Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
The guardians of monetarism are flummoxed. With almost no evidence, but supreme faith, they believe that there is a direct and (more or less) proportionate relationship between the stock of money and the level of prices.
Our esteemed Dear Leader would run naked through Hades if there was a photo-op involved.
The gang problem in New Zealand is totally out of control. It is all pervasive and almost impossible to avoid. Unlike other problems like poverty, which the government has mainly managed to keep out of the rich areas, the gangs now infiltrate every suburb. It is time to identify them and replace welfare with warfare.
The best way out of this confict of interest is for the government’s cybersecurity unit to be independent of the GCSB and any relevant GCSB personnel and equipment to be transferred to the new unit.
When a spokesperson for the government tries to employ scare-tactics to persuade the public that increasing surveillance powers for various arms of the State – in this case the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – is warranted, then suspicions arise.
Keeping New Zealand and New Zealanders safe is best done by the police under strong democratic oversight through parliament. We should abolish the SIS and GCSB – they contribute only to make New Zealand a target for terrorism.
As I am writing (Thursday, March 10), the New Zealand parliament has unanimously passed a law that will eliminate zero…
It would be an inordinate shame if the message the Indian community took away from this particular imbroglio was that New Zealand First didn’t want them to vote.
The mainstream media pundits just don’t get it. They don’t get it that the Bernie Sanders campaign has never been about “politics as usual”. Rather, it is “the politics of the unusual”.
It is the privilege of historians to pinpoint the causes of an institution’s malaise, even when they have little to offer by way of immediate solutions.