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Why I’m Protesting Outside The Aerospace Summit In Ōtautahi

When I tell someone I’m going to protest against the New Zealand Aerospace Summit, they often react with confusion. People ask hesitantly: “What’s wrong with aerospace? I thought that was just GPS satellites and space missions!” And I don’t blame them. The aerospace industry does huge amounts of public relations work to paint itself as a benevolent, science-focused industry, and it's been pretty successful in its greenwashing efforts. The summit, hosted in Ōtautahi on September 23-24, is themed Aerospace for Good, its website flooded with buzzwords like “sustainability” and “diverse“. But beneath this glossy corporate veneer lies a violent truth about aerospace.

Global Indigenous Leaders Condemn New Zealand Treatment Of Māori

A collective of global Indigenous leaders and environmentalists have expressed their extreme concern regarding the Treaty Principles Bill as the New Zealand government presents it to the cabinet. They express their solidarity with Māori and call upon the government to act in good faith and with respect for the treaty “upon which the legitimacy of their existence rests”, Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The statement of solidarity was endorsed at the Protecting Mother Earth Conference, held by The Indigenous Environmental Network and supported by the Indigenous embassy Tonatierra in Eastern Cherokee Nation (co-existent with North Carolina) 1-4 August 2024.

Opening The Devil’s Door In Asia-Pacific

Political tensions are increasing in the Asian-Pacific region after a summit in Washington resulted in indications that New Zealand, Japan and the Philippines are moving towards greater integration with the U.S.-led military bloc in the region. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and U.S. President Joe Biden attended a trilateral summit on Thursday, where they announced an agreement enhancing military operation, including joint naval exercises alongside Australia in the disputed East China Sea.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand Urge Israel Against ‘Catastrophic’ Assault

Canada, Australia, and New Zealand issued a joint statement on 15 February expressing serious concern over Israel’s planned assault on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. "We are gravely concerned by indications that Israel is planning a ground offensive into Rafah. A military operation into Rafah would be catastrophic," the joint statement read. “We urge the Israeli government not to go down this path. There is simply nowhere else for civilians to go,” it added. The statement comes one day after Germany and France showed their concern over the planned attack. “One point three million people are waiting there in a very small space. They don’t really have anywhere else to go right now

New Zealand Leaning To Controversial AUKUS Alliance

Concerns are rising for peace and sovereignty in the Pacific after strong signals from New Zealand’s new government that it wants to swiftly join the U.S.-led military alliance AUKUS. If New Zealand does join the U.S.-led military bloc it would effectively compromise the country’s long-held anti-nuclear policy, Marco De Jong, historian and co-director of the New Zealand foreign policy group Te Kuaka, told Consortium News. He said the decision would put an end to what is left of the nation’s independent foreign policy, as well as its image as an “honest broker” in a region already divided by increasing militarization.

New Zealand’s ‘Russian Edits Scandal’

In this tumultuous time of war and global conflict, where pervasive propaganda campaigns mask geopolitical machinations of the powerful and serve their interests, mainstream journalists’ ability to counter these campaigns have never been more limited. Gone are the days when John Pilger was able to have a story attacking George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq on the front page of the British tabloid, the Daily Mirror. We live in a time of state surveillance and creeping restrictions on freedom of speech, where whistleblowers are criminalised and publishers like Julian Assange face persecution and life imprisonment.

Transparency International’s Covert Agenda

On July 24, it was revealed that Transparency International’s New Zealand wing had enlisted the specialist advice of some of the country’s biggest, most notorious lobbying firms on improving ethical standards in the political and corporate lobbying industry. A local businessman, who’d independently offered to assist TINZ in cleaning up the sector, blew the whistle. Expressing “astonishment,” they compared TINZ’s consultation of high-ranking lobbyists on how to clean up their own industry as akin to “police recruiting gang members to determine new rules on pursuit of fleeing drivers.” Yet, anyone familiar with Transparency International’s history would hardly be surprised.

Unease Over New Zealand Overtures To US Military Presence In The Pacific

Whangarei,New Zealand - Recent reports from New Zealand’s security state have sparked protest after all but suggesting the country join the U.S.-led AUKUS military alliance, a move that would reverse years of New Zealand’s independent foreign and defence policy and put it on a collision course with China. Ex-Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark lamented the loss of what would remain of the country’s military sovereignty. Clark blasted an “orchestrated campaign” by defence and security officials to join the U.S., Britain and Australia in AUKUS. In a Twitter thread, she said the government was “abandoning its capacity to think for itself and is instead cutting & pasting from Five Eyes partners.”

Palestine Solidarity Conference Draws Widespread Support

Melbourne, Australia - More than 150 people from across Australia and New Zealand attended the Palestine Solidarity Conference, January 27-29, in Melbourne. They included First Nations, progressive Jews, unionists, students, Labor, Greens, socialists and independent and Palestinian activists. Encouragingly many young activists attended and, notably, young Palestinian women. The conference, which included plenary sessions and activist workshops, was hosted by the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) and featured renowned Palestinian guests from Australia and around the world, speaking via video link. Senator Lidia Thorpe, on the opening plenary “Organising for Palestine on Stolen Land” said both struggles are connected by “disempowerment, oppression, death, killings and grief” and the fight for land and justice is key.

New Zealand’s New Sectoral Bargaining Law Holds Lessons For US

In one of the more important advances in collective bargaining around the world, New Zealand recently passed an innovative sectoral bargaining policy, called Fair Pay Agreements. Labor supporters in Britain and Australia want to replicate elements of the policy in their countries, while for American audiences the most important lesson may be how New Zealand’s experiences highlight that sectoral bargaining — in conjunction with worksite bargaining — is necessary to improve working conditions in today’s economy and thus should be part of policy efforts to strengthen unions. Sectoral bargaining, sometimes called broad-based bargaining or industrywide bargaining, is a type of collective bargaining between unions and employers that sets minimum standards on issues such as wages, benefits, safety, and training for all workers in a sector or occupation.

How New Zealand’s Maori Are Reclaiming Land With Occupations

Two years ago, a small pocket of land three kilometres from Auckland’s international airport became the most prominent site of a struggle by Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous people, to reclaim land confiscated by the crown more than 150 years ago. Ihumātao contains evidence of New Zealand’s first commercial gardens, where thousands of hectares were planted with kumara, a tropical sweet potato which thrived in the warm and nutritious soil. The adjacent stonefields, today a category one Unesco heritage site, are rich with ancient nurseries and storage pits. When William Hobson, then-governor of New Zealand, founded Auckland in 1840, the produce of Ihumātao sustained the growing population.

New Zealand Is Infusing Policing With A Social Work Philosophy

A call for help from domestic or family violence is made on average every four minutes in New Zealand, whose high statistics regularly top global lists. And South Auckland is the country’s ground zero, where 23,000 calls come in yearly for family violence. The area also has a large Māori and Pacific Islander population, but New Zealand’s police force is mostly white. Encounters between residents and officers summoned to respond to family disputes have often ended with arrests made and children funneled into emergency state care, where a bewildering bureaucracy of government agencies and community organizations await.

Some Countries Have Brought New Cases Down To Nearly Zero

Perhaps the greatest success story is New Zealand, which has stopped local transmission and has a plan to completely eliminate the virus from its territory. "The lesson is that it can be done," says Siouxsie Wiles, an associate professor of microbiology in New Zealand. "Obviously, the longer you leave it, and the more cases there are, the harder it becomes. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try." Wiles heads up the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland. Much of her work focuses on antibiotic resistance and infectious diseases. When the coronavirus hit, she got involved in communication efforts in New Zealand to help explain the virus, including by using a popular cartoon. But it wasn't just scientists who led the charge. Wiles — and many other New Zealanders — give much of the credit for their country's success to the swift and decisive leadership of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in March.

The Strike Returns To New Zealand

Over the last year, New Zealand has seen tens of thousands of workers walk off the job, challenging the Labour government’s self-imposed austerity. In early 2018, a New Zealand nurse and union member Elizabeth Alice wrote an open Facebook post that went viral. “Here’s the thing,” Alice wrote. Nurses were fighting for pay, staffing levels, and “the future of our public health system.” “Our communities deserve investment in public health,” Alice continued. ‘If we don’t fight for it now then it will be gone, and we will have a situation like the USA where the rich get premium care and the poor die on the streets from curable diseases.”

Christchurch Happens Every Day In The War On Terror

As we mourn the victims of the terrorist atrocity in New Zealand -- where at least 50 Muslim worshippers were mowed down by a white supremacist partially "inspired" by Donald Trump -- many are looking for answers to the inevitable questions of why and how. To answer those questions, and explore how we might prevent such terrorist acts, it may be helpful to recognize that what happened at Christchurch -- mass murder produced as the logical result of a long-running political epoch that is almost singularly defined by the dehumanization and demonization of Muslims, Arabs, and anyone perceived as such -- happens every day.

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