In November this year, an American warship will be entering Auckland Harbour for the first time in 32 years for the 75th anniversary of the NZ Navy. I remember protesting against the last warship visit when I was ten years old and I’m damned if I’ll simply sit quietly by while National and their corrupt followers cheerlead the American empire back into our waters!
News that NZs worst employer, AFFCO Talleys, are now trying to kill off any social media criticism of their despicable work practices, union busting and appalling work and safety record is just the latest round of this disgusting company gleefully crushing worker rights.
The racism that has denigrated aboriginals is one thing, a sceptic wound that can be covered over by history and a ‘we didn’t know any better’ type of attitude, but what Australia is doing to refugees right now has no pretence of history to hide the horror.
Key has built a tax haven, was instrumental in personally intervening in 2010 to create it, had his lawyer lobby the Minister to stop any crackdown and then gets caught out benefiting from the very trusts he’s helped build.
If you are not incandescent with rage now, you are the problem!
…this is apartheid era bigotry. We are so bloody casual in this country we don’t ever seem to trip over the truth even when it hits us in the face. It is inexcusably racist that our justice system has produced such a cultural massacre within the poorest communities.
Latest Roy Morgan shows National plummeting to 42.5% and NZ First soaring to 12.5%. These are pretty huge swings and might explain why National are so nervous they need to talk about a Land Tax.
If you are a Gen X or Y, that pain you feel, that lack of job security, real wages, stake hold in society – that’s neoliberalism and that laughing you hear are property speculating boomers refusing to give up their illusionary wealth.
As believers of the power for good a well funded state sector can create, we on the Left are big supporters of the state, so what do we do when we realise that some functions of state are not only broken and deformed, they are actually creating counter productive damage that demands a radical amputation and regrowth?
Meanwhile the property speculator boomers laugh and the rich lock Gen X, Y, millennials and the poor out of ever owning a home in their own country.
If we want to respect the glorious dead, then surely it is as the current generation promising the next generation that we won’t ever waste their precious lives for the obscenity of war.