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Complicity In Gaza: Holding US Foreign Policy Legally Accountable

Tuesday, 19 March 2024, 3:01 pm | Binoy Kampmark

On March 15, the next stage of an intriguing legal process seeking to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to prevent, as well as being complicit in, alleged acts of genocide taking place in Gaza, was taken. It all stems from a ... More >>

Predictable Outcomes: Australia, The National Security Committee, And Invading Iraq

Tuesday, 19 March 2024, 6:31 am | Binoy Kampmark

The latest documents from the NSC are more sleet than snow. They do confirm that the parliamentary system, more than ever, should be involved in reining in the wild impulses of war makers. More >>

Starlink’s fixed wireless challenge

Monday, 18 March 2024, 6:32 pm | Digitl

SpaceX’s Starlink deprioritised plan challenges rural fixed wireless broadband. Spark job cuts. More >>

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On Dune 2, And Images Of Islam

Monday, 18 March 2024, 11:29 am | Gordon Campbell

Depictions of Islam in Western popular culture have rarely been positive, even before 9/11. Five years on from the mosque shootings, this is one of the cultural headwinds that the Muslim community has to battle against. Whatever messages of tolerance and ... More >>

Five Years Since The Christchurch Terror Attack, Many Unanswered Questions Remain

Monday, 18 March 2024, 10:00 am | Socialist Equality Group

By Tom Peters March 15 marked five years since fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 men, women and children, and injured 40 other people, in mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The 2019 terror attack was the country’s ... More >>

We Need A Plan For The Transition To Renewable Energy

Friday, 15 March 2024, 9:26 am | Independent Media Institute

The transition to renewable energy is inevitable given the current climate crisis and the fact that fossil fuels are a finite resource. To make the shift, a detailed plan is required to indicate the first steps and anticipate challenges in allocating ... More >>

Words Vs. Action: A Supplication For Gaza, And Humanity

Thursday, 14 March 2024, 2:14 pm | Ramzy Baroud

‘All we can do for Gaza is just offer our Du’a.” This is an oft-repeated statement by enraged Arabs and Muslims who feel helpless before the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But is it true that only invocations and supplications are possible, as tens of thousands ... More >>

Prejudicial Bans: Congress Tosses Over TikTok

Thursday, 14 March 2024, 1:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark

How delicious is political hypocrisy. Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity. Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States. ... More >>

On National’s Fantasy Trip To La La Landlord Land

Thursday, 14 March 2024, 11:39 am | Gordon Campbell

How much political capital is Christopher Luxon willing to burn through in order to deliver his $2.9 billion gift to landlords? Evidently, Luxon is: (a) unable to cost the policy accurately. As Anna Burns-Francis pointed out to him on Breakfast ... More >>

Winning Director Compares Gaza To Auschwitz

Wednesday, 13 March 2024, 9:45 am | Eugene Doyle

At the Oscars this week Jonathan Glazer went nuclear. The director of Zone of Interest, the Best Foreign Film, directly compared the Auschwitz death camp to what is happening in Gaza. I have to admit that until I heard his speech I had no intention of watching ... More >>

Matters Of Revenue: Meta Abandons Australia’s Media Stable

Tuesday, 12 March 2024, 12:55 pm | Binoy Kampmark

It was praised to the heavens as a work of negotiated and practical genius when it was struck. The then Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had finally gotten those titans of Big Tech into line on how revenue would be shared with media outlets ... More >>

On Luxon’s Landlord Myths, And The Needless Nightmare Of High Interest Rates

Tuesday, 12 March 2024, 11:05 am | Gordon Campbell

During the PM’s post-Cabinet press conference yesterday, Christopher Luxon claimed that renters will be feeling “grateful” for the way the government is putting “downward pressure“ on rents. Really. Allegedly, the coalition government is ... More >>

Road Ambulance Service Cuts Highlight Vulnerability Of Ownership Model

Monday, 11 March 2024, 7:08 pm | Ian Powell

The vulnerability of Aotearoa New Zealand’s road ambulance service was highlighted by the announcement last month than the largest ambulance (Hato Hone St John) was looking to pull ambulances off the road because of rising fiscal deficits. It raised ... More >>

Empty Rentals And 'Investor'-friendly Taxes

Monday, 11 March 2024, 4:27 pm | Keith Rankin

This morning on RNZ's Morning Report, Revenue Minister Simon Watts admitted that it was a legitimate option for 'landlords' to leave their houses empty. (Refer Revenue Minister on mortgage tax deductions for landlords , RNZ 11 March 2024.) The official ... More >>

Academic Witch-hunted For Criticising Military Boot Camps For Young Offenders

Monday, 11 March 2024, 10:28 am | Socialist Equality Group

By Tom Peters, Socialist Equality Group New Zealand’s far-right government and sections of the media this week launched a furious witch-hunt against an academic who criticised plans to cut spending on school lunches and to establish military ... More >>

The Campaign to Free Assange: Reflections on Night Falls

Sunday, 10 March 2024, 6:18 pm | Binoy Kampmark

The town hall meeting is the last throbbing reminder of the authentic demos. People gather; debates held. Views converge; others diverge. Speakers are invited to stir the invitees, provoke the grey cells. Till artificial intelligence banishes such ... More >>

On The Government’s Fast Track To Trashing The Environment

Friday, 8 March 2024, 11:27 am | Gordon Campbell

With Shane Jones as the watchdog, who needs predators? Mining on DOC land now seems to be a fait accompli. Plainly, New Zealand‘s conservation estate is now open for business, regardless of the impact on the environment and on the endangered species ... More >>

Download Weekly: Call for firmer data leak action

Friday, 8 March 2024, 10:14 am | Digitl

Kordia's annual survey finds businesses are losing patience with poor data protection, Spark wants email customers to pay for the service, Mobile World Congress looks at 5G evolution. More >>

On Solidarity And Kushner’s Shame: How Gaza Defeated US Stratagem, Again

Thursday, 7 March 2024, 3:07 pm | Ramzy Baroud

Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom. In 2020, he advised ... More >>

Interest Costs, The Cost-of-Living, And The Cost-of-Government

Thursday, 7 March 2024, 3:01 pm | Keith Rankin

In Question Time in Parliament, yesterday, Finance Minister Nicola Willis was asked a question about the extent of the cost of government debt-servicing. The answer, in short, was 'a lot'; and she mentioned that the cost had been assessed on an interest-only ... More >>

Christchurch Terrorist Foreshadowed Mosque Attacks Online Over A Year Before

Thursday, 7 March 2024, 12:35 pm | Socialist Equality Group

By John Braddock   According to a report from the Conversation , republished in the Guardian on February 20, Christchurch fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant posted about his intentions on the website 4chan at least a year before his 2019 deadly ... More >>

Aiding Those We Kill: US Humanitarianism In Gaza

Thursday, 7 March 2024, 12:29 pm | Binoy Kampmark

The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Planes dropping humanitarian aid to a starving, famine-threatened populace of Gaza (the United Nations warns that 576,000 are “one step from famine”), with parachuted packages veering off course, ... More >>

A Wishful Gamble: Rugby League In Las Vegas

Wednesday, 6 March 2024, 2:42 pm | Binoy Kampmark

The history of such experiments is not promising. Why would those in the US like the game of rugby league, when an established code of superficial similarity already exists? Fundamental differences, for one thing, abound. The US NFL Superbowl tries ... More >>

On The Supreme Court’s Collusion With Trump

Wednesday, 6 March 2024, 11:49 am | Gordon Campbell

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. In the week preceding the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, a US Supreme Court stacked with Trump appointees obligingly handed the former President a couple of huge victories. First, the Court helped Trump ... More >>

Wary Of Sinophobia: Anwar Ibrahim At The ASEAN Summit

Tuesday, 5 March 2024, 1:46 pm | Binoy Kampmark

It can take much bruising, much ridicule, and much castigation to eventually reach the plateau of wisdom. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who took office in November 2022, is one such character. Like a hero anointed by the gods for grand ... More >>

Child Palliative Care: A Sad But Avoidable Plight

Monday, 4 March 2024, 5:54 pm | Ian Powell

On 21 February the NZ Herald published a compelling article by its Wellington-based journalist Vita Molyneux on the state of child palliative care in Aotearoa New Zealand:     Health system failing terminally ill children . The ... More >>

Mistakes, Misfiring And Trident: Britain’s Flawed Nuclear Deterrence

Monday, 4 March 2024, 4:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark

Nuclear weapons are considered the strategic silverware of nation states. Occasionally, they are given a cleaning and polishing. From time to time, they go missing, fail to work, and suffer misplacement. Of late, the UK Royal Navy has not been doing so ... More >>

On The Flaws In Anti-gang Laws

Monday, 4 March 2024, 11:34 am | Gordon Campbell

Google “Christopher Luxon“ and “mojo” and you get nearly 60,000 matching responses. Over the past 18 months – here and here and again, here – Luxon has claimed that New Zealanders have either lost their mojo and/or are in the process ... More >>

Download Weekly: Aue to succeed Rousselot at Chorus

Friday, 1 March 2024, 5:56 pm | Digitl

Aue to take over at Chorus as Rousselot moves on. Mobile shows strength in Spark first half. Crown Infrastructure update as Rural Broadband programme nears completion More >>

Conscious And Unconscionable: The Starving Of Gaza

Friday, 1 March 2024, 1:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark

The starvation regime continues unabated as Israel continues its campaign in the Gaza Strip. One of the six provisional measures ordered by the International Court Justice entailed taking “immediate and effective measures” to protect the Palestinian ... More >>

On The Newshub/Smokefree Twin Fiascos

Thursday, 29 February 2024, 10:57 am | Gordon Campbell

Here’s a tale of two sunset industries. One has a track record of quality investigative reporting, and sound reportage of the 24/7 news cycle. The other sunset industry peddles a deadly substance that kills and injures tens of thousands of New Zealanders ... More >>

Dunne's Weekly: Unseemly Rush Shows Need To Review Role Of Waitangi Tribunal

Thursday, 29 February 2024, 9:12 am | Peter Dunne

The rush to push legislation through Parliament under Urgency to abolish the Māori Health Authority, Te Aka Whai Ora, has been unseemly. No matter that the Authority’s abolition was an election commitment of all three government coalition partners, ... More >>

Trussonomics At CPAC

Wednesday, 28 February 2024, 1:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark

The silly will make print and leave bursts of digital traces; the idiots will make history, if only in small print. One such figure is the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in living memory, the woeful, joke-packed figure of Liz Truss who lasted ... More >>

Missing The Health Target

Tuesday, 27 February 2024, 8:17 pm | Ian Powell

Wilhelm Tell (more commonly known as William Tell in the English speaking world) was a 14th century folk hero in Switzerland then ruled by the Austrian Hapsburgs. Tell is widely considered to be the symbolic father of the Swiss Confederacy. Among ... More >>

Old Problems With The New: Reforming The UN Security Council

Tuesday, 27 February 2024, 2:20 pm | Binoy Kampmark

The end of the Second World War was a calamitous catalyst, laying the bricks and mortar for institutions that were always going to look weary, almost comically so, after some decades. The United Nations was meant to be the umbrella international ... More >>

Formal Democracy, Popular Will And Military Coups

Monday, 26 February 2024, 5:48 pm | Ian Powell

In its 2023 Index of the countries of the world Transparency International rated Aotearoa New Zealand the third best nation on transparency. However, as credible as this was, there was a drop in its score. The fall was in how common it was for ... More >>

A Copper’s Skewed Logic: Politicising Palestinian Visas

Monday, 26 February 2024, 5:45 pm | Binoy Kampmark

If only we could say that Peter Dutton, Australia’s federal opposition leader and curator of bigoted leanings, was unusual in assuming that granting humanitarian visas to Palestinians might be problematic. But both he, and his skew-eyed spokesman ... More >>

Imperial Venality Defends Itself: Day Two Of Julian Assange’s High Court Appeal

Friday, 23 February 2024, 2:19 pm | Binoy Kampmark

On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised ... More >>

On The Perils Of Joining AUKUS Pillar Two

Friday, 23 February 2024, 10:25 am | Gordon Campbell

The lure for New Zealand to join the AUKUS military alliance is that membership of only its “second pillar” will still (supposedly) give us access to state of the art military technologies. As top US official Kurt Campbell said during his visit ... More >>

Identifying Imperial Venality: Day One Of Julian Assange’s High Court Appeal

Thursday, 22 February 2024, 7:10 pm | Binoy Kampmark

On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended ... More >>

Dunne's Weekly: National's Benefit Changes All About Politics

Thursday, 22 February 2024, 9:31 am | Peter Dunne

Here we go again. Another National-led government, and another round of cracking down on beneficiaries. That was the reaction of the parties of the left to the coalition government's announcement it was returning to applying sanctions to beneficiaries ... More >>

Swiftie Nonsense Down Under

Wednesday, 21 February 2024, 6:13 pm | Binoy Kampmark

Gaza. Palestinians. Israel. Genocide. Taylor Swift? This odd cobbling of words is the extent celebrities make a mockery of serious conversation, even in such middle-brow outlets as Australia’s Radio National. Admittedly, it was breakfast, and the presenter ... More >>

New Zealand Foreign Minister Seeks To Block Chinese Influence In Southwest Pacific

Wednesday, 21 February 2024, 9:24 am | Socialist Equality Group

By John Braddock New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters undertook a four-day tour of three Pacific Islands states beginning on February 7, hard on the heels of a visit to Australia that saw a strengthening of security and defence ties between ... More >>

Far-right Activist Kyle Chapman Avoids Jail On Gun Charges

Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 3:22 pm | RNZ

Far-right activist Kyle Chapman has avoided jail, telling a court he now wants to be a father first. More >>

Things Are Not What They Seem

Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 3:21 pm | Eugene Doyle

We are homo dramatis , the species that tells stories. Today more and more of us are rejecting America and Israel’s stories and are searching for a better script. That is a good thing because History is calling us to be actors, not spectators, ... More >>

On National Spreading Panic About The Economy

Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 9:03 am | Gordon Campbell

It is a political strategy as old as time. Scare the public with tales of disaster and stampede them into supporting your ideological agenda because they believe There Is No Alternative. Yet, if the NZ economy truly is as “fragile” as PM Christopher ... More >>

Joe Biden: The Damnation Of Age

Monday, 19 February 2024, 12:07 pm | Binoy Kampmark

He was sweet and well meaning, but he was old. He was hazy. His memory was poor. Doddering, confused, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World seemed ready to check into a retirement village. That, at least, is the thick insinuation of the ... More >>

Here Come The Steroid Games

Saturday, 17 February 2024, 6:34 pm | Binoy Kampmark

To attribute weighty moral codes to athletes has always been a silly pastime of the judging classes and flesh admiring voyeurs. But sporting bodies, in a manner similar to the clergy, demand something called the level playing field. Fairness ... More >>

Download Weekly: Chorus names new fibre sites

Friday, 16 February 2024, 12:57 pm | Digitl

Chorus names new fibre areas, what the telco sector learned from Cyclone Gabrielle, PC slump continues More >>

On National Passing Bad Policies Under Urgency

Friday, 16 February 2024, 11:10 am | Gordon Campbell

If National really had faith in its welfare policies, it wouldn’t be ramming them through Parliament under urgency – a step that means the policies can’t be exposed to select committee debate, public submissions, expert commentary, media scrutiny ... More >>

Waymo Luddites, the right to disconnect, NZ streaming, consu

Thursday, 15 February 2024, 12:30 pm | Digitl

You can hear me talking about these topics on RNZ Nine-to-Noon with Kathryn Ryan. . More >>

When Courts Intervene: Halting The Transfer Of F-35 Parts To Israel

Wednesday, 14 February 2024, 1:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark

Legal challenges regarding the Israel-Gaza War are starting to bulk lawyers’ briefs and courtroom proceedings. South Africa got matters underway with its December application before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in its campaign ... More >>

On Five Of Luxon’s Gaza Absurdities

Wednesday, 14 February 2024, 11:43 am | Gordon Campbell

Earlier this week, PM Christopher Luxon met with 48 public service CEOs to make sure they were on board with his plans to cut spending on public services so that National can proceed to give the revenue away to those New Zealanders least in need. ... More >>

Auckland train network reliability in question with CRL on horizon

Wednesday, 14 February 2024, 11:28 am | RNZ

There are concerns the problems causing rail disruption won't be fixed before the underground metro is finished next year. More >>

Silencing Francesca Albanese

Wednesday, 14 February 2024, 9:24 am | Eugene Doyle

It was with a sense of disgust rather than despair that I read in the Jerusalem Post today: " 'Antisemitic' UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese banned from Israel." We’re being gas-lighted again and this is a chance to push back ... More >>

Feathery Infiltrators: The Case Of The Pigeon Spy

Tuesday, 13 February 2024, 12:14 pm | Binoy Kampmark

Animals have, at times, been given the same dismissively nasty treatment humans love giving themselves. Be it detention, torture, trial, and execution, the unwitting creatures can be found in the oddest situations, anthropomorphised with all the characteristics ... More >>

On National’s Misleading Policy Packaging

Monday, 12 February 2024, 12:27 pm | Gordon Campbell

Truth in packaging can be a political rarity, but the gap between what the Luxon administration says it is doing and what its policies will actually deliver is looking as wide as the Grand Canyon. Is it possible to run a government for three years purely ... More >>

Absence Of Evidence: Israel’s Case Against UNRWA

Sunday, 11 February 2024, 7:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark

Statistics are often given lanky legs that take their user far. But how they are used, and how they are received, is striking. The current figure of 27,500 dead is a blighting, grotesque fact. But as they are Palestinians, the issue is less significant ... More >>

When Times Were Better: Victoria’s Ties With Israel’s Defence Industry

Friday, 9 February 2024, 12:12 pm | Binoy Kampmark

Times were supposedly better in 2022. That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two. That view is premised on the ... More >>

On The Politics As A Morality Play

Thursday, 8 February 2024, 12:49 pm | Gordon Campbell

To a striking extent, the working class vote in Western societies has been going to right wing demagogues, not to left wing social democrats. Even the mainstream parties on the right of the political spectrum are running the risk of being rejected ... More >>

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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