Guest and sponsored opinion pieces published on The Daily Blog, offering diverse perspectives within clear editorial guidelines.
Food insecurity, a housing crisis and a welfare system that now has so many gaps in it that it resembles more of a giant hula hoop than a safety net are three of the many gifts that eight years of a National Government have given us
All water supplies are controlled by the Israelis, including West Bank mountain aquifer water which by international law should be a Palestinian resource. Practising ‘hydrological apartheid’ , control of water is used as weapon to drive Palestinians off the land, and if not to another country then into squeezed isolated miserable ‘bantustans’.
The Brexit vote represents the current progressive paradox: the left should be able to represent the many marginalised by neo-liberal capitalism; but is struggling to connect with them in reality, particularly young people and males. The result is that extremist nationalist figures are converging far right and left wing dissatisfaction thinking under a nationalistic, populist banner.
However the Brexit vote turns out, one thing is certain: public anger with the status quo is taking Britain to within a few % of bolting from the EU, weakening a key global institution and continuing a trend towards political “weirdness” worldwide.
Right now we are in a desperate situation, where we read stories of newborns spending the first precious days of their lives in cars. Where cancer stricken teenagers try to recuperate in homes sheltering up to fifteen people. Where decent, hard working people still struggle to get by. Where the government ignorantly spouts bullshit about how there have always been homeless people, and what we are in is not a housing crisis.
With the Greens’ long and deliberate shift from the fringes, which has now resulted in an official Memorandum of Understanding with Labour, there is a renewed need for the outspoken, radical flank.
Last night, I joined with about 750 people at the Mangere Town Centre car park for one sleepless night in our cars to gain a better understanding of what’s it’s like for those doing it tough. And it is tough.
The NACTS budget is really a fudget for trying to hide the growing weakness of NZ’s neo-colonial economy behind a veil of spin. The Key regime hopes to promote business confidence in a climate of falling profits by ‘tax cuts’ made possible by cuts to public spending on the ‘social wage’ and by ‘dividends’ created by privatising state assets and plundering public resources such as water and fisheries.
On Thursday, Talley’s Group Ltd was fined for its role in the death of Leighton Muir, a Kiwi bloke in his 20s who was decapitated on a Talley’s tuna vessel. According to a Muir family friend, Leighton was “a happy, hard-working young man who always had a great big, beaming smile.”
I, as did many frontline prison guards, knew the absence of tobacco would raise the level of violence that it would bring. Your risk of being assaulted/injured would outweigh the health benefits. That’s why the smoking in a prison context is fundamentally different than anywhere else.