Critical analysis breaking down New Zealand news coverage, media framing, and political narratives behind the headlines.
In terms of a political game changer, the Labour Party’s final present to NZ on its 100th Birthday of 100 000 affordable homes is about as good as it gets.
I’ve personally known 5 Labour Party leaders. Lange, Clark, Goff, Shearer and Cunliffe. Lange wrote columns for the University Magazine I edited, I met Clark dozens of times, I went around to Goff’s house for a BBQ, I used to catch up with Shearer for coffees now and then and I’ve hung out with Cunliffe.
Labour have probably won the next election. The nifty, ‘we will build houses while National will sell them’ is the perfect simplistic juxtaposition that loads emotional attachment where ideology once resided.
John Key is desperately thrashing around pretending like he’s actually doing something about the housing crisis so that middle NZ get conned again.
The response to highlighting the appalling human rights of some of those country’s we are trying to cut free trade deals with is always ‘if we only traded with those we agree with we wouldn’t trade at all’.
I call bullshit on that on two grounds.
Well it’s a 100 years of Labour and what can one say? A political movement that began with thunder manages to barely cause a fart these days.
13 years after the deeply flawed and divisive decision to invade Iraq as punishment for a group of Saudi’s who had no connection with Iraq flying planes into the World Trade Centre, the Chilcot report has finally been released and it paints a grim and disurbingly naive British and American leadership who went to war based on little more than ego and bullshit.
The role of the state is to enable you to live your life with as much freedom and autonomy as you are capable of, it isn’t there to tell you who you can love and what toilet you must use.
The history of slavery, racism and a brutal apartheid mentality Police force mixed with America’s ludicrous gun laws is a hateful cocktail of spite that erupts with enough regularity to remind us that there are deep problems still within the culture of our largest Super Power.
Fast food has an enormous amount of power in our economy and it politically inoculates itself by having far right hate speech bloggers post attacks on their health campaigns.