Green Left sits down with Fightback – Aotearoa/Australia activist Ani White to discuss the recent New Zealand elections and the meaning of NZ Labour's landslide victory under Jacinda Ardern.
New Zealand
Unite Union, which represents fast food workers in New Zealand, announced on November 18 it had reached an agreement with fast food giant McDonald's, which will see tens of thousands of its current and former staff receive payment for miscalculated holiday pay.
SkyCity Casino workers in Auckland have voted overwhelmingly to take strike action on August 31, to force the company to compensate employees for working unsociable hours — which allows the casino to rake in profits at night and on weekends.
Teachers around Aotearoa New Zealand held a historic one-day strike on May 29 with both primary and secondary teachers joining together in a “mega-strike” to demand pay rises, parity between primary and secondary teachers, staffing increases and more time for preparation and out-of-classroom activities.
Islamophobia is a weapon to serve the needs of a war-mongering profit-seeking system and a way of keeping the oppressed and exploited people of the world fighting among ourselves instead of against our common enemy.
A week after the Christchurch mosque attacks, thousands of people mobilised in Auckland for the “Love Aotearoa, hate racism” rally on March 24.
New Zealand solidarity activist Maire Leadbeater’s new book, See No Evil: New Zealand’s betrayal of the people of West Papua, features a theme also relevant for Australia. Both countries were involved in the tragic betrayal of West Papua.
The filmmaker Taika Waititi said racism is very pronounced in New Zealand, explaining he faced blatant discrimination as a Te Whānau-ā-Apanui youth.
In a recent interview, "Thor: Ragnarok" director and sometimes actor says his native New Zealand is “racist as fuck.”
"People just flat-out refuse to pronounce Maori names properly. There’s still profiling when it comes to Polynesians. It’s not even a colour thing – like, ‘Oh, there’s a black person.’ It’s, ‘If you’re Poly then you’re getting profiled.’”
With the release of the full text of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) on February 21, activists in the 11 signatory countries finally got to see if their worst fears of a corporate power grab would be confirmed.
Unfortunately, they mostly were.
In the face of a campaign by supports of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel in protest against its apartheid policies, New Zealand superstar singer Lorde cancelled a planned Tel Aviv concert in December. The BDS call was first issued in 2005 by dozens of Palestinian civil society organisations, and has been heeded by many cultural figures, including musicians.
The Labour-led coalition government in New Zealand was formed in October after the welcome usurping of nine years of rule by the neoliberal National Party.
However, Labour was only able to form government with the help of two minor players — the populist, anti-immigration New Zealand First and the Greens.
New Zealand Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, who says capitalism has been a “blatant failure”, became the country’s new, and youngest ever, prime minister on October 19.
Asked a few days after becoming PM if capitalism had failed New Zealanders, 37-year-old Ardern responded: “If you have hundreds of thousands of children living in homes without enough to survive, that’s a blatant failure. What else could you describe it as?”
Hit and Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan & the Meaning of Honour
By Nicky Hager & Jon Stephenson
Potton & Burton, 2017
159 pages
In this well-written and powerful book, Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson present a barrage of evidence that “New Zealanders and their United States allies were involved in war crimes” in Afghanistan in 2010.
KFC, Pizza Hut, Carls Jr and Starbucks workers wenton strike across new Zealand on April 22 after negotiations broke down over a new collective agreement.
“Yesterday Restaurant Brands announced profits of $26 million and they have paid their CEO a million dollar bonus. Tomorrow the workers who actually make and sell their products have to go on strike to get a few cents above the minimum wage” said Unite National Secretary Gerard Hehir said on April 21.
Unions representing care and support workers are pleased to be jointly announcing with government a proposed equal pay settlement to 55,000 workers across the aged residential, disability and home support sectors.
The proposed settlement is a huge win and will make a real difference in valuing the work of care and support workers and the people they support, workers in the sector say. It is a significant step in addressing gender inequality in New Zealand.
I often hear that music and politics should remain separate. I snigger at such a concept; as if they have ever been separate.
Those proponents may as well take the next logical turn and suggest that drugs and pop have never taken the same fork in the road.
Without some form of statement, music would have become as relevant as the novella, or Spanish mime.
Every turn in society has been reflected in the music of the day, from medieval folk to early jazz and blues, to punk and beyond. In some societies, it is one of the few ways of telling how brutal life is.
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