of us had been talking about for years—that the anti-trans movement is a fascist cause
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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.
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Both 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”.
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Traditional 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.
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After 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.
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Yimbyism can be problematic for the pro-housing left, especially those of us who are environmentalists as much as we are leftists.
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The 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.
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People are once again talking about the New Zealand media being broken and wondering what it will take to fix it.
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On 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
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Inflation 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
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We 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.
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With 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.
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As 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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