Green vomit and statistical nonsense: lies about immigration and housing
A few days ago the Labour party announced a new policy of increasing police numbers by 1000. I groaned at this news but it didn’t really surprise me. Then yesterday I heard of the new Greens policy on immigration, with James Shaw calling for a drastic reduction in numbers. Is New Zealand First calling the shots here, aided and […]
No Deportations!
On Monday night in quiet leafy suburbs in Lynfield, the silence was broken by calls for justice from a crowd of around 50 people. Justice for the 150 Indian students who have been swindled by immigration agents overseas and tertiary institutions here in New Zealand. The National Party was hosting a public meeting at the Lynfield Community […]
Our ‘work ethic’ is not the problem
John Key came out this week and said it: New Zealanders are just too lazy or drug-addled to work, so we have to bring in migrants to “do a fabulous job” harvesting fruit and veges. It’s a meme that has done the rounds on the media, slyly suggested by employers, farmers and politicians but never before as baldly […]
Resisting the pro-police backlash after Dallas
THE POLICE KILLING of two Black men–Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, a suburb of the Twin Cities in Minnesota–last week horrified people around the world and brought protesters into the streets in large numbers across the country to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Yet just as quickly, in […]
After the Brexit: Fighting Racism
Kevin Hodder sent these notes from London: I awoke in London to a shock. Travelling from New Zealand and only briefly abroad, I only had a relatively tenuous grasp on the debates going on in the UK around the “Brexit” vote. The details of these debates are not for me to cover. Irrespective of why […]
Should workers in Britain vote to Leave the EU?
The referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU takes place on Thursday 23 June. Aotearoa has been touched by the referendum in a couple of ways. Winston Peters has not hesitated to give the British the benefit of his advice. Rightwing, anti-immigrant populist that he is, Peters is for a Brexit. On Saturday 18 […]
Don’t turn homophobia into Islamophobia
Nicole Colson reports on the outpouring of solidarity for the victims of a horrific mass shooting–and the need to challenge the tide of racist scapegoating of Muslims. HORROR. The word alone isn’t enough to describe the feeling as the country woke up to news of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. For three […]
Stop the anti-immigrant rot
There is growing pong around the Labour Party. I am talking about the reek of foreigner-bashing. For some time now Labour’s main plank of housing policy has consisted of banging the anti-foreigner drum. In July last year the party’s housing spokesperson Phil Twyford notoriously came out with a deliberate, racist, anti-Chinese outburst when he claimed, […]
The Cruel Irony of Pride
I sat down to talk with a couple of No Pride In Prison (NPIP) members as they tried to get a respite from their scrum with the police. One of them tells me “pride has historically been a protest and to deny protest for the rights of queer and trans people where it began in […]
Making the Zika threat worse
Images of Black and Brown people suffering an epidemic viral disease are flooding television screens yet again. This time, however, it isn’t Ebola but the Zika virus that is the culprit. The current outbreak of the Zika virus evokes similar racist fears to those surrounding the 2014 Ebola epidemic–but more than that, the explosion in […]
