Learning from Helen
Working people lost a hero on Friday. We knew Helen Kelly’s death was imminent, but nothing could really prepare us for losing such a powerful voice for fairness and justice.
politics
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GUEST BLOG: Maire Leadbeater – Pacific Nations diplomacy for West Papua puts New Zealand to shame.
Something remarkable happened this year at the United Nations General Assembly. Seven Pacific nations used the occasion to speak out for their neighbours in Indonesian- controlled West Papua. It was decades ago when the world body last witnessed this kind of multi-nation lobby. Bold Vanuatu has been close to a lone voice in recent years.
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GUEST BLOG: Ben Peterson – Wrong- The Greens on Immigration
The NZ Greens should see this as their time. Instead, the political sock puppet that is James Shaw has seen fit to by himself invent a new history, invent a new policy and sell it to an electorate who aren’t much interested.
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The horror of Clinton winning vs the horror of Trump winning – voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil
The bizarre gladiatorial orgy of gross absurdity between Clinton and Trump will damage the American psyche in a way I don’t think it can return from. Either candidate will inherit a White House that is smeared with lies and bitter resentment.
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We can build more private prisons but we can’t build homes for the poor – this is Key’s NZ
We can build private prisons, but we can’t build houses for the homeless. We can’t build affordable housing but we can build tax havens. We can give away billions in tax cuts but we can’t fund suicide prevent programs properly.
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MUST READ: Bill opens door to extensive GCSB surveillance of New Zealanders
I recommend the Select Committee not proceed with this Bill in its present form. Overall it puts New Zealanders in a worse situation than in already existing legislation, in relation to both their personal privacy and their right to untrammeled freedom of expression.
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Can we at least acknowledge the $15m to ‘fight’ P using the proceeds of crime is part of the problem?
One of the most interesting things about the last 8 years in NZ has been the dumping of rational and empirical evidence based social policy. We don’t implement policy based on facts now, we implement ideologically extreme brain farts.
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Dear NZ – You can’t have doctors AND tax cuts
So Junior Doctors are on strike because of their insane work loads while at the same time Bill English manufactures a $1.8billion surplus by cutting back on the social infrastructure so the richest amongst us can get tax cuts.
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A Howling Moral Vacuum: America’s Syrian Policy
The creation of a liberal secular democracy was not the real reason the CIA was in Syria. The real reason they were working so hard to make civil war inevitable was because they wanted to prevent Syria and its neighbours, Lebanon and Iraq, from getting any closer to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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GUEST BLOG: Dave Macpherson – ‘Nero’ Coleman fiddling while people die
Two weeks ago a seriously mentally ill Otorohanga man killed his mother and two others, and badly injured his father – only days after his mother had requested help from Waikato DHB’s mental health services for fear of the harm her son might cause others (the request was obviously unsuccessful).