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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This 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.
A 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.
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.
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.
The Commerce Commission gets slightly more aggressive as the supermarket duopoly and government lean into failed, repressive carceral policy. The alleged UHC shooter has been caught -what does this mean for populos? TPM’s vote share looks to be on the rise, Māori continue to be the most likely electoral party for driving change. And the spectre of climate change is becoming a very violent poltergeist.
We host freelance reporter Glen Johnson and genocide researcher Kieran Kelly to discuss the recent events in Syria and what it might mean for the region.
Join us for the week that was! We talk about the death of the United Health Care CEO, the concept of Social Murder, political issues in South Korea and France and the (willing) appropriation of legacy media as a propaganda network alongside Western government authoritarianism.
We’re joined by Jathan Sadowski, AI critic and co-host of This Machine Kills to discuss his “ruthless criticism of AI and Capitalism and how it fits into the NZ context.
Back with current events after a few midweek episodes! We talk proxy wars, the fascist turn, and the increasing propensity of “centre left” parties in the west to be the ones moving towards authoritarian policy - particularly in regards to immigration and freedom of speech.
We are joined by PATHA president Jen Shields to discuss the recent government release about puberty blockers, the realities of trans healthcare and the extremely nasty attacks by right-wing parties.
We’re back with current events as we hurtle towards the end of 2024. Civil liberties, “libertarians”, hīkoi, haka and the ICC arrest warrants.
