Partition is apartheid – reunify the Holy Land
At first sight, for many well-meaning people, the two-states ‘solution’ would seem to be the most rational and just way…
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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Michael Joseph Savage and Universal Welfare Reform
The capstone achievement of the Savage-led ‘social security’ reform was a genuinely ‘universal’ superannuation that caught the imagination of middle New Zealand; the world’s first explicit demogrant, a ‘universal basic income’ for all older New Zealanders.
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Blind faith in Government a threat to our democracy
I read Steven Joyce’s “open letter to the TPPA protesters” with a great sense of incredulity.
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Better Public Service Targets Require Independent Auditing – NZ First Private Members’ Bill Series Part Two
Yesterday morning, we woke up to news that government agencies are quite literally “inventing numbers” in order to make themselves seem competent and measure up to the government’s public service performance targets.
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Dancing With The Devil: How China and India made their elites richer by impoverishing their people
ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN the wonders of modern Chinese architecture might easily be persuaded that “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” is a spectacular success. But the skylines of Shanghai and Beijing testify not to the emancipation of the Chinese masses, but to the burgeoning power of the Chinese elites.
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New Zealand Housing Summit
The government assault on state housing, state house tenants and Housing New Zealand is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of this country.
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Capitalism’s Comforter: The myth that the free-market has liberated humanity
The steady advancement of humanity has proceeded apace. Not because the big-hearted capitalists have been demanding that their workers be given the best of everything, but because workers and peasants around the world have insisted on translating advances in science and technology into measurable social progress for themselves and their children.
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Setting it straight on user-pays in tertiary education – one letter at a time
Labour’s promise of a return to (limited) free tertiary education appears to be unsettling some, for whom the last thirty years has been dominated by the implementation and bedding-in of user-pays (often gradually, so as not to spook the punters) ; reduced-tax; and minimalist-government ideology;
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Defending Free Tertiary Education: Chris Trotter responds to Dr Oliver Hartwich’s defence to the user-pays university
let me respond in kind by declaring that my own experience of free tertiary education threw up not one case of a recipient who did not value their opportunity to explore the life of the mind in their late teens and early twenties. Quite the reverse, actually.
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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL – My love/hate relationship with Australia
For too long I’ve excused your boorish behaviour because of how your golden shores were so brutally colonised. My Aboriginal brothers and sisters shot down as vermin; the torturous treatment meted out within those convict settlements – irrespective of guilt or innocence, irrespective of youth, age or gender.