Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
The ongoing travails of our nation’s convenience store and dairy operators have grown to such a scale that even those perennial champions of Ostrich Economics in our Government are unable to ignore them.
My friend and I cast our votes for the Iranian Presidential Election in Christchurch last Friday knowing full well the election was effectively rigged in advance by unelected clerics who had decided who could and couldn’t run.
A leading suicide prevention campaigner published a social media post on the weekend asking why the Southern District Health Board had yet to apologise to her family over the poor care for her son, who was a victim of suicide 4 years ago.
Ground control to Major Tom? Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Apologies to the late lamented David Bowie. But the bullshit from the National government on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) since the Trump administration formally pulled out in January is really off the planet (apologies, I don’t usually swear in blogs, but I couldn’t find a suitable acronym).
National is increasingly on the back-foot with New Zealand’s ever-worsening housing crisis. Ministers from the Prime minister down are desperately trying to spin a narrative that the National-led administration “is getting on top of the problem”. Despite ministerial ‘reassurances’, both Middle and Lower Working classes are feeling the dead-weight of a housing shortage; ballooning house prices, and rising rents.
My son Nicky, 21, died as a direct result of being sent off the Waikato Hospital campus, unescorted, while a known suicide risk, to smoke; when there was (and is) a perfectly good safe outside courtyard area that he could have been in.
The Spanish Inquisition, claiming to combat heresy, was a brutal political device for consolidating the power of the monarchy, leading up to and following the Christian reconquest of Andalucia. Previously, the region’s Jewish population had been among the largest in Europe, growing both in numbers and professional status.
I will be genuinely surprised [and inestimably pleased] if any of our political class dare – as part of what’s set to become this year’s election debates – to name the specter whose rapacious possessionary antics have fed so perniciously into the mental health crisis of today.
Here are 13 reasons why NZ needs an independent Mental Health Review…
Yesterday, 15 May, marks 69 years of the Palestinian Nakba, the catastrophe imposed upon the Palestinian people by the Zionist enterprise. On this day, in particular, the Palestinian people remember the massacres of Deir Yassin and Abu Shusha, among the many crimes against humanity perpetrated in order to found the Zionist state.