The response to highlighting the appalling human rights of some of those country’s we are trying to cut free trade deals with is always ‘if we only traded with those we agree with we wouldn’t trade at all’.
I call bullshit on that on two grounds.
Well it’s a 100 years of Labour and what can one say? A political movement that began with thunder manages to barely cause a fart these days.
13 years after the deeply flawed and divisive decision to invade Iraq as punishment for a group of Saudi’s who had no connection with Iraq flying planes into the World Trade Centre, the Chilcot report has finally been released and it paints a grim and disurbingly naive British and American leadership who went to war based on little more than ego and bullshit.
The role of the state is to enable you to live your life with as much freedom and autonomy as you are capable of, it isn’t there to tell you who you can love and what toilet you must use.
The history of slavery, racism and a brutal apartheid mentality Police force mixed with America’s ludicrous gun laws is a hateful cocktail of spite that erupts with enough regularity to remind us that there are deep problems still within the culture of our largest Super Power.
In my own area of the Otara subdivision, only 29 per cent of eligible voters returned ballot papers – well below the greater Auckland average. And the data speaks for itself: older, wealthier, housed and white voters had a much higher rate of ballot return. That’s what the data tells us so our challenge is to encourage a better ballot return from younger, poorer, transient and brown voters
There has been a lot of discussion lately here in Ōtepoti about something called “cultural appropriation”. It first came to my attention when a well-meaning friend starting objecting to our plan to have a “Gypsy Party” as part of a local festival, with Eastern European and Arabic influenced music, a performance by our local belly dancer troupe, and decoration to fit the theme.
The era of neoliberal globalisation is ending. People – who are also voters – have had enough of governments that work for the rich. Precarious jobs, stagnant incomes, unaffordable housing, massive household debt, stripped out safety nets, elected governments that are arrogant and unaccountable, opposition parties who are captives of their past or too cowed by fears of a collapse in business confidence to embrace demands for real change.
Joining us tonight to discuss the Government’s $1billion dollar solution to housing and whether it will do anything for the homeless and most vulnerable…