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Category: Opinion

  • Just Stop Oil issues ultimatum for London’s Pride

    On the evening of 29 June, protest group Just Stop Oil posted on its Twitter account stating that it had been “in negotiations with the organisers of Pride in London”. The climate activist group is demanding that Pride “return to its protest roots”, and align itself with the demand to halt oil production:

    Around an hour later, Just Stop Oil posted a list of their three demands:

    A 30 June press release from the group stated that:

    We are a group of LGBTQ+ supporters of Just Stop Oil. We have been taking action against the licensing of new oil, gas and coal in the UK, repeatedly putting our bodies and our liberty on the line, in resistance to a government which has been bought by corporations and fossil fuel capital. We take action because the government is continuing to develop new fossil fuel projects in 2023, even though the world’s climate scientists agree that this threatens the collapse of our food systems and the breakdown of ordered society.

    Pride is a protest

    Now, first things first, Pride is – or at least should be – a protest. This is at the core of its history. Pride originated as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. In turn, the march marked the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riot.

    In the riot, queer patrons of the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Manhattan rose up in response to aggressive and repeated police raids. The first Pride was, very literally, about throwing rocks at cops.

    Some modern Prides – and especially London’s – have drifted away from that spirit of protest into one of celebration. Now, with rising homophobic hate crimes and a government-led crackdown on trans lives, we could surely do with a return to “protest roots” – just as Just Stop Oil is asking.

    Seeking clarity

    Likewise, the first point on Just Stop Oil’s list of demands seems laudable. The group stated that it requires:

    Clarity on where Pride sources its money from, what floats are included and what ethical considerations are taken when deciding where to accept money from

    Pride in London is somewhat notorious for its poor attitude to social justice issues more broadly. Just Stop Oil offered “some context” of the event’s deplorable sponsorship deals. In particular, the Green London Assembly criticised Pride’s choice of headline sponsor – United Airlines.

    Beyond that, London’s Pride has a history of both racism and being overly cosy with police. Despite the Met’s well-documented homophobia, it was only last year that uniformed officers were only told not to march.

    So, I’m all for transparency on the parade’s funding and ethical considerations. Great so far.

    Climate is an LGBT+ issue

    Then, onto Just Stop Oil’s second demand:

    Pride makes a statement to demand an end to new oil and gas.

    Again, all good! Any new oil and gas extraction scuppers our planet’s chances of remaining within the tolerable limits of the 1.5C warming set by the Paris Climate Agreements, or even its 2C upper bounds.

    The climate, without an attempt at hyperbole, is a queer issue. In the Global North, poor people are disproportionately impacted by climate change – and LGBT+ individuals are disproportionately likely to be poor. Furthermore, in the Global South, climate change drives forced migration – and LGBT+ people are more likely to be mistreated by border security forces.

    This being the case, Pride – and queer movements more broadly – have a moral duty to stand in solidarity with climate defenders. However, this is where the problem with Just Stop Oil’s threat creeps in. To me, what they’re doing doesn’t look much like solidarity.

    Just Stop Oil: Solidarity – or else

    That brings us to Just Stop Oil’s third and final demand:

    Pride to set a public meeting for it’s volunteers about joining in civil resistance against new oil and gas, and why the climate crisis is the biggest threat to LGBT+ rights, due to societal collapse.

    Along with the list, they set an ultimatum:

    We will wait 24 hours, as of 4pm today (28/06), for Pride to respond to our demands and the actions Pride will take. Beyond this time or not meeting these demands will mean we may or may not take action at this weekend’s events.

    The ultimatum’s time limit has now elapsed. However, at the time of writing, neither Pride nor Just Stop Oil had confirmed whether any response had been issued. It’s this last demand – and accompanying threat – where I feel the climate group has overstepped its mark.

    Is this your solidarity?

    Now, solidarity between progressive movements is hugely important. Chances are, at any given Pride in the UK, you’ll see a handful of people wearing “Pits and Perverts” t-shirts. These refer to a slogan used by Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM):

    a political activist group of gay women and men that formed in a spirt of solidarity with the striking miners in 1984. Mark Ashton, one of the founders, saw the struggle of the miners as the same faced by gay people fighting for their rights against a government that would not listen.

    LGSM supported the Neath Dulais and Swansea Valley Miners mining communities during the 1984 strikes. Its fundraisers generated £20,000 for direct aid. This is what queer solidarity looks like at its best.

    What Just Stop Oil are demanding is nothing like this. It’s not a hand across a divide. To put it bluntly, they’ve issued a vague threat in an attempt to co-opt what should be a queer protest space.

    ‘Help us make your activists into our activists… or else’ is not a way to foster community – which isn’t even to mention the greater threat to queer people that accompanies being arrested as part of a climate protest or elsewhere.

    Learn it, and come back

    Let me be completely clear. I want Pride to be a real protest again, and especially London’s corporate, pinkwashed parody. Fuck knows we need it now. Oil money has no goddamn place within 100 miles of a queer march. Hell, I don’t particularly think any corporations belong in Pride – half of them scarper as soon as the winds of public opinion change.

    That said, Just Stop Oil can – for now – sling its hook right along with United Airlines. Go away and learn what solidarity and community building actually look like. I know you can manage it.

    Hell, I’ll even take a statement of support for any of the numerous actual queer protests in the UK. If Just Stop Oil has ever made one, I couldn’t bloody find it.

    Happy Pride.

    Just Stop Oil had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Raphael Renter

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • What the latest Tory-Labour ‘chums’ podcast tells us about power in politics

    Jess Phillips and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Then, Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Now, Ed Balls and George Osborne. Labour figures are so snuggly with Tories it is hard to imagine what the actual difference between the parties is supposed to be. Of course, the likes of Balls have no skin in the game. these are all wealthy, comfortable figures. But the combination of podcast grift and civility politics says a lot about power in this country.

    Chums

    The latest offering in the chum grift is a podcast hosted by former shadow chancellor Ed Balls and former actual chancellor George Osborne. Balls’ successes include a run on a TV dancing show and once tweeting his own name. Osborne’s greatest hits involve the most violent processes of austerity in modern times.

    “Ed and I are frenemies”, Osborne beamed to the Guardian on Thursday 29 June:

    Once bitter foes, and now firm friends. When we talk politics and economics I find myself talking to someone who brings a different perspective but with an insight and intelligence I rate.

    Meanwhile, Balls said:

    George and I want to bring economics back to life and on the agenda – with explanation and entertainment in equal measure.

    Nothing so entertaining or restorative as chumming up with the Bullingdon Club, hey Ed? We can and should mock this kind of thing. But we should also discuss what it says about our body politic.

    From economics to empire

    The Balls-Osborne podcast follows tightly on the heels of another Labour-Tory crossover. Except in that case, it is two arch-imperialists pouring into your ears. Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart started The Rest is Politics in May 2023.

    As the Canary has had to point out before, Stewart is a favourite of the Mk 1 centrist Twitter ignoramus. Simply sounding sort of authoritative and posh is enough for them. At least, enough to cover for his objectively vile voting record and his stint as imperial governor of a province of Iraq.

    Former Blair-era comms guru Campbell, of course, is even more familiar with Iraq. He is a figure of contempt for his role in the buildup to the war. Though one can almost admire how this slippery character has used the debate over Brexit to recondition his reputation. For well-heeled #FBPE liberals, little Poppy’s gap year being disrupted by ‘Brexshit’ is far more important than, say, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed or displaced.

    Jacob, bab

    While it hasn’t become a podcast yet (if it does, then just whack me over the head with a shovel) the Jacob Rees-Mogg-Jess Phillips love-in is another prime example of this utterly turgid trend.

    In 2015, Phillips, who routinely cosplays as working class, toured Mogg’s Somerset constituency:

    The ultimate outcome of this was lots of smiley pictures and jovial banter about nannies and Jeremy Corbyn.

    Naturally, people who buy into this kind of performance – just like the people who do it – have a particular formulation. That is, they have no skin in the game. They’re comfortable. Politics can be chummy if you’re secure. You can afford to talk about ‘civility’ if the barbarism inflicted by Mogg’s, Osborne’s, and Stewart’s doesn’t touch you.

    Civility politics is a trap

    Personally, I have no time for this bourgeois mode of politics. I do not ‘love my enemy’, as the Christian adage urges us. Better, surely, to take the man and the ball. Your political commitments should actually be, er, commitments. And not something to suspend for a headline or to fill a gap in the podcast market.

    That’s not to say one wouldn’t be polite or collegiate if the occasion demands, or even as a general rule. Sometimes it is right. And sometimes it isn’t. Like last week, when I spent a few days rinsing butt-hurt Corbyn nostalgists and discredited Labour Big Brains. Either way, the idea that we should all get on board with the sort of smirking comradely patter embodied in these podcasts is just bizarre to me.

    That’s all very well for the wealthy, posh, and comfortable but it’s not conducive to any serious politics. A serious working-class politics is ‘chat shit, get banged’ not ‘pass the biscuits, please, Rory’.

    Dead in the water

    And there is another point to be made here. The three politicians mentioned here aren’t marginal figures. Balls, Campbell, and Phillips represent the dominant politics in Labour. A brief and accidental moment of left-wing leadership did not change this. These three aren’t just figures in the Labour Party, they embody it.

    And a look at the purges in Labour since 2019 then tells us there won’t be another time like the Corbyn moment. The Labour left won’t get near the levers of state power again. Vapidly and abstractly calling for everyone to back the party just won’t cut it.

    Nor will talking about ‘extra-parliamentary’ activity as if getting some Red Tories elected should be at the centre of our thinking. What we need isn’t ‘extra-parliamentary’ activism, it’s an anti-parliamentary politics. The point isn’t to put your preferred set of capitalists, imperialists, and grifters in a position to govern you. It is to become yourself ungovernable.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Adrian Pingstone, cropped to 1910 x 1000, public domain.

    By Joe Glenton

  • Jeremy Corbyn won’t save us – nor should he be expected to

    Revolutionary change is not built by people, but by communities. As many oppressed communities will tell you, basing movements largely upon one leader will simply result in states destroying said leader. Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton could attest to that if they hadn’t been killed for their advocation for Black rights.

    Waiting on a saviour

    There are other movements we can turn to in order to see great leaders suppressed and overpowered by a seemingly irrepressible state. The crushing weight of the status quo often appears to stamp out any glowing embers that possible resistance might have conjured up.

    There is a particular tendency amongst left-wing white folks in the UK to rally around figures on the left as saviours. These figures are supposed to be the ones who come along and do the work. They’ll finally get rid of the Tories, save the NHS, and be good for a soundbite that does numbers on Twitter.

    But be they Jeremy Corbyn or Mick Lynch, that’s simply not going to happen.

    This is nothing to do with the proven talents of the likes of Corbyn or Lynch. Instead, it’s because unduly investing in one leader is no path to liberation. No one person can do it alone – nor should they have to.

    Ruminating and re-litigating

    My colleague Joe Glenton caused quite a stir when he asked Jeremy Corbyn supporters to accept what has come to pass over the Corbyn years and move on. Here at the Canary we’re hardly strangers to how Corbyn has been lied about and his supporters ridiculed. The man himself has been smeared, targeted, and subject to infuriating aspersions on both his politics and character. None of this is to criticise him, and I’d wager, he may well agree with what we’re saying.

    Given the Canary’s history of being a staunch supporter of Corbyn, it’s fair to say that our social media pages and comment sections are a reasonably accurate picture of the mood amongst supporters of Corbyn. One thing that hasn’t changed since 2019 is how much fans of Corbyn – and I would note, not necessarily Corbyn himself – insist on ruminating over how Corbyn was shoved out of mainstream politics.

    Now, you may well counter that it’s possible for people to care about more than one thing at once. However, our mentions demonstrate a huge amount of energy being sunk into re-litigating the Corbyn years.

    Parliamentary politics won’t save us

    It’s tempting to rally around political camps and leaders, but to do so is – as we should have learnt by now – a distraction that keeps us from finding connection and community with the people who suffer the most. Rallying around a memory of Corbyn is dangerous because it positions parliamentary politics as a legitimate source of change.

    Parliamentary politics will not save us. Voting cannot get us out of this mess. As many of us have asked so often since 2019, who on earth would you happily vote for anymore?

    Any kind of radical politics that actually helps the most vulnerable people in our society, that doesn’t operate through racism, classism, and transphobia, but through dismantling those very oppressions, is a politics that cannot – and will not – be found in Westminster.

    Perspective

    Our welfare system is operated by cruel and morally depraved people who are so determined to stamp out non-existent abuse of universal credit that they don’t mind stripping the meagre benefits of people struggling to feed themselves.

    Our government and media are throwing everything they have into demonising trans people whilst stripping back their basic healthcare.

    The Home Office has spent several administrations pouring money into the Prevent duty in the name of counter-terror. All this, to make sure Black and Brown Muslims are surveilled and abused as a matter of course.

    Our police forces operate with impunity and stifle dissent wherever they can. Those same police forces target and kill Black people with very little consequence. All conceivable levels of institutional power are engaged in anti-Blackness. Reports are then commissioned to confirm or deny such a thing, all whilst the anti-Blackness continues.

    Our country is paying to facilitate bombing Yemen. We’re raining down an apocalypse across regions Britain has already destabilised with decades of colonial and neocolonial violence. British companies are the ones making vast profits and causing the climate crisis, and are congratulated by the government and media for doing so.

    Consider all this. Consider the actual communities that are being crushed under this weight. Then, realise that it’s more than a little fucking annoying to see people rallying around the Corbyn years as though nothing else matters.

    A familiar blow

    For some of us, Corbyn’s demise as Labour leader was a blow. The man himself appears to have a proven track record politically and an admirable doggedness. He even has a rare ability amongst his skin folk to treat Black and Brown people as his equals. But, it wasn’t a blow that was unfamiliar.

    Poor Black and Brown people know what it is to be lied about, ignored, and shoved out of the way. We know because it happens to us. Not on the same scale, and perhaps not with the same level of scrutiny but it happens nonetheless.

    We know because our doctors don’t believe our pain. Our workplaces require us to not make too much of a fuss about racism. The people teaching our children are guided to report them to Prevent before they are to treat them as children. Whenever a famous Black or Brown person is caught in a racist storm, the rest of us get it in the neck.

    Our class identity is erased. We’re implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, shut out of queer spaces. Our disabilities are less often diagnosed, and are even questioned by the people who are supposed to treat us. Teachers look at us not with care, but with suspicion. Our fellow comrades fail to see us and our struggles, all while we’re supposed to be fighting for the same thing. These same comrades will often further marginalise and betray us.

    Communities, not leaders

    Corbyn was a breath of fresh air. There is more air to be taken in, fresh lungfuls, if we can lean on the communities some of us have had to build up in order to live.

    Black and Brown people – and queer, disabled Black and Brown people in particular – live with the knowledge that the systems we live under want us dead. We know what it means to only be able to rely on people like us in order to be seen. And, we also know the strength, and the necessity, of that kind of community.

    We shouldn’t be rallying around one person. Instead, we must rally around communities of people. After all, that’s what Corbyn himself has spent his political career doing.

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot/PoliticsJOE

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Decolonising the news: 4 fundamental questions media can ask when covering stories about Māori

    ANALYSIS: By Angela Moewaka Barnes, Massey University; Belinda Borell, Massey University, and Tim McCreanor, Massey University

    There is little evidence to suggest Aotearoa New Zealand’s mainstream news media critically evaluate their own reporting on issues about or affecting Māori and te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi).

    This is concerning, given the negative framing of so much coverage, past and present.

    The one exception to this general ambivalence has been the groundbreaking apology in 2020 by digital and print news organisation Stuff for a long history of monocultural and Eurocentric bias.

    Informed by our research on how news about Māori and te Tiriti is often constructed, Stuff looked back at its legacy mastheads and found stories that ranged from “blinkered to racist”. It pledged to change and improve to reflect a commitment to Māori audiences and the principles of te Tiriti.

    To date, no other media organisation has attempted to evaluate its reporting in this way — or, in fact, acknowledge this might be necessary.

    But media funding agency New Zealand on Air now offers a Tiriti Framework For News Media, also based on our research, to guide organisations applying to its Public Interest Journalism Fund.

    It is hoped the framework will help media organisations develop strategies that promote more accountable and equitable practices in their day-to-day reporting and commentary.

    Colonial and settler narratives
    The initiative is important because news is not some objective truth waiting to be reported. It is constructed through the lenses of news teams — and particularly senior journalists and editors — who are predominantly Pākehā.

    The types of stories that are told, and the way people and subjects are represented, involve deliberate choices. This frequently means few Māori stories are told. And when Māori are represented, they can be framed in limiting and negative ways.

    Historically, this is common to news and media representations of Indigenous peoples everywhere. There is undoubtedly bias at work some of the time.

    But as we have argued previously, these “negative ‘stories’ and representations of Indigenous peoples are strategic; tactical necessities rather than aberrations”.

    In other words, they “play important roles in the ongoing colonial project, enhancing the legitimisation and naturalisation of the institutions, practices, and priorities of the colonising state”.

    Early European colonists in the South Pacific founded newspapers and published material to serve their interests, institutionalising their preferred social order and norms. For example, an early handbook from the New Zealand Company in 1839 — “Information Relative to New Zealand, Compiled for the use of Colonists” — included some of the first representations of Māori as savage and lawless.

    Settler newspapers recycled these themes from 1840 onwards. Variations of the same message persist to the present day. Recent research shows that in countries colonised by Britain, news consistently represents Indigenous peoples as violent, primitive and untrustworthy.

    Fundamental questions
    Contemporary coverage of Māori activism still routinely misinforms and fails to capture nuance. Reporting of the 2020 Ihumātao occupation, for example, frequently reduced internal tensions to a clash between young and old.

    Similarly in Australia, the debate over the proposed First Nations Voice to Parliament has seen the spread of disinformation attempting to equate the policy with apartheid.

    On the other hand, there is evidence that both journalists and their audiences want to see change. This is where the new media framework can make a difference.

    It provides detailed examples of more equitable news practices, and prompts news organisations to ask themselves several fundamental questions:

    • Commitment to te Tiriti: how do you enact responsibilities under He Whakaputanga and te Tiriti?
    • Societal accountabilities: how do you transform use of harmful, racist themes and narratives around Māori?
    • News media practices: who benefits from the kinds of stories you choose to tell?
    • Māori-controlled media: how do you represent diversity in Māori stories and in your own staffing?

    Challenge and opportunity
    We’ve seen some positive responses to the framework, as well as accusations that the Tiriti requirements of New Zealand on Air’s Public Interest Journalism Fund amount to “propaganda” that muzzles mainstream media.

    Either way, media organisations are now operating in an environment where profit models require innovation, with increasing competition from social media and changes in audience behaviours.

    While this is challenging, it also offers an opportunity to transform journalism and improve newsroom practices. The Stuff and New Zealand on Air initiatives show how it’s possible to tackle harmful representations of Māori in mainstream news media.

    Our framework could also be adapted to other sectors and settings where systemic bias and disadvantage are felt. For now, though, it is up to media organisations, funders and policymakers to decide how they will respond.

    The authors acknowledge Dr Jenny Rankine and Dr Ray Nairn who were authors on Te Tiriti Framework For News Media and contributed to this article.The Conversation

    Angela Moewaka Barnes, senior researcher, Massey University; Belinda Borell, Kairangahau, Massey University, and Tim McCreanor, Professor of Race Relations, Health and Wellbeing, Massey University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • Papua governor Lukas Enembe’s legal drama and tragedy in Jakarta

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Yamin Kogoya

    Last Monday, suspended Papua Governor Lukas Enembe was indicted on gratification, bribery and corruption charges in Indonesia’s central Corruption Criminal Court in Jakarta.

    Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) prosecutors accused and charged Governor Enembe of accepting bribes totalling Rp 45.8 billion (US$3 million) and gratuities worth Rp 1 billion (US$65,000).

    Tomorrow the ailing former high official will know the judges’ rulings and responses to his requests.

    Prosecutors argued that these funds came from private infrastructure development companies in West Papua.

    As the Governor of Papua Province, Enembe, along with his subordinates Mikael Kambuaya and Gerius One Yoman, are accused of giving the bribe in order to obtain the companies used by Piton Enumbi and Rijatono Lakka for the 2013-2022 procurement project within the Papua Provincial government.

    Enembe was charged under Article 12a and Article 12b of Law 31 of 1999 regarding the Eradication of Corrupt Criminal Acts, Kompas.com reports.

    A barefooted Governor Enembe sat in the middle of the courtroom beside his lawyer Petrus Balapationa, looking directly at the panel of judges. Both of his defence attorneys and KPK prosecutors were seated on opposite sides of the courtroom.

    ‘Empty speeches, trickery’
    During the 2.5 hour hearing, the governor shouted angrily at the KPK’s prosecutors, asking, “Woi (hey) — lying, where did I receive (Rp 45 billion)?” . . . “Not right, not right, empty speeches, you’re lying, empty speeches, trickery and lying, where did I get it?,” Lukas Enembe said during his indictment reading, reports Kompas.com.

    The governor’s lawyer Petrus Balap read out statements of objections written by Enembe in response to the allegations and charges.

    “I am being vilified, dehumanised, impoverished and made destitute,” said the governor in his statement to the judges and prosecutors, raising 32 objections to the indictment. He said:

    “To all my Papuan people. I, the Governor, whom you have elected twice, I am the traditional chief, I have been vilified, dehumanised, demonised, mistreated and, I have been [made] destitute and impoverished.

    “I, Lukas Enembe, never stole state money, never took bribes, yet the KPK provides false information and manipulates public opinion as if I were the most notorious criminal.

    The suspended Governor of Papua, Lukas Enembe, enters Jakarta's Corruption Criminal Court on 19 June 2023
    The suspended Governor of Papua, Lukas Enembe, enters Jakarta’s Corruption Criminal Court last Monday . . . He shouted out, “I am being vilified, dehumanised, [made] impoverished and destitute”. Image: Kompas.com

    “I have been accused of being a gambler. Even if this were true, it is a general criminal offence, KPK does not have the authority to investigate gambling issues. Even the alleged bribe of one billion dollars in my indictment grew into a bribe of tens of billions of rupiah, resulting in the confiscation of all my savings.

    “Not only was my money confiscated, but also the money of my wife and children. Even though I have emphasised in my BAP (minutes of the legal examination) that the one billion rupiah is my personal money and does not constitute bribes or gratuities.

    “On my oath as a witness against defendant Rijatono Lakkadi in court on May 16, 2023, I explained the same statement.

    “Once again, I dare to declare that the one billion rupiah is not the result of a bribe that Rijatono Lakka gave me at my request. I have never given Rijatono Lakka facilities, Rijatono Lakka’s wealth has come from his own work.

    ‘Cruel treatment’
    “I have never interfered in the tender process of the procurement of goods and services, nor do I know the participants of the Electronic Tender since I created the E-Tender process to prevent the participation of KKN (Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism) in the tender process.

    “Not only was I the target of the pensoliman (cruelty and inhumane treatment), but my wife and son were also called as witnesses for me, despite their refusal to cooperate which is protected by the constitution.”

    The governor continued to protest against the KPK’s arrest of Dr Stefanus Roy Rening, one of his lawyers who had defended Enembe against the allegations and the attempt to arrest him September last year.

    “It was also difficult for me to comprehend that my lawyer, Dr Stefanus Roy Rening, was made a suspect, obstructing the examination, despite the fact that he did not accompany the witnesses and stated that because of the statements made by Dr Stefanus Roy Rening who had defended me in public, which could affect the testimony of witnesses. He (Dr Roy) did not accompany the witnesses of my case.

    “Is it possible for Dr Stefanus Roy Rening to influence witnesses when they are not accompanied by a lawyer and at the end of every witness BAP [statement] a sentence is included stating that the witness’ testimony is free from influence, and it is the witness’ own testimony without any influence from others?”

    The governor concluded his statement of objections by stating:

    “What I have explained and [with] the facts stated above, I have the right in this court to be treated fairly, not to be slandered, vilified, or impoverished, as I have been accused of gambling to the tens of hundreds of millions in Singapore, despite the fact that no one has ever given a statement about gambling, or that I was involved in the purchase of KKB weapons (arms for West Papuan freedom fighters) by a pilot arrested in the Philippines.”

    Lawyers’ objection letter
    An objection letter by the governor’s legal team was released last Thursday stating:

    Lukas Enembe’s senior lawyer, OC Kaligis, expressed his objection to KPK officials’ attitude during the trial at the Jakarta District Court, Thursday (22 June 2023). Lukas Enembe’s legal counsel have only been able to consult with him for two hours a week since he has been detained.

    Is it possible that legal counsel will only be given two hours of visitation time per week? Kaligis stated that the two-hour period was insufficient for discussing all the witnesses in the case file (184 witnesses) and the 1024 minutes of seizure according to Article 129 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

    According to Kaligis, his defence counsel had the right to provide legal assistance, as per Article 56 of the Criminal Procedure Code, in order to determine whether there were any witnesses who directly gave bribes or gratuities to Lukas Enembe.

    “The [details] in this case need to be explained carefully to Lukas Enembe, with adequate time. Two hours of consultation each week is definitely not enough,” said Kaligis.

    Kaligis stated that on June 19, 2023, following the indictment, when legal counsel sought to meet with Lukas Enembe, the time given was very short, and a KPK official who claimed to be the Public Prosecutor closely monitored the meeting.

    “Even though the legal counsel had requested that the seating be changed in the same area, the Public Prosecutor arrogantly still forbids, despite the fact that the panel of judges before the court had stated that we can meet Lukas Enembe after the hearing. Particularly now that the power of detention lies with the panel of judges and not with the KPK anymore,” said Kaligis.

    Detention visits
    His legal team requested that the panel of judges allow him to visit Lukas Enembe at the KPK detention centre every day before his trial.

    “The legal counsel team filed an application with the panel of judges, as the extension of detention is now within the jurisdiction of the court and is no longer under the authority of the KPK. The KPK prohibited us from meeting Lukas Enembe in court, everything was done based on the KPK’s power and arrogance.

    “Doesn’t that violate Article 56 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, granting a right to legal counsel to consult the law?” Kaligis said.

    Governor Enembe’s ordeal has been characterised by numerous twists and turns as the KPK, doctors, the governor himself, and the defence legal team strive to find a resolution to these problems.

    The situation is made worse by the fact that in Indonesia the lines between law enforcement agencies, KPK officials, medical doctors, and judges are blurred in a country notoriously known for corruption and impunity from top officials to local mayors.

    Dealing with cases like Lukas Enembe is even worse — coming from Indonesia’s most contested territory — West Papua.

    Legal system questioned
    Indeed, this case undermines the whole foundation of the Indonesian legal system.

    Judging whether Papua’s governor is guilty or not within Indonesia’s legal system — which regards Papuans as being “illegal” in managing Papuan affairs — is always going to be perceived with suspicion from the Papuan side. This is because the fundamental issue (West Papua’s sovereignty) underlying the West Papua-Indonesia conflict has never been resolved.

    What has broken down between Papuans and Indonesia’s government for the past 60 years is trust.

    Unfortunately, Governor Lukas and every Papuan considered to be breaking Indonesian laws, must face the Indonesian legal system. This in itself is so ironic and demoralising for Papuans, as every moral, ethical and legal framework Jakarta employs is viewed as fraught by Papuans within the West Papua sovereignty disputes in Indonesia.

    Jakarta’s criminalisation of Papuans is like criminalising innocents and accusing them of breaking the law through the perpetrator’s legal system.

    This is due to the fact that the Indonesian government has a long history of targeting Papuans for their political views and beliefs. This has led to an environment of fear and intimidation, where Papuans are often accused of crimes they did not commit and are treated harshly by the Indonesian legal system.

    For more than 500 years, most indigenous people around the globe have been criminalised and exterminated since a series of Papal bulls (decrees) signed by European Catholic popes and Christian kings during the early period of European colonisation in the 1400s and 1500s.

    Legal myths
    They were legal myths for conquests, civilising mission — the myth of discovery, the myth of empty lands, and the myth of Terra Nullius.

    It has been used to justify the exploitation of indigenous peoples, to strip them of their rights, and to deny them access to land and resources.

    By criminalising the indigenous population, colonial authorities have maintained an unequal power dynamic and control over them. These colonial myths have had devastating consequences for the original inhabitants.

    Today, Jakarta still propagates this myth in West Papua. Colonial myths have been made truer than truth, more real than reality, and unfortunately, indigenous leaders, such as Governor Lukas Enembe, have been swayed by them by their legal jargon, codes, numbers, symbols, grammar, and semantic power.

    Currently there are three high profile Papuan leaders locked up in KPK’s prison cells — Papua Governor Lukas Enembe; the Regent of Mimika Regency, Eltinus Omaleng; and the Regent of Mamberamo Tengah Regency, Ricky Ham Pagawak. All are accused of corruption.

    The status of the two regents remains unclear.

    As for Governor Lukas Enembe, he requested that the judges take his deteriorating health seriously and that he receive medical assistance from specialists in Singapore, and not from KPK’s appointed general practitioners.

    This is partially due to the breakdown of trust.

    Further, the Governor has also requested that the block on the bank account of his son (a student based in Melbourne) be lifted in order for him to be able to continue his studies.

    The judges are due to deliver their verdict tomorrow regarding the outcome of his requests and all charges against him.

    Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic/activist who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

  • The provisional wing of Corbynism is getting a bit tiresome

    Many of us invested heavily in Corbyn. Against my better judgment, I was one of them. The betrayals, disingenuous attack lines, and internal sabotage from within the Labour party robbed many people of reforms which could certainly have improved working class people’s lives. On top of that, it showed us that there is no route to power for working class people through Parliament.

    Even as somebody about 400 miles to the left of Jeremy Corbyn – a man who I like very much, by the way – I banged on doors and argued the case and actively helped his comms team out with veterans-related matters.

    I did this because because while I’m on the radical and anti-state end of the Left, I’m not a weird spiky separatist or poseur when it comes to getting things which might help people. I backed Corbs’ mild reformist agenda while also arguing that it wouldn’t resolve real human needs. I’d spent too much time broke, hungry and homeless myself to do anything else.

    People were traumatised by the defeat. Though we should put it in context: the result for most of us wasn’t Stalin- or Franco-esque gulags (excepting migrants and so on). That’s real defeat. We just got more time being governed by Tory wankers. I note also that many people for whom that period was their first political experience were then duped by Keir Starmer. We all remember his explicitly left-wing election video right? Before he emerged as a conniving Tory.

    This all grieves me as much as the next recovering Corbynista, no doubt. Surely though, it’s time to move the fuck on. Look no further than the tone of row about new film about that period, The Big Lie, being pulled from Glastonbury.

    Endless re-litigation

    I haven’t seen the film yet. Maybe it makes some good points. And it is certainly cowardly of Glasto not to show it. Though I note the excellent Reel News did stealth in a screening:

    My issue is the tone of debate around the film. Or rather some of people attached to it

    There’s a group of people who insist on reliving the Corbyn years and spend their energy mired in its memories. This credo can be slightly indistinct but is evidently quite real. I term this Provisional Corbynism. Of course, I do this to take the piss out of it because I think it is silly. But also because of its rudderless and cranky militancy.

    The politics of these 2015-2019 nostalgists sometimes seem verge on the manically conspiracist. I’ve seen it up close on several occasions from a range of individuals. Ask anyone who worked at the pre-revolutionary Canary what it was like.

    Ultimately, this is a politics of endless re-litigation, of ‘Jeremy should start his own party’, and of urging anyone remotely left-wing who gets a platform to do the same.

    Yes, Corbyn was treated badly. But this band of Corbyn’s fandom are keeping themselves looking back at the heady days of 2018 to the detriment of building any meaningful resistance here in 2023. Instead, they’d rather lament the Corbyn days gone by, and urge anyone remotely left-wing to become Corbyn 2.0. Case in point – every time Mick Lynch appears on TV.

    Moving on from Corbyn

    But, Provisional Corbyn people miss the big points. First, that people like Lynch (and militant union members) are far better positioned to practically improve their own lives than any political party or politician ever could be. Parliament is where the ruling class goes to manage its affairs. It’s where radicalism goes to die. Formulating a progressive politics around elections is a failure of imagination and analysis.

    Secondly, that this is a zombie politics. It shambles on long after the moment has passed with just an echo of the energy which animated the Corbyn movement.

    The question needs to stop being how do we re-litigate that defeat. It needs to be how we build working class confidence and power in new ways, outside ruling class institutions like Parliament – or, indeed, the film tent at Glasto.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Raph_PH, cropped to 1910 x 1000, licenced under CC BY 2.0.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Donna Miles-Mojab: Is there such a thing as unbiased reporting?

    COMMENTARY: By Donna Miles-Mojab

    Recently, there was a serious revelation that some wire service reports were edited, without attribution, by an individual employee of our national broadcaster, RNZ.

    Now, let’s examine the way I composed the above sentence.

    I included the word “serious” to signal to readers that this news is of significant importance. The reason is that I believe there is already extensive frustration at media coverage of news — and therefore anything that erodes trust in our major media should be taken seriously.

    Later in the sentence, I used the word “edited”. Initially, I had used the word “altered” but I made a conscious decision to change it to “edited”. I did this because I thought the word “altered” might suggest a higher type of wrongdoing — one that could be linked to fraud and criminality, such as being paid by a foreign agent to alter documents.

    There is no evidence that this was the case at RNZ. The word “edited” suggests the use of some sort of journalistic judgment which, in this particular case, regardless of the factuality or falsehood of the edits, were clearly unethical because they were unauthorised and undeclared.

    The reference to “an individual employee” was to ensure that other journalists at RNZ, and the organisation as a whole, were not implicated in the revelation. If I had thought RNZ was systematically biased in its reporting, I probably would have just written that RNZ had been found to be altering wire service news.

    So my choice of words to form the first sentence of this column was informed by my personal perspectives, as well as the impression I hoped to create in the minds of those reading it.

    The subject of this column isn’t about what happened at RNZ. We will be informed of this, in time, when the result of the ongoing inquiry is made public.

    Unbiased reporting?
    The question I intend to explore here is if there is such a thing as unbiased reporting.

    I went back to university later in life to study journalism because it was important to me to understand how the news was produced. My course placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of objectivity and impartiality as ideal standards of news reporting, without much discussion about the limits of achieving such unrealistic standards.

    News is produced by reporters and shaped by editors who cannot help but inject their own perspectives and personal experiences into the final product. Even when reporting live from the scene, journalists often have to form a judgment as to what is newsworthy, and so depending on who is reporting the story, the information we receive may alter.

    In general, the idea of “unbiased”, “objective” or “neutral” reporting cannot be entirely divorced from the editorial guides journalists use to determine what information to report, and also what they believe is the truth.

    Omitting context or the decision to exclude some key words can, in some instances, produce a misleading report.

    For instance, my interest in the Palestinian cause has meant that I notice the journalistic language used in reporting on Palestine. I consider that Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) should always be referred to as “occupied Gaza” and “occupied West Bank” because this is their legal status under international law.

    But in many articles about Palestine, the word “occupied” is often dropped even though its use matters because it gives relevant context to reporting of political and military events there.

    Impartial presentation
    Some journalistic codes refer to “balanced” and “fair” reporting. The idea here is that, where there is controversy, there should be an impartial presentation of all facts as well as all substantial opinions relating to it.

    A fair report, it is said, should avoid giving equal footing to truths and mistruths and should provide factual context to any inaccurate or misleading public statement.

    In recent years, The New York Times has used a series of articles known as Explainers to, as they describe it, “demystify thorny topics”.

    Stuff’s Explained follows a similar format to help deconstruct topics that are complex and challenging to understand.

    The notion of bias in news writing has become the most common criticism of the media.

    Ultimately, the solution to increasing trust in journalism lies in transparency and disclosure of the standards, judgments and systems used to produce and edit news. It is therefore right that RNZ has announced an external review of its processes for the editing of online stories.

    But there should also be a mind shift in our understanding of the notions of unbiased and objective reporting — namely that these notions have always existed and continue to operate within power dynamics that give privilege to certain perspectives.

    The best approach, therefore, is to always allow for an element of doubt — and only believe something to be true just so long as our active efforts to disprove it have been unsuccessful.

    Donna Miles-Mojab is an Iranian New Zealander interested in justice and human rights issues. She lives in Christchurch and works as a freelance journalist and a columnist for The Press. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

  • Starved of funds and vision, struggling universities put NZ’s entire research strategy at risk

    ANALYSIS: By Nicola Gaston, University of Auckland

    The crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand’s university and wider research sector did not happen overnight. While funding shortfalls and sweeping redundancies are now making headlines, the underlying problems have been evident for years.

    As I wrote after last year’s budget, financial support for research across our universities and crown research institutes “is steadily eroding and has been doing so for some time”, given the impacts of inflation.

    The year before was no better. “The 2021 budget is not the investment we needed to see,” I wrote then. “Anything other than an increase in line with inflation is rather a slap in the face.”

    And of 2020’s covid-dominated budget, I could only say: “Under normal conditions, I might describe this as a disappointing budget for science [. . . ] missing not merely in action, but in aspiration.”

    It was a similar story in 2019, with a 1.8 percent increase to tertiary tuition subsidies only slightly alleviating inflation pressure; and in 2018, when the government restated its intention to lift research funding to 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over 10 years.

    That 2 pecent of GDP target has been around for a long time now, with little significant movement and a current spend of 1.47 percent. The lack of new funding for science and research in recent successive budgets might once have been explained by sector reform being a work in progress.

    But time is running out.

    With redundancies wreaking havoc across the university sector in particular, getting new funding into the system should have been a priority in this year’s budget. The opportunity cost of not doing this is simply too great.

    Challenge and capacity
    The university sector is now undeniably in crisis, with the scale of the cuts — most seriously at Otago and Victoria University of Wellington, but also at Waikato and Massey — becoming clearer in the past few weeks.

    The Prime Minister and Minister of Education refuse to interfere in what they see as operational matters, saying universities need to adapt to changing realities.

    And there is little doubt universities face real challenges, from the changing nature of work, to increased expectations of digital learning, and the implications of artificial intelligence tools.

    But cutting staff undermines the sector’s capacity to deal with those challenges in the first place — because capacity lies at the heart of this issue. As former prime minister Helen Clark said last week:

    It has taken decades to build the current capacities of our universities. That should not be destroyed by short-term budgetary considerations. The money required to maintain viable and comprehensive universities is small in the overall scheme of things.

    The missing money may indeed be small. But a lack of inflation adjustment over multiple years has created real problems — especially given universities did not qualify for any financial support during covid-19, and have cut or not replaced staff over the past three years already.

    A system at odds with itself
    This year, the key budget hole is traceable to a dip in student numbers, likely related to sub-optimal student experiences during the pandemic, and perhaps the relatively strong job market.

    It is easy to sympathise with this, and to hope those students return to tertiary education in future. The question is, what will our universities look like if and when they do?

    That research funding target of 2 percent of GDP — reiterated again in this year’s budget — has been with us since 2017.

    Patience was encouraged on the basis that, while government funding was below target, business expenditure on research and development (R&D) was even worse. We needed to wait for R&D tax credits to move that dial before government funding would increase.

    But the reverse is now true. As last year’s white paper from science sector reform programme Te Ara Paerangi-Future Pathways made clear, it was no longer business R&D capacity that was holding us back — it was capacity on the public side:

    The current [research, science and innovation] system is poorly placed to utilise increased funding to prepare us for [the] future.

    That the loss of capacity threatened by current university cuts seems not to have raised concerns in government about the viability of its own research strategy suggests something is profoundly wrong.

    Simple funding solutions
    The immediate solution shouldn’t be that hard. As has been pointed out elsewhere, money to cover projected higher student enrolments was originally budgeted for by the government.

    The decision not to allocate that money due to lower than expected enrolments is really a question of funding priorities and structures.

    The research activities of universities are supported first through baseline funding to ensure there is available capacity; and secondly through contestable grants that allow governments to invest in research areas on strategic grounds (such as health or economic development).

    A shift in the balance between baseline and per-student funding is not a dramatic structural change. An alternative might be to set a floor on how much per-student funding can be cut from one year to the next — just like the government sets a cap on raising student fees, for example.

    A coordinated national strategy
    In the longer term, it would also be good to see stronger coordination and collaboration between universities at both governance and academic levels.

    Perhaps a “supercouncil” composed of representatives of each university council could provide the forum for this. It would help ensure individual university strategies were complementary, making the most of their distinctiveness and responsibilities to local communities.

    And to address those concerns about adaptation to modern realities, a ministry of education initiative to develop strategic plans for disciplines and programmes (with academic input) would be welcome.

    The relationship between university research and teaching, mandated in the Education Act, should mean that changing research realities have implications for how and what we teach.

    It is a matter of academic freedom that universities and academics make these decisions themselves. But having national strategic thinking available to support those decisions could only be a good thing.

    At the very least, it would be rather more strategic than making these decisions based on the order in which staff apply for redundancy.The Conversation

    Dr Nicola Gaston, co-director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • From Stubborn Chefs to Exclusive Landlords, Do Vegans and Meat-Eaters Need to Drop the Beef?

    After Chef John Mountain failed to cater for one vegan customer at his restaurant, Fyre, in Perth, Australia, he was met with some constructive criticism. “I think it’s incredibly important nowadays that restaurants can accommodate everyone,” the customer wrote. “To not be able to have actual plant-based meals shows your shortcomings as a chef.” Mountain’s response? A flat-out ban on all vegan customers. 

    “Sadly all vegans are now banned from Fyre (for mental health reasons),” read a post on the restaurant’s social media. “We thank you for your understanding.” 

    It’s a seemingly extreme reaction, but it’s far from the first example of meat-eaters and vegans hitting the headlines for not getting along. In fact, just recently, another story broke relating to a ban, but this time, it was a vegan landlord preventing meat-eaters from cooking animal products in his New York apartment. According to the real estate listing, which has since been removed, the one house rule was “no meat or fish in the building.”

    These two examples may have gone viral, but, away from the social media frenzy, people clash over dietary beliefs all the time. But why, exactly, is it so hard for vegans and meat-eaters to just get along? And are there any benefits to meeting in the middle?

    Why can’t vegans and meat-eaters just get along?

    In the last few years, the food industry has started to change. Veganism used to be on the fringes of society, with plant-based shoppers regulated to health food stores and dedicated meat-free cafés. But now, most mainstream supermarkets and restaurants (Fyre aside, of course) offer an array of plant-based choices, and the market is growing consistently. In fact, according to some estimates, by 2030, it could hit a value of $162 billion.

    But despite this growth, not everyone is accepting of vegan values. And according to some social psychologists, for many, this could be due to some deep psychological reasons. 

    For years, meat has been the norm in society. It has long been the center of the grill in the summer, the Thanksgiving table in the autumn, and the meals we share with loved ones on regular weekday evenings all through the year.

    Animal products have become so entrenched in everyday life that the thought of giving them up is unnerving, and maybe even scary, to many. But when others do make the leap and reject the system of industrialized factory farming that produces 99 percent of animal products in the US, this often forces people to sit with some uncomfortable feelings about their own behavior, resulting in conflict. 

    “By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance,” reads an article for BBC Future. “And this makes people angry.”

    And on the flip side, some vegans struggle to relate and empathize with meat-eaters, despite the fact that, for most people, there was likely a time when they ate animal products, too. 

    ​​”In most cultures, people grow up eating meat as a perfectly normal thing to do. But at some point, they learn where meat comes from and that can create a conflict,” psychology professor Matt Ruby told Insider. “A lot of people are really disconnected with where their food comes from, so it can be a bit of a shock.”

    VegNews.Cows.EtienneGirardet.UnsplashEtienne Girardet/Unsplash

    The bottom line: the food system’s role in the climate crisis affects us all

    The truth is, all of the petty arguments and inflammatory headlines about “meat eaters versus vegans,” are just a distraction from an uncomfortable and scary truth: the climate crisis is here, and it’s getting worse. 

    While some can disagree on the ethics of killing and exploiting billions of animals for food, it is hard to deny the facts about the meat industry’s role in climate change. Animal agriculture is, after all, responsible for 14.5 percent of global emissions, plus it’s the leading driver of deforestation around the world. 

    Many experts have called for a total drop in meat consumption (the biggest-ever food production study in 2018 noted that going vegan was the single-biggest change a person could make to reduce their impact on the planet), but others have opted for a pragmatic approach: vegans be vegans, and meat-eaters, cut back.

    In 2022, one study from the University of Bonn in Germany urged Western countries, in particular, to rethink their relationship with meat, and cut back on consumption by 75 percent.

    “If all humans consumed as much meat as Europeans or North Americans, we would certainly miss the international climate targets and many ecosystems would collapse,” said Matin Qaim, the study’s lead author, at the time.

    In 2021, a report commissioned by the UK government recommended that Brits cut meat consumption by 30 percent to fight climate change, and in 2020, Greenpeace called for a 71 percent drop in Europe.

    Meeting in the middle: the rise in flexitarianism

    And some meat-eating consumers are listening to the experts. Flexitarianism, which is a predominantly plant-based lifestyle with occasional meat consumption, is rising in popularity. In fact, in 2022, research from Beneo GmbH evaluated 12,000 consumers across 10 countries and found that around one in four consumers identify as flexitarian now. 

    Some of these people may end up going totally vegan, and others may just continue to treat meat as an occasional indulgence, but one thing is for certain, creating more division and shame around dietary choices isn’t going to help either of those things happen. And the truth is, a society full of flexitarians is a significant improvement from where we’re at now. 

    For many vegans, a meat-free world is, understandably, the dream. But while that may happen in some distant, hard-to-imagine-right-now future, it’s not our current reality. 

    Encouraging and supporting meat-eaters to cut back on their consumption, without judgment, would still save billions of animals, and would reduce emissions, too. And if we were all honest with ourselves, cognitive dissonance and burger preferences aside, that’s what most of us truly want. 

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • From Stubborn Chefs to Exclusive Landlords, Do Vegans and Meat-Eaters Need to Drop the Beef?

    After Chef John Mountain failed to cater for one vegan customer at his restaurant, Fyre, in Perth, Australia, he was met with some constructive criticism. “I think it’s incredibly important nowadays that restaurants can accommodate everyone,” the customer wrote. “To not be able to have actual plant-based meals shows your shortcomings as a chef.” Mountain’s response? A flat-out ban on all vegan customers. 

    “Sadly all vegans are now banned from Fyre (for mental health reasons),” read a post on the restaurant’s social media. “We thank you for your understanding.” 

    It’s a seemingly extreme reaction, but it’s far from the first example of meat-eaters and vegans hitting the headlines for not getting along. In fact, just recently, another story broke relating to a ban, but this time, it was a vegan landlord preventing meat-eaters from cooking animal products in his New York apartment. According to the real estate listing, which has since been removed, the one house rule was “no meat or fish in the building.”

    These two examples may have gone viral, but, away from the social media frenzy, people clash over dietary beliefs all the time. But why, exactly, is it so hard for vegans and meat-eaters to just get along? And are there any benefits to meeting in the middle?

    Why can’t vegans and meat-eaters just get along?

    In the last few years, the food industry has started to change. Veganism used to be on the fringes of society, with plant-based shoppers regulated to health food stores and dedicated meat-free cafés. But now, most mainstream supermarkets and restaurants (Fyre aside, of course) offer an array of plant-based choices, and the market is growing consistently. In fact, according to some estimates, by 2030, it could hit a value of $162 billion.

    But despite this growth, not everyone is accepting of vegan values. And according to some social psychologists, for many, this could be due to some deep psychological reasons. 

    For years, meat has been the norm in society. It has long been the center of the grill in the summer, the Thanksgiving table in the autumn, and the meals we share with loved ones on regular weekday evenings all through the year.

    Animal products have become so entrenched in everyday life that the thought of giving them up is unnerving, and maybe even scary, to many. But when others do make the leap and reject the system of industrialized factory farming that produces 99 percent of animal products in the US, this often forces people to sit with some uncomfortable feelings about their own behavior, resulting in conflict. 

    “By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance,” reads an article for BBC Future. “And this makes people angry.”

    And on the flip side, some vegans struggle to relate and empathize with meat-eaters, despite the fact that, for most people, there was likely a time when they ate animal products, too. 

    ​​”In most cultures, people grow up eating meat as a perfectly normal thing to do. But at some point, they learn where meat comes from and that can create a conflict,” psychology professor Matt Ruby told Insider. “A lot of people are really disconnected with where their food comes from, so it can be a bit of a shock.”

    VegNews.Cows.EtienneGirardet.UnsplashEtienne Girardet/Unsplash

    The bottom line: the food system’s role in the climate crisis affects us all

    The truth is, all of the petty arguments and inflammatory headlines about “meat eaters versus vegans,” are just a distraction from an uncomfortable and scary truth: the climate crisis is here, and it’s getting worse. 

    While some can disagree on the ethics of killing and exploiting billions of animals for food, it is hard to deny the facts about the meat industry’s role in climate change. Animal agriculture is, after all, responsible for 14.5 percent of global emissions, plus it’s the leading driver of deforestation around the world. 

    Many experts have called for a total drop in meat consumption (the biggest-ever food production study in 2018 noted that going vegan was the single-biggest change a person could make to reduce their impact on the planet), but others have opted for a pragmatic approach: vegans be vegans, and meat-eaters, cut back.

    In 2022, one study from the University of Bonn in Germany urged Western countries, in particular, to rethink their relationship with meat, and cut back on consumption by 75 percent.

    “If all humans consumed as much meat as Europeans or North Americans, we would certainly miss the international climate targets and many ecosystems would collapse,” said Matin Qaim, the study’s lead author, at the time.

    In 2021, a report commissioned by the UK government recommended that Brits cut meat consumption by 30 percent to fight climate change, and in 2020, Greenpeace called for a 71 percent drop in Europe.

    Meeting in the middle: the rise in flexitarianism

    And some meat-eating consumers are listening to the experts. Flexitarianism, which is a predominantly plant-based lifestyle with occasional meat consumption, is rising in popularity. In fact, in 2022, research from Beneo GmbH evaluated 12,000 consumers across 10 countries and found that around one in four consumers identify as flexitarian now. 

    Some of these people may end up going totally vegan, and others may just continue to treat meat as an occasional indulgence, but one thing is for certain, creating more division and shame around dietary choices isn’t going to help either of those things happen. And the truth is, a society full of flexitarians is a significant improvement from where we’re at now. 

    For many vegans, a meat-free world is, understandably, the dream. But while that may happen in some distant, hard-to-imagine-right-now future, it’s not our current reality. 

    Encouraging and supporting meat-eaters to cut back on their consumption, without judgment, would still save billions of animals, and would reduce emissions, too. And if we were all honest with ourselves, cognitive dissonance and burger preferences aside, that’s what most of us truly want. 

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • No-one cares about poor Black and Brown refugees dying in the ocean, so why should we care about billionaires?

    Throughout the week, the mainstream media have obsessively been giving us live updates about billionaires missing inside a submarine in the Atlantic Ocean. The Titan submersible has five people on board, including three UK citizens. It was on a scheduled dive to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The chief executive of OceanGate, the firm which runs the voyages, was also inside the vessel.

    The people onboard have been described by the media using colonial terms, such as explorers and adventurers. In reality, it was their money that allowed them to embark on such a mission. Each of the passengers paid $250,000 (£195,600) for the opportunity to get close to the Titanic. The minute-by-minute updates about their whereabouts are perhaps unsurprising, given that we live in a society obsessed with the antics of the rich.

    Billionaires need saving, refugees are left to drown

    The lives of these billionaires are deemed so important that there is a massive rescue operation. The US coastguard has teamed up with the US Navy, as well as the Canadian coastguard, to find the Titan. Meanwhile, the French government vowed to send a ship, along with a deep-diving vessel. The odds of saving the people onboard are said to be around 1%, but that doesn’t stop the efforts.

    Now let’s compare that to the lack of action from governments after up to 600 refugees drowned off the coast of Greece on Wednesday 14 June. Think about that figure for a second. 600 people are all thought to have been killed, many trapped in a trawler’s hold. Where was the live tracker on the BBC website? Why wasn’t the Guardian‘s ‘most viewed’ section filled with pieces about this tragedy? How was it allowed to even happen?

    750 people were on board the trawler that sank. Greek authorities evaded any responsibility, despite their patrol boats shadowing the trawler for many hours. Indeed, AlarmPhone – a hotline for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean – alerted authorities that the boat was in distress. The Hellenic Coast Guard insisted:

    From (1230 GMT to 1800 GMT) the merchant marine operations room was in repeated contact with the fishing boat. They steadily repeated that they wished to sail to Italy and did not want any contribution from Greece.

    Yet survivors from the ship have stated that Greece’s Hellenic Coast Guard towed the boat, causing it to capsize.

    27,047 dead: it’s far past time we cared

    This latest tragedy marks ten years since around 600 people died in two shipwrecks off the island of Lampedusa, Italy. A decade later, nothing has changed. Since Lampedusa, at least 27,047 people have drowned in the Mediterranean. Only one of these people sparked headline news: two-year-old Alan Kurdi. His aunt, Tima Kurdi, spoke out about the 14 June drowning, and pleaded with people to actually take notice:

    This shipwreck brings back my pain, our pain. I am heartbroken. I am heartbroken for all the innocent souls lost that are not just numbers in this world. “Never again” we heard in 2015, I heard it countless times. And what changed? How many innocent souls have been lost at sea since then? I want to take you back to September 2, 2015, when all of you saw the image of my nephew, the 2-year-old baby lying on the Turkish beach. What did you feel when you saw his image? What did you say, what did you do? Me, when I heard about my nephew drowning, I fell to the floor crying and screaming as loud as I could because I wanted the world to hear me! Why them? Why now? And who’s next?

    She continued:

    Since then, I decided to raise my voice and speak up for everyone who is not heard. And most importantly for my nephew, the boy on the beach, Alan Kurdi, whose voice will never be heard again. Please do not be silent and add your voice to mine. We cannot close our eyes and turn our backs to people seeking protection. Open your heart and welcome people fleeing to your doorstep.

    Why worship capitalists?

    These two incidents, of refugees dying and billionaires trapped in a submersible, should make us reflect on the state of the world we live in. Those on the Titan had signed disclaimers agreeing that they were risking death, and knew the risks. Nevertheless, five international vessels are currently at the site of the Titanic wreckage, with more set to arrive. Meanwhile, US and Canadian aircraft plough the skies in the desperate search.

    At the same time, off the coast of Greece hundreds of people are still missing in one of the deepest spots of the Mediterranean; their bodies not yet recovered. Their lives are seen as expendable: only worth a few news headlines, if that. Where are the submarines searching for them? And where is the French deep diving vessel? It is being sent to rescue the billionaires.

    Europe is to blame

    To be clear, Greek authorities and Frontex (the European Union’s border police force) allowed these people to drown. Determined to wash its hands of any responsibility, Greece has arrested and held nine Egyptian men in detention, accusing them of people smuggling.

    Since the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, capitalist and power-hungry policies around the world have caused millions of people to have to flee their homes. Despite what comfortable white people in Europe might think, very few people actively want to leave their roots, say goodbye to their homes, and risk their children’s lives – heading across continents and into the unknown. They are forced to do so by countries like the UK, which historically and currently have participated in destabilising whole regions.

    Yet in the global north, we continue to be enthralled by the lives of capitalists and billionaires, completely disconnected from the fact that it is power and greed that is causing the forced displacement of 108.4 million people worldwide.

    In time, I’m sure a movie will be made about the rescue effort to save the Titan, just as there was about the very ship the billionaires were so desperate to catch a glimpse of. There will be no film about the 600 who have died off the coast of Greece.

    Dehumanised

    As the mainstream media obsesses about how much oxygen the billionaires have left, readers of the Guardian, the BBC, and others will no doubt be wondering about how the men are coping in such a small space, what they’re going through, and whether they will actually be saved. But for the most part, white people in Europe or the US don’t give a second thought about what it must be like to drown on a cramped ship in the Mediterranean.

    Black and Brown people trying to make safer lives for themselves are seen as a scourge on our society. Governments relentlessly make racist laws, militarise borders, and imprison those who have the audacity to come to Europe for safety. White people, meanwhile, moan that “illegal” refugees steal our precious resources (which have been built from pillaging other countries, anyway).

    We need to reflect on why we worship celebrity and power, and why five rich people’s lives are deemed more significant than 600 poor Black and Brown people’s. It is time that as white people, we take a long, hard look at ourselves.

    Featured image via OceanGate / screenshot

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Equality Act debate Part 2: Which lesbians count?

    On Monday 12 June, MPs held a debate in response to two petitions, for and against changing the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act. This followed advice from the EHRC stating that such a change could “bring clarity” to the law. It would also serve to remove protections for trans women as women, and vice versa for trans men.

    In part one of this series, I spoke about how the debate was a proxy for questioning trans existences more broadly. People react to trans people’s statements about themselves with either acceptance or rejection. Neither side has objective reasons for its reactions. Rejection of the possibility that someone can be trans means that the trans person can’t be trusted – either they’re deluded, or lying.

    In part two of this article series, I’ll examine more closely the arguments and assertions that the MPs made. I’ll also talk about how this acceptance or rejection informs the ways the MPs spoke in the debate.

    Equality Act: Which lesbians count?

    One of the central topics of the debate was the relationship between transness and queer sexuality. In particular, a great deal of focus fell squarely on lesbians and lesbian spaces. This is understandable: if you reject what trans people say, then trans women aren’t women, and their presence in lesbian spaces is read as a violation.

    For example, Tonia Antoniazzi opened the discussion by stating:

    I heard how, for the lesbians I met, biological sex is fundamental to understanding their rights as same-sex-attracted people, so the grey area that we have is creating ongoing problems for lesbians

    Likewise, the SNP’s Joanna Cherry rejects trans people’s statements that they are who they say they are. She repeated the sentiment which Antoniazzi relayed:

    In the short time I have, I want to focus on the right of lesbians and gay men to be same-sex and not same-gender identity attracted, and on our right to freedom of association. The protected characteristic of sexual orientation is contingent on the definition of sex as meaning biological sex. Lesbians, gay men and bisexual people all experience same-sex attraction—that is, attraction based on biological sex, not gender identity.

    However, there are a few problems here. First, if the “protected characteristic of sexual orientation is contingent on the definition of sex as meaning biological sex” in the Equality Act then we wouldn’t be having this debate in the first place.

    That aside, it’s undeniable that there are lesbians who don’t date trans women. There are also gay men who don’t date trans men and straight people who don’t date trans people of the opposite gender, for that matter. And, besides that, there are bi people who don’t date trans people full stop. Some, not all, of these groups are vocal about these facts.

    However, they’re not the only people out there. What’s more, it’s deeply disingenuous to speak as if that’s the case. There are cis lesbians who date trans women, and cis gays who date trans men. I know because I’ve met them, seen them, spoken to them. I know happy couples of cis and trans people of many different sexualities, and I’d wager that anyone active in a modern queer scene that isn’t explicitly trans-exclusionary could say likewise.

    Sexuality is complex

    Then, that’s not even to mention the fact that there are lesbians who date trans men and mascs, and a thriving trans femme scene on Grindr. This is because sexuality is complex.  You can embrace this or deny it, but you can’t stop it. Yet this is what people like Cherry are doing when they state that queer attraction is based on “biological sex, not gender identity”.

    As an aside, people don’t tend to check up on someone’s chromosomes – or whatever other sex marker you set store by – before becoming attracted to them. Unless people can tell with 100% certainty who is trans and who isn’t – and, as came up later in the debate, most people can’t – then there is some component of attraction that isn’t simply based on biological sex.

    People of whatever sexuality who don’t want to date trans people are welcome not to. That’s their deal, it’s valid. However, Cherry and the lesbians who spoke to Antoniazzi are not arguing this alone. In fact, they’re going much further.

    They also seek to redefine the sexuality of anyone who does love trans people. If, as they say, sexuality is based on ‘biological sex’, then any gay or straight person who loves a trans person is suddenly redefined as bisexual, or similar. This is, to put it bluntly, unacceptable.

    Cherry and her like gave no reasons why they get to speak for all lesbians, and why they get to redefine the sexuality of people who disagree. Individuals know best about their sexuality, just as they do their gender – Cherry doesn’t get to speak for them.

    Trans-affirmation

    What’s more, there are plenty of lesbians who are dog-tired of being used as a political tool for transphobic ends. Among them, Angela Eagle spoke with passion in favour of trans people in the Equality Act debate. She said:

    I am also a lesbian. I was only the second out lesbian ever to sit in this place, and the first ever out lesbian Government Minister, so I have had some experience of bigotry, prejudice, misogyny and homophobia—and I recognise a politically induced moral panic when I see one. I also recognise a discredited Government unleashing a culture war for their own divisive ends when I see it.

    Here, Eagle recognised the distinct similarities between the homophobic and transphobic movements. To elaborate, both are replete with quickfire accusations of pedophilia, rejections of the ‘natural role’ of the body, and dogwhistles about ‘slippery slopes’. This is why many view transphobia and homophobia as inextricably linked. Quite apart from anything else, no-one ever stopped to check if I was a flamboyant gay or a trans femme (hint, it’s both) before yelling abuse at me.

    Likewise, when Cherry attempted to slip in a casual insinuation that lesbians were being “forced to include men in our groups and our dating pool” to date trans women, Eagle was having none of it:

    I do not recognise anywhere in the Equality Act that there is a mandate on anyone’s dating pool and who should be in it.

    Cherry relied on her fellows disbelieving trans women. She referred to them as “men” and conjured up the spectre of coercion. Eagle, quite correctly, called it out for what it was – a ridiculous exaggeration of the law.

    Who speaks for whom?

    I would ask why Cherry and her side have to rely on such exaggerations – deliberate or simply mistaken – in order to make their point. If it is such astoundingly common sense, why lie or reach?

    In answer, I’d point out that they – the trans-denying – are attempting a linguistic trick. It’s they who are trying to speak for everybody, who are denying the sexualities of trans-inclusive lesbians, gays, and straights. They have to appeal to the idea of the predator because they need their audience to fear trans people. If we are feared, it’s easier to ensure that we are not believed when we say who we are.

    Cherry and her side – those who argue in favour of trans-denying lesbians – don’t need to prove that they exist. That much is clearly true. What’s more, their sexuality isn’t being denied.

    What Cherry’s side needs to do is prove that trans-affirming lesbians don’t exist, or at least, why it is the trans-denying lesbian alone who deserves protection under the law.

    Until they can, their arguments will be obvious in their weakness. What’s more, they’ll continue to be rejected by the community they try so desperately to speak for.

    In part three of this series, I’ll speak on the appeals to fear and silencing in the Equality Act debate.

    Featured image via UK Parliament/YouTube

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

  • Critical D-day over Papua governor Lukas Enembe’s legal nightmare?

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Yamin Kogoya

    Next month, on July 10, six months will have passed since Papua’s Governor Lukas Enembe was “kidnapped” and flown to Jakarta for charges over alleged one million rupiah (NZ$100,000) graft.

    Despite his deteriorating health, he has been detained in a Corruption Eradication Commission’s cell (KPK) in the Indonesian capital — more than 3700 km from his hometown of Jayapura.

    He is due to appear in court today, but that depends on his health status.

    His drawn out ordeal has been full of drama and trauma. There has been indecisiveness around the case and the hearing date has been repeatedly rescheduled — from 20 more days, to 40 more days, and now into months.

    There are no clear signs of any definite closure. For his family, friends, colleagues, and the Papuan people, this has been a nightmare.

    While being held captive and tortured in the KPK’s prison cell in Jakarta, his kidney, stroke, and heart specialists in Singapore are concerned about what has been happening to their long-term patient.

    In December 2020, Governor Enembe had a major stroke — for the fourth time. He lost his voice completely in Singapore, but his medical specialists at Mount Elizabeth hospital brought his voice back.

    Since then, during a covid lockdown in 2021, he had another stroke, and was flown to Singapore.

    Between 2020 and 2022 he had been receiving intensive medical assistance from Singapore. He was about to go to Singapore last September as part of his routine check-ups, only to discover that his bank account had been frozen, and his overseas travel blocked.

    The trip in September was supposed to fix his already failing kidneys. He was unable to walk properly, his foot kept swelling and he began to lose his voice again.

    He was on a strict diet as advised by his doctors in Singapore.

    After Jakarta’s special security forces and KPK “abducted” him during a happy lunch hour at a local restaurant in his homeland on January 10, all his routine medical treatment in Singapore came to an abrupt halt.

    Governor’s health
    Following the abduction, medical specialists in Singapore expressed their concern in writing and requested that the medical report of his latest blood test from KPK Jakarta be released so that they could follow up on his critical health issues.

    On 24 February 2023, the medical centre in Singapore wrote a medical request letter and addressed it directly to KPK in Jakarta.

    The above mentioned (Lukas Enembe) is a patient at Royal Healthcare Heart, Stroke and Cancer Centre under Patrick Ang (Senior Consultant Cardiologist) and Dr Francisco Salcido-Ochoa (Senior Renal Physician). He was last reviewed by us in October 2022. As his primary physicians, we are gravely concerned about his current medical status.

    We are aware that his renal condition has deteriorated over the last few months with suboptimal blood pressure control. We are humbly requesting a medical report on his renal parameters via biochemistry, blood pressure readings and a list of his current medications.

    To date, however, KPK has prevented his trusted long-time Singaporean medical specialists and family members from obtaining any reports regarding his health.

    The governor’s family in Jakarta have repeatedly requested for an independent medical team to oversee his health, but KPK has refused.

    Only KPK’s approved medical team is allowed to monitor his health and all the results of his blood tests, types of medications he has been offered and overall report on his treatment since the kidnapping has not been released to the governor, his family, medical specialists in Singapore or the Papuan people.

    Elius Enembe, spokesperson of the governor’s family said they want the panel of judges at the Tipikor Jakarta court to appoint a team of independent doctors outside the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI) to check the governor’s health condition.

    According to the family, it was important to ensure Enembe’s current health conditions are verified independently before the court hearing takes place. This is because “we consider IDI to no longer be independent”, Lukas Enembe’s brother, Elius Enembe, told reporters in Jakarta, reports Medcom.

    “After all,” he continued, “Indonesia’s Human Rights Commissioner had issued a recommendation that Lukas continue his treatment, rights that had been obtained before being arrested by the KPK, a service to be received from the Mount Elisabeth Singapore hospital doctor’s team.”

    An independent opinion of the governor’s actual health condition is critical before the hearing so that judges have a clear, objective picture on his health condition.

    “If there is an independent doctor, then there is another opinion that could be considered by the judge to ensure the governor’s health condition. This is what we are hoping for, so that the panel of judges can objectively make its decisions,” said Elius Enembe.

    The court hearing
    One of his five times failed case hearing attempts was supposed to be held in Central Jakarta’s District Court at 10am last Monday, 12 June 2023. This highly publicised and anticipated hearing did not take place.

    Two conflicting narratives emerged about why this was adjourned.

    Papua Governor Lukas Enembe
    Papua Governor Lukas Enembe on a video monitor inside Jakarta’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) building last Monday – June 12. Image: Irfan Kamil/compas.com

    KPK’s view
    According to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Lukas Enembe’s actions hampered the legal process. In fact, the head of the KPK news section, Ali Fikri, stated that his first session was met with a very uncooperative attitude.

    “We regret the attitude of the defendant, which we consider uncooperative,” Fikri said in his statement quoted by Holopis.com on June 12.

    “The confession of Lukas Enembe, who was ill and could not attend the trial, was considered strange and far-fetched by the KPK. The defendant can answer the judge’s questions and explain his situation, even though he later claims that he is ill,” he said.

    Fikri also threatened Lukas Enembe by saying that the Governor would face consequences during the prosecution process.

    “The KPK Prosecutor Team and the panel of judges will assess his attitude separately when conducting prosecutions or drafting charges,” he said. ‘

    “Of course, there are aggravating matters or mitigating issues, which will be a consideration when a defendant is uncooperative in the trial process,” he continued.

    “When the trial process takes place, the KPK will always include a doctor’s health report to anticipate Luke’s uncooperative attitude in the retrial,” Fikri said. “The KPK Prosecutor Team will convey to the court in detail the defendant’s health condition during the next [hearing],” he said.

    The first hearing in Lukas Enembe’s gratuity case has been postponed until this week. The reason for this is that Lukas Enembe claimed he was sick and could not participate in the virtual trial.

    The Governor’s legal team protest
    The Governor’s legal team protested against the KPK, saying that it was a “deliberate attempt” by the agency to manipulate public opinion based on biased and inaccurate information about what actually happened on Monday, June 12.

    The following is the account provided by the Governor’s legal team after KPK was accused of spreading media news that the hearing had failed due to an “uncooperative governor” in terms of the legal proceedings on that day.

    Monday, 12 June 2023, around 9.30am local Jakarta time, a guard entered the KPK’s detention room where Papua’s Governor, Lukas Enembe, was detained. The guard was requested to accompany the detained Governor to the hearing room.

    Upon arriving at the door, the Governor asked the guard where the hearing was being held. The guard explained that he was taking him to the online courtroom in the red and white KPK building (red and white symbolise the colours of Indonesia’s flag or Bendera Merah Putih in Bahasa Indonesian).

    The Governor said he would not attend the hearing via tele link. The Governor wanted to attend the hearing in person, not virtually via a screen.

    Afterwards, the Governor went to his detainee room and wrote a letter of protest, explaining his aversion to viewing the proceedings on television. After the letter was written, the guard accompanied the Governor to the detention room to inform them of his desire to appear in court physically.

    The court hearing was scheduled for 10am that day. Guards from KPK’s detention arrived at 9.30am to escort the Governor, allowing him only 30 minutes to prepare.

    The Governor’s legal team was waiting outside the KPK’s building. As 10am approached, the legal team (Petrus, along with Cosmas Refra and Antonius Eko Nugroho), went to KPK’s receptionist and asked why they were not called to enter the hearing room.

    The receptionist replied that they were still in the process of coordination since Enembe was not yet awake. Moments later, officers took the legal team into the detention visiting room, where there were masses of visitors because it was visiting time.

    At one corner of the room, Governor Enembe was surrounded by prison guards working on a laptop. The governor’s lawyers were then told that the hearing would begin when the audio system was fixed.

    When the Governor and the legal team finally met, the legal team asked Enembe why he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt to court. Governor Lukas said he was annoyed at the guard for suddenly arriving to escort him without warning, which is why he had not dressed neatly. He could not wear sandals because his feet were swollen.

    Governor Enembe refused to have an online hearing because he had not been informed in advance of Monday’s hearing and the summons was only signed once the hearing was opened by the judges.

    If the KPK prosecutor had notified him at least the day before the hearing, Governor Enembe would have cooperated. But he was only notified 30 minutes earlier.

    As the judge covered the trial, the legal team led by Petrus, informed Governor Enembe to appear before the court on 19 June 2023. The governor nodded in agreement.

    “In light of this explanation, we must emphasise that Mr Lukas does not intend to be uncooperative in facing the alleged case,” said the legal team.

    According to Petrus, “the detained Governor Lukas Enembe did not immediately leave the detention room because he was still writing a statement that the prosecutor had not informed him in advance of the trial scheduled for Monday, 12 June 2023”.

    The Governor’s next court hearing has been rescheduled for today and whether he can physically attend will depend on his health.

    However, the main issue is will he be found guilty of the charges? There is a lot at stake.

    Goveror Lukas Enembe's wife, Yulce Wenda (left) on the front bench in court last Monday
    Governor Lukas Enembe’s wife, Yulce Wenda (left) on the front bench in court last Monday. Yunus Wonda, chairman of Papua’s People Parliament, is on the front right and the governor’s family and staff are sitting behind. Image: ebcmedia.id.

    Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic/activist who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

  • Richard Naidu: Money, politics and fear – yet FFP’s millions still weren’t enough

    ANALYSIS: By Richard Naidu in Suva

    It has been six months now, but I have to make a strange admission. I miss the laughs I used to get over the pseudo-authoritative pronouncements of Fiji’s former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum (pictured).

    I recall that he got a bit over-excited in January this year. That was when he decided to lecture the new government on “constitutionalism” and “rule of law”.

    This was apparently without any reflection on how he and his FijiFirst party government had performed by the rule of law standards on which he was pontificating.

    But in the last few days he decided to debate Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica on the FijiFirst party’s 2022 financial accounts, apparently insisting that FFP was not insolvent.

    This was never going to be an equal contest. Kamikamica is a chartered accountant. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, well — he isn’t.

    You don’t need to be an accountant to read a balance sheet — or to understand the simple definition of insolvency.

    It’s not hard. You are insolvent if you “cannot pay your debts as they fall due”. You can find the accounts of all the main political parties on the Fiji Elections Office website.

    More cash than others
    FFP’s balance sheet (see image) says it has cash and term deposits of more than $270,000 in the bank.

    That’s pretty good. It’s actually more cash than all the other political parties combined. But FFP also has debts (called, in accountant-speak, “payables and accruals”).

    These come to well over $1.6 million. Once you add and subtract all the smaller stuff, FFP is left with net liabilities of just over $1 million.

    The FijiFirst party 2022/3 balance sheet
    The FijiFirst party 2022/3 balance sheet . . . “Why pretend otherwise?” Image: Elections Office screengrab FT/APR

    In other words, that’s $1 million that FFP, even if it sold everything it owns, still could not pay to its creditors.

    That $1.6 million in debts “fell due” months ago. And FFP could not pay them as they fell due. So FFP is insolvent.

    Why pretend otherwise? Luckily for FFP, there isn’t a simple legal way for a creditor to wind up a political party for not paying its debts. Presumably FFP’s unpaid suppliers have learned that bitter lesson a bit late.

    Learning lessons
    But we are all learning lessons about FFP. Six months ago it was all-powerful. Its leaders sat in taxpayer-funded government offices and did (pretty much) whatever they wanted.

    They regularly lectured the rest of us on all of our failings and all the things we were doing wrong. They exuded competence. Fast forward to June 2023.

    The same FFP — which previously ran a government that spends $4 billion a year — had been suspended because it couldn’t prepare its own accounts on time.

    The deadline for submitting political party accounts is March 31 each year. That’s in the Political Parties Act. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum presumably knew that because, after all, he “wrote the law”.

    FFP’s accounts were not submitted by March 31. The Acting Supervisor of Elections (in stark contrast to her predecessor) did not fire off a suspension letter one day later.

    She gave FFP (and some other political parties) an extension of time to put in their accounts. Six weeks later, FFP still had not filed its accounts.

    And at that point even the most reasonable supervisor is entitled to be annoyed. That was when the suspension letter went out. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s reaction at the time was the usual legalistic bluster unsupported by the facts. FijiFirst, he said, had not been afforded “due process and natural justice”.

    Failed to meet deadline
    He did not elaborate. And what could he say? His party had been given a six-week extension of time and still not met the deadline under the law he had himself drafted. And then we found out.

    FFP was deeply in debt — and presumably too embarrassed to tell the rest of us. If it hadn’t been suspended, we would probably still not know.

    What else can we learn from the accounts of the former ruling party? We can see from its balance sheet that it began 2022 with (cash and term deposits) more than $860,000 in the bank.

    That’s the sort of money other politicians could only dream of. At that time the People’s Alliance and National Federation Party, between them, had less than $20,000.

    However FijiFirst then went on to spend $4.2 million — or more accurately, it ran up debts of that amount, and now it has to find $1.6m to pay off those debts.

    That is because FFP raised only $2.2 million in donations. I say “only” — but that $2.2 million was twice as much as the three parties now in government could collect.

    More lessons
    There are other, bigger, lessons to learn from all of this — lessons about money and politics. What was FFP thinking as it threw around the cash in the 2022 election campaign?

    Who would spend $1.6 million they didn’t have? The answer — a party that thought that, as long as it could win, the cash would keep rolling in.

    No political party in Fiji’s history has ever had millions of dollars to spend.

    And no political party in Fiji has ever cashed in on its political power as cynically as FFP did in the past 10 years. It was FFP that made the laws on electoral funding for political parties.

    Companies were not allowed to contribute — only individuals and only up to $10,000 each. All donors had to be publicly disclosed — this included someone who put $2 in a bucket during a soli.

    SODELPA leader Viliame Gavoka famously commented on how the laws required his party to issue a receipt for selling a $1 roti parcel. FFP of course, did not have to bother with the small stuff.

    Soli? Roti parcels? Why bother when you can just wait for the $10,000 cheques? And the cheques rolled in — with embarrassing enthusiasm.

    Early donor lists
    Many of us saw the early FFP donor lists when they were published. Prominent business families fell over themselves to write their $10,000 cheques.

    Of course, these cheques were from “individuals”. Those individuals were company directors, their spouses and even their under-age children, even if those children (and probably some of the spouses) didn’t have bank accounts to write cheques from.

    You would hear from other, less enthusiastic, business people about invitations to FFP fund-raisers. You went — and you took your chequebook with you — because if you didn’t, well…

    One business man complained to me: “If I pay, I get to talk to them — but they don’t do anything about my business problems anyway.”

    Fiji is not the first country to encounter unhealthy problems about money and politics.

    These create challenges in every democracy. In Fiji’s so-called “true democracy”, the rules about who donated money were supposed to be transparent.

    The Political Parties Act originally required the Supervisor of Elections to publish the names of people who donated to political parties. But as FFP’s donors squirmed with discomfort under the spotlight of social media, in 2021 FFP quietly changed the law — buried, of course, in one of those Bills that would be rushed to Parliament on two days’ notice and rushed through the infamous Standing Order 51.

    The law change meant that those party donor lists still had to be disclosed to the Supervisor of Elections — but the Supervisor no longer had to publish them in the newspapers.

    Climate of political fear
    Of course, in the climate of political fear that FFP actively promoted, that created a separate problem.

    The ruling party always collects the millions. But the opposition parties would have to work much harder to collect their cash because no one with any serious money wanted to be identified on those disclosure lists as giving money to the opposition.

    Because, even though the Supervisor of Elections no longer had to publish those lists, any member of the public could still inspect them.

    Most Fiji citizens might not know that. But the one person who would know that was the general secretary of FFP — also the minister for elections, attorney-general and minister for economy.

    Now, however, for the first time since 2014, we can do something about our money-and-politics laws.

    Those laws need to be reviewed, with a strong eye on the lessons of the past.

    But the most critical lesson is probably not about those laws. It is about the climate of fear that enabled one political party to raise millions of dollars to keep itself in power while keeping all of its opponents out of cash.

    Some good news?
    Finally, for diehard FijiFirst supporters — a small spot of good news in those accounts. Apparently FFP still has 6120 “promotional sulu” in stock.

    The sulu, according to the accounts (Note 11), have been “fully expensed”. This is because “realisable value cannot be determined with reasonable accuracy.” This is the way accountants say: “We don’t think anybody wants them so we can’t put any value to them.”

    Perhaps to show their loyalty, FFP’s fans could buy the sulu to pay off the $1.6 million debt. This would cost only $270 per sulu. Just thought I’d try to help.

    Richard Naidu is a Suva lawyer who writes a regular independent column for The Fiji Times. He has enough sulu. Republished with permission.

  • The Equality Act debate served to highlight a deep division in UK politics and society

    On Monday 12 June, MPs gathered to debate changing the definition of ‘sex’ in the equality act to mean ‘biological sex’. This was in response to e-petitions 623243 and 627984 – for and against the change, respectively. Both received over 100,000 signatures.

    As I’ve already reported for the Canary, the potential change would remove a swathe of legal protections from trans people. And, as UN independent expert Victor Madrigal-Borloz recognised, it would offer the government:

    a formula through which it could carry out discriminatory distinctions currently unlawful under UK law, and that will remain so under international human rights law.

    In part one of this article series, I want to talk about three things that are hovering behind this current culture war – honesty, belief, and complexity. In turn, these inflect and inform a great deal of what was said in the debate.

    ‘Trans men are men’

    First, a bit of background. I’m trans. I’ve always been trans – a core part of me, even before I had the words to articulate it properly. This meant that people looking at me, assuming I was a man, and treating me as such were incorrect. The deep distress this causes is part of what we call gender dysphoria.

    My transness is, fundamentally, something that I can’t prove to you. There’s no objective test. I can only tell you that I’m not a man, and this is central to my knowledge about myself. In my day-to-day life, everybody I know takes my word for it.

    In the Equality Act debate, several MPs began by stating some variation on ‘trans men are men, trans women are women’. Transphobes and gender critical people have referred to this as a mantra or as dogma. This is incorrect.

    Rather, it’s a statement that takes trans people, and their information about their experience of themselves, at their word. It doesn’t discount the other person’s belief about themselves – you still have your gender, I still have mine. Instead, it broadens it, adding new ways in which a person can be a given gender.

    Equality Act: Confronting complexity

    When someone hears about trans people for the first time, they’re faced with complexity where there was simplicity. Something that they previously held to be true – the body is identity – is now apparently false.

    A person can then take the trans individual at their word in their description of their own internal life – a trans woman is a woman, she’s described herself. The world has cis women and trans women – it’s complex.

    Again, this isn’t conclusively provable. That’s not to say it’s not hugely important, though. Our society and our interactions as people run on these unprovable statements about ourselves. For example, I have no way to prove to you that I’m gay, but most people are inclined to take my word for it, perhaps influenced by their observation of the way I live my life.

    This assumes that people are, for the most part, honest when they tell you about who they are.

    However, if you choose to reject my statement that I’m gay, there’s nothing I can really do. Maybe you think no gay people exist, or that I’m a liar. You’re simply incorrect. What’s more, a society which pretends that one can test whether someone is actually gay is likely to do something horrific – see the UK government’s foul and invasive treatment of queer refugees, for example.

    Rejection and consequences

    Alternatively, someone can reject this newfound complexity. They insist that the world is as simple as it was previously assumed to be – people are who they appear to be at birth, and always will be. 12 June’s debate was full of this kind of rejection. For example, Tory MP Jonathan Gullis insisted that:

    Someone is not assigned their gender at birth; they are born male or female. A man is an adult human male and a woman is an adult human female. We should not be disputing those facts in the 21st century—these are the basics of biology that we talk about in our classrooms.

    This, then, carries several assumptions. The trans woman who stated that she is a woman is one of two things: deeply deluded, to the point of apparent insanity, or else for some reason deliberately lying.

    The former, here, is deeply infantilising. Other people can be trusted to make statements about themselves, but a trans person can’t. If you categorically insist that trans people can’t exist, then the simple assertion that I’m trans becomes proof that I’m deluded or insane, even if I give absolutely no other signs.

    This relies on a circular assumption – people are always who they appear to be born as, so anyone who believes otherwise must be deluded. But then, the assertion that trans men are men is equally circular. However, and crucially, the assertion that trans people can’t exist is someone else making a claim about my life, whereas the opposite isn’t true.

    Lying

    Alternatively, if the trans person isn’t assumed to be deluded, then they must be lying about themselves. In this case, the belief is that the trans woman ‘knows’ that she is a man, and is simply lying about it. Then, suddenly, hostility and paranoia set in. If the trans woman is lying, she must to trying to achieve something nefarious.

    It was abundantly clear that this was a central assumption of many of the speakers in the Equality Act debate. And, although Tonia Antoniazzi opened by calling for “respectful, adult conversation”, the tone was frequently anything but. Several MPs casually insinuated, or else outright stated, that trans women are predatory in nature.

    The Conservatives’ Miriam Cates contended that:

    While academic elites cave in to aggressive and misogynistic trans activism, ordinary women are frightened to go to hospital, ordinary men fear for the safety of their daughters in public toilets, ordinary children are subjected to a psychological experiment in which they are told they can choose their gender, and ordinary toddlers are used to satisfy the sexual fetish of adult men dressed as eroticised women.

    Likewise, Tory Nick Fletcher implored:

    Let us do what we need to do to clarify the Equality Act and ensure that no biological male can enter that six-year-old girl’s changing room. To me, that would be excellent legislation, and a must—a near miss reported to stop tragedy happening.

    In both examples here, the central assumption is that a trans woman is a man. More specifically, she’s a man who should always be assumed to have a predatory nature.

    Deeply held ideologies

    Going forward into part two, the assumptions listed above will inform my coverage of the debate on the potential change to the Equality Act. People either react to trans people’s statements about themselves with either acceptance or rejection. Rejection, in turn, means that the trans person can’t be trusted – either they’re deluded, or lying.

    The Equality Act debate was about whether ‘sex’ in the Equality Act should always mean ‘biological sex’. However, it was clear that the division in the House was not purely legislative. Instead, it became a matter of deeply held ideologies. As Cates blustered:

    It is extraordinary that in 2023—a time of unprecedented knowledge—we are arguing about the definition of something that has been known since the dawn of time. The most contentious question of our day has famously become “What is a woman?”—a question that no previous society has felt the need to answer.

    Of course, this pretends that the world is always as simple as we want it to be. Societies are frequently wrong, paradigms shift, knowledge of the world about us expands. It’s fundamentally conservative – small ‘c’ or capital – to see a world that is complex and messy, and despise it for failing to lie still in its proper place.

    Personally, I believe that complexity is part of being human, and beautiful too. I can’t prove that to you, but my life is all the richer for it.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/David Woolfall, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, resized to 1910*1000

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

  • I was involved in stalled talks to free kidnapped NZ pilot in West Papua. What happens now?

    ANALYSIS: By Damien Kingsbury, Deakin University

    New Zealand pilot Phillip Mehrtens has now been held hostage in West Papua for four months. Stalled attempts to negotiate his release, and an unsuccessful Indonesian military rescue attempt, suggest a confused picture behind the scenes.

    Members of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) kidnapped Mehrtens on February 7, demanding Indonesia recognise West Papua’s independence.

    The Nduga regency, where Mehrtens was taken and his plane burnt, is known for pro-independence attacks and military reprisals.

    New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has said: “We’re doing everything we can to secure a peaceful resolution and Mr Mehrtens’ safe release, including working closely with the Indonesian authorities and deploying New Zealand consular staff.”

    Meanwhile, the Indonesian military (TNI) has continued its military operation to hunt down the TPNPB — including by bombing from aircraft, according to Mehrtens in one of several “proof of life” videos released by the TPNPB.

    Early negotiations
    From late February, I was authorised by the TPNPB to act as an intermediary with the New Zealand government. This was based on having previously worked with pro-independence West Papuan groups and was confirmed in a video from the TPNPB to the New Zealand government.

    In this capacity, I communicated regularly with a New Zealand Police hostage negotiator, including when the TPNPB changed its demands.

    The TPNPB had initially said it would kill Mehrtens unless Indonesia recognised West Papua’s independence. But, after agreeing to negotiate, the TPNPB said it would save Mehrtens’ life while seeking to extract concessions from the New Zealand government.

    Its current position is that New Zealand stop its citizens from working in or travelling to West Papua, and also cease military support for Indonesia.

    In late May, however, frustrated by the lack of response, the TPNPB again said it would kill Mehrtens if talks were not forthcoming.

    My involvement with the New Zealand government ended when I was told the government had decided to use another channel of communication with the group. As events have unfolded, my understanding is that the TPNPB did not accept this change of communication channels.

    Latest in a long struggle
    The TPNPB is led by Egianus Kogeya, son of Daniel Yudas Kogeya, who was killed by Indonesian soldiers in an operation to rescue hostages taken in 1996. The TPNPB is one of a small number of armed pro-independence groups in West Papua, each aligned with a faction of the Free West Papua movement.

    The West Papua independence movement grew out of Dutch plans to give West Papua independence. Indonesia argued that Indonesia should be the successor to the Dutch East Indies in its entirety, and in 1963 assumed administration of West Papua with US backing. It formally incorporated West Papua in 1969, after 1035 village leaders were forced at gunpoint to vote for inclusion in Indonesia.

    As a result of Indonesians moving to this “frontier”, more than 40 percent of West Papua’s population is now non-Melanesian. West Papuans, meanwhile, are second-class citizens in their own land.

    Despite the territory having Indonesia’s richest economic output, West Papuans have among the worst infant mortality, average life expectancy, nutrition, literacy and income in Indonesia.

    Critically, freedom of speech is also limited, human rights violations continue unabated, and the political process is riven by corruption, vote buying and violence. As a consequence, West Papua’s independence movement continues.

    There have been a number of mostly small military actions and kidnappings highlighting West Papua’s claim for independence.

    “Flag-raising” ceremonies and street protests have been used to encourage a sense of unity around the independence struggle.

    These have resulted in attacks by the Indonesian military (TNI) and police, leading to killings, disappearances, torture and imprisonment. Human rights advocates suggest hundreds of thousands have died as a result of West Papua’s incorporation into Indonesia.

    Illustrating the escalating conflict, in 2018 the TPNPB kidnapped and killed more than 20 Indonesian workers building a road through the Nduga regency. It has also killed a number of Indonesian soldiers, including some of those hunting for Mehrtens.

    Negotiations stalled
    TPNPB spokesperson Sebby Sambom has said foreigners were legitimate targets because their governments support Indonesia. Despite Kogeya’s initial claim that Mehrtens would be killed if demands were not met, Sambom and TPNPB diplomatic officer Akouboo Amadus Douw had responded positively to the idea of negotiation for his release.

    Since talks broke down, however, the TPNPB has said there would be no further proof-of-life videos of Mehrtens. With the TPNPB’s late May statement that Mehrtens would be killed if New Zealand did not negotiate, his kidnapping seems to have reached a stalemate.

    The TPNPB has told me it is concerned that New Zealand may be prioritising its relationship with Indonesia over Mehrtens and has been stalling while the TNI resolves the situation militarily.

    At this stage, however, Mehrtens can still be safely released. But it will likely require the New Zealand government to make some concessions in response to the TPNPB’s demands.

    Meanwhile, the drivers of the conflict remain. Indonesia continues to use military force to try to crush what is essentially a political problem.

    And, while the TPNPB and other pro-independence groups still hope to remove Indonesia from West Papua, they feel they have run out of options other than to fight and to take hostages.The Conversation

    Dr Damien Kingsbury is emeritus professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gavin Ellis: Proof our newsrooms need a ‘second pair of eyes’

    COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis

    Own goals by two of our top news organisations last week raised a fundamental question: What has happened to their checking processes?

    Both Radio New Zealand and NZME acknowledged serious failures in their internal processes that resulted in embarrassing apologies, corrections, and take-downs.

    The episodes in both newsrooms suggest the “second pair of eyes” that traditionally acted as a final check before publication no longer exists or is so over-worked in a resource-starved environment that they are looking elsewhere.

    The RNZ situation is the more serious of the two episodes. It relates to the insertion of pro-Russian content into news agency stories about the invasion of Ukraine that were carried on the RNZ website.

    The original stories were sourced from Reuters and, in at least one case, from the BBC. By today 22 altered stories had been found, but the audit had only scratched the surface. The alleged perpetrator has disclosed they had been carrying out such edits for the past five years.

    RNZ was alerted to the latest altered story by news watchers in New York and Paris on Friday. It investigated and found a further six, then a further seven, then another, and another. This only takes us back a short way.

    A number of the stories were altered only by the inclusion of a few loaded terms such as “neo-Nazi” and “US-backed coup”, but others had material changes. Some are spelt out in the now-corrected stories on the site. Here are two examples of significant insertions into the original text:

    An earlier edit to this story said: “Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February last year, claiming that a US-backed coup in 2014 with the help of neo-Nazis had created a threat to its borders and had ignited a civil war that saw Russian-speaking minorities persecuted.”

    An earlier edit to this story said: “The Azov Battalion was widely regarded as an anti-Russian neo-Nazi military unit by observers and western media before the Russian invasion. Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the nationalists of using Russian-speaking Ukrainians as human shields.”

    Hot water with Reuters
    The scale and nature of the inappropriate editing of the stories is likely to get RNZ into very hot water with Reuters. The agency has strict protocols over what forms of editing may take place with its copy and even the most cursory examination of the altered RNZ versions confirms that the protocols have been breached.

    It is unsurprising that RNZ’s chief executive Paul Thompson has told staff he is “gutted” by what has occurred.

    Both security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan and AUT journalism professor Dr Verica Ruper have cautioned against speculating on how the material came to be appear on the RNZ website and I agree that to do so is premature. Clearly, however, it amounts to much more than a careless editing mistake.

    Paul Thompson has acted promptly in ordering an external independent enquiry into the matter and in standing down the individual who apparently handled the stories. It is likely that the government’s security services are also taking an interest in what has occurred.

    What we can speculate on is the possibility that RNZ’s internal processes are deficient to the point that there is no post-production vetting of some stories before publication — that “second pair of eyes”.

    We might also speculate that the problem is faced by The New Zealand Herald newsroom, following the publication of an eight-line correction at the top of page 3 of the Herald on Sunday, and carried equally sparingly on the Herald website.

    “A story published last Sunday about a woman who triumphed over a difficult background to become a lawyer had elements that were false. In publishing the article, we fell short of the high standards and procedures we hold ourselves to.”

    Puzzled by correction
    Many readers would have been puzzled by the correction, which gave no details of the story concerned, nor did it identify those elements that were false.

    There may have been legal reasons for omitting which details were incorrect, but not for leaving readers to puzzle over the story to which they referred.

    It appears to relate to a three-page story in the Review section of the previous Sunday’s edition that was headed “From mob terror to high flyer”. The story related to the daughter of a woman jailed for selling methamphetamine. The daughter had gone on to a legal career in the United States.

    I recall having some undefined concern about the story when I read it and still can’t quite put my finger on why the old alarm bell in the back of my head tinkled. Perhaps it was that — apart from previously published material — the story appeared to rely on a single interview. There also appeared to be a motive in telling the story to the Herald on Sunday — a forthcoming book.

    The article seems to have been removed from the Herald website, but the short correction suggests that checks were missed. The same seems to have been the case with RNZ.

    It is, of course, sheer coincidence that both RNZ and the Herald on Sunday should face such shortcomings in the same week. However, the likely root causes of their embarrassment are issues that all news media face.

    First, the pressure on newsroom resources has increased the workload of all staff, from reporters in the field to duty editors. Time pressures are a daily, and nightly, reality and multi-tasking has become the norm.

    Checking comes second
    In such an environment, checking the work of other well-trained staff may come second to more pressing demands.

    As an editor, I slept better knowing that each story had passed through the hands of a news editor, sub-editor and, finally, a check sub with a compulsive attention to detail who checked each completed page before it was transmitted to the printing plant. I fear our newsrooms are now too bare for that multi-layered system of checks.

    If the demands of newspaper deadlines are tough, the pressures are manifestly greater in a digital environment where websites have become voracious beasts that cry out to be fed from dawn to midnight. New stories are added throughout the protracted news cycle, pushing older stories down the home page, then off it to subsidiary pages on the site tree.

    The technology to satisfy the hunger has advanced to the point where reporters publish direct to the web using Twitter-like feeds. We saw it last week during the Auckland City budget debate when news websites were recording the jerk dancing minute by minute.

    Clay Shirky, in his influential 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, popularised the term “publish, then filter”. It referred to a change from sifting the good from the mediocre before publication, to a digital environment in which users determined worth once it had been published.

    However, increasingly, the phrase has taken on additional meaning. The burden of work created by digital appetites has seen mainstream media foreshortening the production process by removing some of the old checks and balances because they can always go back later and make changes on the website.

    The abridgement may, for example, mean a pre-publication check is limited to headline, graphic, and the first couple of paragraphs. Or, in the case of “pre-edited” agency or syndication content, it may mean foregoing post-production text checks altogether (I hasten to add that I do not know whether this was the case with the RNZ stories).

    Editorial based on trust
    Editorial production has always been based on trust. It works both down and up. Editors trust those they rely on to carry out processes from content creation to post-production, and those responsible for one phase trust their work will subsequently be handled with care.

    Individual shortcomings should not erode trust in the newsroom, but such episodes do point to a need to re-examine whether systems are fit for purpose.

    Over a decade ago, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote a book called Blur. It was about information overload. In it they state that, as journalism becomes more complicated, the role of the editor becomes more important, and verification is a bigger part of the editor’s role.

    Incidents such as those that came to light last week reinforce that view. They also suggest that mainstream media organisations should leave Clay Shirky’s mantra to social media and bloggers. Instead, they should (thoroughly) filter, then publish.

    Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The jailing of a woman for her abortion exposes the misogyny at the heart of modern state surveillance

    On 12 June, a judge sentenced a 44-year old woman to 28 months in prison for aborting a ‘late-term’ pregnancy. The woman, a mother-of-three, allegedly received abortion pills through the “pills by post” scheme introduced during the first coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown in 2020. 

    Abortion: criminalised under an archaic act

    The legal case for the prosecution was possible because the woman pleaded guilty to an offence under the Offences against the Person Act (OAPA). This is an archaic piece of legislation from 1861 which is supposed to ‘protect children in-utero’ by making abortion a criminal offence if a woman:

    with intent to procure her own miscarriage, shall unlawfully administer to herself any poison or other noxious thing”. 

    In the UK, abortion is only legal up to the 24th week of pregnancy. However, coronavirus changed this.

    People who were pregnant could receive a remote consultation with the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). The woman followed this process to obtain the pills. Prosecutors say that she ‘misled’ the BPAS by suggesting she was earlier than 10-weeks pregnant. They alleged she ‘believed’ she was closer to 28-weeks. However, much of this claim seems to come from internet searches made on Google.

    Google searches as evidence

    In the sentencing remarks, the judge – Justice Pepperall – said:

    Messages found on your phone indicate that you had known of your pregnancy for about three months on 1 February 2020. By mid-February, you were conducting internet searches on ways to induce a miscarriage. By the end of February, you were searching for abortion services. Your search on 25 February indicated that you then believed that you were 23 weeks pregnant. Your internet searches continued sporadically through March and April 2020. On 24 April, you searched “I need to have an abortion but I’m past 24 weeks.”

    The assertion that the evidence of searches on Google proves her dishonesty reveals the thorny overlap between data privacy rights and abortion rights – the right to privacy and the right to choose. 

    Searches for health information online, regarding abortions or any other health-related matter for that instance, have no business being admissible evidence in law. However, conglomerate tech companies have normalised the collection and storing of data, along with web trackers and targeted ads. So, the economic underpinning of companies like Google results in fresh surveillance opportunities for law enforcement. 

    The burden of proof

    In the US, we can see this intersection more recently in the overturning of Roe V Wade.

    US law enforcement can subpoena data collected by period apps. Then, they can use that data as ‘evidence’ of a terminated pregnancy because of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, along with states’ subsequent criminalisation of abortion. The issue here is with Google searches being considered indicative of knowing exactly how far along someone is.

    I use Google to search for all kinds of things. I have often searched “how to know if you are pregnant” or “what to do if your period is 7-days late.” If I was pregnant at the time, this doesn’t prove that I know exactly how many weeks along I am. Nevertheless, it seems as though the woman’s search history influenced the sentencing.

    Pepperall went on to say:

    On 9 May, you took mifepristone. That same day you conducted internet searches suggesting that you were 28 weeks pregnant.

    What we search, click, and share online is not private. We make use of private companies to manage our personal lives. However, because of this we have no protections when it comes to online privacy, law enforcement, and in this case the criminalisation of abortion.

    Legalising misogyny via state surveillance

    You may think that the government is not legally allowed to track private citizens. However, there are legislative provisions under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act that do in fact enable it to do so. Liberty, the UK’s largest civil society organisation, noted that this:

    Act grants [the government] wide-ranging powers to scoop up and store all of our emails, texts, calls, location data and internet history. They can also hack into our phones and computers and create large ‘personal datasets’ on us – all without needing to suspect us of any criminal wrongdoing.

    Our online lives are not separate from our offline lives. Women and other marginalised genders already suffer from the chilling effect that online harassment and abuse causes. This readily results in them choosing not to participate in social media.

    The criminalisation of abortion, and the use of search histories as surveillance, set a disturbing precedent for safe access to abortion for British citizens – and feed directly into misogynistic attempts to silence and control women. 

    Featured image via Mikayla Mallek on Unsplash

    By temi lasade-anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The jailing of a woman for her abortion exposes the misogyny at the heart of modern state surveillance

    On 12 June, a judge sentenced a 44-year old woman to 28 months in prison for aborting a ‘late-term’ pregnancy. The woman, a mother-of-three, allegedly received abortion pills through the “pills by post” scheme introduced during the first coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown in 2020. 

    Abortion: criminalised under an archaic act

    The legal case for the prosecution was possible because the woman pleaded guilty to an offence under the Offences against the Person Act (OAPA). This is an archaic piece of legislation from 1861 which is supposed to ‘protect children in-utero’ by making abortion a criminal offence if a woman:

    with intent to procure her own miscarriage, shall unlawfully administer to herself any poison or other noxious thing”. 

    In the UK, abortion is only legal up to the 24th week of pregnancy. However, coronavirus changed this.

    People who were pregnant could receive a remote consultation with the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). The woman followed this process to obtain the pills. Prosecutors say that she ‘misled’ the BPAS by suggesting she was earlier than 10-weeks pregnant. They alleged she ‘believed’ she was closer to 28-weeks. However, much of this claim seems to come from internet searches made on Google.

    Google searches as evidence

    In the sentencing remarks, the judge – Justice Pepperall – said:

    Messages found on your phone indicate that you had known of your pregnancy for about three months on 1 February 2020. By mid-February, you were conducting internet searches on ways to induce a miscarriage. By the end of February, you were searching for abortion services. Your search on 25 February indicated that you then believed that you were 23 weeks pregnant. Your internet searches continued sporadically through March and April 2020. On 24 April, you searched “I need to have an abortion but I’m past 24 weeks.”

    The assertion that the evidence of searches on Google proves her dishonesty reveals the thorny overlap between data privacy rights and abortion rights – the right to privacy and the right to choose. 

    Searches for health information online, regarding abortions or any other health-related matter for that instance, have no business being admissible evidence in law. However, conglomerate tech companies have normalised the collection and storing of data, along with web trackers and targeted ads. So, the economic underpinning of companies like Google results in fresh surveillance opportunities for law enforcement. 

    The burden of proof

    In the US, we can see this intersection more recently in the overturning of Roe V Wade.

    US law enforcement can subpoena data collected by period apps. Then, they can use that data as ‘evidence’ of a terminated pregnancy because of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, along with states’ subsequent criminalisation of abortion. The issue here is with Google searches being considered indicative of knowing exactly how far along someone is.

    I use Google to search for all kinds of things. I have often searched “how to know if you are pregnant” or “what to do if your period is 7-days late.” If I was pregnant at the time, this doesn’t prove that I know exactly how many weeks along I am. Nevertheless, it seems as though the woman’s search history influenced the sentencing.

    Pepperall went on to say:

    On 9 May, you took mifepristone. That same day you conducted internet searches suggesting that you were 28 weeks pregnant.

    What we search, click, and share online is not private. We make use of private companies to manage our personal lives. However, because of this we have no protections when it comes to online privacy, law enforcement, and in this case the criminalisation of abortion.

    Legalising misogyny via state surveillance

    You may think that the government is not legally allowed to track private citizens. However, there are legislative provisions under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act that do in fact enable it to do so. Liberty, the UK’s largest civil society organisation, noted that this:

    Act grants [the government] wide-ranging powers to scoop up and store all of our emails, texts, calls, location data and internet history. They can also hack into our phones and computers and create large ‘personal datasets’ on us – all without needing to suspect us of any criminal wrongdoing.

    Our online lives are not separate from our offline lives. Women and other marginalised genders already suffer from the chilling effect that online harassment and abuse causes. This readily results in them choosing not to participate in social media.

    The criminalisation of abortion, and the use of search histories as surveillance, set a disturbing precedent for safe access to abortion for British citizens – and feed directly into misogynistic attempts to silence and control women. 

    Featured image via Mikayla Mallek on Unsplash

    By temi lasade-anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • John Mitchell: Planet Ocean – tides are changing, but halt plastic horror

    By John Mitchell in Suva

    Fiji got to celebrate World Oceans Day this week — a day when our conscience gets the occasional prick on matters related to the value of the ocean in sustaining life.

    I like to brag about growing up surrounded by the sea and those unique moments during childhood I spent rowing across Qamea’s picturesque and mangrove-fringed Naiviivi Bay, plucking seashells from shallow tide pools and digging up vetuna (sandworm) from the sand.

    Yes, the sea is a way of life for all of us.

    Think of this.

    The ocean covers more than 70 percent of the planet.

    It is our life source, supporting humanity’s sustenance and existence, and that of every other organism on earth.

    The ocean produces much of the oxygen we breath and need to survive, it is the habitat of most of earth’s biodiversity and is the main source of meat protein for more than a billion people around the world.

    40 million ’employees’
    The ocean is key to our economy with an estimated 40 million people to be employed by ocean-based industries by 2030.

    In Fiji, an estimated 60 percent of the 900,000 population are thought to live in coastal communities, surviving on activities linked to the ocean, and our fisheries and tourism sectors are so intrinsically connected to the health of the ocean.

    But the ocean we call our home is facing a variety of threats that challenges its existence and endangers humanity.

    United Nations statistics say that we have depleted 90 percent of big fish populations and destroyed 50 percent of coral reefs.

    “We are taking more from the ocean than can be replenished. We need to work together to create a new balance with the ocean that no longer depletes its bounty but instead restores its vibrancy and brings it new life,” the UN says.

    With such dreadful reality in the backdrop, the 2023 WOD theme seemed timely and relevant — “Planet Ocean: tides are changing”.

    It provides us with an opportunity to rethink what we’ve done, what we need to do and how to work together with world leaders, decision-makers, indigenous leaders, scientists, private sector executives, civil society, celebrities, and youth activist to make the health of the ocean a public agenda.

    Veiuto Primary School Year 2 student Josaia Waqaivolavola takes part in the beach clean up at the My Suva Picnic Park along the Nasese foreshore in Suva
    Veiuto Primary School Year 2 student Josaia Waqaivolavola takes part in the beach clean up at the My Suva Picnic Park along the Nasese foreshore in Suva on Tuesday. Image: Jonacani Lalakobau/Fiji Times

    Clean up day
    On Wednesday this week, The Fiji Times’ front page photo was of Josaia Waqaivolavola, a Year 2 student from Veiuto Primary School who was captured on camera participating in a beach clean up at My Suva Picnic Park along the Nasese foreshore.

    His group collected 10 trash bags filled with plastics, among others.

    It’s when we see the amount of rubbish along our coastlines and in the sea around us that we begin to realise that all the talk about “putting rubbish in the bin” is not working.

    We talk about responsible citizenship but plastics continue to pollute our communities, roads, streets and parks, and our oceans.

    Plastics have become so cheap to produce that we are producing things we don’t intend to keep for long.

    In other words, we are producing plastics only to throw them away.

    We are now mass producing disposable plastics at a phenomenal rate that the world’s waste management systems are finding hard to keep up.

    40% of plastics disposable
    It is estimated that about 40 percent of the now more than 448 million tonnes of plastics produced every year is disposable and used in products intended to be discarded virtually soon after purchase.

    Just go to the beach and you’ll find them on the sand.

    World statistics estimate that each day billions upon billions of plastic material find their way into our rivers, streams and eventually into our oceans.

    During my childhood years on Qamea, my family’s livelihood depended on the sea.

    At a time, when village canteens had no refrigerators to store meat, the sea was our main source of daily meat protein.

    Many years ago, scientists and environment experts were warning us that the amount of plastics in the world’s ocean would increase 10 times by 2020.

    That was three years ago.

    Too polluted for fish
    They further advised that by 2050, if statistical predictions remain true, we’d have so much plastics in the sea and our oceans would too polluted that fish and other delicacies would be unsafe to eat or we’d not be able to even swim anymore.

    Cleaning the ocean is good but may not be good enough.

    We need to nip this spiralling issue in the bud.

    We need to work before the plastic reaches the ocean.

    We need to work on land where they are produced before we go to the ocean.

    In Fiji, the concern over disposable plastic waste is the same as the threat in other countries of the world — we are using more disposable plastics at a rate faster than we are able to effectively dispose them that our waste managing systems are struggling to contain the problem.

    Recycling not effective
    Our recycling initiatives are not effectively solving our disposable plastic dilemma.

    During this year’s WOD celebrations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the ocean as “the foundation of life”.

    That pretty much sums everything up.

    If the ocean is life, then why can’t we get out act together.

    The ball is in everyone’s court and the time to act is now.

    Until we meet again, stay blessed, stay healthy and stay safe!

    John Mitchell is a Fiji Times journalist and writes the weekly “Behind The News” column. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • John Kerry’s misguided opinions on population growth are racist

    John Kerry, US special climate envoy and one-time presidential candidate, has told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the world’s population will not be tenable in 2050, when it is projected to hit nearly 10 billion.
    The global population is now more than eight billion, more than three times the figure in 1950. According to Kerry and AFP, food supplies are stretched. But instead of pointing the blame at the Global North’s unsustainable food systems, Kerry blamed the people of Africa. He stated:

    I’ve been to a number of African countries where they’re very proud of their increased birth rate but the fact is, it’s unsustainable for life today, let alone when you add the future numbers.

    Kerry was quick to add:

    I’m not recommending the population go down. I think we have the life we have on the planet. And we have to respect life and we could do it in so many better ways than we’re doing now.

    Global warming is exacerbating the problem, which in turn exacerbates global warming. Producing food for eight billion mouths accounts for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

    Racist

    But this is a low, racist blow from Kerry – essentially blaming the people of the African continent for population growth and unsustainable living. Not once does he acknowledge that the Global North has ravaged and pillaged Africa of its food and vital resources.

    Africa is one of the continents worst affected by climate change, with devastating droughts and flooding. However, its citizens have had barely any impact on global warming compared to the Global North nations.

    The US, with its all-powerful corporations, was key in leading the ‘Green Revolution’ after the Second World War. It forced industrial agricultural practices onto farmers around the world. The so-called ‘revolution’ imposed hybrid seeds, pesticides, fertilisers, and irrigation-heavy practices onto growers, contributing greatly to greenhouse gas emissions.

    Another initiative, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), is now doing the same. According to the Canary’s Tracy Keeling:

    AGRA’s ‘revolution’ reduces farmers’ autonomy, making them reliant on artificial inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides supplied by corporations, the civil society alliance says. Moreover, these agrochemicals ravage the natural world – from waterways to insects – and play a central role in the world’s environmental crises.

    Corporate control

    A recent Greenpeace report listed global corporations that wield “wildly disproportionate control” over global food supply chains. Cargill, Yara, JBS, and Nestlé have the most power. Unsurprisingly, they are headquartered in the US and Europe.

    The corporate industrialisation of Africa has resulted in land grabs, the displacement of indigenous peoples and their cultures, and the destruction of indigenous biodiversity and ecosystems. Agribusiness corporations have huge influence over African governments, too.

    It is the people of the African continent who lose out, while company directors in the US and Europe laugh all the way to the bank.

    According to Greenpeace:

    in Africa 20.2% of the population was facing hunger in 2021... Meanwhile in Europe and North America less than 2.5% of the population was affected by hunger. Updated projections suggest that by 2030 nearly 670 million people will still be undernourished – 78 million more than in a scenario in which the pandemic had not occurred.

    Leonida Odongo, from the Kenyan social justice organisation Haki Nawiri Afrika, previously spoke to the Canary. She said that further spread of corporate agricultural practices will be destructive for Africa’s biodiversity and ecosystems.

    Odongo said that industrial-scale production is unnecessary, arguing that Africa has enough arable land to feed itself and others, if only it was able to practice food sovereignty.

    Eating fast food and steak

    But Kerry would rather not dwell on Western consumers’ food habits: their addiction to red meat, their obsession with processed food, or the fact that they expect food on demand whether it’s in season or not.
    While having the audacity to imply that the people of the African continent – whom he lumped into one mass group – should have fewer babies, he argued that those in the US don’t need to sacrifice their own lifestyles. He said:

    I think that those choices are up to people on their own, what they want to do, how they want to do it.

    Kerry even stated:

    I don’t think you have to ask for a sacrifice of lifestyle in order to accomplish what we need to do.

    He continued:

    What I would recommend is that we change our practices of how we feed livestock and what we feed them and how we use farming.

    According to AFP, Kerry is referring to new technologies in farming that supposedly reduce the negative impacts on the environment.

    Food production is responsible for a massive one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The meat industry is one the most harmful industries for our climate, and one of its biggest consumers is the US. Emissions come from land clearing to create feed and pasture, as well as the use of farming machinery, the spraying of fertilisers, and the transport of meat products. On top of this, cows also produce massive amounts of the greenhouse gas methane when they’re alive.

    Kerry did, however, concede that people in the US should stop wasting food. He said:

    I think you can have a better lifestyle, and you can eat better food and we can feed more people if we stop wasting as much food as we waste.

    Indeed, according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), food waste is estimated to account for 30–40% of the food supply. The FDA said:

    Food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills and represents wasted nourishment that could have helped feed families in need. Additionally, water, energy, and labor used to produce wasted food could have been employed for other purposes.

    The planet is burning

    As the world warms up, the man in one of the greatest positions of power around climate change argues that Africans should have fewer babies, while saying that the Global North can go on as normal. We consume what we like, while allowing our corporations to pillage the Global South.

    When politicians like Kerry lay on their death-beds, will they spend their last hours reflecting on how they actively destroyed the planet?

    Additional reporting by AFP

    Featured image via World Economic Forum, Creative Commons licence 2.0, resized to 770 x 403px

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Climate crisis greatest threat to Pacific regional security, says Vanuatu PM

    By Hilaire Bule, RNZ Pacific Vanuatu correspondent in Port Vila

    Vanuatu Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau says Pacific security is about the security of the Pacific peoples and their way of life as identified by Forum Leaders in the Boe Declaration.

    Kalsakau said this reaffirmed climate change as the single greatest threat to regional security.

    The PM was speaking at the opening of the Pacific Fusion headquarters in Port Vila on Tuesday, alongside Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles.

    He said Vanuatu, with the world’s first climate change refugees with the relocation in 2005 of 100 villagers in Torba Province, “will always consider climate change its top priority”.

    He said climate change is real, an existential threat, impinging on the security and stability of all nations.

    “We do not have to look too far to see how the increased intensity of climate change-induced tropical cyclones wreak havoc on the daily lives and livelihoods of our people and set us back years in our development,” said Kalsakau.

    He said Vanuatu’s Pacific brothers also faced human security challenges caused by the nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands (by the US), Mororoa Atoll (France) and Australia (United Kingdom).

    ‘Our reefs are dying’
    “With the effects of global warming and nuclear testing, our ocean is getting warmer, our reefs are dying and fishes are now very scarce.

    “Our children and grandchildren are bound to never experience what we’ve enjoyed in our childhood.

    “The maintenance and sustenance of our marine resources must be the top priority of our Pacific Leaders.”

    Kalsakau said there were other pressing issues such as the Fukushima nuclear waste water discharge and AUKUS.

    “I say again that Pacific security is about the security of our Pacific peoples and way of life.

    “This is why Vanuatu stood alongside our Pacific brothers and sisters to produce the Rarotonga Treaty. Which brings me to today’s very special occasion.

    “The Pacific Fusion Centre is guided by the regional security priorities identified by the Boe Declaration and supports regional decision-making on these shared security priorities,” he said.

    The centre, which is funded by Australia and to be run in collaboration with Pacific Forum member states, will aim to provide training and analysis on regional security issues.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Rainbow capitalism was always going to fold if anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment rose: now, we’re at that moment

    The months running up to Pride have seen right-wing shitheads whipping themselves into a frenzy regarding rainbow branding – particularly in the US. In turn, shops such as Target have begun to quietly drop their Pride merchandise.

    My problem here isn’t the potential of seeing less queer branding in shops, per se. They’re a cash grab, and always were. This is called ‘rainbow capitalism‘:

    Rainbow capitalism, aka pink capitalism, is the action of companies claiming to support LGBTQ+ causes and communities, but are actually making merchandise for-profit and capitalize on the trend. In other words, it centers on corporate interests and profit.

    The rise of rainbow capitalism was never a sign that companies themselves support queer people. Companies support anything that makes them money. For a while, slapping the Pride colours on t-shirts, vodka bottles, and dog leashes was an easy way to do that.

    Now, as homophobia, transphobia, and all the rest are once again on the rise, we’ll see more and more companies quietly shrink their Pride displays and merch lines. This, in itself, I don’t give a shit about. But it is a fucking terrifying sign of the times.

    Bud Light

    Back in April, Dylan Mulvaney – a trans actress and influencer – posted a video to her Instagram. In the video, Mulvaney revealed that brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev sent her a personalized Bud Light can with her face on it to celebrate the anniversary of her gender transition.

    Though Mulvaney has some 10 million followers on social media app TikTok, she isn’t exactly a household name. However, the gift was enough for some conservatives to declare Bud Light a ‘trans beer’. They even called for a boycott against the company – and other brands that Mulvaney has worked with – for going ‘woke’.

    But that obviously wasn’t enough. Trump-loving musician Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cans of Bud Light with an assault rifle. A man went on a rampage in a Kansas Walmart store, hurling cans of Bud Light and Busch Light across the floor. Anheuser-Busch factories reported bomb threats being made against them.

    In response, the company CEO issued a lukewarm statement that:

    We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.

    LGBTQ+ campaigners pointed out that the company was trying to weasel its way out by distancing itself from Mulvaney.

    Target

    More recently, on 23 May, big-box retailer Target said that it had removed products to commemorate Pride month. It cited threats to employees in the wake of criticism by social conservatives. The giant US chain has showcased rainbow-colored items celebrating Pride for more than a decade.

    Conservative activists have filmed themselves at stores expressing outrage at “tuck friendly” swimsuits designed for trans customers. In a now-familiar pattern, they also destroyed displays and sent bomb threats to stores.

    Target said in a statement:

    Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work.

    Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.

    Our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.

    Except, they’re doing the opposite of ‘continuing commitment’, aren’t they? Right-wing tools threw their dummy out the pram, got violent, and were promptly given exactly what they wanted.

    Not the only ones

    Bud Light and Target are by no means alone, either. Pink News put together a list of over 40 brands that are being targeted for their perceived support of Pride and LGBTQ+ people. These include Hershey’s, Disney, and even Tesco.

    Daniel Korschun, associate professor of marketing at Drexel University, stated that executives:

    are becoming much more skittish about taking these stands and making strong statements…The pendulum is swinging a bit back… toward a more conservative approach, where they’ll be less vocal.

    Professor Sophie Bjork-James of the US-based Vanderbilt University, who works on white nationalism, pointed out that this reticence from companies was exactly what the right is after. She said in an interview:

    I think this will embolden alt-right actors, who now are going to believe that with social media campaigns and targeted actions against retailers that they can proceed in limiting visibility of LGBTQ people.

    Remember your Pride

    I didn’t like it when more and more shops started slapping the Pride flag on their stuff. But now, removing the rainbow because it might hurt a brand’s image or some shit is only going to add insult to injury.

    I’ve got two points that I want to leave off on here. Select whichever seems most appropriate.

    If you consider yourself an ally, over the coming month while you’re out shopping, pay attention to the Pride merch you see around you. I don’t care if you don’t buy it: I wouldn’t. But ask – are the shops going as hard as they did in previous years? Take note of those that’ve put their rainbow shite to the back aisles like a shameful little secret.

    And, for my fellow queers, it is – as ever – a great time to remember that Pride is a protest. The most important item of Pride merchandise is, and will always be, a brick. They’re very cheap. You can paint it yourself if you really want to.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Missvain, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, resized to 1910×1000. 

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Why the Trial Penalty Must Go

    Why the Trial Penalty Must Go

    Faced with the threat of severe sentences, innocent people can and do plead guilty.

    Opinion 06.01.23 By Christina Swarns

    (Image: Tingey Injury Law Firm / Unsplash)

    (Image: Tingey Injury Law Firm / Unsplash)

    When I was just starting out as a public defender, I got the opportunity to assist on a case that was scheduled for trial. Our client, who was out on bail, made it clear that he was innocent. If convicted after trial, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence involving significant prison time. 

    We worked incredibly long hours — researching the law, conducting investigations, and consulting with our client — and we developed a trial strategy that we believed could vindicate him.  

    On the morning that jury selection was scheduled to begin, we got an offer: the prosecutor announced that if our client pleaded guilty, he could be free within a year. 

    I vividly remember standing in the hallway of the criminal court watching our client struggle with this offer. He said he was innocent — why should he admit to something he didn’t do and go to jail? We were ready to go to trial — what was all of that work for? If we believed he was innocent, why would we urge him to plead guilty? 

    But my experienced colleagues were clear-eyed. They understood — and explained — the enormous risk that the trial represented, including the fact that he was a young Black man whose case would be decided by an overwhelmingly white jury. 

    Our client pleaded guilty. 

    The Sixth Amendment enshrines the right to trial for anyone accused of a crime. Yet, in America today, less than 3% of criminal cases ever make it to trial. 

    A lot of factors drive that statistic, including the trial penalty: the practice of offering more lenient sentences in exchange for a guilty plea before trial and promising (and imposing) severe sentences after a conviction at trial. Confronted with an impossible choice — fighting for their innocence but often risking decades in prison or admitting to something they didn’t do but salvaging their family and future — innocent people can and do plead guilty. 

    DALLAS, TX - MAY 24: Tyrone Day attends his exoneration hearing in the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, Texas on May 24, 2023. (Montinique Monroe for Innocence Project)

    Tyrone Day attends his exoneration hearing in the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, Texas on May 24, 2023. (Image: Montinique Monroe for Innocence Project)

    Take Tyrone Day, a client of the Innocence Project and Innocence Project of Texas, who was exonerated last week. He was wrongly convicted of a 1989 sexual assault in Dallas. On the advice of his attorney and under threat of a 99-year prison sentence, he agreed to plead guilty after his attorney incorrectly told him that he would be eligible for parole after serving four years. Mr. Day spent nearly 26 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit as a result of that plea deal.

    Innocence Project re-entry coach Rodney Roberts, who was also wrongfully convicted as a result of a plea deal, described the experience as, “saving and sabotaging [myself] at the same time.”

    Of the more than 3,300 people exonerated since 1989, one in four (25%) pleaded guilty. And more than 60% were people of color.

    DALLAS, TX - MAY 24: Tyrone Day attends his exoneration hearing in the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, Texas on May 24, 2023. (Montinique Monroe for Innocence Project)

    Tyrone Day attends his exoneration hearing in the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, Texas on May 24, 2023. (Image: Montinique Monroe for Innocence Project)

    How Did We Get Here?

    Tough-on-crime rhetoric has resulted in federal and state legislation that imposes draconian mandatory minimum sentences. These laws prevent judges from considering mitigating factors — like trauma and abuse — and imposing individualized sentences. Instead, prosecutors can unilaterally decide to file charges that require high sentences and unilaterally decide if, when, and how such charges or sentences may be reduced in plea negotiations.

    Add to the mix the very rational fear of pretrial detention, which serves as an additional thumb on the scale in favor of taking a plea deal even in cases of innocence and cases in which the stakes are lower because the potential charges are not as serious. For example, when faced with the prospect of a stint in New York City’s notoriously violent jail Rikers Island, Jason Serrano pleaded guilty despite being innocent. Police body camera footage showed officers planting drugs in his car.

    None of this is good for justice. A guilty plea short-circuits the process (from discovery to investigation to cross-examination) that can otherwise expose coercion, misconduct, and actual innocence. It also prevents meaningful accountability.

    How Do We Fix It?

    Calls for an end to the trial penalty have gained momentum across the country. We’ve joined with 24 leading national civil rights and criminal legal reform groups to form the End the Trial Penalty Coalition — a group that has developed reform recommendations and will push for those reforms at every point in the system. As members of the American Bar Association Plea Bargaining Task Force, we, along with a diverse group of fellow attorneys, judges, and academics, released a groundbreaking report earlier this year that outlines recommendations to reduce excessive plea bargaining.

    In New York, we’ve helped advance truly transformational reforms. In 2019, legislators enacted pre-plea discovery measures that allowed people accused of crimes to see the evidence against them before considering a plea deal, for the first time. 

    That same legislative package addressed cash bail and pretrial detention to keep people out of pretrial detention facilities like Rikers, and thereby lessen the risk of false guilty pleas. Despite the fact that these reforms likely prevented an unknown number of coerced pleas and kept people safely in their communities rather than detained in dangerous jails, there have been multiple efforts to roll back these critical reforms and New York must remain ever vigilant in protecting them.

    Still, there are other changes we need to drive. We need to eliminate the use of extreme sentences, including mandatory minimums; ensure prosecutors offices have ethical charging policies; give judges more discretion to “look back” and adjust excessive sentences; and remove language often used in plea agreements that requires people to waive certain legal rights. We need to get rid of charge stacking — a practice in which police officers and prosecutors level as many charges at a person accused of a crime as they can and, in turn, heighten an accused person’s anxiety and the pressure to settle. And we should close the door on “take-it-or-leave” offers where people have virtually no time to make a decision.

    Without a concerted and serious approach to preserving the critical constitutional right to trial, our legal system will continue to function like a game of chance — pushing people to take a bet on the due process of law when they know that the deck is stacked against them. 

    With gratitude,

    Christina Swarns
    Executive Director, Innocence Project

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  • Australia’s ‘de facto’ SAS war crimes trial has lessons for the UK

    A famous SAS soldier has lost a multi-million defamation trial in Australia. Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith was found not to have been defamed over media claims of murder in Afghanistan. The case has been referred to as a ‘proxy’ war crimes trial.

    Australian cases of this kind tell a story about the wars. And, for that matter, about the responses of the occupying nations. Australia has had major inquiries and cases have reached the courts. Meanwhile, the UK chose to legislate to protect past and future war criminals.

    Hero soldier?

    For decades, Western soldiers have been lionised by governments and the press to stave off criticism of wars like Afghanistan. This is nowhere truer than the Special Forces. Political expediency meant that elite troops were overused in Afghanistan and Iraq. Partly because their deaths were not as politically loaded as regular forces.

    Australian SAS soldier Roberts-Smith is an example of this. The Australian SAS, like its British and American counterparts went rogue. In each case, they started to act like unaccountable gangs.

    When accused of involvement in war crimes, this hero of the Australian right-wing sued for defamation. He just lost his case on most of the allegations made. Over a year long case, the court heard how the SAS was a factional, rogue force, riven by internal rivalry. This allegedly included ‘blooding’. This is a practice where new recruits were made to extrajudicially kill captives to prove themselves.

    One of the allegations included an incident in 2012 when Roberts-Smith was said to have kicked a prisoner off a cliff before another SAS soldier shot the prisoner. Another allegation was that he killed an old man found hiding in a compound. The man’s prosthetic leg was then turned into a macabre drinking vessel at the regimental bar.

    While the former corporal can’t be jailed for the findings in a civil defamation case, they are very damaging. He may well have to pay out millions in damages to the newspapers in question. The Guardian reported:

    The onus of proof in the defamation case rested with the newspapers, who were required to prove to the civil standard of “balance of probabilities” that the allegations they had published were true.

    The newspapers appear to have won this time.

    UK parallels

    British SAS troops are also accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. An inquiry into these is finally underway. Yet the UK government has gone to great lengths to make sure UK war crimes cases never come to court. It has even tried to rewrite the law to protect itself from accountability.

    The Overseas Operations Act, as the Canary has argued, makes war crimes much harder to bring to court. It is at once an establishment stitch-up, and a betrayal of the UK troops it claims to protect.

    Not satisfied with this, the Tories are now pursuing a separate bill for the north of Ireland. Again, this would prevent victims of British and paramilitary violence from getting justice. This includes the families of British soldiers.

    Ultimately, the cult of the elite warrior which developed during the so-called ‘war on terror’ has collapsed. Far from being superhuman heroes, special forces units have shown themselves to be entirely fallible.

    And, as anyone with half a brain would expect of military units with a death cult ethos, they are perfectly capable of descending into complete savagery.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/OR-6 Chris Moore, cropped to 1910 x 1000.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • NATO has recruited the politically inane but the truth is much more complex

    The thing about NATO is that it’s only possible to support it uncritically if you’ve never been anywhere near it. And sadly for me, I have. I find myself back here again, well over a year after writing this piece on why picking a side from NATO or Russia is a mug’s game for big babies.

    Let’s be clear, being critical of NATO isn’t to accept the arguments of the Twitter conspiracists who flood the Canary’s mentions each time we criticise one of their faux-anti-imperialist favourites. Yes, that would be the ‘Gaddafi/Assad/Putin/Insert Authoritarian was actually just misunderstood’ crowd. Rather, it’s a call for a serious analysis of what NATO is and what it does. I extend the same call in regard to Putin’s Russia.

    In truth, the pro- and anti-NATO camps are united in a key aspect of their politics: fervent anti-intellectualism. For them, politics seems to be a sort of real-world game of Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons. In their minds, they push pieces around a tabletop battlefield. There’s lots of partisan emotion, as if they’re supporting a football team. It involves little by way of even-handed analysis. 

    Tantrums

    I can’t imagine formulating a political identity around an indifferent military alliance, or around a version of anti-imperialism which exists only in my own head. It would be hard not to look at all this and feel a bit sad for them, if they weren’t such vacuous arseholes.

    On numerous occasions, I’ve seen even mild critiques of NATO attacked. On two occasions in person, I’ve had grown adults melt down when it’s been suggested they exercise reason over emotion in the context of Ukraine. But unthinking fanboying and fangirling doesn’t cut it for me. You see, I’m not a centrist, liberal, or a social democrat. I’m not that easily taken in. And I know NATO’s record in Afghanistan and Libya, and it’s Cold War era dalliances with fascism.

    Nor do I have a hard-on for a fantasised anti-imperialist version of the Soviet Union. I’d hope my politics are a bit more sophisticated than cosplaying Uncle Joe Stalin down the pub with my two clammy mates or, God forbid, on Twitter to a large audience. Please, all of you, bear in mind that your poor mum might see this stuff.

    This is because I’m on the anarchist end of politics. I distrust all states and their military alliances. I ended up in these positions precisely because I took part in the NATO mission in Afghanistan. So if you expect me to morph into some kind of NATO-shagger over Ukraine, you’re set for a rude awakening.

    Recruited

    Many people have been pulled into uncritical support for NATO on the basis of emotion. And that’s understandable. The constant images and stories which have emerged from Ukraine are shocking. There’s no doubt Russia is the aggressor, just as the US and UK were in Iraq. But emotion alone doesn’t cut it. If you subtract rationale and reason from your analysis what you have left is good-old fashioned war fever.

    Of course, people are pulled into NATO fandom for slightly different reasons. Most prominently, the brand of simpering centrists who made up the FBPE (Follow Back, Pro EU) cohort on Twitter. For them, solidarity starts and ends at adding the Ukraine flag next to the EU one in their bio.

    It’s not for nothing I accuse them of mistaking NATO for  ‘FBPE with Guns’, though in fairness it could just as easily be ‘Eurovision fans with F-16s’. In the end though, these are low-calibre people with low calibre politics. Anyone to the left of Tony Blair should hold themselves to a higher standard.

    For my part, I’ll continue to view NATO with critical eye born out of hard experience. But keep on vacuously stanning your team, by all means.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/US Gov, cropped to 1900 x 1000.

    By Joe Glenton

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Duncan Graham: Compromise worked in Aceh – why not West Papua?   

    There are parallels between Indonesia’s Aceh where an Australian surfer faced a flogging, and West Papua where a New Zealand pilot may be facing death. Both provinces have fought brutal guerrilla wars for independence. One has been settled through foreign peacekeepers. The other still rages as outsiders fear intervention.

    By Duncan Graham in Malang, East Java

    There were ten stories in a Google Alert media feed last week for “Indonesia-Australia”.

    One covered illegal fishing in the Indo-Pacific claiming economic losses of more than US$6 billion a year — important indeed.

    Another was an update on the plight of New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens, held hostage since February 7 by the Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat (TPNPB-West Papua National Liberation Army).

    This is the armed wing of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, (OPM Free Papua Organisation) that has been pushing its cause since the 1970s.

    A major story by any measure. The Indonesian military’s inability to find and safely secure the New Zealander has the potential to cause serious diplomatic rifts and great harm to all parties.

    There have been unverified reports of bombs dropped from helicopters on jungle camps where the pilot may have been held with uninvolved civilians.

    The other eight stories were about Queenslander Bodhi Mani Risby-Jones who had been arrested in April for allegedly going on a nude drunken rampage and bashing a local in Indonesian Aceh.

    Stupidities commonplace
    Had the 23-year-old surfer been a fool in his home country the yarn would have been a yawn. Such stupidities are commonplace.

    But because he chose to be a slob in the strictly Muslim province of Aceh and facing  up to five years jail plus a public flogging, his plight opened the issue of cultural differences and tourist arrogance.  Small news, but legitimate.

    He has now reportedly done a $25,000 deal to buy his way out of charges and pay restitution to his victim. This shows a flexible social and legal system displaying tolerance — which is how Christians are supposed to behave.

    All noteworthy, easy to grasp. But more important than the threatened execution of an innocent victim of circumstances caught in a complex dispute that needs detailed explanations to understand?

    Mehrtens landed a commercial company’s plane as part of his job for Susi Air flying people and goods into isolated airstrips when he was grabbed by armed men desperate to get Jakarta to pay attention to their grievances.

    Ironically, Aceh where Risby-Jones got himself into strife, had also fought for independence and won. Like West Papua, it’s resource-rich so essential for the central government’s economy.

    A vicious on-off war between the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, (GAM-Free Aceh Movement) and the Indonesian military started in 1976 and reportedly took up to 30,000 lives across the following three decades.

    Tsunami revived peace talks
    It only ended when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami killed 160,000  people and  former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected president and  revived peace talks. Other countries became involved, including the European Union and Finland where the Helsinki Agreement was signed.

    Both sides bowed to a compromise. GAM leaders abandoned their demands for independence, settling for “self-government” within the Indonesian state, while soldiers were withdrawn. The bombings have stopped but at the cost of personal freedoms and angering human rights advocates.

    Freed from Jakarta’s control, the province passed strict Shariah laws. These include public floggings for homosexual acts, drinking booze and being close to an opposite sex person who is not a relative. Morality Police patrols prowl shady spots, alert to any signs of affection.

    Australian academic and former journalist Dr Damien Kingsbury was also instrumental in getting GAM and Jakarta to talk. He was involved with the West Papua standoff earlier this year but New Zealand is now using its own to negotiate.

    Dr Kingsbury told the ABC the situation in West Papua is at a stalemate with neither Wellington nor Jakarta willing to make concessions. The Indonesian electorate has no truck for “separatists” so wants a bang-bang fix. NZ urges a softly-slowly approach.

    A TPNPB spokesperson told the BBC: “The Indonesian government has to be bold and sit with us at a negotiation table and not [deploy] military and police to search for the pilot.”

    The 2005 Aceh resolution means the Papua fighters have a strong model of what is possible when other countries intervene. So far it seems none have dared, fearing the wrath of nationalists who believe Western states, and particularly Australia, are trying to “Balkanise”  the “unitary state” and plunder its riches.

    Theory given energy
    This theory was given energy when Australia supported the 1999 East Timor referendum which led to the province splitting from Indonesia and becoming a separate nation.

    Should Australia try to act as a go-between in the Papua conflict, we would be dragged into the upcoming Presidential election campaign with outraged candidates thumping lecterns claiming outside interference. That is something no one wants but sitting on hands won’t help Mehrtens.

    In the meantime, Risby-Jones, whose boorish behaviour has confirmed Indonesian prejudices about Australian oafs, is expected to be deported.

    Mehrtens will only get to tell his tale if the Indonesian government shows the forbearance displayed by the family of Edi Ron.  The Aceh fisherman needed 50 stitches and copped broken bones and an infected foot from his Aussie encounter, but he still shook hands.

    After weeks in a cell the surfer has shown contrition and apologised. Australian ‘”proceedings of crime” laws should prevent him earning from his ordeal.

    If the Kiwi pilot does get out alive, he deserves the media attention lavished on the Australian. This might shift international interest from a zonked twit to the issue of West Papua’s independence and remind diplomats that if Jakarta could bend in the far west of the archipelago,  why not in the far east?

    Lest Indonesians forget:  Around 100,000 revolutionaries died during the four-year war against the returning colonial Dutch after Soekarno proclaimed independence in 1975. The Dutch only retreated after external pressure from the US and Australia.

    Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press) and winner of the Walkley Award and Human Rights awards. He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia. This article was first published in Pearls & Irritations on 30 May 2023 and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Phony War on American Culture

    Bereft of an economic program, Republicans turn to social values, beliefs, and prejudices to gain votes and turn the clock back on the change that accompanies society’s development. The GOP can no longer convince a majority of voters to support tax cuts for the rich, eliminating government regulations and cutting programs for the poor. In desperation, they are conducting a war on changing American values.

    Powerful and wealthy interests discovered that rural people fear the social changes that replace the white Christian power structure with more open, inclusionary, equal, and forward-looking values that attempt to fulfill American ideals. A new set of values accepts gays, different ethnicities, business regulations to protect our health and environment, food, education, housing assistance, and the equal distribution of our economic surplus.

    The world changes as America’s great melting pot absorbs immigrants, young people, women, and tries to prevent discrimination based on skin color. They reject being ruled by a closed white, male power infrastructure. People no longer accept being dictated to by the color of their skin, sexual preference, cultural choice, or other incidental characteristics—and demand to share power.

    When GOP billionaires, the Koch network, Fox News, and smaller state and local elites began to lose power, they pandered to traditional religious, business, and rural prejudices to gain support. Politicians like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and Marjorie Taylor Greene cashed in. They exemplify politics that clings to the past and resist change. They cherry-pick the most radical, out-of-the-mainstream behavior and language for campaigns that promote elite corporate and business interests to amass power and take a larger share of national wealth.

    Their made-up “culture war” focuses on changing values and diverts attention from everyday concerns about medical care, paychecks, and standard of living. Instead of asking why the government doesn’t guarantee education and health care, they conceal how, sometimes in concert with Democrats, they distribute economic surplus into their own pockets. A perfect illustration is the 470 state anti-gay bills the GOP is trying to pass, which diverts attention away from GOP demands to cut aid for education, housing, and environmental protection. They increase military spending and ignore the GOP gift to the rich when they passed Trump’s tax cuts.

    This strategy shifts focus from worker rights, pay increases, housing costs, and medical care to disguise their efforts to keep profits high and shrink government power to allow the wealthy to control the country. They use language such as “woke” to label anything threatening their power and authority. By connecting cultural changes to gay marriage and teaching the American history of institutional racism, they shift emphasis away from issues such as Trump’s rapes and molestation of women, stiffing contractors, lying about his taxes, demonizing minorities, and promoting violence and insurrection. It likewise obscures their continual demands to cut taxes, deregulate, and shrink government.

    Consider how gender is one focus of their culture war campaign. Transgender people hardly affect our personal lives, despite the Republican campaigns to make it a voting issue. In America, only 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children identify as transgender out of a population of 332 million. Only 36 transgender athletes compete in college sports that include over half a million participants. Yet the Republican legislature in Kansas recently banned transgender girls from female high school sports, despite having only three transgender girls out of 41,00 competing in the state. Indeed, they should be respected and accommodated in some way. Yet, GOP legislators are considering a flood of bills to restrict transgender behavior, flooding email boxes with requests for donations, blasting isolated events on Fox News, and making them campaign issues.

    The GOP’s phony culture war is a temper tantrum orchestrated to blame everything on Biden and the Democrats, a simple hate campaign that reminds us of playground rivalries and dictatorships like the USSR and Nazi Germany. At the same time, these attempts are real and divert people’s attention from the everyday issues and reforms that affect our lives. As for culture: It’s changing—religion, ethnicity, immigrants, sexuality, age, and attitudes. The GOP cannot stop change.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Monkerud.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The situation at the University of Brighton is worsening – but we’re fighting for justice

    In the last few weeks, staff and students have collectively organised to stop the University of Brighton making 140 academic and professional services staff members redundant. However, on 27 May, management sent another shockwave through the faculty and student body.

    Now, the university as announced it will close the Brighton Centre for Contemporary Arts (BCCA) due to alleged financial pressures. This is another blow to our institution – but also sums up a wider problem in UK universities.

    University of Brighton: the decimation of our institution

    As I previously wrote for the Canary:

    The University of Brighton announced the redundancies on 4 May. It said that it was asking staff to take voluntary redundancy first, before forcing people to leave. The university’s senior management team attempted to justify the decision. It argued that the freeze in regulated tuition fees has reduced the real-terms value of their primary source of income by around a third.

    Senior management also said that the situation has been compounded by current inflation levels reaching near-record highs. They claimed this has pushed up the costs of maintaining all areas of the institution…

    This round of redundancies is another blow to an academic institution that has faced years of brutal cuts. After the closure of the Hastings campus (and of the Eastbourne campus, due to be complete by 2024), along with years of wage stagnation, staff have reached breaking point.

    And now, university management are also closing the BCCA. This indicates a broader trend in devaluing the arts and humanities. For example, in 2021 controversial government reforms saw money taken away from the creative arts. This was to fund subjects such as healthcare, medicine and STEM.

    Moreover, the university’s executive board made no internal announcement about its closure of the BCCA. Students and staff found out via an article in the Art Newspaper. BCCA director Ben Roberts stated that the process felt “very top-down”. He also said:

    There was no discussion about what we might do to reduce costs or try to be part of a solution.

    Stop calling our supervisors ‘savings’

    The sentiment that the ongoing consultation processes are a farce came to the fore this week for post-graduate researchers (PGRs) at Brighton. After fighting to get a meeting with someone from senior management, on 24 May we met virtually with professor Rusi Jaspal. I was in attendance at this meeting. The answers he gave, and the way he spoke to us, shocked me.

    His tone was patronising, and he failed to answer a single question adequately. The moment which struck me the most in the meeting was when a peer asked Jaspal to apologise for the distress senior management had caused. PhD researchers like myself are at risk of losing entire supervisory teams. This has resulted in many researchers being unable to work and struggling mentally.

    However, rather than take accountability and offer a sincere apology, Jaspal apologised for the economic situation and for caring about the university’s financial sustainability. PhD student Mandeep Sidhu, who also attended the meeting, told me:

    I left the meeting feeling more outraged, frustrated and patronised than I had been before. Rusi kept on insisting the meeting was an “open dialogue”; it soon became clear that this was nothing more than a veneer for his condescending monologues, which he deployed to “respond” to students’ testimonies.

    As PGRs, we felt we needed answers. Where will the expertise come from if our supervisors are forced to leave? Why have we heard nothing from vice chancellor (VC) Debra Humphris? Why are the cuts not impacting senior management? Overall, management’s tactics have been silence or stonewalling. Hence, a group of anonymous students decided to take action.

    Student occupation of the vice chancellor’s office

    On 25 May, they occupied the VC’s office on the 8th floor of the Cockcroft building. They said they will occupy the building indefinitely until management meet their only demand – that no redundancies take place. Students said in a press release:

    The university’s complete lack of care and concern for the people whom they are most affecting by their financial mistakes to retain profit is unacceptable. Our staff are not disposable!

    There are students who are finding themselves in a position where choices they have made for their futures have been either completely cut off or severely limited as certain pathways have been cancelled by the cuts. They find themselves trapped after financially committing themselves to a course that will not run due to the university’s management failures and are unable to escape.

    The school of Humanities and Social Sciences will be disproportionately affected – 21 out of 54 humanities staff will be made redundant.

    A growing trend

    In response, the university threatened legal action against the students occupying the VC’s office. However, rather than communicating with the students directly, university management decided to serve the students with a solicitor’s letter. It stated that the university had reported the occupiers’ conduct to the police, and:

    intends to pursue disciplinary action under the student disciplinary process.

    Brighton is not alone in seeking to clamp down on students protesting. The University of Sheffield has been criticised for spending £40,000 on hiring a private investigator to look into the involvement of two student activists in an occupation. Similarly, the University of Manchester wishes to make an example of 11 students who protested over poor living conditions by disciplining them.

    Such actions taken by universities are all the more worrying in the context of the Public Order Act. It will infringe on our right to protest in the UK. However, at Brighton, such draconian measures are not directed at just the occupiers – they are now impacting our daily lives.

    Campus security crackdown

    Since the occupation, management has heightened security on campus. The university claims there is no money to retain staff, but it appears there’s money in the budget to hire private security firms to police students. Now you need to show your student or staff ID card in order to access campus buildings.

    On one occasion, after my colleague and I showed our ID to security, they questioned who I was, if I was a staff member, and where I was going. Security then followed me and my colleague to the elevators. They made us feel intimidated in the place where we work and study.

    This is not a one-off occurrence. Two undergraduate students, who wish to remain anonymous, told me:

    We went to Cockcroft’s women’s downstairs bathrooms at 7am this morning. We were in there a couple of minutes, then heard pounding at the door. It really made us jump. We came out, and it was two older men. One said, “Sorry girls” but he didn’t sound particularly sincere.

    It feels like we are being sussed out to see if we’re the “enemy”. We cannot go to the loo, fill up our water bottles, or walk past the front desk without being asked, “Where are you going” “what are you doing” or “Unicard entry only”, even with my Unicard in hand.

    There is only one demand: no redundancies

    Although the response from management has been hostility and intimidation, the students at Brighton should be commended. Their dedication and commitment to protecting their education have been incredible to witness. They should be proud of themselves. Since last writing, an open mic fundraiser and a study-themed sit-in have taken place to support our lecturers.

    Brighton’s staff and students are also participating in a no-confidence vote against the VC. On 10 June, a solidarity march and rally are planned, and we hope to see as many people as possible stand in solidarity with us.

    The petition is still available to sign here. And if you want to keep up to date with our actions, follow us on Twitter at @pgrs_brighton and @UOBSolidarity.

    Featured image via the author

    By Kathryn Zacharek

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Slow down Simeon Brown – NZ bilingual traffic signs aren’t an accident waiting to happen

    ANALYSIS: By Richard Shaw, Massey University

    When New Zealand’s opposition National Party’s transport spokesperson, Simeon Brown, questioned the logic of bilingual traffic signs, he seemed to echo his leader Christopher Luxon’s earlier misgivings about the now prevalent use of te reo Māori in government departments.

    Genuine concern or political signalling in an election year? After all, Luxon himself has expressed interest in learning te reo, and also encouraged its use when he was CEO of Air New Zealand.

    He even sought to trademark “Kia Ora” as the title of the airline’s in-flight magazine.

    And for his part, Brown has no problem with Māori place names on road signs. His concern is that important messaging about safety or directions should be readily understood. “Signs need to be clear,” he said.

    “We all speak English, and they should be in English.” Adding more words, he believes, is simply confusing.

    It’s important to take Brown at his word, then, with a new selection of proposed bilingual signs now out for public consultation. Given the National Party’s enthusiastic embrace of AI to generate pre-election advertising imagery, one obvious place to start is with ChatGPT, which tells us:

    Bilingual traffic signs, which display information in two or more languages, are generally not considered a driver hazard. In fact, bilingual signage is often implemented to improve safety and ensure that drivers of different language backgrounds can understand and follow the traffic regulations.

    ChatGPT also suggests that by providing information about speed limits, directions and warnings, bilingual traffic signs “accommodate diverse communities and promote road safety for all drivers”.

    Safety and culture
    With mounting concern over AI’s potential existential threat to human survival, however, it’s probably best we don’t take the bot’s word for it.

    Fortunately, government transport agency Waka Kotahi has already examined the use of bilingual traffic signs in 19 countries across the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Its 2021 report states:

    The use of bilingual traffic signage is common around the world and considered “standard” in the European Union. Culture, safety and commerce appear to be the primary impetuses behind bilingual signage.

    Given Brown’s explicit preference for the use of English, it’s instructive that in the UK itself, the Welsh, Ulster Scots and Scots Gaelic languages appear alongside English on road signs in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

    More to the point, on the basis of the evidence it reviewed, Waka Kotahi concluded that — providing other important design considerations are attended to — bilingual traffic signs can both improve safety and respond to cultural aspirations:

    In regions of Aotearoa New Zealand where people of Māori descent are over-represented in vehicle crash statistics, or where they represent a large proportion of the local population, bilingual traffic signage may impart benefits in terms of reducing harm on our road network.

    A bilingual road sign in Calgary, Canada
    A bilingual road sign in Calgary, Canada. Image: The Conversation/Getty Images

    ‘One people’
    Politically, however, the problem with a debate over bilingual road signs is that it quickly becomes another skirmish in the culture wars — echoing the common catchcry of those opposed to greater biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand: “We are one people”.

    It’s a loaded phrase, originally attributed to the Crown’s representative Lieutenant Governor William Hobson, who supposedly said “he iwi tahi tātou” (we are one people) at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.

    Whether or not he said any such thing is up for debate. William Colenso, who was at Waitangi on the day and who reported Hobson’s words, thought he had.

    But Colenso’s account was published 50 years after the events in question (and just nine years before he died aged 89).

    Either way, the assertion has since come to be favoured by those to whom the notion of cultural homogeneity appeals. It’s a common response to the increasing public visibility of te ao Māori (the Māori world).

    But being “one people” means other things become singular too: one law, one science, one language, one system. In other words, a non-Māori system, the one many of us take for granted as simply the way things are.

    Any suggestion that system might incorporate or coexist with aspects of other systems — indeed might benefit from them — tends to come up against the kind of resistance we see to such things as bilingual road signs.

    Fretful sleepers
    The discomfort many New Zealanders still feel with the use of te reo Māori in public settings brings to mind Bill Pearson’s famous 1952 essay, Fretful Sleepers.

    In it, Pearson reflects on the anxiety that can seep unbidden into the lives of those who would like to live in a “wishfully untroubled world”, but who nonetheless sense things are not quite right out here on the margins of the globe.

    Pearson lived in a very different New Zealand. But he had his finger on the same fear and defensiveness that can cause people to fret about the little things (like bilingual signs) when there are so many more consequential things to disrupt our sleep.

    Anyway, Simeon Brown and his fellow fretful sleepers appear to be on the wrong side of history. Evidence suggests most New Zealanders would like to see more te reo Māori in their lives, not less.

    Two-thirds would like te reo taught as a core subject in primary schools, and 56 percent think “signage should be in both te reo Māori and English”.

    If the experience in other parts of the world is anything to go by, bilingual signage will be just another milestone on the road a majority seem happy to be on.The Conversation

    Dr Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Massey University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.