Jacinda Ardern

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.

It has happened again. A white supremacist has committed another atrocity, this time in El Paso, Texas, in the United States. Like the Christchurch murderer, he took to the internet to promote his motives.

Activists are tracking a ship bound for New Zealand containing an unknown quantity of what they allege is stolen Sahrawi phosphate which is illegally mined and exported by Morocco, the occupying power in Western Sahara. Morocco is the largest producer and exporter of phosphates in the world.

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.

Why is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan broadcasting the video of the Christchurch mosque attack? The reason lies within the deep contradictions shattering Turkish politics and growing popular opposition.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is the highest-paid leader in the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), according to a recent report.

Analysis by market research group IG also showed Turnbull earns up to 10 times the average Australian wage — the second-highest disparity with the majority of ordinary workers among OECD countries.

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.  

Four hundred men are still protesting in the Manus Island detention centre. They are calling for nothing less than their freedom and will not move to another centre on the Island. They have held out since the Australian government shut down the centre and removed services on October 31.

November 15 was the 107th consecutive day of protest on Manus Island since the Australian government announced it would close the centre.

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?”