Yesterday, a case manager from WINZ called to tell me that I needed to “imagine what I would do if I did not have welfare”. I replied “Well, I guess if I couldn’t live at home, I would be homeless.” The case manager responded by saying “Now, you see that is a really negative way of seeing it. You would find ways to support yourself.”
There seems to be an agreement amongst those currently vying for the leadership that Labour needs to take up more of the middle ground. These White blokes have said that Labour needs to occupy that political space in order to win the votes of their peers, other White blokes.
“When the truth is replaced with silence” wrote the soviet dissident Yevgeni Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”
I am so tired of the dirty politics of the National government, aren’t you?
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of opening Voice Up – a youth forum run by young people in Otara. I had been asked as Chair of the Local Board to set the scene, encouraging young people to take part in the democratic process by casting a vote.
As New Zealanders begin to learn the full extent of Slater’s corruptions, smear campaigns and how much he and his Whale Oil blog have influenced elections in the last six years, he is being paid, as I type this, to also pedal Israeli propaganda.
At around 12pm yesterday Nadia Filistin, who has been a major organiser in the Auckland protests against Israel’s ongoing assaults in Gaza over the last 6 weeks which has killed over 1900 Palestinians and injured thousands, updated her Facebook status with this…
From the bottom of my heart fuck John Key and his selfish, misogynistic, rape minimising, war mongering government that only cares for the rich, disregards the voices of young people and has no compassion for the working poor or those suffering under the poverty line.
Clinton is being held up by many social commentators as some kind of vision of ‘female empowerment’ – after all, she has smashed glass ceiling after glass ceiling, and she is a proud self-declared feminist. Hell, maybe she is even a ‘feminist icon’.
Men’s masculinity is under attack in New Zealand and four people, one of whom is a woman (it always to do something about it. Sound your battle cries: