One Day Out with Green Team #5
As part of my contribution to the Green party election campaign, I joined the Green’s Billboard Team #5. Our team was assigned to the Rimutaka Electorate – and it was an eventful day…
Setting the Agenda
Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
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NZ’s huge criminal underclass created from political choice
Criminals aren’t born, they’re created. They’re created in response to a combination of factors such as socioeconomic status (poverty) and class (social marginalisation and exclusion), family dysfunction, illiteracy, unemployment, substance abuse and mental ill-health. And they’re created by punitive laws, ‘penal populism’ leading to policies ‘strong on law and order’, unconscious bias in the police force, and subsequent distortions in remand terms and conditions, sentencing and incarceration.
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It’s A Question Of Values, My Friends: What The Greens Must Do To Survive
New Zealand needs the Greens in Parliament. Not to turn New Zealand into a “thriving green economy” filled with “booming businesses”, but to remind us, at every possible opportunity, that “people are more important than progress”, and that a better world is possible.
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Let’s Do This NOW, Jacinda – NOT “As Finances Permit”
THIS IS THE TIME of maximum danger for Jacinda Ardern. Caught off-guard by their stop-gap leader’s astonishing energy and confidence, the tired grey men of the Labour Party could only look on in wonder like the rest of us. As public expectations of Jacinda have soared, however, the men and women of Labour’s political apparatus are beginning to close in around her.
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The Zombie TPPA: what the opposition parties say
The National government has got its wish – the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is off the front pages and back into the shadows of secret negotiations. Big dangers lurk in those shadows!
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The Greens’ Campaign Reset: Normal Ideological Transmission is Resumed
WATCHING THE GREENS’ campaign reset unfold, I couldn’t help but regret the demise of the pre-Dotcom Mana Party. Because sure as eggs-is-eggs, the Greens have put poverty behind them. Not rhetorically, of course, as James Shaw, now the party’s sole leader, made clear to the assembled journalists: “[W]e will continue to talk about poverty. That conversation makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I’m comfortable with that.” Except, of course, he isn’t. Not in the least. Not on your Nelly.
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National’s (“New”) Boot Camps Policy – HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER? Or Will That Just Be The Criminals
It has been said by a mind far wittier than myself that whilst history doesn’t repeat … it sure does…
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Black and white or 50 shades of grey?
In 1994 CPAG was formed in response to the truly appalling changes Ruth Richardson rammed through in the early 1990s that saw rates of child poverty soar along with rates of 3rd world child diseases. Do people really understand that a sole parent’s benefit was cut below the poverty line but if they tried to earn extra money, they lost most of it?
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Metiria Turei and the debate on poverty and inequality
Poverty and inequality are topics our two main political parties would prefer not to talk about. It was their political decisions in the 1980s and 1990s which led directly and predictably to poverty for beneficiaries and low-income families and their political decisions which have maintained and entrenched it since.
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Shouldn’t Radio NZ feel ashamed for its Metiria Turei coverage?
For the first time ever, I had willfully switched off a Radio NZ political programme. Listening to three, privileged, well-paid, middle-class, pakeha professionals pontificating on the sins of a 23 year old young maori woman two decades ago was more than I could stomach.