Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
It could safely be argued that stories of “jihai brides” would scare the bejeezus out of the public, in the process softening opinion to welcome extending the powers of the SIS and GCSB. If so, this would be a cynical ploy by National and our spy agencies to manipulate public opinion to accept the unpalatable; a massive increase in state surveillance and mass-gathering of data on all NZers.
WHAT LEADS THE MAN who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to come out for Donald Trump in 2016?
Not profiting from pollution is one part of the solution, another is ending the more than $600 billion annual fossil fuel subsidies, according to the International Energy Agency.
New Zealand needs more state housing, not less. We are in the middle of a housing crisis for low and middle income New Zealanders and only the government has the resources and the capacity to provide the large number of quality, affordable housing so desperately needed.
The Chair of Air New Zealand’s Sustainability Panel, British environmentalist Sir Jonathon Porritt, spoke to a group of decision makers in Nelson recently and warned about the unsustainable disjuncture between New Zealand’s branding and its reality
Of late I’ve been trying to get my head around the discriminatory adoption laws the Human Rights Review Tribunal has recently bought to public awareness.
Another Israeli West Bank land grab: “the latest step in what appears to be an ongoing process of land expropriations, settlement expansions and legalisations of outposts . . .” [US State Department spokesman John Kirby]
The Labour Party has been trapped into appearing as being opposed to migrant workers in New Zealand.
Due perhaps to an ongoing lack of vision on the part of our theoretically ‘lead’ Opposition party, we’re quite used to thinking of Labour as being a watered down version of the beliefs of others.
We discovered a bit over a year ago that most employers we dealt with, and the payroll systems they used, were not doing the necessary calculations for this.