GUEST BLOG: Alex Pirie – Let Them Eat Flags
So where does one begin with a first stab at becoming a leftie political blogger in the current local and…
politics
-
-
Dear NZ – let’s just send poor kids straight to jail
We hate poor children right? We blame their parents for being hungry (despite welfare purposely calculated so that beneficiaries are hungry), we blame parents for their kids freezing to death in cold houses (despite privatising state houses and subsidising slum lords) and we blame poor kids for underachievement (despite under resourcing public education).
-
Denying Helen Kelly justice
..what a shallow, baseless society we have become when the war on drugs trumps basic reason.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Government boasts of benefit theft
While 2015 did see an increase in the size of the working age population this was driven principally by immigration. The number of jobs in the economy grew, but at a slower pace than the population. The unemployment rate fell, but principally driven by people giving up looking for work. That is not progress.
-
The merits of internal discipline
The fractured opposition to the TPP from within Labour has caused a lot of grief within and laughter without. Little has missed an opportunity to present himself as the fearless leader who has no difficulty understanding right from wrong and sorting out dissent within the ranks.
-
BOOK REVIEW: Te Rangihaeata
The central characters in each book represent, for me at least, the ‘most important’ New Zealanders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; namely Ngāti Toa chief, Te Rangihaeata, and our most-loved Australian immigrant, Michael Joseph Savage.
-
The Independent Police Conduct Authority – A toothless watchdog has its bark muzzled
It should come as no surprise at all that the IPCA has been so starved for funding they can’t investigate a Police force who abuse power with alarming regularity.
-
Who on earth wrote James Shaw’s speech and why do they still have a job?
…now I don’t want to sound like a Troll’s Troll, but who the hell allowed Shaw to run with this speech and why do they still have a job? It was clumsy, stilted and seemed terribly unrehearsed.