Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
I explained a few weeks ago that the government had $36 billion in an investment account that could be taken and used to fund the desperate improvements we need in the health sector. They could do this without breaching their self-imposed fiscal responsibility rules.
Joe Carolan on the nurses strike
Everything now points to another such detonation being imminent. Pumped-up by the steady expansion of global liquidity the world’s stockmarkets have climbed to giddy and unprecedented heights. Over the last few weeks, however, the value of the stocks and shares traded on the world’s exchanges has fluctuated wildly. Such volatility, warns Pettifor, almost always precedes a catastrophic market crash.
Regardless of headlines, the content confirmed years of media reports and countless blogposts on The Daily Blog, The Standard, and elsewhere, that New Zealand’s public healthcare system was critically under-funded; over-stretched; and staff were burning out from over-work. The story confirmed nine years of National’s gross under-funding and mis-management of the health system as successive ministers demanded that DHB managers and health-workers “do more with less”;
I prefer to live in a country that makes its international relations decisions based on firm, independent evidence rather than speculation. Let’s not forget the rush to war based on allegations of Weapons of Mass Destruction. It doesn’t have to be ‘you’re either with us or you’re against us’, it can be a case of wait and see – at least until Wednesday when the UN Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons releases its report into the incident.
On 30 March 2018, Good Friday, thousands of unarmed Palestinians gathered to take part in a well-publicised, non-violent annual protest, known as the Great March of Return. The event commemorates the day in 1976 when the lives of six Palestinians were taken by Israeli forces for daring to protest in a general strike against 30 years of repression and dispossession.
BEFORE CRITICISING THOSE who continue to treat Russia as an “evil empire”, I should first explain why I don’t. It’s not only because I know that without the extraordinary sacrifices of the Russian people during the Second World War (twenty million dead!) the United States and British Empire losses would have been much, much higher.
The people of Gaza are prisoners in a giant cage made by Israel. And Israel is shooting at them.
Can liberal democracy survive if the news media abandons evidence-based judgement and simply piles-on “as one” against a prime minister and her government? And what if it isn’t just the timing that’s consistent, but the message as well? What then? How is the public to avoid the impression that the news media is rooting for one side and not the other?
Under MMP our small voting public effectively constitutes a single manipulable seat. The psychographic dispositions of swing voters could be identified , targeted and manipulated without difficulty. Certain offshore and resident billionaires could easily meet campaign research expenses and hide their contributions behind blind trusts. In place of Cambridge Analytica would be another similar organisation with a friendlier sounding name. Election campaigns centred around the issues of tax, national sovereignty and/or oil, gas and coal exploration would certainly draw the attention of the one-percenters .