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?”
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