Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
Instead of allowing more permanent residents in the government has continued to allow bosses to import labour on a temporary work visa. The number of these remains around 250,000 a year – yes, a quarter of a million a year. This has created a pool of at least 150,000 workers here at any one time on a temporary visa.
A WARBLING CHARM of magpies in the macrocarpa serenaded the windy forecourt of the service station. Two weather-beaten cockies were filling up their mud-splattered gas-guzzlers and chatting away to one another in the desultory fashion of their kind.
Anyway, I will leave the technical writing to others, but I do want to talk a bit about winning. Competition is healthy until it becomes unhealthy. Whether it be a sporting game, an educational outcome or anything else, sometimes one person alone does not come put on top. What you do about that defines who you are as a person, a country or a sporting tournament.
MANY OF US want to believe that if Jacinda Ardern watched Melanie Reid’s “Taken Generation” video, she’d be outraged. What person with a heart wouldn’t be? Reid’s exposé of Oranga Tamariki’s failings is an enormously confronting piece of journalism. It has moved Maoridom like nothing else since the Foreshore and Seabed furore of 2004-05. For that reason alone, you would think the Prime Minister might consider the 45 minutes required to watch Reid’s video, time well spent.
Calling for villagers not to kill elephants destroying their crops, or tigers killing their children, are just causes for us in the west. But we live in the luxury of the system that’s delivered goods to us at the expense of those communities and ecosystems and species.
According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, the term anti-Semitism means “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. It defines Semite as: “A member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs. From modern Latin Semita, via late Latin from Greek Sēm ‘Shem’, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom these peoples were traditionally supposed to be descended.”
The pervasiveness of the rural virtue/urban vice myth similarly explains the widespread refusal of the Right to accept the reality and urgency of climate change. The countryside cannot be disentangled from the extractive and environmentally unsustainable industries it supports. But, accepting this fact means casting rural New Zealand in the role of ecological villain, rather than economic and cultural hero. Unacceptable.
Regardless of whether one views immigration as a good thing or a bad thing, there can be no disputing its dramatic impact on the demographic profile of New Zealand society. The official motivation behind the decision to transition this country away from ethnic homogeneity and towards a multicultural society may have been profoundly progressive, but its potential political consequences have always been, and continue to be, extremely dangerous.
I once took my husband to see the play ‘Waiting for Godot’, with Ian McKellen in the starring role. Afterwards, he was puzzled. What was that all about? “Waiting”, I replied, “or should I say the existential experience of waiting”. More puzzlement. “So, what is it about waiting, as opposed to working, or talking, or sitting on a park bench dreaming, that is different from any other human activity?” At this point he sighed in exasperation. The Marxist was not well-attuned to existentialism.
We need a well-funded public education campaign ahead of the cannabis referendum, and a model based on social equity, social retail enterprises and social clubs.