Guest and sponsored opinion pieces published on The Daily Blog, offering diverse perspectives within clear editorial guidelines.
2016 has been another year of decreasing membership for the Union movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many Unionists will blame this on an anti-worker government. It is true that the Key is government has had a pro-business agenda. But to focus on government as the defining challenge of the union movement can be unhelpful
The NZ Intelligence and Security Bill is the culmination of twenty years of increases in the powers of NZ’s spy agencies. It gives them everything they could hope for. The Bill radically broadens the focus of the SIS and the GCSB so they can run operations on almost anything. It allows them to do literally anything to advance on operation or to cover it up. It allows them to co-opt anybody else into an operation. And it grants immunity from prosecution to everyone involved.
When it comes to disciplining the general population there aren’t too many different deceptions you can use to do it.
In this series of three articles, I outline why I think this Bill represents the most disturbing attack to date on the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders. Part two traces two decades of intelligence and security legislation from 1996 to 2016.
Hekia couldn’t commit herself to the extreme hardline right education policies being prepared for 2017 election manifesto.
I can tell you what the over 350 submissions to our People’s Review project is starting to tell us:
The National Government has done a great job at silencing criticism of immigration from the liberal-left. Until recently any mention of concern over the deluge of migrants coming into the country under various guises has been greeted with claims that critics are zenophobic or even racist.
When New Zealand amended the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) Act in 1996, it was the first significant change in almost 20 years. The 20 years since that amendment have seen a constant stream of law changes extending the powers of the country’s spies. The Intelligence and Security Bill currently before Parliament is the latest of these. In this series of three articles, I outline why I think this Bill represents the most disturbing attack to date on the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders.
Something remarkable happened this year at the United Nations General Assembly. Seven Pacific nations used the occasion to speak out for their neighbours in Indonesian- controlled West Papua. It was decades ago when the world body last witnessed this kind of multi-nation lobby. Bold Vanuatu has been close to a lone voice in recent years.
The NZ Greens should see this as their time. Instead, the political sock puppet that is James Shaw has seen fit to by himself invent a new history, invent a new policy and sell it to an electorate who aren’t much interested.