Rocky Times Ahead
A clutch of recent polls and economic statistics herald a hardening of the political and industrial landscape. Since Labour won the general election in October 2020 with 50.0 percent of the vote, no opinion poll has found the party’s support dipping to under 40 percent until just recently. Two Roy Morgan polls taken in June […]
Queer Endurance/Defiance
Serah A is a member of the ISO in Wellington. This is a speech she gave at the recent rally in support of trans rights You’ve heard from some great speakers tonight. You’ve heard about trans awesomeness. You’ve heard about the TERFs, and where their hate leads. You’ve heard about the BMDRR bill that will […]
A Win for Trans Rights
We are winning. Yesterday’s rally in Wellington for trans rights was a victory, and holds important political lessons. And the numbers matter: on a cold, wet, dark winter’s night thousands came out to answer the call to show solidarity with a basic message: queer endurance, queer defiance, trans visibility, trans dignity. Cisgender and transgender, women, […]
The Political Independence of the Working Class: A lesson from the early years of the Chinese Communist Party
At the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party it is doubtful that its leaders of today will be drawing any lessons from the party’s early history. Two great revolutions of the twentieth century reinforce the principle that the working class must maintain its political independence in relation to other classes. In 1917 […]
Should We Keep the Tiwai Point Smelter?
This article was first published in Socialist Review 79, May-June 2021 The Tiwai Point Smelter, located at the very south of Aotearoa’s South Island, is an operation jointly owned by Rio Tinto and Sumitomo, two massive multinational corporations to which the profits flow. Alumina is imported from Australia and refined into aluminium. Around 90 percent […]
Capitalism: The Only Roadblock to a Sustainable Future
With Trump out of the White House, it seems like there is a return to normality in international media. But this normality hides the existential dread of climate change. The emissions targets set in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 were abandoned when they were supposed to come into force in 2005. Governments around the world […]
Climate Change Commission Draft Advice Report
In 2015 the world’s governments signed the Paris Agreement, a mostly non-binding agreement, with the goal of keeping the global temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as a means to mitigate the looming climate collapse. The crux of the plan was to redirect markets towards greener technologies and climate-conscious infrastructure, […]
The Struggle at Our Universities
In mid-April the University of Waikato announced plans to cut up to twelve jobs from its Management courses, following on from six cuts in its Science faculty already. Across the sector in 2020-2021 hundreds of jobs have been cut. Factoring in “voluntary” redundancies, jobs have gone in significant, damaging numbers: 300 at Auckland, 71 at […]
