It’s a sad irony that the wizened politician Winston Peters is the one who allowed Jacinda Ardern the current opportunity to form a Government coalition while also limiting her ability to oversee a properly transformational government.
When the smoke from the Australian bushfires turned the sky yellow at the beginning of the year, it felt like shit got real. Armageddon was upon us.
I’ve just had a couple of days camping. Time to escape the jingles; the advertising invoking us to spend, spend, spend; the overconsumption and the manic traffic. Time to reflect on the end of the year, the end of the decade, and according to the Doomsday Clock, the end of the world.
There are suggestions that the focus on questionable NZF funding and donation practices could undermine the Government to such a degree as to prompt a snap election, which is probably desperate and wishful thinking from the National Party.
News reports this week covered the Coronial inquest into the tragic killing of five-year-old Leon Jayet-Cole – beaten to death…
In Chile, Catalonia, Hong Kong and Lebanon and beyond, and across the western world, millions of citizens have increasingly taken to the streets to protest racist policies and policing, inequality, draconian laws, punitive fare / cost-of-living increases and environmental catastrophe that are the manifestations of the pathologies of our times.
So while the democratic principle of one (adult) person, one vote gives us the semblance of equal access to power, that power and wealth remain inaccessible and unjustly distributed, and no-one’s even talking about deconstructing the CCO system that castrates politicians, dwarfs their income, undermines their accountability to their voters, and short changes the workers on the ground.
I’m suffering from electile dysfunction. -The inability to be aroused by any of the candidates standing for election in the upcoming local government contest.
They will never admit it, but the cowboys of New Zealand’s raw resource extractive economy are privileged.
Animal agriculture is the elephant in the room regarding the climate change and biodiversity crisis.