[This was first published in The Spinoff Ātea, 16 December 2017] The deputy prime minister of Australia, Barnaby Joyce, is grumpy with Jacinda Ardern because she offered a place to 150 of those refugees that Australia illegally imprisoned and then abandoned on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. He was so grumpy that he threatened… Read More Manus Island: why we can’t keep our noses out of it
Amidst the exhausting and unending controversies in Trump’s presidency, the tone deaf phone call made by President Trump to the widow of La David Johnson has only stayed the distance because the President and his previously squeaky clean Chief of Staff have chosen to lie and degrade the widow and congresswoman Wilson who both confirmed… Read More The war you’ve never heard of: Africom and the death of La David Johnson
I had a little interaction with an often very good NZ Herald investigative business reporter this morning about their morning coverage as it related to Hit and Run (Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson’s new book on an SAS operation gone very very wrong): David Fisher is outstanding and has covered New Zealand’s military operation overseas… Read More Settling back into the status quo: NZ Herald and its Hit and Run coverage
In the beginning of October, 40 million Russians engaged in three days of drills in preparation for a nuclear or natural disaster. Last week, Vladimir Putin instructed Russian officials overseas to bring all their relatives home. India and Pakistan are escalating their decades old conflict in the Kashmir. Syria and Iraq seem quagmires that more… Read More Nukes are back in fashion: proliferation, a terror we thought we had left behind
It is a matter of historical record that the majority of European governments knew of the existence of concentration camps prior to World War II. Political refugees who had escaped the Third Reich brought reports of beatings, torture and executions, and this was backed by a few brave reporters. European powers reacted with disbelief. Similarly,… Read More It’s time for an intervention: Australia’s goose-stepping over refugees to villainy
The Review of Intelligence and Security by Sir Michael Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy is a strange beast. The two eminent reviewers see themselves as proposing a sensible and sober streamlining of our two intelligence services, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). John Key sees the review as having… Read More National Security: an open cheque for the GCSB and SIS
[Trigger warning: the photos of Alyan Kurdi’s body and Laith Majid with his children are in this blog] This is not a blog about Alyan Kurdi. But it is a blog about who we allow to speak to us about Alyan Kurdi. The public outpouring of grief and the demand for change in the pathetic… Read More Monsters amongst us: inhumane commentators damn us all in their refugee crisis response
Currently New Zealand abides by the UN Security Council sanctions imposed on Al Qaida and the Taliban, the Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The range of sanctions include: asset freezes in which we “prohibit dealings in… Read More We need to impose sanctions on Australia
Often the two World Wars are given as the final winning argument as to why non-violent resistance and pacifism is not a practical solution to conflict and stopping aggressors. The argument is simply that only violence could have stopped the Kaiser in World War I and Hitler and the Third Reich in World War II.… Read More Not in our name: remembering our World War I peacemakers this Anzac Day
Like many of you, I imagine, the centenary of the invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli by the Anzacs including the New Zealand Expeditionary Force has piqued my interest in my own personal ancestral connection to this distant conflict. None of my ancestors were at Gallipoli itself, but I had three ancestors who joined the armed… Read More Lest we remember: the jarring jingoism of the Iraq deployment on this Anzac Day
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