Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
PRESIDENT-ELECT JAIR BOLSONARO and Halloween are made for each other. If you’re attempting to evoke feelings of fear and dread, then the next President of Brazil is indisputably the right man for the job. For sheer terror, however, nothing beats contemplating the people whose votes propelled him into office.
If Jami Lee Ross has achieved anything, it is casting the full glare of public scrutiny over Party donations. His methods may have been unorthodox – but he’s got our attention. We can no longer feign lack of awareness of this dark shadow over our democracy.
During my .. brief awokenness this afternoon, I happened to peruse the newspaper. And what did I see? Pieces commenting on the recent attack at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. This is, of course, to be expected. But what was *not*, like *at all* to be expected, was the escalating level of accusations in relation to the attack that Donald Trump… is apparently an anti-semite.
THE MAINSTREAM NEWS media’s constant and effusive praise for Green co-leader, James Shaw, draws into sharp focus the party’s fundamental contradiction. That the supra-political character of the present planetary crisis must doom to failure any attempt to present the Greens as just-another-political-party. Undaunted, Shaw exploits with considerable skill the urgent need of the status-quo’s defenders’ to keep “common-sense solutions” in play. Were in not so tragic, this acquiescence to the short-termism that defines both the intractability of climate change, and of modern politics, would be hugely and comically ironic.
It was a slaughter in the end. The Wentworth Sydney by-election was expected to be a close race between Dave Sharma (Liberals) and Kerryn Phelps (independent). Malcolm Turnbull’s ejection as Prime Minister on August 24 and his subsequent departure from federal politics had riled local voters
So the pipe bomber targeting Democrats in the US was a Trump fanatic wanting to destroy his enemies? This is not surprising except to certain Republicans, who were keen to pin it on the Democrats as a sort of reverse strategy to harm Trump by harming their own.
A robust international response to the gruesome murder of Khashoggi might offer a watershed moment in the dark history of despotism in the Middle East.
Recently Unite Union discovered a case of migrant exploitation where the workers talked about being “treated like slaves”.
Thinking about the National Party’s recent woes – there’s a funny sort of … I guess you’d say “symmetry” to a lot of happenings politics; and not simply in the sense that they occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.
9 November, 2018, 8.30am to 6.30pm
James Cook Hotel, Wellington
Registration $91.50+bf from Eventfinda