Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
Successive Governments have encouraged the pretence of ‘local control’, while ensuring the control strings are firmly kept in the hands of both Wellington and their private sector health partners, such as the drug and medical equipment supply companies and, in many cases, the insurance companies.
Jacinda has said that this is the year when the fixes will begin. We should see this as a sort of home renovation job. Part by part, room by room, the house, which has been left neglected to weather the storms of neo-liberalism, must now be fixed up, so that the rotten bits are replaced, and the worst bits are brought up to the standard of the best.
The carrying of the resolution thus represented a rare assertion of the interests of private sector workers within the CTU – as well as an important breaking-of-ranks within the usually dominant “Big Four” public sector unions. Together, Wagstaff’s opponents have delivered a stunning blow to his presidential mana, greatly reducing his chances of being re-elected to a second term as leader of the CTU.
The questions that arise from the Hanoi Summit are all about diplomatic and journalistic consistency. The United States and the Western news media both need to explain why the measured diplomacy and largely accurate reporting on display in Hanoi, has been so conspicuously absent with regard to Venezuela. The naked diplomatic aggression and outright lies which have characterised the West’s treatment of the Venezuelan Government could hardly be more different from its handling of the DPRK’s “Supreme Leader”.
But thanks to Williams’ screeching abrasive would-be prognostication … if it keeps up, there is a very real risk that the only ‘entrails’ being read, will be those of the Tamihere campaign.
POLICE NUMBERS just topped 13,000. Forty years ago there were fewer than half that number – considerably fewer. Astonishingly, we now have almost as many cops as we do soldiers. At last count the New Zealand Defence Force numbered 14,921. Put those numbers together and the state’s coercive potential turns out to be not far shy of 30,000 highly-trained and fearsomely-equipped men and women. Those who allow expressions like “revolution” and “class war” to trip so merrily off their tongues should be required to explain where their 30,000 highly-trained and fearsomely-equipped men and women are currently hiding – just waiting for the word.
As property investors/speculators; assorted financiers; and their political-wing, the National Party, ramp up their opposition to a capital gains tax to a stridency approaching hysteria, current party leader, Simon Bridges, has used the mainstream media to push his highly propagandised (and highly emotive and misleading) messages;
The rise of high cost debt in Aotearoa is purely a response of the successive political movement to keep the bottom third of families living below the poverty line. No-one actually worried about the families at the time that Ruth Richardson’s mother of all budgets came in. The only goal of decreasing benefits then was to provide a gap between benefits and wages, so that wages could be pulled down.
What the world is currently witnessing in the UK, is the “pre-emptive split” that simply has to happen if the looming, uncontrolled, disintegration of the British Right, and the left-wing victory such an unmediated break-up would permit, is to be circumvented.
National’s new Environment Policy Discussion Document released this weekend in Raglan has plenty of virtue signalling, and motherhood and apple pie. But despite the Party’s claim of an ambitious approach, it fits neo-liberal solutions to ecological problems, and in many ways reflects business as usual.
