For the many, not the few: Labour in Britain shows we deserve better here
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has delivered a stunning blow against the Tories and British Labour’s rightwing Blairites. Theresa May might not survive as Tory leader. With most of the British general election results declared the upshot is a hung parliament. The general election has dramatically shown the power of simple leftwing policies “For the Many, […]
Niki is still resisting eviction
Niki Rauti has been staunchly defending her home at 14 Taniwha Street for years now, against a sustained attempt to evict her from it by the state. Yesterday the Auckland district court ruled to allow Niki to be evicted and this is in the process of being brought to the high court for appeal. In […]
Oppose Big Brother University
The University of Otago is pushing to have 60 CCTV cameras installed in student neighbourhoods in late 2017-2018. The project which will cost around $1,270,000 has been accepted by both the local police and the university administration who claim it is a successful crime detection and prevention tool. By extending it’s preying eyes, the university is seeking to […]
Labour must turn left to win support
The Labour and Green alliance could win September’s general election outright, without being held to ransom by Winston Peters. This statement defies the conventional wisdom of commentators, who are fixated by opinion polling that has Labour on around 30% of the vote. Unlike dialectical Marxists, the commentators struggle to grasp that stasis can give way […]
Greg O’Connor: Labour cops in
Labour’s decision to run Greg O’Connor against Peter Dunne in Ōhāriu tells us much about the party’s strategy. And the news is not good. O’Connor is a hardened reactionary, a veteran of decades at the head of the Police Association. In this role he was the public face of the police, and used his considerable […]
The Expropriators are Expropriated
Review of ‘The Expropriators are Expropriated’ and other writings on Marxism By Tom O’Lincoln (Melbourne: Interventions Inc). Tom O’Lincoln’s The Expropriators are Expropriated is a collection of talks and essays from his political career in socialist organisations in Australia from the early 1980s. Tom’s writing is immensely readable and easy to understand. In this collection, […]
‘A mighty lesson’: how did New Zealand socialists respond to 1917?
‘There is a mighty lesson to be learned from the Russian Revolution.’ That’s how the Maoriland Worker, newspaper of the radical wing of New Zealand’s labour movement, editorialised in March 1917. The newspaper’s editors – including Harry Holland, who would go on to lead the Labour Party for the next 16 years – had only […]
Shop workers against Easter Sunday working
The National-led majority in Parliament passed the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Act 2016 last August at the behest of the big retailers. The law change allows local councils to adopt Easter Sunday trading. This is another step in the erosion of public holidays. There were already a host of exemptions that allowed cafés, fast-food and […]
Migration, Racism and New Zealand Politics
From 2015, and gathering pace during 2016, an ugly development took place in New Zealand politics: a growing chorus of anti-immigrant rhetoric, with an anti-Asian slant. The rightwing populist New Zealand First has long traded on being anti-immigrant, but Winston Peters’s crowd have now been joined by the Labour Party, some union officials, and, since […]
Vale Rochelle Kupa
Kua hinga te tōtara i Te Waonui-a-Tāne —The totara has fallen in the forest of Tāne Rochelle Kupa (1963 – 2017), of Tuhoe and Tūwharetoa, was a class fighter, an educationalist, and a campaigner for Māori rights. After fighting an aggressive cancer for two years longer than what doctors predicted, Rochelle died on Wednesday, 22 […]
