Very few have anything more, and it would be fair to say, FijiFirst is not rich in intellectuals or academics. No prestigious universities for any of them.
What is important is the fact that just over a third of the candidates — 18 people — have degrees from the Suva-based University of the South Pacific.
They owe their careers and jobs to a university that the FijiFirst government is trying to destroy.
The 21 FijiFirst candidates with nothing more than a high school education are famously led by Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and include his possible successor Inia Seruiratu.
Michael Field is an independent journalist and author and co-editor of The Pacific Newsroom. Republished with permission.
New York: New York City Election is going to take place on Tuesday, November 8th. This election is dubbed as ‘critical’ and the ‘last’ chance to join millions of New Yorkers in making their voices heard and cast their ballots. The outcome of these elections will affect the future of New Yorkers, their economy, education, healthcare, and more.
The polls will be open from 6:00 am to9:00 pm. People who can’t vote on Tuesday can also vote early in person! Early voting polls will be open through Sunday, November 6th, as per the NYC government. Your poll site may have changed, so it’s important to check your poll site location and its hours before you vote at nycvotes.org.
This year, voting is more important than ever. In every single race, your vote matters – from the Governor and Attorney General to your Congress people and state representatives. We’re deciding who will lead the state into the future, and what kind of future New Yorkers want for our state. Also, four ballot proposals are on the back of your ballot, so remember to flip yours over. All U.S. citizens aged 18 and older who have registered are eligible to vote. Millions of New Yorkers in going to the polls and getting the change they want to see done. Those who are not currently registered to vote can register for next year’s election on that website as well. All New Yorkers have the right to vote in their language. You may bring an interpreter to the voting booth—it can be a friend, a family member or a poll worker, but it can’t be your employer or union representative.
The Civic Engagement Commission has said that it will be providing interpretation services in select languages and poll sites on Saturday, November 5th, and Sunday, November 6th, and on Election Day, Tuesday, November 8th. Our democracy relies on individuals with different opinions coming together to find solutions. Voting is one crucial way we do this, and having discussions with each other is another. Recently, the Administration held a summit on criminal justice. It brought experienced defense lawyers, judges, district attorneys, advocates, and law enforcement officials together in search of solutions to a goal we all share: keeping New Yorkers safe and ensuring justice for all. There is a lot that this group disagrees on, and each individual groups will keep pursuing their individual goals.
But there is also much we agree on. Both public safety and justice are prerequisites to prosperity, and we need to do a better job on both. No one should be afraid of crime on the subway, and no one accused of committing a crime should have to wait for months to get a hearing. The discussion helped participants find common ground on important improvements to the system, and over the coming weeks and months, more conversations and turning are expected for actionable solutions that will make New York a safer city. Working toward a more perfect city and country is never easy. It takes all of us engaging in good faith conversation, expressing our views, and casting our ballots. See you at the polls on Tuesday.
A culture of misogyny and predatory behaviour is “prevalent” in many police forces across England and Wales, and fuelled by lax vetting standards, according to a report by His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC).
Inspectors found cases where incidents such as indecent exposure were dismissed as a “one-off”, and where applicants with links to “extensive criminality” in their families had been hired.The findings of the report won’t come as a surprise to anyone who faces the brunt of this behaviour every day, and especially those from marginalised and working class communities. But it does show that our police force is beyond reform, and we need to start looking at alternatives to our current policing model.
“Systemic failures”
The report found:
systemic failings, missed opportunities, and a generally inadequate approach to the setting and maintenance of standards in the police service.
It further stated that:
over the last three or four years, the number of people recruited over whom we would raise significant questions is certainly in the hundreds, if not low thousands.
It added:
Our vetting file review showed that forces had found language and comments on social media, attributable to vetting applicants, that were potentially discriminatory, inflammatory, or extremist.
HMIC’s Matt Parr said that “it is too easy for the wrong people to both join and stay in the police” and that there were “significant questions” over the recruitment of thousands of officers.
However as Kevin Blowe from the Network for Police Montioring pointed out, it’s hardly surprising that police recruitment attracts the wrong type of people:
"so what was it that attracted you to conservative, racist, misogynist institution that holds the monopoly on state violence and yet whose members constantly celebrate their victimhood in the face of a public they despise for never understanding them?"
Report after report has exposed the institutionalised racism and misogny at the heart of UK policing. We should no longer be shocked or surprised with these findings. We should be taking action to do things differently.
Time and again we hear promises of reform. Following this report, the Met tweeted that it would be “ruthless in ridding the Met of those who corrupt our integrity”.
This is not good enough. As Sisters Uncut tweeted, “They had their chance to reform”:
This will surprise no one who has been paying attention.
The Met was founded 200 years ago. They had their chance to reform. Time to abolish.https://t.co/Ao7NtpZoPl
It’s undeniable that the Met is institutionally corrupt, racist, misogynistic, and violent. HMIC’s findings present an opportunity to reconsider the role of police in our society, and to move towards systems and strategies that actually work to make the world a safer place.
This begins with investment in and the empowerment of communities, not the police. We need strategies that actively prevent harm from occurring, and foster accountability when it does.
Our police force is rotten to the core. The problems are systemic, and this report is yet further proof that the police do not keep us safe. It’s time to stop talking about reform. Instead, let’s look at ways to defund the police and fund services and actions that benefit our communities rather than perpetuating the violence, racism and misogyny marlignalised communities face on a daily basis.
Following the petrol bombing of a refugee detention centre in Dover, the police and government response showed this country’s deeply ingrained racism. The attacker – who was white – threw three bombs into the centre before taking his own life. Two people were injured in the attack.
Can you imagine the government and police outrage if this had been an attack on a white community by a person of colour? The government’s response would have been instant, while front page headlines of a suicide bombing would have dominated our front pages. Instead, home secretary Suella Braverman expressed a delayed, half-baked concern over the “distressing incident“, several hours after it happened.
Victim blaming
But the racism and xenophobia doesn’t stop there. In response to the attack, Dover’s Tory councillor, Nigel Collor, said:
I’d like to see them stop the boats coming across. I know this is something that’s been going on for a few years and if they stopped the boats coming in you wouldn’t have the problem.
Yes, that’s right: the councillor hasn’t directly expressed outrage at the attack, nor shown any concern for those who could have been killed. Instead, he has placed the blame squarely on the victims. He argued that if people didn’t flee to England in the first place, attacks like this wouldn’t happen. Disgraceful.
Dover and its neighbouring district of Thanet are deprived areas of the country, where opportunities are scarce and where xenophobic viewpoints – blaming others for working class poverty – can easily take hold. Politicians like Collor carry a weight of responsibility when they spread racist opinions of an invading ‘other’. Nigel Farage targeted the same area back in 2015 when he stood as MP in the South Thanet constituency, which also spans parts of Dover.
It’s clear that Farage hoped his viewpoints would resonate with the local population. He saw them as easy prey for his fascist views. Fortunately, he lost that election, but we shouldn’t underestimate his and Collor’s influence.
Disease-ridden prisons
Collor’s victim-blaming response is perhaps unsurprising in a country built on an empire of racism. It’s also a country where the government thinks nothing of locking up people as soon as they land on its soil, even though they might be fleeing persecution or escaping bombs made in the UK.
The 700 people locked up in the Dover detention centre have been moved to Thanet’s Manston asylum processing centre. Manston is currently in the headlines for its squalid conditions. At least eight people locked up in the centre have been diagnosed with diphtheria, and there’s been at least one case of MRSA.
The centre is designed to hold 1,600 people, but there are reports that 3,000 are crammed in. Meanwhile, more than a dozen more buses filled with people seeking asylum arrived at the prison on Sunday 30 October.
There’s little public outrage in the UK at people seeking asylum being firebombed and catching diseases in filthy conditions. The state – with its racist politicians and police force, punitive laws, and vile mainstream media – is squarely to blame. We have two choices: we can hold the state accountable, or we can get on with our lives, leaving our fellow humans to fester as if they weren’t people at all.
Featured image via Milad Fakurian / Unsplash, resized to 770 x 403px
British trade unions and a section of the broader labour movement have a military-shaped blind spot. When that blind spot is visible, we should all pay attention – accepting the militarist status quo is a major weakness. Militarism is anti-working class. It chews up generations of young people in wars, it allows for massive defence budgets which would be better spent on human needs, and it normalises state violence as a way of resolving problems.
The big British trade unions are, of course, status quo organisations. They are often conservative and aim to tweak the economy a little, rather than ending the extractive violence of capitalism. Some go as far as campaigning for defence spending hikes. In effect, this is lobbying for the arms industry.
The Queen’s death
Recently, the RMT – which is doing great work in other areas – backed down on a strike day following the death of the Queen. Fair play, some may feel. We don’t want to lose support. In fact, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch himself explained at The World Transformed in Liverpool in October 2022:
We cancelled the strikes because many of our members would want to do that.
He told the audience that he himself was from an Irish Republican background, but that many RMT members were ex-military and liked the queen.
This is an example of what we might call militarist realism. Supporting or avoiding conflict with militarist ideology because there might be a backlash. Just because militarism is a force in British politics, doesn’t mean we can just skip over it to save hassle. Socialists should openly and confidently oppose militarism (and right-wing nationalism) wherever they find it.
The British Legion
More recently, the RMT has come into conflict with the Royal British Legion (RBL). The Legion is the most monolithic of the military charities. Despite claims to the contrary, the Legion has embodied right-wing, establishment politics from its foundation in the early 1920s.
One of the main figures associated with it was field marshal Haig, known as the ‘Butcher of the Somme’ because of the massive death toll of his WW1 battles. As I explained in my book, Veteranhood: Hope and Rage in British Ex-Military Life, the Legion was a bulwark against radical working class politics. Haig wanted veterans of WW1 “back under their officers” – not engaged with the left-wing politics of the day.
One trade union leader of the time called the Legion “Haig’s White Guards” after the anti-Bolshevik forces fighting to crush the Russian Revolution. Elements within the Legion also wanted to help break the 1926 General Strike. And, as I reported in Veteranhood, the legion tried to have jobs performed by foreign and women workers given to veterans. So, the British Legion has always been a right-wing organisation.
RMT vs the Legion
On 21 October, the Legion announced that Poppy Day would not go ahead because of an RMT strike set for 3 November. Poppy Day is used to fundraise for the Legion ahead of Remembrance Day. The Legion complained that up to £1m in donations could be lost:
This from a charity which is, in effect, a large corporation. Figures from a 2019 report suggest the Legion had an income of over £160m, with reserves of £70m last year.
The Legion announcement saw far-right and Tory twitter condemn the RMT. But the RMT quickly offered to have the charity collectors on the pickets alongside striking workers:
This is such a shame @PoppyLegion as an alternative to cancelling London Poppy Day, we would love you to stand shoulder to shoulder with @RMTunion members on our picket lines and collect alongside us? #PoppyAppealhttps://t.co/0htUgZa5wq
The RMT eventually backed down, announcing the strike would go ahead on 9 October instead:
RMT update on national rail strike days Having been made aware of Royal British Legion @PoppyLegion London Poppy day on November 3rd, @RMTunion NEC has decided to re-arrange strike action for the 9th.https://t.co/dYQE5VBwyz
Moving a strike by a few days to avoid some negative headlines is not necessarily massively damaging to trade union’s aim. It is also true that the tendency to defer to the sacred cows of British national identity – the royals and the military – is a road to nowhere.
In the end, you can be for workers or you can be for militarism and monarchy – you cannot be for both. It is the job of the left to question and critique these institutions. This starts from the political position that militarism divides and harms workers at home and abroad.
Clearly the BBC shares a similar dream to first-sacked, now-back home secretary Suella Braverman: demonising refugees and deporting them to Rwanda. Or rather, you’d think that was the BBC‘s goal if you saw the hideous and frankly immoral segment on its News at Six on Wednesday 26 October.
Migrants everywhere!
BBC News was reporting on the number of refugees that had crossed the Channel this year. Host Sophie Raworth noted that:
More than 38,000 people have already made the journey to the UK, compared with 28,500 last year.
The normal response to this news should be fear and sorrow for the brave people risking their lives in one of the world’s busiest waterways. However, this was not on BBC News‘s agenda. Instead, the segment generally focused on the economic and social impact of refugees. And it was straight out of right-wing politicians like Braverman’s playbook.
Reporter Mark Easton set the BBC stall out from the off. Amid images of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) pulling near-drowning refugees out of the water, he commented that these were:
Distressing images illustrating the challenge posed by record numbers of migrants trying to reach the Kent coast in flimsy boats.
Never mind that these people could have died. It’s a “challenge” – the implication being for those having to deal with the situation, not the refugees themselves. Easton and the BBC then hammered home the point that 10,000 of the people who crossed were “single men” from Albania. ‘They aren’t refugees!’ you can almost hear the gammon squealing. No – they’re desperate humans, exploited by gangs which have taken thousands of Euros from them, only to potentially send them to their death or a UK prison camp. However Easton still dropped in the tired, right-wing trope that somehow these people are ‘illegals’ – when under international law no migrant, immigrant or refugee is ever illegal when they first enter a country to claim asylum.
Foreigners costing YOU money, says the BBC
If the idea of single men coming over here illegally wasn’t enough to send Middle England’s blood pressure rocketing, then the BBC knew what would give it a coronary: these people are costing YOU, the hard-working taxpayer, money! Easton claimed that:
Many migrants are being housed in hotels like this one in Scarborough. The cost? Almost £7m a day.
But if £7m a day has boiled your piss – wait until you hear what everyone’s favourite right-wing girlboss Liz Truss pissed away with her mini-budget. She managed to wipe around £10bn a day off the UK economy after the announcement. So actually, refugees are costing us 0.07% of Truss’s clusterfuck and just 0.00003% of the UK’s gross domestic product (our overall wealth) in 2021.
BBC: Braverman Broadcasting Corporation
To be fair on the BBC, it did show evidence given by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration to a parliamentary committee. He called the conditions in one refugee camp “pretty wretched”. However, Easton couldn’t help but frame this as the inspector had written to “warn” the home secretary of the “dangerous” conditions there. This implies that Braverman and the government didn’t know of the situation, which is unlikely. This is because the media started to report on it over a month ago, and historically governments have always managed refugee centres like prison camps – the appalling Yarl’s Wood centre being a case in point.
But this is the BBC – and in the face of an increasingly authoritarian government it has to play by the rules. So, not one refugee was interviewed in the segment, nor were any advocacy groups or charities spoken to. Instead, it was little more than a piece of right-wing propaganda, dressed up as public service broadcasting.
Of course, the only service the BBC is performing is to Braverman and the government – not the 150 plus people who have died in the past five years trying to get to the UK. When we have a state broadcaster as cold, heartless and cynical as the BBC, it’s little wonder the public keep electing politicians with those exact same characteristics.
Keir Starmer’s hypocrisy knows no bounds, as demonstrated by an interview he gave recently. The Labour leader not only carried out a Tory-style break-neck U-turn but also exposed yet more betrayal of former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Moreover, Starmer continues to sell out left-wing Labour members down the river. This is because he just backtracked on a 2019 policy pledge that helped sink Labour at the last general election. It’s about Brexit – and it shows Starmer for the rank opportunist he is.
The second Brexit vote and Labour
In Labour’s 2019 manifesto, it committed to a second referendum on Brexit. The party stated that, firstly, it would scrap then-PM Boris Johnson’s deal. Next, Labour would negotiate another one with the EU. Finally, the party would:
put it to a legally binding referendum alongside the option of remaining in the EU. This will take place within the first six months of a Labour government.
This was a historic mistake which led to defeat in the General Election… Labour should have respected the vote to Leave and offered a platform for change based on a future outside of the European Union.
But it didn’t, and we know why. As Wilkinson wrote, Corbyn capitulated to remainers in his own party and pressure groups in an attempt to please everyone. This was disastrous, losing Labour’s so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats to the Tories, and losing voters elsewhere. Of course, one of the people behind the campaign to force Corbyn into a second referendum pledge was Starmer.
Starmer the remainer
The evidence is there that Starmer was central to the second vote policy. As the Guardian wrote:
Starmer felt so strongly about the Brexit referendum result in June 2016 that he quit as a junior shadow minister under Jeremy Corbyn. A few months later he returned to the Labour frontbench as shadow Brexit secretary and spent the next four years campaigning to mitigate the result, which he described as “catastrophic”, while at the same time retaining voters in “red wall” constituencies. But he was a remainer. He campaigned against a no-deal Brexit and for a second referendum to give the people a “confirmatory vote” on any deal with Brussels.
Starmer was his party’s shadow Brexit secretary. And it’s worth recalling that in the long “Brexit wars” from 2016 to 2019, he was not a mere observer but a very active participant. During private talks between Theresa May’s government and Corbyn’s team to try and find a compromise Brexit deal that could get through the hung parliament, her former chief of staff Gavin Barwell claimed in his memoir: “Starmer was not prepared to settle for anything that didn’t include a confirmatory vote.”
So, the now-Labour leader played a fairly sizeable part in the undoing of the former one. However, Starmer is also a stinking hypocrite.
A hypocrite and a snake
On Monday 24 October, LBC was interviewing Starmer. In short, after a caller asked him if Labour would “reverse Brexit”, Starmer said:
It’s a straight no from me! We’re not going back into the EU. We do think that we should make Brexit work.
This is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Opinion polls now say the majority of people want to rejoin the EU, and the economic impact of Brexit under the Tories has become clear. Starmer saying we won’t rejoin now is a clear indication of his courting of Tory voters – but this is too little, too late. If he had pushed this position in 2019, Labour may have forced a hung parliament, and the past three years would have been a very different story.
But Starmer didn’t. Given the lies he told during his leadership campaign around his ‘ten pledges’, it is likely that he knew the second vote position would kill Corbyn’s Labour. This would clear the way for his leadership bid – in which he could proclaim a wish to continue a “radical socialist tradition” while keeping his fingers crossed behind his back.
Starmer’s position on Brexit has all been about his career. He cannot be trusted to run Labour, let alone potentially lead a UK government. Due to his Brexit position, he condemned the rest of us to the hellscape that has been the past three years – he should be nowhere near power.
What a time to be alive. The UK will soon be on its second prime minister elected by around 140,000 Tories. Voters chose to elect the one before that, sadly. Jam-making and girthy marrows don’t look quite so unattractive now, do they? 2022 has been quite the hellscape – even by the UK’s standards. Underpinning the swirling greed is the ultimate driver for these cretins: colonial power. Both the country’s politicians and people have never moved on from the idea of Britain as a colonial, world-conquering state.
2022: a hellscape
Boris Johnson was central to 2022’s carnage, causing untold damage to the rest of us in pursuit of his own narcissistic agenda. Enter Truss to continue this theme of elitist, well-off white people trashing the country for their own benefit. As the Canary‘s Maryam Jameela recently wrote, however, even with Black and brown people in top government jobs this toxic mindset still dominates. She noted that:
What’s the point in trumpeting diversity when all of these people are rich and/or privately educated? They have the kind of opportunities that most poor Black and brown people couldn’t even dream of. They’re in these positions of power because they’ve chosen to act in the interests of power. This is all the more grating given that the praise heaped on this ‘diverse’ cabinet is based on fucked-up understandings of what representation and diversity are.
Evidently, you don’t need to be white to wield colonial power. The political horror witnessed in recent years is a perfect example of this. For example, Priti Patel had “undisclosed meetings” with the Israeli state. Suella Braverman made comments around it being her “dream” to deport refugees to Rwanda. These miscreants literally seep colonialist attitudes from their very pores. British politics craves the fantasy of Britain as central to global politics, and these examples are the thin end of the wedge. Ultimately, we have an alleged democracy in the UK which is wholly based on these attitudes.
Colonialism never left
19 October’s parliamentary chaos was the epitome of centuries of repressive, authoritarian governance masquerading as democratic politics. State actors, both men and women, were bullying, coercing, and physically manhandling other MPs. They asserted their authority over those they believe to be lesser, more incompetent or weaker than them. And it was all for their own greed and lust for power. This all sounds very familiar. This colonial mindset has been perpetually rampant. The empire-riddled Brexit, with its talk of “global Britain” – a thinly-veiled hard-on for a return to a colonial, protectionist past – is a pertinent example.
Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget was colonial to the core. They literally believed that Great Britain could thrust hyper-neoliberalism upon the almost-equally toxic corporate capitalist world order. Truss and Kwarteng believed that those in society below them should just suck up the pain and suffering it would cause. And ultimately, they thought that everyone would bow-down in God-like awe of them. But as the fallout showed, ending in Truss’s departure, this longing for empire is little more than a wet dream.
We are governed by colonialists who think lesser mortals are expendable if they’re no use to the empire’s project. The colonialism-addled corporate media dutifully act as their wingmen. But why do we, the public, keep letting this happen? Because many of us, knowingly and unknowingly, instinctively uphold the colonial route.
We’re all colonialists, really
Yes, I said it. We’re nearly all tainted by empire’s original sin, whether we like it or not. As Dr Robert Saunders surmised:
postcolonialism cannot be something that happens only to other people. One of the great insights of postcolonial scholarship has been its insistence on the ubiquity of post-imperial ‘habits of thought’ and its sensitivity to their manifold forms of expression; a recognition that, as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, ‘We – all of us – are still [empire’s] inheritors’. Applying that insight to the Brexit debate requires us to recognise post-imperial patterns of thought, not as a psychological affliction to which only half the population is subject, but as a common cultural inheritance through which all sides think and argue.
provide ‘the leadership in Europe which Britain and Europe need’, putting Britain ‘once again … at the centre of international decision-making’. Britain, he told Commonwealth Heads of Government, had resumed its ‘true role’ as a ‘pivotal’ power.
Deluded
Of course, these colonialists will all deny and attempt to whitewash the colonialism of the past and present. And many of us will buy it. During a general election, a majority of us will vote for one of them – or maybe their counterparts in a smaller party. After this, we’ll move on (probably moaning along the way in a very British queue somewhere). And this will continue ad infinitum, until the planet has had enough and drowns/crisp-fries/freezes/oxygen-starves us all.
Our colonial past and present has left most of us, at best, only capable of seeing UK politics through the prism of hierarchy. We’re all participants in this racist, classist sham we call the United Kingdom. Our leaders believe they have the God-given right to lead. Truss’s catastrophic tenure summed this up. Colonialism lives on in modern corporate capitalist and neoliberal forms. It shapes a corrupt, deluded, servile nation obsessed with its own fantasy of global power – and that’s not going to change any time soon.
Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It’s time that we right these wrongs.
These are the last two sentences of Joe Biden’s statement on his executive order from 6 October that granted pardons for all those convicted of simple possession of cannabis. Biden also called for the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to begin the process of rescheduling cannabis in federal law. In most liberal circles, this was celebrated as a huge win for justice and a big symbolic step towards ending the ‘war on drugs’. It also served as a very easy win for Democrats to tout during the upcoming election season, and to silence critics of Biden from the left.
Quickly, however, the cracks began to show when pro-legalization organizations, advocates for undocumented immigrants, racial justice organizers, and others began pointing out inconvenient facts about the executive order. These facts included that undocumented immigrants were excluded from the order; that this wasn’t expungement, meaning that people still have these crimes on their records; and that nobody was released from prison as a result of this order.
These things being noted, and many are asking what the point of the order was if so many were left out and so little was done to enact immediate material change. I argue that the point of moves like these – that look radical but are anything but – is primarily to maintain the illusion of the United States as a nation of progress—specifically in the eyes of white liberals.
Settler colonial society
Some historical perspective is helpful in understanding the dynamics of our present. The United States is a society that was born through the violent invasion of Native people’s land, the attempted genocide of their peoples (which is still ongoing), the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the colonization and theft of the resources of nations all over the planet. This is what is called a settler colonial society. Settler colonial societies exist because of unimaginable colonial violence, but these same societies often justify their existence based on their ‘advancement’ and ‘level of civility’.
Realistically, one would question how a society that engages in genocide and slavery can also see itself as the most advanced democracy on the planet. In truth, all settler colonial societies – the US included – are societies held together by cognitive dissonance. There are always far-right elements who actively lean into their genocidal past, but most other members of settler colonial societies want to see themselves as good people who are part of a good society. To this end, an entire culture develops to protect white settler citizens and their descendants from the reality of the violence meted out daily in order to sustain their lives.
The two main ways to prolong this status quo is to imagine away the violence altogether, or to somehow justify the violence directly. A big example of the latter is the justification for cannabis criminalization in the first place. Cannabis was painted as a key driver of Black and Brown criminality. That imagined connection between cannabis and criminal savagery justified the creation of the prison industrial complex and the expansion of police over the past century. You also see this in the denial of the brutality of chattel slavery in US school textbooks, and the minimizing or purposeful ignorance of the crimes of historical figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. There are many other examples, but they all serve to allow primarily middle class white Americans to keep their image of the US as the “shining city on the hill” intact.
True, substantive change
This brings us back to the present, and to Biden himself. Many liberals in 2016 touted him as the cure to the rot that is Donald Trump. He was supposed to usher in much-needed reforms – the biggest being a proper Covid-19 response strategy and to address anti-Black police violence. On both fronts we’ve gotten a lot of talk, but not many of the concrete measures vulnerable communities have been asking for.
Instead, Biden and his party have engaged in reifying the myth of the ‘urgency of normal’ in the case of Covid-19 to protect corporate profits. Similarly, they have played into the myth that police solve crime by facilitating the ballooning of already excessive police budgets. This contradiction is why things like the cannabis executive order are necessary. They serve as a way for his liberal base to hold onto the idea that society is still “progressing”. That means they don’t have to question, for example, how Biden’s own actions are a large part of why we need cannabis reform in the first place. It’s these things that are used to silence marginalized people when we rightfully criticize Democrats for not truly addressing the needs of our communities or apologizing for their part in preventing us from meeting them.
Americans have been largely conditioned to downplay harm. If we want to truly see a more just world, we – especially the most privileged among us – have to resist that conditioning. We have to see this society and our leaders for what they truly are, and not the illusion that is fed to us. It’s through that resistance that we will collectively achieve the resolve necessary to push for true, substantive change that actually unbinds us from this country’s terrible past.
You can’t have missed the Conservative government nearly imploding on Wednesday 19 October. From resignations to ‘don’t give a fuck’s‘, via bullying and a collapse in comms – the Tory party is eating itself alive. While this may seem very entertaining, this Westminster soap opera is just that. Because back in the real world, for the rest of us, life is as difficult as it was before this latest Conservative clusterfuck.
The Ladybird Book of Chaos Volume 2
Liz Truss’s government had its own political Black Wednesday on 19 October. The day started innocuously enough, with a predictable mauling for the PM at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). Keir Starmer’s Labour honed in on Truss’s now-infinite U-turns – with the opposition benches chanting “gone” as he read out a list of her backtracking. Bad dad jokes from Starmer followed, along with the thinly-veiled notion that somehow his right-wing party would be better than the far-right one we currently have in charge. Truss may have thought that was bad enough, but PMQs was just a taster of things to come.
Out of nowhere, in the mid-afternoon, home secretary Suella Braverman quit after she said she broke ministerial rules. Of course, she didn’t really quit because she broke the rules – it’s almost in the Tory Party job description to do that. What Braverman was actually doing was piling the pressure on Truss to do the same. From here, the PM and the government’s day spiralled. She had to appoint arch-critic and expertfuckwit Grant Shapps as home secretary – a perfect fit for Truss’s equally clusterfucking government, you might think. However, even Shapps couldn’t have cocked up as much as the Tory Party did for the rest of the day. His appointment, along with Jeremy Hunt’s, is looking more and more like a coup in the making.
A very Tory farce
The moment everything spun out of control for the government was the vote on fracking. It seems that the Tories tried to make it a confidence vote in the PM. They did this by enforcing a three-line whip, meaning that any MP who didn’t vote with the government could face the party booting them out. However, just before the vote a minister said it wasn’t a confidence vote – leaving parliament in chaos. Right-wing Labour MP Chris Bryant alleged that he saw senior Tories using “bullying” and physical manhandling to get Tory MPs into parliament to vote. Bryant claimed two of the MPs doing the manhandling were time-travelling Victorian Jacob Rees-Mogg and cigar-smokingprescription sharer Thérèse Coffey.
All this led to the chief and deputy whips resigning. The latter apparently walked out of the Commons screaming “I am fucking furious and I don’t give a fuck anymore!”. Meanwhile, Truss apparently grabbed the chief whip Wendy Morton to stop her resigning. Except no-one, including Downing Street, seemed to know if they had resigned or not. This was probably because they hadn’t actually resigned – as Truss’s comms team confirmed later that evening. Confused yet? You should be – the Tories clearly were. Just to finish off this farce, at 1:30am on Thursday 20 October, the government confirmed that the fracking vote was indeed a confidence vote – after it was, then it wasn’t.
Back in the real world…
So, as of 12:30pm on Thursday 20 October, it’s looking like the Tory Party might sack Truss as she’s meeting with the 1922 committee boss; parliament will investigate MPs’ behaviour, and everyoneelseoutside the Tory Party is calling for a general election. The EastEnders and Hollyoaks scriptwriters must be seething in jealousy. Even the most extravagant of soap operas couldn’t match the Westminster bubble on 19 October. But for the rest of us, all this is a world away from what’s going in our lives. Amid the Tory omnishambles, we found out inflation has hit 10.1% – with the rate on food hitting nearly 15%. Some mortgage rates have hit 14-year highs. More people were skipping meals than at the start of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. To top it all off, almost 11 million households, one in three, could be in fuel poverty next year.
The Tory chaos may be entertaining for Westminster bubble journalists and Labour MPs looking to score quick dad-joke wins. But behind the awful behaviour, devious agendas, and narcissistic power-struggles lies a democracy and a political and economic system that has collapsed around us. It’s one that never really worked for most of us, anyway. But now, as the Tory Party implodes, the rest of us have to continue to pick up the pieces of our own shattered lives, while Westminster spirals out of control.
There is a shameful public tragedy unfolding day by day as the Bainimarama government tries to stop a potential political candidate, lawyer and former journalist Richard Naidu, from getting into Parliament by trying to “criminalise” him over a trivial social media post.
Richard Naidu is one of Fiji’s leading lawyers, for decades a fighter for democracy and rule of law, with a deep social conscience that drove him to frequently write articles in the media to enlighten Fiji on relevant issues of vital interest.
Naidu’s alleged crime: a trivial post on his personal Twitter account that a legal judgment probably intended to say “injunction” rather than “injection” — an error that may have even been a typist’s error which the learned judge failed to pick up (as we all all do now and then).
No big deal any sensible person or judge would have thought, or even slightly funny.
But the malevolent forces running the Bainimarama government, suddenly pounced on Richard Naidu five months after that social media post, for allegedly “scandalising the judiciary”.
The media speculation was that Naidu became a target when there were public indications that he might be a candidate for the opposition National Federation Party (NFP), and if elected would have made an excellent Attorney-General.
But if he is convicted of this alleged “crime”, Richard Naidu would not be allowed to be a candidate in the 2022 elections, he might face a jail term and be deprived of legal practice. One can only imagine the dreadful trauma for his wife and family — all for a trivial throwaway line on Twitter, by a witty lawyer.
The tragedy is not that the Attorney-General and Minister of All Things (Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum) is driving this legal persecution — which he is — just as he has been the driver of the Bainimarama government for more than 14 years.
The real tragedy is the utter silence of the many bright people, once upon a time pro-democracy fighters with me, who have helped to bring Bainimarama to power and strengthened his government’s credibility nationally and internationally over the last 16 years.
The unfolding tragedy is far more painful for me personally as most of these silent warriors for Bainimarama and Sayed-Khaiyum, were friends with whom I closely interacted more than a decade ago.
A recent Fiji Times article on “good governance” by Richard Naidu … enlightening Fiji on relevant issues of vital interest. Image: The Fiji Times screenshot APR
The shameful silences At the head of the list of course has to be Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum himself, who shared a cell with me for our 1988 Sukuna Park protest against the Rabuka coup. My wife and I attended his first wedding function.
Then there is Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum who was a good journalist friend who used to invite me to his family home for Eid. Riyaz has been driving the vicious Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) media campaign to tarnish Richard Naidu. Aiyaz and Riyaz are sons of Khaiyum Sr who welcomed me into the NFP parliamentary team in 1996.
Wadan Narsey (second from left) being welcomed by friends after being elected National Federation Party’s MP for Suva Central Indian in 1996. (Syed Abdul Khaiyum is on the right). Image: Narsey On Fiji
Then there are Nazhat Shameem and Shaista Shameem who were part of the Shameem family who used to welcome me and my wife to their mother’s home in Samabula.
As a bright High Court judge, Nazhat took to the slippery slope when she irregularly chaired a committee that replaced Chief Justice Danial Fateaki with Tony Gates.
We all remember that Gates tried to justify the 2006 coup alongside fellow High Court judges Davendra Pathik and John Byrnes, but failed when the 2009 Court of Appeal overturned their judgment.
Nazhat Shameem is now a high flying international bureaucrat, President of the International Human Rights Council. But she has been totally silent on the abuse of human rights going on in Fiji, and currently to the mistreatment of her old legal colleague Richard Naidu.
Shaista Shameem, a friend for decades until she justified the 2006 coup as a Fiji Human Rights Commissioner assisted by once radical unionist James Anthony. Despite that, I went to months of trouble to help her in making the legal case for pensioner (the late) David Burness against the Bainimarama government’s illegal reduction of his pension.
Shaista Shameem is now professor of law and vice-chancellor at the University of Fiji. She is totally silent on the abuse of human rights in Fiji and that of Richard Naidu who is also a lawyer like her.
Shaista has even appointed as professor of law Brigadier Aziz who saw at close quarters through his membership of the Evans Board of Inquiry into the 2000 coup and mutiny, the erosion of human right to life in the Republic of Fiji Military Force (RFMF).
There is Dr Satyendra Prasad, a former USP colleague who was part of our group (including the Citizens Constitutional Forum) that battled for democracy and racial equality after the 1987 Rabuka coup. Dr Prasad has astonishingly resurfaced politically serving the Bainimarama cause in New York and Washington.
Then there is Ashwin Raj (head of the Fiji Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission) who once upon a time was helped by Professor Biman Prasad and me to get a substantive post at USP.
He has faithfully served the Bainimarama regime for years (including the vicious persecution of the late Ratu Timoci Vesikula for an alleged racist remark), but Raj could never be accused of defending the many persons in Fiji whose basic human rights have been attacked by the Bainimarama regime itself.
Ashwin Raj is silent on this current attack on the basic human right of a Fiji citizen to point out on social media, a possible spelling mistake in a legal judgment.
There is the shadowy RFMF Military Council which is the real power behind Voreqe Bainimarama, that Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum has silently used. I have little doubt that many of these officers were in the post-2000 classes I taught at the RFMF Officer Training courses in Vatuwaqa.
They would also have been in the early 2006 pre-election workshops at the RFMF camp in Nabua, attended by the top 400 RFMF officers, including Commander Voreqe Bainimarama who today is allegedly powerless to control his rampaging deputy.
Wadan Narsey (right) with the late former NZ High Commissioner Michael Green (left), Police Commissioner Andrew Hughes and Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama – well before the 2006 Fiji coup. Image: Narsey On Fiji
Then there is also Brigadier General Ioane Naivalarua who, as Commissioner of Police in 2010, invited me to give a two hour workshop to his top police officers on how to tackle escalating crime in Fiji and the costs to the police of the coups.
It would seem that all my detailed explanations to the RFMF and police hierarchy of the terrible economic costs of the coups — and to them — clearly fell on deaf ears.
Wadan Narsey lecturing to Fiji troops and Police Commissioner Brigadier Ioane Navalarua. Image: Narsey On Fiji
Then there are the corporate giants of Fiji who have been financially backing the Bainimarama government’s FijiFirst Party for years. The donors’ lists released by the Supervisor of Elections through the Fiji Sun two years ago, showed conclusively that hundreds of thousands of dollars were donated over the period 2014 to 2018 by the owners, their wives, daughters, mothers and even employees of Tappoos, Vinod Patels, Punjas, RC Manubhais, CJ Patels, the Wella Pillays etc through the strong-arm fundraising by Sanjay Kaba and other collectors.
These corporate giants, while occupying key positions on pubic enterprise boards in Fiji as never before, have never spoken out on their social responsibilities in Fiji such as the protection of human rights.
Yet Richard Naidu is a principal lawyer of a top law firm in Fiji, Munro Leys, with a well-earned reputation for protecting lawful corporate rights in Fiji — including theirs.
The silent Pontius Pilates Like modern day Pontius Pilates, the above silent protagonists for Bainimarama and Khaiyum seen to have washed their hands of the basic human rights of Fiji citizens which are being battered left right and centre by the Bainimarama government that they helped to install.
As if all that matters to them are their profits and their personal careers and interests.
But Fiji will not forget them and their complicit silences, nor their shared responsibility in the abuses of human rights taking place in Fiji.
Sadly, Fiji people have not spoken out and taken to the streets when so many individuals have been unjustly persecuted after the 2006 military coup, like Russel Hunter, Hank Arts, Fred Wesley, Netani Rika, Anish Chand, Mereana Kitione, Kemueli Naiqama, Professor Pal Ahluwalia and so many others.
Many, like Professor Biman Prasad and other critical opposition MPs face daily attacks by the FBC and Fiji Sun for their efforts to hold the Bainimarama government to account.
And now they are after decent law-abiding lawyer Richard Naidu, all because he put up his hand to serve Fiji in Parliament at great financial cost to himself.
As I have done before, I remind Fiji readers of the wonderful lines attributed to Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller who was originally anti-Communist, an early supporter of Hitler, and even thought by some to have had anti-Semitic views:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Pastor Niemöller, like Archbshop Chong (head of the Catholic Church in Fiji) currently, frequently spoke on the dangers to decent society of the apathy of the general public.
I would urge the governments of Australia, NZ, US and Canada to keep a close watch on the progress of this legal case by the Bainimarama government and also of the names of the silent collaborators, who will one day no doubt want to settle in decent countries with respect for the rule of law, which they have helped to destroy in Fiji.
Dr Wadan Narsey is a former professor of economics at The University of the South Pacific and a leading Fiji economist and statistician. This article is republished from the author’s blog Narsey On Fiji with his permission.
To the superficial observer, it may be a blessing the despots and dictators, human rights abusers, like Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Colombia’s Iván Duque; Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno; Chile’s Sebastián Piñera; to name just a few, are gone, have disappeared from the Latin American political arena, in what was made believe to be democratic elections.
Good, you may think. These countries have a better future ahead. So, who are the new “leaders” of just these four “demo-countries”?
Argentina: Alberto Fernández; label “center-left”;
Colombia: Gustavo Petro; label “left”;
Ecuador: Guillermo Lasso; officially described as “the country’s first center-right president in nearly two decades”. What a lie! Moreno was so right-wing; he could easily be dubbed a fascist.
Chile: Gabriel Boric; label “left”.
There are many more of these “new left” leaders throughout Latin America. Those who were not recently replaced by “democratic elections”, had to bend to methods of coercion and “obedience” to stay in place or alive. Nicaragua may be a case in point.
They all have in common being graduates or scholars of Klaus Schwab’s (WEF) Academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL). Schwab himself boasted earlier this year, how “we were able to infiltrate countries’ governments [with YGLs’] around the world.”
So, think again. Are these countries now better off with their new “left” or “socialist” governments? Hardly. But they carry the very confusing label of being “left”- meaning for the good of the people. That, in today’s world is a total lie, outright BS.
You must know – left and right have seized to exist already twenty to thirty years ago, when globalism entered center-stage. Now there are only Globalists and the others. The others are too many. They have to be massively reduced, by fake and coerced “vaxxes” which may cause immediate death, lingering diseases to death, destruction of natural immunity, infertility and many more deadly calamities; and endless wars, possibly nuclear wars and most certainly weather wars – all under the pretense that wars bring peace.
What is even more disturbing than this dystopia is that today still the majority of people buy all these propaganda slogans and lies. Even if they know, something is not quite right, they still go along. Their conscience doesn’t want to infringe on their comfort zone. They are suffering under cognitive dissonance.
They are the perfect citizens for the globalists. If they survive, they will become digitized slaves, owning nothing but being happy.
All the new progressive LAC leaders – and many others around the world (Schwab’s pride, the YGLs) have been put into their positions to defend the anti-human Globalist Agenda. Of course, they were all “democratically elected”.
Cyber-targeted, AI-steered, election propaganda and outright election fraud have become so sophisticated that most people can’t see it, or even if they would see it, they wouldn’t want to believe in so much evil. Good old cognitive dissonance is an integral part of the Globalists take-over formula.
Is President Biden, a “Democrat”, the US equivalent of “left-leaning” – good for the people?
Absolutely not. He, and his vassalic European counterparts, are abject globalists, destroying the US and Europe to the detriment of the people, following the Financial-IT complex’s mandate of artificial energy crises, food shortages, and, of course, “climate change and / or global warming” – which will lead to water shortages, to privatization of the remaining pristine water resources and eventually to water wars.
And remember – all will be the Russians fault, and by extension the Chinese. A fake emperor always needs a fake enemy to survive. But fakeness is shining through the ever thinner vail of an imploding pyramid of lies and deceptions.
Man-made climate change, also called “geoengineering” – or weather warfare, is part of the Reset/Agenda 2030 program, all supported by Biden, and, by scholarly obedience, also by the new LAC (Latin America and Caribbeans) leaders – and all those submissive puppets of the 193 UN members – plus the entire UN leadership. All are bought, coerced, or blackmailed.
It’s the end-phase. Only we, the awakened, can stop this treacherous approach to a new world governance.
First you should know that worldwide – including in Europe and even in the United States, no President or Prime Minister is being “elected” without the approval of “Washington”, which is the front and the face for the behind the scene reigning giant digital-financial interests that rule not only Washington, but the world.
Yes, all 193 UN member countries and the UN itself and all its specialized technical “sub-organization” are controlled and directed by this digital-financial complex.
To refresh our memories – they include on top of the financial empire pyramid, BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet. The first two are interlinked, able to act as one asset manager, if convenient. Further down, the road, follow minor giants, like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, UBS and more.
The first three control literally all western production, including food manufacturing processes, by direct or indirect majority stock owners. They are majority shareholders in everything. This just as a background to better understand their power and leverage over the world.
If by “miscalculation” the wrong PM or President is “elected” – he or she will be ousted. Of course, even that will be done, so that people think, the coup was carried out internally.
Take Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan, was democratically elected in 2018 by a two thirds majority of Pakistanis. He was a leader of the people and for the people. He wanted his country to regain political sovereignty, be free to choose Pakistan’s alliances, for example China and Russia, to the detriment of the United States. Imran Khan was ousted as PM on 10 April 2022 by a Washington instigated Pakistani parliamentary no-confidence motion. He was immediately succeeded by his Washington-friendly opponent, Shehbaz Sharif.
Any leader who doesn’t dance to the tune of Washington, or rather – doesn’t follow the orders of the WEF, backed and directed by the Cult, the IT-Financial complex, will simply be removed.
Regime change may come in different shades of Color Revolutions. Presidents Putin and Xi are certainly in the Cult’s crosshairs. Endless lie-campaigns and war propaganda, may eventually convince the public at large that nothing less than a nuclear attack on Russia can bring peace to the world. War is Peace and Peace is War (1984, George Orwell).
The spirit of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, the acknowledged father of public relations and war propagandist per excellence – is alive and well.
Latin America is just being highjacked by the worldwide phenomenon of selling neoliberal Globalism as people-friendly socialism.
People wake up. Your leaders (sic) are not for you but against you. The same as is the case throughout the west. We, the People, have to fend for ourselves. Consciously and vehemently. Otherwise, we will be doomed.
Once again Aotearoa New Zealand’s local elections were plagued by low voter turnout and a lack of engagement. Is the media coverage, or lack thereof, contributing to the problem — and what can it do to help?
In dozens of campaign trail appearances, new Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown told audiences he planned to get rid of board members on the council-controlled organisations Auckland Transport and Eke Panuku.
But just days after his election victory, employment lawyer Barbara Buckett gave RNZ’s Morning Report what appeared to be surprising news on that repeated promise.
“There are legal processes and procedures that have to be followed [with board members’ employment],” she said.
“While he can influence, he certainly can’t interfere.”
Buckett added that the governing body of Auckland Council would have to consent to any changes to the boards.
Interviewer Guyon Espiner seemed startled.
‘He doesn’t have the power’
“So he doesn’t actually have power to do this?” he laughed. “He’s campaigned on something he can’t do?”
That reaction was understandable.
Despite admirable efforts from Stuff’s Todd Niall, the Herald’s Simon Wilson, The Spinoff and publicly-funded Local Democracy reporters, the promises and policies coming from mayoral candidates hadn’t received quite the same level of scrutiny they would have had if this were a general election.
If tough, fact-checking coverage was in comparatively short supply for the most high-profile mayoral election in the country, it was sometimes non-existent in ward races and less-heralded mayoral contests.
Pippa Coom, who lost her seat in Auckland’s Waitematā ward, told Mediawatch she didn’t see much coverage at all of her tight ward race against Mike Lee.
She said some media outlets didn’t publish their usual rundowns on ward races like hers, and as a result the “void was filled by misinformation and attack ads”.
“As a candidate I have to absolutely take responsibility for my own loss and for not reaching my potential supporters and not getting people out to vote,” she said.
“But the media coverage is such an important part of our democracy and our elections. So if it’s not there, it is going to … have an impact on election turnout and the result.”
Lack of coverage, engagement
The lack of coverage was matched by a lack of engagement from the public.
The number one reason given was that they didn’t know anything about the candidates. Number two was that they didn’t know enough about the policies — and number three was that they couldn’t work out who to vote for.
In the weeks before the election, RNZ’s Lucy Xia vox-popped some Auckland students who told her that not only did they not vote, but they didn’t know the identity of the city’s mayor.
“I don’t really have an opinion,” one said. “Maybe for the prime minister next year. But for mayor? I don’t have views.”
The lack of engagement weighed on the mind of fill-in presenter John Campbell during last weekend’s episode of TVNZ’s Q+A.
Poorer suburbs lagged behind
In conversation with reporter Katie Bradford, he pointed to turnout in the poorer suburbs of Auckland, which — as usual — lagged behind richer areas.
“You have to say that a turnout below 20 percent in Ōtara is heartbreaking. It’s not good enough either,” he said.
“This is a dismal fail by someone.”
He went on to list some possible culprits for that — including central government, uninspiring local candidates and the election system itself.
There is some evidence pointing toward all of those.
In a BusinessDesk column, Pattrick Smellie said postal voting favours older homeowners, who are more likely to stick around at an address and to send letters than younger people and renters.
“It’s hardly news that no one under 40 has much experience of actually posting a letter. We’ve known for a while that postal voting skews local body voting to the asset-owning classes,” he wrote.
TVNZ reporter Katie Bradford, current press gallery chair . . . “It’s almost a chicken and egg situation. How much coverage the media does is so much based on what we think the public wants.” Image: TVNZ/RNZ
‘Boring’ consultation processes
Others criticised local government’s consultation processes, which are often boring and inaccessible for people with busy lives, along with the ratepayer roll which gives homeowners a vote for each property they own in different places.
But in response to Campbell, Bradford honed in on the media’s role in voter disengagement.
“I’m passionate about local government and there are lots of people out there who are. But how do we show people why it matters? It’s a frustration as a journalist,” she said.
Bradford told Mediawatch it was unclear whether the comparative paucity of media coverage on local government reflected a lack of public interest in the topic — or vice versa.
“It’s almost a chicken and egg situation. How much coverage the media does is so much based on what we think the public wants, and if people aren’t picking up the paper, or they’re switching off the radio or the TV when local government stories are on, they’re not going to run them,” Bradford told Mediawatch.
TV and radio had particular difficulty producing interest stories about local government because council meetings aren’t renowned for creating interesting visuals or soundbites, Bradford said.
‘Maybe media partly to blame’
“All of this stuff is so important and I think people think it’s always central government’s fault. They don’t necessarily think there’s council involvement and maybe the media is partly to blame for not explaining that stuff enough,” she said.
“But it’s not just our job. It’s also the job of Local Government NZ and councils to explain that.”
Bradford backed the idea of giving local government a similar amount of attention as central government, which is covered round-the-clock by teams of press gallery reporters.
But the economics of that move likely wouldn’t stack up for newsrooms, which are already experiencing significant financial constraints, she said.
She thought reporters could help by targeting the broken parts of the electoral system and shining a spotlight on the things that keep people from engaging with councils.
“This election shows that turnout didn’t get any better despite quite extensive coverage, despite a big campaign by LGNZ and others.
“Whatever we have right now is not working,” she said. “Something has to change.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
We need to know how many people didn’t vote because they didn’t receive their ballot papers and what practical obstacles to voting might have occurred.
We also need to know how many people just couldn’t be bothered, and if some people made a conscious choice not to vote. A conscious choice is a legitimate democratic decision.
Wayne Brown’s campaign for the Auckland mayoralty may have succeeded partly because it targeted people who traditionally vote — property owners and people over 50. People who are less likely to be Māori.
However, positioning Māori as Treaty partners to the Crown may also be a factor, because it overshadows The Māori citizenship as a share in the Crown’s authority to govern.
Participating in the affairs of government is a greater political authority than partnership. The state is a large and powerful institution and always the senior partner in the relationships it forms. Its partners may have a voice, but they don’t have the right to help make decisions. Decision-making is the task of the participant.
Democracy requires complementary participation
While there are examples of council/Māori partnerships that work well, democracy requires that they complement participation, rather than take its place.
Te Tiriti wasn’t a partnership between races. It was an agreement over the distribution of political authority. Rangatiratanga, as an independent Māori authority over Māori affairs, on the one hand, and the right of the British Crown to establish government on the other.
Auckland’s new mayor, Wayne Brown (right), may have succeeded at the election against Fa’anānā Efeso Collins by targeting people who own property and people over 50 – people who are less likely to be Māori. Image: RNZ News
Te Tiriti didn’t intend that the rights of government should override the rights of rangatiratanga. Indeed, it provided a check against this outcome by granting Māori the rights and privileges of British subjects.
In 1840 those rights and privileges were not extensive. But, in 2022 they have developed into the rights, privileges and political capacities of New Zealand citizenship.
Most importantly, citizenship means that everybody has the right and obligation to participate in public decision-making. They should expect that their contributions have the same likelihood of influence as anybody else’s.
Nobody should have reason to feel so alienated from the system that they can’t see the point of voting. Māori wards are supposed to guard against this possibility by supporting active participation and influence.
Influence means being able to participate with reference to culture and colonial context.
Yet, in 2019, the Iwi Chairs’ Forum commissioned a report on constitutional transformation, Matike Mai Aotearoa.
Ethnically exclusive Pakeha body
It comments on what rangatiratanga looks like, but it sees citizenship as the domain of its partner, the Crown. It sees the Crown as an ethnically exclusive Pakeha body governing only for “its people”.
In other words, government is for other people. It’s not for us because rangatiratanga is where our exclusive political authority lies. Our relationship with government is as Treaty partner.
Another view is that rangatiratanga and citizenship are different but complementary. While voting doesn’t matter if one is a partner, it’s essential if one is a participant. Participation means, as Justice Joe Williams, argued, that, there is a need for a mindset shift away from the pervasive assumption that the Crown is Pākehā [non-Māori], English-speaking, and distinct from Māori rather than representative of them.
“Increasingly, in the 21st century, the Crown is also Māori. If the nation is to move forward, this reality must be grasped.”
The review is required to consider Treaty partnership. But it has also decided to be “bold” in its thinking.
Boldness could mean strengthening Te Tiriti and democracy by thinking beyond partnership as a treaty principle, established by the Court of Appeal in 1987, to thinking about the real substance of rangatiratanga and citizenship.
Local government functions by iwi
Rangatiratanga could mean that not all local government functions need to be carried out by councils. There may be some that are more logically and justly carried out by iwi, hapu, marae, or other Māori political communities.
The ideal that decisions are best made at the point closest to where their effects are experienced is a well-established democratic principle.
Citizenship is different from rangatiratanga but especially important because if Māori are, like everybody else, shareholders in the Crown’s authority to govern, then they are entitled to make culturally distinctive contributions to council decisions.
They are also entitled to expect that councils’ powers and decision-making processes will work for them as well as they work for anybody else.
Increasing voter turnout depends on people believing that councils make a positive contribution to their lives.
Professor Dominic O’Sullivan (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu) is adjunct professor at Auckland University of Technology’s (AUT) Taupua Waiora Centre for Māori Health Research, and professor of political science at Charles Sturt University in Australia. He is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by Stuff and is republished with the author’s permission.
Much like individual change, societal developments happen gradually, often painfully; even when sudden shifts take place, seemingly ‘out of the blue’, they are the result of an accumulation of incremental steps – the last straw on the camel’s back as it were. Small developments may slip by unnoticed, major events scream out and demand our attention. Take man-made global warming – going on for 70 years or so, ignored for most of that time, until one July, when, in 40°C heat people collapse, crops are wiped out, water is rationed and drought blights the land.
Whilst it’s true that change is, paradoxically, constant, dramatic shifts, life-changing developments, by their very nature, occur only rarely, at key moments. Globally, we are living through such a time of major change; a transitional time akin to that step from one age group to another, adolescence into early adulthood, for example. A moment when everything is, potentially, set to shift and evolve, when old habits and ways of living, recognized as inadequate, either fall away naturally or are rejected.
Signs that we are living through such a time have been evident for a while – decades, longer probably, and have year on year become more and more widespread and diverse. The momentum for change, and with it resistance (which is intense) from those wedded to the status quo, appears to be reaching a point of crisis. Battle lines are exposed, delineating the choices before humanity, alternative values and modes of living that are becoming more defined, and more opposed all the time.
The political-economic arena has been the primary field of conflict and resistance, and also opportunity. This all-pervasive space encompasses most, if not all, areas of contemporary life, including education and health care, the environment, international relations, immigration, defense, etc; it shapes values and determines the direction of collective travel. Differing viewpoints have become increasingly polarized, opinions hardened. And, growing out of the vacuum created by government’s inability to meet the challenges of the time, and the uncertainty caused by clinging to systems and modes of living that are day by day being drained of life, extremism has exploded; populism, on the left and most fiercely, on the right of politics. Intolerance, prejudice and hate have accompanied this political polarization, dividing societies around the world.
Cynical politicians hungry for power have fueled and exploited these splits, inflamed divisions with the politics of tribal nationalism and intolerance. Truth has been perverted, facts questioned or disregarded; democracy, limited to begin with, has been undermined and autocratic leaders/demagogues have surfaced, or intensified their stifling grip on power.
When and how?
As points of crisis draw near in diverse, yet interconnected areas – climate/ecosystems, economic uncertainty and mass migration/displacement of persons, energy supplies and war, food security and global health threats, demands for solutions intensify.
Current socio-economic-political methodologies hold no answers, and are increasingly seen to be inadequate. Rooted in the Ideologies of Division Exploitation and Greed (Imperialism and Neo-liberalism), they are an integral part of the problem and cannot therefore respond adequately to the current challenges, which are immense. Creative solutions consistent with the emerging times are called for; compassionate alternatives rooted in social justice and freedom.
Systemic change in the economic sphere is desperately needed. Neo-Liberalism, which dominates the global economy, is a poisonous unjust ideology that relies on unlimited, irresponsible consumption and promotes greed, exploitation and inequality. Once change in this area takes place, and a more humane unifying and just model is introduced, then development in a range of other related areas becomes possible – health care and education, the eradication of food insecurity and large scale action on the environment.
It is values that need to change first though, and among many people they are changing; systems, policies and structures will naturally follow. Central to shifting values is the idea of unity, a recognition that humanity is one, varied, diverse but whole. This is not some incense-coated pseudo-religious fluff, but a fact (spelled out many times by visionary figures throughout the ages) in nature that is sensed by people everywhere; a fact that the existing socio-economic ideology, with its emphasis on competition and selfishness, actively works against.
Unity is a primary quality of the time, as is cooperation and tolerance. From these primary Principles of Goodness a series of positive consequences, or secondary colors flows: social and environmental responsibility, the eradication of prejudice; sharing as an economic social principle; social justice and equality, brotherhood — talked about for at least two thousand years, known in the heart but expressed fleetingly — and understanding of self and others. Unity shatters tribalism and strengthens collaboration; working together encourages relationship and erodes fear of ‘the other’, which in turn dissolves tensions and creates a space in which conflict is less likely. These are the values and ideals of the time, not radical, not new, perennial values that have been long buried and are now re-surfacing, influencing thinking in all areas of society. Coloring social and environmental initiatives, empowering popular action and driving change.
Momentum is building and, despite entrenched resistance from fearful forces determined to maintain control and ensure the perpetuation of systems and attitudes that breed division and suffering, the question is no longer will there be fundamental change and the inauguration of new modes of living, but when and how.
The ‘when’ is not a fixed moment in time but a dynamic flow expanding throughout the now; the ‘how’ is a creative explosion of collective action, examples of which are all around us, in every country of the world.
Wherever voices are raised in praise of social justice there is the how and the now; when people, young and old, stand together, despite the risks, demanding freedom from suppression, that is the how and the now; it’s individuals forming groups, acting in unison, crying out for substantive environmental action; it’s the rise of Trades Unions; it’s thousands of community initiatives, large and small, throughout the world; it’s Citizens Assemblies and the fall of demagogues – some, not all; it’s the growing influence of so-called Green Politics and demands for equality in all areas.
These are the signs of the times; diverse worldwide manifestations of ‘the how’, occurring within ‘the now’. Daily they multiply and strengthen, and the forces of resistance falter; they are the seeds of evolving socio-economic-political forms; they are the promise of things to come, the forerunners of The New time, which, no matter how the forces of resistance kick and scream, cannot, and will not, be held at bay.
Barristers have won a 15% payrise, after months of strike action, which put a spanner of the works of the UK’s legal system.
The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) demanded a 25% increase in legal aid rates, but barristers finally agreed to the 15% offer after the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) agreed to pay the higher rate for cases within the 60,000 Crown Court backlog.
57% of the CBA’s members voted to accept the MoJ’s deal.
Critical solidarity
At the Canary we maintain a stance of solidarity with workers taking collective action. We support defence barristers organising for better pay. Barristers who prosecute – on the other hand – are akin to cops, judges and prison officers.
In September, as the strikers voted to escalate their action, we wrote:
if strikes like this are going to help us move toward societal change, they need to be about more than just pay and conditions.
It’s not enough for the ‘justice’ system to go back to normal once the CBA’s demands are met. We need to bring this system to its knees for good. The CJS [Criminal Justice System] is one of the primary mechanisms which the ruling class use to dominate and repress us. It is responsible for untold suffering and misery. It is a racist system which disproportionately affects people of colour. For example, Black people make up 10% of the prison population in the UK, despite only accounting for 3% of the UK’s overall population.
And whilst a 15% payrise for defence barristers may benefit some of the people who are brought before this racist, classist, transphobic and misogynist legal system, and need a decent defence, it will still leave the rotten system itself wholly unchanged.
Taking issue with the CBA
I take issue with one part of the CBA’s message to its members. As the Association announced the final ballot which ended the strike, it wrote:
The CBA remains committed to the future of the Criminal Bar and to the Criminal Justice System.
It’s clear that if our future is to be a just one, then it has to involve the downfall of the Criminal ‘Justice’ System, and the creation of community-led and truly democratic systems of transformative justice. Siding with the future of the CJS means siding with the oppressor.
A view on the strike from inside a segregation cell
if criminal barristers had a real belief in defending the innocent from wrongful imprisonment, they would make this strike about a lot more than just their pay-packets and in doing so could draw in the support of wider society.
It has not been the ever-decreasing standards of criminal trials – which have seen the introduction of anonymous witnesses, use of hearsay ‘evidence’, the slander that is bad character evidence, the ability for police and prosecutors to sit as jurors, the permissibility of double jeopardy or the mass use of the Joint Enterprise Doctrine – which has brought them out to protest. The campaigning organisation APPEAL set out 25 vital reforms to the criminal justice system earlier this year. It would not be difficult to adopt these as demands to go along with barristers’ quest for better rates of pay.
Today, the CBA has been victorious, but a system of oppression remains firmly and squarely in place. It is up to us to imagine a world without this system, and to fight for it.
Another prisoner’s perspective
We asked ex-prisoner, and anarchist, John Bowden for his perspective on the CJS. John spent over 40 years in the UK prison system. He said:
Essentially the criminal justice system exists as a state apparatus of repression and is the hard fist of that state, particularly exemplified by the prison system, whose inmate population is composed almost wholly of the poor and most marginalized, and disproportionately Black and ethnic minority, reflecting the institutionalised racism of the criminal justice system.
The deep structural class inequalities of this society require an apparatus of social control and repression to maintain “Law and Order”, and that is the prime purpose of the criminal justice system. Some lawyers are motivated by a noble intention to legally empower the most disempowered and provide them with the means to challenge injustice and state abuse, but the reality is that small partial legal victories do not change the structural reality of a fundamentally unjust and unequal society or a legal and judicial system that exists to defend and maintain that society.
True justice will never be achieved by a criminal justice system designed and intended to keep the poor down and maintain the social status quo. Those involved with that criminal justice system like lawyers, even when motivated by an intention to use the judiciary in a positive way to defend the powerless and most marginalised, should seriously consider if they’re just legitimising a system that exists for one sole purpose, to maintain and enforce the power of a system rooted in inequality and injustice.
Lawyers need to pick a side
In my opinion, we need to face two important facts. Firstly, the vast majority of barristers – including defence barristers (many of whom also prosecute) – stand with the establishment. Secondly, if we are to struggle against the state, we are going to need radical lawyers (that is, until the day when we can tear the whole rotten system down).
However, if lawyers are truly to be comrades, we need more than professionalism and careerism. We need true militancy and bravery. We need lawyers to take risks for the struggle, just like others must.
I’ve been involved in supporting comrades experiencing state repression for many years. Most recently, I’ve been supporting those criminalised after Bristol’s 2021 uprising against police violence. During my time as an organiser in this area I have met hundreds of lawyers, and only a tiny handful of them have displayed anything approaching radicalism.
It is possible to be a truly radical lawyer
Because of these experiences in my own communities, I’ve looked outside of the UK – at how people organise against state repression in other contexts. Occasionally, I’ve met lawyers who are integral parts of radical struggles, and who display bravery in opposing state oppression.
In Bakur, the part of Kurdistan within Turkey’s borders, an intense struggle against the state is raging. I’ve met defence lawyers who are part of radical organisations supporting defendants, prisoners and their families. These lawyers are prepared to take risks on behalf of their comrades, and many of them have been imprisoned themselves. When I visited Bakur this year, one lawyer told me that he had been arrested by Turkish police while he was representing a client in the courtroom. Another – Ibrahim Bilmez – was imprisoned for three years for representing Kurdistan Workers’ Party co-founder Abdullah Öcalan. Bilmez has since spent over a decade under investigation for terrorism.
I’d be willing to bet that none of these radical lawyers believe in the state system which they have trained in. Their role as radical lawyers is to defend – and to speak out for – their comrades. It is possible to firmly take a stand against the ‘justice’ system, even whilst working as a defence lawyer within it
Our future lies in the downfall of this system
The CBA’s statement that it is committed to the “future” of the CJS is at odds with the change we need in society. Our future lies in the downfall of that system.
We need bravery and dedication from the UK’s radical lawyers. We need their complicity in building a movement which can challenge the system that they’re a part of. Most of all, we need them to pick a side and stand with the people against the system, instead of with the state, careerism and capitalism.
Port Moresby’s “amazing city” tag in Papua New Guinea is fast losing its varnish and appeal — its veneer of a modern metropolis tarnished by an ethnic underbelly that relishes criminal activity, racial violence and a tendency to unleash aggressive violent behavior at any opportune time.
Last weekend’s violence which left three people dead is the fifth such “amazing act” this year, says an exasperated Police Commissioner David Manning.
The question, raised on social media, in homes, schools, offices, among local landowners, the Motu Koitabu, and discussed in pubs and boardrooms across the city, is: “When will enough be enough?’
When will Port Moresby truly rise above its ethnic cleansing bloodbath rituals to become the modern Amazing City of cross cultures that it professes to be, and that every peace loving Papua New Guinean wants to enjoy?
A drug deal gone wrong has sparked a deadly ethnic war between Eastern Highlands and Hela province people living in Port Moresby.
Yesterday, the fight was violent around the Erima, Wildlife, 8 and 9 Mile settlement areas as pitched battles raged.
NCD Governor Powes Parkop called for calm and for peace to return, adding it is against the law to carry offensive weapons in public.
‘Leave it to police’ call
Commissioner Manning also called for calm and for the warring parties to lay down their arms and let police investigate the killings.
As of last night, three men were dead and six wounded who were being treated at the Port Moresby General Hospital.
Last night, Gordon, Erima, Wildlife, 8 and 9 Mile were tense with police patrols keeping a close watch on those areas.
The ethnic clash, the fifth so far this year, is putting a huge dent on the National Capital Diustrict Commission’s (NCDC) effort to promote the capital city’s image as “Amazing Moresby”.
On social media, angry residents have taken not so kindly to the fighting with many urging the government to clamp down on ethnic groups from the Highlands by returning all settlers back to their province of origin.
The Vagrancy Act, which enables police to evict illegal settlers in the city, was thrown out at Independence, which has led to a growing settlement population in the city.
But fed up Motu Koitabu landowners and angry residents want the city cleaned up.
A call for martial law
One commentator even called for martial law to be enacted and the city cleaned of all illegal settlers.
The flare-up between men from the Eastern Highlands and Hela provinces has sent innocent women and children scattering for cover and refuge.
It is alleged the death of a man from Eastern Highlands during a drug deal is said to have started the fight. The police, however, cannot say much, but could only confirm that an investigation has commenced on the issue.
The roads around Erima and 9 Mile saw men and women running with offensive weapons.
While police tried their best to make their presence felt during the chaos, they were outnumbered as scores of men continued to fight.
Commissioner Manning said that any ethnic clashes at other major centres in the country were “unnecessary” and “unfortunate”.
“It is concerning how people can employ their tribal tactics and think that they can clash with other groups in the cities and towns,” he said.
These ethnic clashes are a result of a lack of appropriate policing interventions.
Why have settlements grown?
Furthermore, there are a lot of discussions on why we have allowed settlements to grow in the last two to three decades and whether those settlements contribute to these ethnic clashes, he added.
Meanwhile, NCD Governor Parkop warned city residents carrying weapons who have gone unnoticed.
Bows and arrows, machetes, iron bars, stones and other dangerous weapons were seen publicly yesterday at the Gordon bus stop and Erima with the ethnic clash still tense with police continuously patrolling the area.
City Manager Ravu Frank said this kind of behaviour was illegal. Unfortunately, lives have been lost. City residents have to move around freely and not be in fear of their safety.
The parties concerned must air their grievances to police.
Commissioner Manning said ethnic clashes were no longer restricted to rural centres and it had greater impact on everyone’s lives and gave concern to a lot of people, especially government and police when it happened in the urban environment.
In 2022 alone, five ethnic clashes have erupted between different groups — mostly from the Highlands region.
Miriam Zarrigais a PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.
On Saturday 8 October, thousands of people converged on the area around the UK parliament. They came out to form a human chain to show solidarity with imprisoned journalist Julian Assange. However, there was a bitter hypocrisy at the heart of the protest. While the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) officially supported the action, the allegedly left-wing Guardian and our public service broadcaster the BBC failed to report on it.
Thousands of campaigners joined MPs over the weekend to form a human chain around Parliament and protest against the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A chain of protesters snaked along Westminster Bridge on Saturday, along South Bank and back around Lambeth bridge completely surrounding the Houses of Parliament.
Assange’s wife Stella was at the demo and shared a video of it on Twitter:
Campaign group Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) organised the action. It said in its pre-demo statement:
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) calls on journalists unions, press freedom organisations and journalists to mobilise and express their solidarity.
Journalists should have responded accordingly to this. Outlets like the Evening Standard, the Independent, Reuters and Sky News did report on the protest. However, the coverage was watered down at best, with an Independent journalist saying “hundreds” of people attended, and Reuters calling Assange an activist when it knows full well he’s a journalist and publisher. However, all these outlets did better than the Guardian and the BBC – they didn’t report on the human chain at all.
it is vital for the UK government to make clear that extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange for these charges would be a grievous blow to the media freedom it promises to champion.
If… Assange is extradited, it will set forth fear among other journalists of doing anything to expose truth. It becomes a self-censorship of journalists all around the world.
Yet still, the Guardian and BBC failed to report on the demo.
Assange: fighting for freedom for us all
Maybe our increasingly fascist Tory government has made Guardian and BBC bosses cower for fear of persecution. Or maybe bosses’ worldviews don’t really marry with those of their worker-journalists – a not-uncommon phenomenon. Either way, for the UK’s biggest media union to be at the protest, and then for two of the UK’s biggest media outlets not to report on it, seems off-balance.
In a video message, Stella said that Assange would be “energised and thankful for the support” that people at the human chain and beyond had showed him:
Sadly, we now know that Assange has tested positive for coronavirus (Covid-19) while languishing in Belmarsh prison. The least the Guardian and BBC could have done was report on the protest in support of him. Not only is Assange fighting for our freedoms, he’s fighting for those of the journalists at those outlets, too.
An LGBT+ Conservative party at the Reflex nightclub in Birmingham was disrupted by homophobic abuse. The event took place on the final night of the Tories’ annual conference. Anyone with a conference pass could attend.
Sources told ITV News that at least two individuals had to be removed for the use of derogatory, threatening, and deeply homophobic language directed at other partygoers. One victim reported that:
We kicked someone out who was blind drunk and called me a dirty l***** and that I needed to watch my back.
We have had discussions with LGBT+ Conservatives regarding this incident, which took place outside of the conference secure zone, and offered them our support.
If those involved are identified as members of the Party, we will launch swift investigations.
Any form of discrimination or abuse is wrong and complaints can be made in confidence under our Code of Conduct.
Tory Homophobia
I must ask though, is anyone really that surprised at homophobia at a Tory conference? The Conservatives have a long and storied history of voting against gay interests. 136 of them voted against gay marriage, including Priti Patel, David Davies, and Kwasi Kwarteng. 30 Tory MPs tried to halt the fast-tracking of a bill to ban conversion therapy. More recently, Thérèse Coffey – whose voting record is strongly anti-gay rights – disregarded advice to procure extra vaccines against monkeypox. It just so happens that monkeypox is thus-far disproportionately affecting gay and bisexual men.
On the opening day of the conference, the LGBT+ Conservatives shared an image of their badges:
They used the caption “yOu cAnT bE gAy aNd a ToRy”. Though meant sarcastically, this obviously isn’t true. What is true, however, is that it takes someone willing to vote against their own interests to be LGBT+ and Tory. It takes someone who is willing to act as an ineffectual fig leaf for the party’s deep-running phobia. It takes someone willing to ignore a party that loathes them. This is a party that, at last year’s conference, just happened to put the LGBT+ Conservatives in section 28, recalling one of the most horrific acts of state hatred inflicted on queer people in the UK in modern times. The law known as Section 28 outlawed the promotion of homosexuality in schools and other institutions, and was only repealed in 2003 in England and Wales.
Homophobia on the rise
The news of homophobia at the LGBT+ Conservative party came just as the government released its official statistics on hate crime in the UK. The number of recorded homophobic hate crimes has increased by 41% since last year alone, rising from around 18,500 incidents to over 26,000. In turn, transphobic hate crimes have risen by 56%. This is a stark reminder of what any LGBT+ person living in the UK could already tell you: the UK is becoming a more openly hostile place for queer people to exist, day by day.
We all saw the naked transphobia that was on display during and after the Tory leadership contest. Of course, openly hating trans people was always going to be the thin end of the wedge. Truss and Sunak, in particular, targeted ‘woke’ issues (read, anything remotely progressive) more broadly, leading LGBT+ Tories to fear that their rights were being weaponised for electoral points scoring.
Falling silent
In an almost poetic illustration, the LGBT+ Conservatives tweeted an image of their pledge boards:
We can see numerous signatures on the board proclaiming “I pledge to be an ally to the LGBT+ community”. Beneath it, we can also see a board with maybe four signatures in total. It reads “I pledge to support trans rights”. This is a clear demonstration of what should be obvious: a Tory will drop their support for marginalised genders as soon as it becomes politically expedient. Why would this not be the case for marginalised sexualities, too?
Every Tory MP is a member of a party which has never done more for LGBT+ individuals than they absolutely had to in order to maintain a thin veneer of tolerance. When the party says that it supports LGBT+ people, we know that the ‘T’ was always silent – why else would it invite the LGB Alliance to its events? As the mask slips, as homophobia becomes increasingly normalised, we will watch every one of those other letters fall silent in turn.
New Zealand’s Ombudsman, Peter Boshier, has given government agency media teams a well-deserved kick up the fundamental over some of their dealings with journalists.
Last week he released his report Ready or not? Thematic OIA compliance and practice in 2022. It is highly critical of the way the teams handle some media requests for information. Incredibly, many did not see such requests as falling under the Official Information Act.
The 66-page report revisits 12 government agencies that were investigated by his predecessor in 2015 and it picks out media teams for particular scrutiny.
“Most of the agencies I investigated have a Media Team responsible for handling information requests from the news media. These Media Teams operate separately from centralised OIA Teams, which typically process information requests from the public.
“While separating requests in this way is not unreasonable in itself, I am concerned that some of the practices associated with this method of request handling has helped to create a false perception that media requests are not OIA requests and, as a result, that agencies do not need to adhere to OIA obligations when handling them.”
The Ombudsman’s report states unequivocally that media information requests are OIA requests, with the core legislative obligations that those confer.
Some excellent service
As one might expect, there were examples of excellent service provided by media teams. He singled out the Ministry of Health Manatū Hauora and the Public Service Commission Te Kawa Mataaho.
The former was praised for its information handling during the pandemic, while the latter’s performance should be a given — it is the lead agency on implementation of the government’s commitments under the international Open Government Partnership.
However, he didn’t mince words over some of the actions of media teams: “In most of the agencies I investigated, I saw evidence of breaches of the law.”
Given some of Peter Boshier’s other findings, that conclusion should not come as a surprise.
“I was deeply concerned to find that the responses from some agencies to my investigation suggested they did not consider that media information requests fall under the OIA. As a result, it had become embedded in the culture and practice of staff in some Media Teams to refuse information without providing a valid reason under the OIA.
“Those staff considered that the OIA did not apply to their actions and decisions on information requests from the media—in stark contrast to their counterparts in OIA Teams operating in the same agency.”
When he gave the agencies a preliminary assessment of this aspect of their operations, one replied that “placing the constraints of the OIA over the work of the ministry’s media team will add a layer of formality over those relationships and despite the best endeavours of staff, will add to the time required to respond.”
Another said it would affect relationships with the media.
Misperceptions a problem
The Ombudsman disagrees with that assessment. And he went further, saying the perception that the OIA did not apply to media information requests was “simply incorrect”. He saw the misperception as the cause of media teams operating contrary to the law.
He called on the leaders of errant agencies to take immediate responsibility for a cultural shift within media teams and ensure policy, practice, and process changes were made to ensure compliance with the law.
The most common breaches have been failure to give reasons for refusing to give information, and failure to acknowledge a right of appeal to the Ombudsman.
He found distinct types of breaches of the requirement to give reasons for refusal:
The agency acknowledged that information was being refused, but the reason given for refusal was not a valid one under the OIA, e.g. “That information is not centrally located’ and “We’re unable to provide that information within the given timeframe”.
No information was given and it was not acknowledged there had been a refusal.
The agency responded with general information but did not actually answer the question, and it was not acknowledged there had been a refusal.
The investigation revealed a curious relationship between media teams and an agency’s OIA team.
Media teams used a “triaging system” to determine when it was more appropriate for the OIA Team to handle the request. The 12 agencies’ media teams “triaged” requests in a broadly similar manner. Where the request could be answered by the media team within the requester’s specified timeframe — typically a matter of hours or days, to accommodate media deadlines — it would be answered by the media team.
Lack of clarity
If the request could not be answered within the timeframe specified by the requester because it was complex, voluminous, or if it was anticipated that withholding grounds may apply, the media team typically advised the requester that their request would need to be handled by the agency’s OIA team.
Some media teams would tell the requester that their request “would need to be an OIA” without making it clear whether they had forwarded the request on, or whether the requester would need to resubmit their request.
“This language and the practice of separating requests in this way is problematic,” the Ombudsman said, “because it helps propagate the misapprehension that quick turnaround ‘media requests’ are distinct from other information requests. It also implies that the OIA does not apply to them, while ‘formal’ OIA requests ‘must’ go through a regimented, multi-stage process which invariably takes the maximum statutory time limit (20 working days).”
The report is couched in measured terms but I cannot help but feel this two-tiered system is a weapon used against the media. Twenty working days is as good as a refusal in the fast moving world of digital daily news. Peter Boshier acknowledges as much in his report.
“Where requested information cannot be provided in a matter of days, but the journalist finds it untenable to wait up to 20 working days, there is rarely a middle ground; the request is sometimes abandoned by the requester. It is here that Media Teams’ commitment to responding in only hours or days may be a double-edged sword: when Media Teams cannot reply within the media’s specified timeframe, the request may not get answered at all.
Few agencies I investigated have effective mechanisms in place for providing information ‘without undue delay’, or under urgency if it falls outside the media’s requested timeframe. This ‘now or never’ approach to media information requests reinforces the false perception that the OIA requires a separate process for handling ‘formal’ information requests, and it creates a potential gap in the provision of information which is of great concern to me and does not serve the public interest.”
And he concedes that the two-tiered system fuels perceptions that the Official Information. Act is used as a shield by delaying or frustrating requests for information. However, he denies that the Act itself is at fault. It does not prescribe the processes to be followed, “and an agency’s OIA process can be as agile, flexible and swift as the agency is prepared to make it.”
Loopholes to be exploited He is absolutely right. What he does not acknowledge, however, is the fact that the sometimes loosely-defined and voluminous reasons for refusing information that are contained in the legislation send a signal to agencies and their employees that there are loopholes to be exploited.
And even outside the OIA there are pressures that work against its spirit. For example, the Ombudsman notes that agencies employ a blanket approach to responses sent to ministers ‘for your information’ under the No Surprises Principle. Even when no input is required from the minister, the material is usually sent three to five days before it is due to be sent to the requester.
The Ombudsman puts it rather delicately — “[It] may lead to the perception that input from the Minister is being sought by the agency that might alter the decision planned for release” — but I read that as saying nothing contentious is released without political approval.
Throughout the report there are sensible and workable solutions to the problem that the Ombudsman has uncovered. Training, policy guidelines and culture change led from the top are all ways in which the spirit of the OIA can be met.
And media teams can start obeying the law.
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 a website called Knightly Views where this commentary was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
Thirty more Palestinian prisoners have joined a mass hunger strike inside Israel’s military prisons, calling for an end to imprisonment without charge.
Thirty Palestinian prisoners jailed without charge or trial under Israeli “administrative detention” have launched a hunger strike on Sunday, 25 September to demand an end to the policy, which is currently jailing over 740 Palestinian prisoners under “secret evidence.
We have shared some of the images of the hunger strikers above. To see the photographs of all of them click here.
The prisoners’ action is against Israel’s colonial ‘administrative detention’ policy, which allows people to be held indefinitely, without any evidence being made public.
This new wave of hunger strikes comes just days after the Israeli military court ruled that hunger striker Khalil Awawdeh’s period of administrative detention would be extended. Khalil had ended his 172-day hunger strike – which brought him close to the death – on the basis that he would be released at the next oppurtunity.
The beings of this earth deserve life, and to the enemies of humanity, we say on this land that it is worth fighting so that we can live, and in the context of our continuous struggle, we embark today on an open hunger strike. Our demand is: clean air, a sky without bars, a space of freedom, and a family gathering around the table. The demand of the occupation is to separate us from our social reality and our national and humanitarian role, and turn us into dry fragments. Between our demand and their demand, the occupying power carries out the abhorrent policy of administrative detention.
The statement goes on to give a heartbreaking message to the prisoners’ loved ones, who will suffer as a result of the strike action:
our apologies to our mothers, fathers, wives, children and loved ones for the pain that accompanies you throughout the days of the strike. We say to you: Our victory lies in your smile, and our apologies to all who will be harmed for their solidarity by the brutality and barbarism of the occupation. We extend our thanks to all the forces that are working to support us and achieve our victory.
Leila Khaled joins the hunger strikers
Palestinian resistance fighter Leila Khaled has also joined the hunger strike from her home. Leila became an icon of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation after taking part in several hijackings of planes in the 1970s as part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). She also took part in providing medical support and organising with Palestinians living in the refugee camps of Lebanon during Israel’s attacks throughout the ’70s. She gave this message to the hunger strikers:
You are on the front lines confronting this criminal fascist enemy. With your strike, you will grab your freedom and the freedom of your people. Glory to you!
A lifetime resisting Israel’s colonial prisons
One of the prisoners who has begun hunger striking is a French-Palestinian lawyer and prisoner solidarity organiser called Salah Hammouri. I met Salah in the West Bank in 2012 while carrying out research with Corporate Watch. I interviewed him about his experiences in Israeli military prisons. When I spoke to him, Salah had already spent a total of almost eight years in Israeli administrative detention.
Salah told me:
You don’t look for justice in a military court […] The military courts are part of the occupation. In those courts you are condemned from the start.
The first time Salah was held in administrative detention was in 2001, when he was just 16. Soldiers had raided his family’s house and accused him of sticking up posters commemorating those who had died resisting the occupation. He was held with 80 other young people in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound interrogation centre. Salah told us that during his time at the compound he was forced to sit on a chair with his legs shackled and his arms tied behind him for up to 20 hours a day. His interrogators accused him of being “close” to the PFLP. He was held for nearly three weeks before he saw a lawyer.
“a kind of psychological torture”
Salah was detained again in 2004. This time soldiers came to the house where he was staying. They said that one of the other men who was staying in the house was wanted. They then arrested everybody and held all of them in administrative detention for nine months. Salah told us:
Administrative detention is a kind of psychological torture where you never know if you are going to be released at the end of each detention period. Sometimes they only tell you on the same day as the possible release if they are extending it or not. It is torture for you and for your family
In 2005, Salah was arrested yet again at an Israeli checkpoint. He was blindfolded and handcuffed, and then held for a month without charge. This time he was interrogated for 65 days before he was able to see a lawyer. He was accused of planning an attack on a right-wing politician. Salah described their interrogation tactics:
They use the idea of threats against your family to make you talk. Just before my arrest I had dropped my dad off at the hospital as he needed to have a heart operation. One day, after I had been interrogated for around a week, the Israelis came to my cell and told me to come and look through a peephole. On the other side was my dad, looking weak, being interrogated by them.
Isolated from support
Most Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank and Gaza are imprisoned inside Israel, in breach of the Geneva conventions (which prohibit the detention of members of an occupied population outside the occupied territory). This leads to an increased sense of isolation, and makes it very hard for their families to visit them.
After our interview, I read how Salah has been arrested again multiple times, and how the Israeli state has applied to revoke his residency in Jerusalem. When I met Salah he was working as a field researcher for Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner support organisation. In 2021, the Israeli occupation forces criminalised several prisoner solidarity and human rights organisations, including Addameer, claiming that they are linked to the PFLP.
Salah was arrested without charge again in March 2022. He is currently being held in administrative detention in Ofer military prison, where he joined the hunger strike just days ago. I wish him and his comrades victory in their struggle.
Steadfastness
Salah’s lifetime of resistance inside and outside Israeli prisons is an example of the steadfastness which keeps the Palestinian struggle alive. It is a resilience and determination that can be seen in the struggles of people resisting incarceration all over the world. That determination can be seen in the ongoing strike happening right now in Alabama’s jails, too.
We need to stand with our comrades resisting prison systems worldwide, listen to their calls for action, and learn from them. Most of all, we need to build our solidarity, and organise across borders and on both sides of prison walls for an end to the oppressive institution of incarceration.
Featured Image is of some of the faces of the hunger strikers, via Samidoun (cropped to 770x403px – with permission)
Russia wants a peaceful Ukraine, Americans prefer one at war.
— Israel Shamir, “Putin Prefers a Bad Peace”
Even before the current round of nuclear brinksmanship in Ukraine, U.S.-Russian relations had descended to a lower point than U.S.-Soviet relations reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We’ve been courting nuclear annihilation for some time.
Those who would like to exempt Washington from blame now will have to account for U.S. hostility towards Russia and the USSR, both of which long pre-date anything that could remotely be construed as provocation by Putin. After all, the United States invaded and occupied parts of the former USSR from 1918-1920, maintained a harshly belligerent stance all during the Cold War, and unleashed a plague of financial locusts to loot state enterprises throughout the former USSR as soon as the Berlin Wall came down, while enrolling the newly “independent” states into an anti-Moscow military alliance that extended to the very borders of Russia. Standards of living plunged, death rates soared, diplomacy suffocated, and Boris Yeltsin’s proposed U.S.-Russian partnership was immediately forgotten.
If a China-Russia alliance had installed hostile governments in Canada and Mexico at the end of WWII, after which all of Latin America went full Communist while narco-terrorists began killing Anglo Texans and banning English, it’s unlikely any blame would fall on Washington if it attempted to resolve the situation by force, as it surely would. So we can dismiss pious moral grandstanding about the “evil” Putin as the boundless hypocrisy it transparently is.
Furthermore, we should note that the rhetoric employed in this mad rush to terminal war is curious and irrational. For example, labeling Putin a “war criminal” actually legitimizes war, since it implies there is some ethical or at least inoffensive way to conduct mass slaughter, which is all that modern warfare is. Transparent attempts to miss this point by labeling massacre “collateral damage” should be dismissed with ridicule.
And it can hardly be repeated too often that the USA is far and away the guiltiest “criminal” where war is concerned, having by far the greatest war industry ever seen in human history headquartered on its soil and forming the heart of its economy (the Defense Industrial Base), which it has used to fight an endless series of wars directly or by proxy throughout the world for the past eighty years. No other contemporary or historical power has achieved anything close to this commitment to mass killing.
So it is absurd to define the situation in Ukraine as a uniquely evil instance of military aggression by Vladimir Putin. In a world of asymmetrical power with no effective world government, technically sophisticated powers always have the upper hand in violent conflicts with their neighbors, which are inevitable. And, of course, they insist on having friendly neighbors, preferably cooperative, though submissive will do.
Hostile neighbors no one accepts. How much of the Americas does the United States permit be part of a hostile military alliance? According to the Monroe Doctrine, not one square inch. How did Washington react to Cuba installing Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from Florida in 1962? (Spoiler alert: it nearly blew up the planet.) What did the media do when Rafael Correa jokingly proposed an Ecuadorian military base in Miami to balance Washington’s Mena Air Base in Ecuador? It laughed, though the punchline is far from a joke.
A majority of the world is fed-up with the hypocrisies of unilateral world order under U.S. control, and is not averse to accommodating an emerging China-Russia-India based new world order. Yes, the current war in Ukraine is causing further expansion of NATO (supposedly a good thing), but this, in turn, is devouring resources needed to stave off European economic collapse, while an emerging Russia-China-India alliance accelerates the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, a U.S. client state, Biden’s phone calls in the early stages of the current war went unanswered while Putin’s were cordially received. Got respect?
Our mind managers warn us of the horrors of forced neutrality via Finlandization, and urge instead that we strive for regime change in Moscow. Strange. Finland is a success story, having achieved balance and stability via social democratic prosperity. On the other hand, U.S.-fostered regime change converts countries into corpse-strewn wastelands on a regular basis. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Trying out this strategy on Russia obviously carries a high risk of nuclear annihilation. What stupendous prize awaits us if we successfully navigate this potentially species-terminating risk? The preservation of “our interests and our values,” as Hillary Clinton so loves to say.
In other words, converting whole cities to radioactive ash is a small price to pay for preserving our favorite abstractions. Got it.
We hear Putin is a strongman, an authoritarian, a totalitarian dictator, though we also hear people are fleeing Russia in droves. Why are they at liberty to do that in a “dictatorship”?
By the way, was Abraham Lincoln also a dictator, he who suspended habeas corpus, jailed journalists, shut down hundreds of newspapers, and locked up thousands of political enemies? And what about Woodrow Wilson, who destroyed unions, imprisoned editors, closed newspapers, and assumed dictatorial control of finance, the press, farms, and commerce and transportation?
Or maybe FDR was a dictator, who imprisoned over 100,000 U.S. citizens without charge and burned more civilians alive in a single night than either atomic bomb killed six months later?
What do we actually mean when we call Putin a dictator? That the media isn’t free? But a major part of Russian, state-owned media has long transmitted pro-Western, anti-Russian content, paid for by Russian taxpayers. Try and find taxpayer-funded, Putin-sympathetic content that reaches mass audiences in the U.S. Good luck.
What about free speech? Well, the Russian people have never had it, and therefore don’t care much about it. Americans have it in theory, but find its political potency nullified in practice by tsunamis of state and corporate propaganda. The most popular use of speech in the contemporary U.S. is not to reveal errors of argument and evidence, but to denounce others for being “idiots.” How free are we then?
Is Putin a nationalist? In recent years state-enterprise CEOs in Russia were seen earning millions of rubles a year while everyone else had to tighten their belts. The Russian central bank bought U.S. Treasury Bonds and supported the U.S. dollar at the expense of the ruble. Where is the nationalism in such policy?
Is Putin anti-democratic? The annexation of Crimea was overwhelmingly supported by Crimeans (97% vote).
Didn’t Putin back Assad? Yes, because he was the legitimate head of state in Syria, while the alternative was rule by Islamic terrorists supported by the United States and Israel, but no sane person in Syria. Israel wants the dismemberment of Syria in order to keep the occupied Golan Heights forever.
Much demonology is spouted from the simple fact that Putin is the former head of the K.G.B. But Putin is critical of the Bolsheviks and is not himself a Communist. Nevertheless, he considers the demise of the USSR a “world tragedy,” since overnight twenty-five million Russians found themselves foreigners living in fourteen new countries.
Is Putin anti-Israel? Well, Daesh oil flowed to Israel, and Putin said nothing, valuing his relations with then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel, of course, supported Al-Nusra, and they were declared terrorists by the United Nations. But Israel is admirable by definition, because … the Holocaust. Strange, though, that Putin gets no credit for aiding the Holy State.
We are told that no threat to the Russian state exists, so therefore no cause for war in Ukraine exists. But the Russian state and everything else can be blown off the map in a matter of minutes. The fact that the world is wired up to explode in a nuclear holocaust has been an American initiative from the beginning, and its dominant enemy has been (1) the USSR, and (2) Russia. NATO is by definition hostile to Russia, and lost even an ostensible reason for existing in 1991 with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Why is it still around? Because Russia is still around, and Washington doesn’t like that fact. Its efforts to achieve regime change in Moscow can and may end human civilization, which isn’t likely to improve matters for Ukrainians.
Is Putin an extremist? No. There is nothing radical in him. He has no plans for social re-arrangement. He merely seeks to have Russia respected as an independent, wealthy, and “great” nation, and yes, he wants Russia to be treated as an equal. But he also wants to fit into the world, not rebel against it. These modest ambitions are a threat to US/NATO hegemony and world dominance, which represent the triumph of Western extremism.
Keeping things in perspective, Putin is a Russian patriot. He wants to see Russia be a strong, healthy country where people lead good lives, are happy, and Russia occupies a prominent position internationally. He’s not a chauvinist or reactionary nationalist.
The Orange Revolution was totally unexpected in Russia, which can’t really be said to have a political opposition because there is no one who embodies and represents the views of a Russian majority. Having said that, Putin has been something of the “golden boy” in Russian politics for the past generation. He is good at addressing issues and speaking in clear terms that average people understand. The initial “democracy” of the Yeltsin period has been curtailed, but the middle class has developed rapidly on Putin’s watch.
Yeltsin spoke to the U.S. Congress in 1992, and offered Washington a partnership in which each nation would treat the other as an equal. For thirty years now the U.S. has rejected this. In the year of the U.S./NATO attack on Serbia (1999), Yeltsin protested, “Russia is not Haiti. You can’t treat us like Haiti.” Washington considers Haiti a “shithole” country, as one of America’s more honest presidents memorably put it.
Washington is incapable of giving Russia its due diplomatic respect. According to the reigning “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” the U.S. should dominate the world and not allow any rivals for power to emerge. Russia therefore is and should be treated as a second rate power. This is a non-negotiable position.
Naturally, Putin does not accept this, and never accepted the U.S. view that Russia lost the Cold War. Russia saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for them to become part of the international community. At the core of Russian beliefs is that Russia must be a Great Power. The Russian people have never doubted that Russia is a great country. Having their noses rubbed in the Wolfowitz Doctrine year after year is insulting, degrading, and an open invitation to mutual suicide.
The USSR’s forcing its rule onto Eastern Europe was a big mistake, though understandable given two Western invasions in a generation that left much of the country a smoldering ruin. The U.S. ignoring the possibility of Russia “coming back” to international prominence was a big American mistake. Washington continues to think of Russia as at most a regional power whose wants and needs can be ignored. But no nuclear-armed country can be ignored.
At the end of the Cold War the U.S. promised not to expand NATO — not one inch — to the East, a promise it quickly violated.
Now we wait to learn if our three-decade refusal to concede Russia minimal diplomatic respect and cooperation will eventuate in nuclear war.
The recent Forde report found widespread Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Blackness in the political sphere. Is anything going to be done about it? Probably not.
It’s simply not politically expedient to meaningfully oppose racism. White supremacy makes racism an opportune tool for those who are looking to maintain the whiteness of the status quo. That’s why it’s so important to look at race and ethnicity alongside religion.
It’s broadly the case that one of the central functions of white supremacy is to ensure that racism is routinely disbelieved and questioned, if the person experiencing the abuse is racialised as a “minority”. The Forde report alleged that a “hierarchy of racism” exists, and this is difficult to deny.
We thus cannot talk about dismantling racism without addressing how political parties and media outlets have perpetuated policies and myths that securitise racialised communities. We cannot allow ourselves to be assuaged by the optics of diversity if we are to truly challenge racism in the workplace and beyond.
The Forde Report confirms many suspicions and experiences that racialised groups already had, but which had been dismissed. It’s time now to listen to those on the margins.
Muslims in Britain have been made to feel, through political messaging and policy decisions, as though we are the enemies within. We’re seen as targets worthy of suspicion, who are not fully British do not fully belong. All this is wrapped up in decades-long Orientalism and xenophobia that carry white supremacy at their core.
Another thing the Forde report showed, however inadvertently, was that institutions like the Labour Party, and the political sphere at large, are not interested in meaningfully tacking antisemitism, Islamophobia, or anti-Blackness. There’s no need to state this politely – the Labour party no longer stands for the working classes. And it has shown time and time again that it has embraced white supremacy through refusing to meaningfully tackle Islamophobia.
White supremacy
We are far past the point where Britain can, in any serious way, be considered a progressive society. Modern British politics has become about optics – it’s about appearing to tackle racism whilst merrily churning out policies that further disenfranchise communities of colour. There’s been a long and complex discussion about how major political parties are not meaningfully tackling Islamophobia and antisemitism. The thing is, though, white supremacy has been missing from this equation.
In Charles Mills’ Racial Contract, he writes:
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.
You wouldn’t know it if you were to look at the state of the British media today. Mills goes on to say about white supremacy:
Though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years.
We can’t understand racism in Britain without understanding white supremacy. Islamophobia is racialised in a particular way. Antisemitism is also racialised – but mainstream politics and media have made the dominant discourse centre around white Jewish people at the cost of Jewish people of colour. It’s no accident that the combination of whiteness with being Jewish has been seized upon by people who don’t care about Jewish communities. Whiteness is seen as neutral.
Racialised religion
In many political and media circles, racial literacy is woeful. Muslim writers have spent far too fucking long explaining patiently and at great cost how Islamophobia actually functions in this country. One of the most useful in understanding this is Salman Sayyid’s work on how we define Islamophobia:
More than an expression of hatred or fear, Islamophobia needs to be understood as an undermining of the ability of Muslims as Muslims, to project themselves into the future. The manners in which Islamophobia is expressed and made manifest are diverse. This makes it difficult to say that Islamophobia has one specific feature that is hidden behind all its various occurrences. There is no essence to Islamophobia; instead there is a series of overlapping elements that constitute a coherence based around a notion of what Wittgenstein described as a family resemblance. It is possible to see how a gesture, a speech, and a police action can all be aspects of Islamophobia reflecting not an underlying unity, but a series of overlapping similarities.
Sayyid demonstrates that the definition of Islamophobia does not hinge upon an understanding of who makes up a Muslim as a singular entity. Rather, we can track Islamophobia as a series of encounters which together form a map of belonging. In arguing that “there is no essence to Islamophobia”, Sayyid is able to express how complex Islamophobia is.
The ability to see oneself, intact, in the future has long underwritten the work of antiracist work. Sayyid neatly articulates that for Muslims to imagine ourselves in the future, to be alive, speaks to resisting the work of death that constitutes white supremacy, racism, and Islamophobia. The costs of Islamophobia to Muslims are serious and steep. It’s not something which can be escaped. It must be confronted.
This is exactly why the fundamental function of white supremacy is death. It orders our societies and controls the lives and deaths of groups of people. Political systems don’t care about Islamophobia, but we must care as individuals.
Media coverage
As the mess described in the Forde report shows, expecting political systems to change, expecting mainstream media to provide better coverage of racism, is a fool’s errand. It’s on those of us who are actually antiracists to commit to dismantling Islamophobic systems. This includes supporting independent media which challenges harmful narratives.
The uncritical treatment of knowledge production, and the types of communities this protects and sustains, is central to the reproduction of stereotypes and restrictive thinking. Edward Said’s work in Covering Islam examines the role of the media in reporting about Muslims. Said writes that:
Far from challenging the vulgar stereotypes circulated in the media, the academic experts on Islam are as a body neutralized in their isolated, immediately functional role as status symbols of relevant authority on Islam, and also dependent on the whole system constituting and legitimating their function within it: and it is this system which the media, in their reliance upon stereotypes based on fear and ignorance, reflect. (1981, p. 148)
A lack of critical thinking has become the hallmark of many works produced on understanding Islam. Said’s analysis, as ever, is a pertinent and astute reminder of the role of the media.
State of the media
The media has a duty to challenge the discourse coming out of Parliament. As we all know, that duty is met with a series of perpetual failures from mainstream media. Hierarchies of racism mean that Islamophobia is often forgotten about or not deemed worthy of opposition. It’s crucial that we can name white supremacy as the root of various forms of racism.
It’s an absolute disgrace that two prominent investigations which upended mainstream discourse on Islamophobia and antisemitism in Britain came from outside of the country. The Trojan Horse affair was investigated by the American podcast Serial, while Al-Jazeera have been rolling out their coverage on a data leak which they claim “attempted to undermine members supportive of Jeremy Corbyn.”
Journalism in the UK is full of anomalies. The press is supposed to be free, balanced and impartial, but this emphasis on impartiality requires being neutral on everything, including glaring injustice.
Hierarchies of racism are not politically neutral, nor is resisting an increasingly Islamophobic state and media. To resist Islamophobia is to resist white supremacy.
Alleged corruption involving Governor Lukas Enembe has dominated both Papuan and Indonesian media outlets and social media groups over the past two weeks.
The Indonesian media is rife with allegations and accusations against the governor who is suspected of spending of billions in rupiahs.
These media storms are sparked by allegations against him of receiving gratification worth Rp 1 million (NZ$112,000).
Governor Enembe was named a suspect by the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) last week and summoned on Monday, September 19, by Police Mobile Brigade Corps (BRIMOB) headquarters in Kota Raja, Jayapura Papua.
Due to illness, the governor was unable to attend the summons. Only his lawyers and Papuan protesters attended, who then condemned KPK of being unprofessional in handling the case.
Papuans (governor’s supporters) take this case as another attempt by the state to “criminalise” their leader motivated by other political agendas, while Jakarta continues to push the narrative of the case, being a serious crime with legal implications.
According to Dr Roy Rening, a member of governor’s legal team, the governor’s designation as a suspect was prematurely determined. This is due to the lack of two crucial pieces of evidence necessary to establish the legitimacy of the charge within the existing framework of Indonesia’s legal procedural code.
Unaware he was a suspect
Dr Rening also argued that the KPK’s behaviour in executing their warrant turned on a dime. The Governor was unaware that he was a suspect, and he was already under investigation by the KPK when he was summoned to appear.
In his letter, Dr Rening explained that Governor Enembe had never been invited to clarify and/or appear as a witness pursuant to the Criminal Procedure Code. The KPK instead declared the Governor a suspect based on the warrant letters, which had also changed dates and intent.
The manner in which the KPK and the state are handling the case involving Papua’s number one man in Indonesia’s settler colonial province has sparked a mass demonstration with the slogan “Save Lukas Enembe” from criminalisation.
The Governor’s case has generated a flurry of news stories with all kinds of new allegations by the nation’s most prominent figures.
Mohammad Mahfud Mahmodin, commonly known as Mahfud MD, Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs, accused Governor Enembe of corruption, amounting to billions of rupiahs during a public media conference held at the Coordinating Ministry Office, Jakarta, on Monday.
His allegations have sparked a backlash from the Governor and his lawyers, as well as from the Papuan people.
Governor’s lawyer Dr Rening said Mahfud MD should not be included in the technical part of the investigation, particularly when in relation to those financial figures. Dr Rening said any confidential information was already protected by the constitution and it was inappropriate for Mahfud MD to make such announcement.
He asked which case the minister Mahfud MD was referring to in his allegation because the actual case involving the KPK investigation only related to a gratuity of 1 billion Rp.
‘Massive campaign to undermine Governor Enembe’
Dr Rening asked how Mahfud MD could explain the other charges that were not included in the dispute of this case, adding that “we are still of the opinion, as I have mentioned in my articles, that ‘This is what we call a systematic, structured, and massive campaign to undermine the honour and reputation of Papuan leader Lukas Enembe’.
“Governor Enembe himself has also rejected the allegations involving the spending of billions of rupiah, accusing Mahfud MD of making false allegations against him.”
Reverend Dr Socratez Sofyan Yoman … the KPK has lost its integrity and legitimacy as an independent institution. Image: Tabloid Jubi
Reverend Dr Sofyan Yoman, president of the Papuan Baptist Church Alliance, stated on the same day as Mahfud MD’s press conference that it would be remembered as the day the KPK lost its integrity and legitimacy as an independent institution for the protection of the nation’s morale.
He said it would be recorded that 19 September 2022 was the day of the “death” of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).
“Therefore, I express my condolences for the passing of the KPK. So, the history of the KPK is over,” reported Tabloid Jubi.
At the press conference, Mahfud MD was accompanied by Alexander Marwata (KPK), Ivan Yustiavandana, director of the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK), and other representatives from the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), National Police, and the Armed Forces were also present.
By engaging in this collaboration, the KPK lacked an independent voice, and its integrity and legitimacy were shattered by state intervention.
Jakarta’s ‘state of panic’
Reverend Yoman’s “condolence” statement about the KPK was the result of the state intervention in suffocating KPK’s ability to stand independently.
Reverend Yoman added: “Jakarta is in a state of panic right now because gross human rights violations in the land of Papua are already being recognised by international institutions such as the UN, European Union, Pacific Island forums (PIF) and Africa Caribbean Pacific nation states (ACP).
“Governor Lukas Enembe’s case is not the real issue,” he said.
In reality, this was “merely a façade designed by Jakarta” to distract the public from paying attention to the real issue, which was the state’s crimes against West Papuans, reported Papua.tribunnews.com.
Natalius Pigai, a prominent Indigenous Papuan figure in Indonesia and former human rights commissioner, wrote on Twitter: “There is no single law that authorises Mahfud MD to lead a state auxiliary body. The coordinating minister can only lead police and prosecutors as part of the cabinet, he cannot act as Head of State. It was a silly intervention that weakened the KPK, and strengthened accusations of political motivations toward Lukas Enembe.”
Despite this condemnation and rejection from the governor’s camp, Governor Lukas Enembe remains a suspect waiting to be investigated by the KPK. The KPK’s Deputy Chair, Alexander Marwata said KPK examined a number of witnesses before establishing Enembe as a suspect.
“Several witnesses have clarified, and documents have been obtained that give us reason to believe there is enough evidence to establish a suspect” reported Kompas.com.
Papuans protect residence
Meanwhile, the Governor’s private residence in Papua is being protected by Papuans, triggering more security personnel being deployed in a region that is already one of the most highly militarised in the Asia Pacific.
Papua’s people have been shaken by the news of this corruption allegation against their Governor.
According to Paskalis Kosay, Papua is worried about the loss of Lukas Enembe, a unifying figure among the Papuan people.
He added: “Papua’s political situation has become increasingly unhealthy since Mahfud MD’s statement. The internet — particularly social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp — are full of both positive and false information. Also, its contents may be used to slander, humiliate, or discredit the good name, honour, or dignity of a certain person, figure, or group.
“We should be vigilant when paying attention to the different information spread on social media and other mass lines. It is imperative that Papuans filter all news content very carefully. You must then respond wisely, intelligently, and proportionally so as not to be accused of being a member of a group of disseminators of misleading information”.
Meanwhile, as Governor Enembe awaits the outcome of the case against him, he has already missed his medical appointments in Singapore. This could unleash unprecedented protests throughout West Papua if or when his health fails him due to him being blocked by Jakarta from leaving the country.
A failure to protect the Governor while he is caught up in the limbo of the Indonesian legal system, would have catastrophic consequences for Jakarta. Papuans have already warned Jakarta “don’t try [to detain him] during the protests.”
As of today, the Governor’s and his family’s bank accounts remain blocked, a decision made by the state without their knowledge a few months ago, that has led to the current crisis.
Who is Governor Lukas Enembe?
Governor Lukas Enembe is a symbol of pride and an icon for the sons and daughters of the Koteka people of the highlands of Papua. He is often referred to as “Anak Koteka” (son of Koteka).
Governor Lukas Enembe … a bold style of leadership and deeds indicate a deep longing in his heart for justice for Papuans. Image: West Papua Today
Koteka as a horim, or penis gourd or sheath, traditionally worn by males in Papua’s Highlands, where Governor Enembe comes from.
When he is called “Anak Koteka” it means that he is a son of cultural groups that wear this traditional attire. Knowing this is critical to understanding how and why this man became such a central figure in West Papua.
Before he became Governor of Papua in 2013, the Koteka people of the Highlands faced many kinds of racial prejudice and discrimination. Wearing the koteka was seen as a symbol of primitiveness, backwardness, and stupidity.
Lukas Enembe turned the symbol of the koteka into hope, pride, courage, leadership, and power when he became governor for two consecutive terms. He broke barriers no one else had crossed, exposed cultural taboos, and used his ancestral wisdom to unite people from every walk of life.
As the Highland’s first Papua Governor (2013 -2023), he upended stereotypes associated with his cultural heritage.
Governor Enembe was born in Timo Ramo Village, Kembu District, Tolikara Regency of Papua’s Highlands on 27 July 1967. His biography A Statesman from Honai, by Sendius Wonda, states that Lukas grew up in a simple family.
He attended elementary school in Mamit (1974-1980) and junior high school in Sentani (1980-1983). He then attended senior high school in Sentani from 1983-86.
Sacred building for sharing wisdom
In Highlands Papua, honai is a traditional hut, but it is more than just a hut; it is a sacred building where ancient teachings and wisdoms are discussed and preserved.
Honai shaped him into the person he is today. In the 1980s, he was one of only a handful of Papuan Highlands village children to study in urbanised coastal regions.
His determination to continue his studies was already noted by his peers. In 1986, he took the selection examination for admission to Indonesia’s State Universities and was accepted as a student at Sam Ratulangi University (Unsrat) Manado Indonesia.
As a fourth-semester student at the FKIP Campus, Enembe majored in political science at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences in Manado. After completing his studies in Manado in 1995, Lukas returned to Papua.
As he waited for acceptance of his Civil Service Candidates (CPNS) he lived in Doyo Sabron, Jayapura Regency with his wife, Yulce Wenda, and his family. The following year, he was accepted as a civil servant (PNS).
He aspired to become a lecturer at Cenderawasih University, Jayapura, where he earned 22 citations for local government lectures. The promise of being a lecturer ran aground during the pre-service announcement, and Enembe was assigned a position as a civil servant at the Merauke Regency Socio-Political Affair’s Office instead.
During 1998-2001, Enembe was sent by a missionary agency to continue his studies for two years at the Cornerstone Christian college in Australia (Dubbo, NSW). Upon returning from Australia in 2001, he participated in the Puncak Jaya regional election, but his dream of becoming a regent was dashed.
‘Papua rising’
From 2001-2006, he served as Deputy Regent of Puncak Jaya alongside Elieser Renmaur. In 2006, Enembe was elected chair of the DPD of the Papua Province Democratic Party. In that year he also attempted to run for Governor of Papua by collaborating with a Muslim couple, Ahmad Arobi Aituarauw.
He lost the vote, however, and Bas Suebu-Alex Hasegem won. Last but not least, he participated in the 2007 Puncak Jaya regional election and was elected Regent of Puncak Jaya along with Henock Ibo.
In 2013, Enembe and Klemen Tinal ran as candidates for Governor of Papua in the 2013 Papuan Gubernatorial Election.
The General Elections Commission (KPU) appointed Lukas Enembe and Klemen Tinal to lead Papua between 2013 and 2018. In 2018, he was re-elected along with Klemen Tinal to serve as Governor of Papua for the period 2018-2023.
“Papua rising, independent, and prosperous” was Lukas’s vision for leading Papua through the landslide victory.
As Governor he gave 80 percent of the special autonomy funds to regional and city areas, and 20 percent to the provinces. In his view, 80 percent of the special autonomy funds are managed by districts or cities which is where most people in Papua live.
Papua has undergone a lot of development during Enembe’s governorship, including the construction of a world-class sports stadium that has been named after him, as well as other major projects like the iconic Youtefa Bridge in Jayapura city.
Papua has undergone a lot of development during Enembe’s governorship, including the construction of a world-class sports stadium that has been named after him, as well as other major projects like the iconic Youtefa Bridge in Jayapura city. Image: APR
Papuans ‘need to live’
Many Papuans opposing Jakarta’s activities in West Papua consider him to be a father figure. When asked about the conditions his people face on national television, Governor Enembe responded by saying “Papuans do not need development, they need to live.”
Such bold statements, along with others he made directly challenge Indonesia’s mainstream narrative, since Jakarta and Indonesians at large regard “development” as a panacea for West Papua’s problem.
Jakarta is also suspicious about the hundreds of Papuan students sent abroad under the scholarship scheme he designed using Special Autonomy Funds.
His boldness, style of leadership and deeds indicate that there is a deep longing in his heart for justice and for better treatment of his fellow humans. His accomplishments distinguish him as a pioneer, a dreamer, a fighter, a survivor, and a practical man with deep compassion for others.
It is this spirit that keeps him alive and strong despite the physical and psychological intimidation, threats, as well as clinical sickness he has endured for years.
The rest of his term (2022-2023) is one of the most critical times for him. After more than 20 years as Indonesia’s top public servant, the strong man of the people is facing his greatest challenge as he enters his final year in his career.
How that final chapter of his career ends will be determined by the outcome of this corruption allegations case, which could have significant consequences for Papua and Indonesia as well as for Governor Enembe.
Jakarta must think carefully in how they handle the governor, son of Koteka.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic 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.
Just the other day a robot guard came along a corridor in a special digital prison, consulted his flatscreen embedded on its wrist and then pressed his thumb on a door, which sprang open.
For the fourth time, I was being released from Facebook prison having served a term of imprisonment imposed upon me by Great Algorithm Machine which we lags shorten to GAM.
Self-sustaining and completely devoid of any human intervention, GAM has deemed me to be a serial hate speech offender. I am absolutely not, but my protests were not only pointless, there was no one listening or reading them.
Again, with no human hand involved at any point, I was hauled off to solitary inside the Mark Zuckerberg Institution for Global Speech Control.
Now, living in Aotearoa and having our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern create the Paris Call, a powerful new weapon to end online hate speech, it is my patriotic duty to support it.
But lately I have become collateral damage to her Paris Call, and a nagging thought is growing that there may be many other casualties too. Stopping the nutters, the terrorists, the bad guys might additionally include GAM wiping out any one expressing any kind of opinion.
Especially opinions that a human reader — rather than a machine — would immediately recognise as arguments opposed to opinions advanced by bad guys.
Silence save the banal
Algorithms will silence all, except the banal, the bland, the boring and the pointless.
As GAM will run all my words through its system, I am going to avoid using the commonly accepted abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers Party. Nor will I mention its leader; that’s a fast ticket back to a Menlo Park prison.
After some trepidation, I present a summary of my rap sheet:
October 11, 2021: I made a small posting based on a clipping from New Zealand Paper’s Past, a significant historical online collection of the nation’s newspapers. I posted a little story from the Bay of Plenty Times in 1941 which reported that people in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were raising money to buy Spitfires in order to defeat the previously mentioned German Workers Party and its leader. I was prevented from any posting or commenting for three weeks.
February 18, 2022: As an anti-covid “freedom convoy” rattled around the country, I posted a meme showing the Workers Party leader in front of the Eiffel Tower, saying he was on a freedom convoy. Locked up again.
May 26, 2022: I posted a link to US CBS News on some new arms non-control measure and commented: “The continued stupidity of (Redacted, insert nationality of a people between Canada and Mexico) bewilders the world.” This got me a big “Hate Speech” stamp, a ban and a declaration that my future posts would be lower in people’s news feeds.
September 13, 2022: I asked why accused woman beater Meli Banimarama and convicted killer Francis Kean were using the “ratu” title. Banned again.
No human review It was immediately apparent from the formatted notice issue to me, that while GAM had processed the thing, no human in Facebook had. Generously they tell the victim that there is a review system and to fill out a submission.
Dutifully, this gullible fellow did, pressed send and got an instant message back from GAM which said, in effect, that due to covid there were no available humans to read my submission. So, the sentence, imposed entirely by machine, stands every time.
It doesn’t matter what you say; no one is listening.
Facebook’s GAM is lying at this point: Covid has nothing to do with the removal of their humans. They are deliberately sacking them, due to Wall Street demands for more profit.
At one stage I discovered email addresses for assorted Facebook functionaries in Australia and New Zealand. That did no good. They ignored me, if they even existed.
Despite all this, I have been something of a Facebook fan. With Sue Ahearn, I co-manage The Pacific Newsroom with its 60,000 plus followers. The fact that I was in the digital slammer meant that group did not get serviced in the way they normally would.
Facebook plainly does not care.
My worry now is what is all this doing to free speech. At first blush, yes it’s a good idea that something like Mein Kampf cannot be trotted out on Facebook. But wouldn’t it be a good idea for some one or ten to read it and warn us all of what is in it?
Digital trip wires Currently GAM is looking you up, digitally speaking if certain trip wires are touched in the algorithm.
Paris Call’s GAM model has no space, or ability, to deal with satire, cynicism or sarcasm. Many would say that is, of course, a good thing. Ban them. But they have long been part of human discourse, indeed vital.
And it will silence Paper’s Past! A national treasure now defined by GAM as a gathering of hate speech.
What else do we have to give up to keep evil from exploiting public conversation?
How will we learn the new rules, other than with a spell in the digital penitentiary? Perhaps there will soon be an app, in which The Machine checks each sentence, prior to use, for social acceptability.
Is social media creating a world in which speech can only be made, after The Machine has deemed it acceptable?
Michael Field is an independent journalist and author, and co-manager of The Pacific Newsroom. This article is republished with his permission.
In the mid-1990s I started working with New Zealand investigative writer Nicky Hager. I have had the most singular of all my authorial relationships with Nicky, the result of the potent, usually red-hot subject matter that is his stock-in-trade.
I knew Nicky from our early days in forest conservation — he had been a fellow campaigner — but he also had a long interest in security issues. In 1996 he came to us with a nearly completed book that, for the first time, revealed the existence of the highly secret ECHELON surveillance programme run between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, now commonly known as the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
This alliance effectively means that New Zealand does the bidding of its more powerful allies. It raises myriad moral and sovereignty issues about who we are spying on, and why.
We published what became Secret Power, with a great deal of trepidation — a prominent QC and expert on media law had expressly warned us off the project, making chillingly clear the potential for jail time if we published state secrets, which we obviously intended to do.
But in an early demonstration of Nicky’s strategic nous, no one came knocking. In this, and in all future publishing decisions with him, it became a careful weighing up of whether the subject of the book — in this case the government and its intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau — would want the scrutiny and public exposure of a court case, even if they were likely to win it.
The other issue that applied to Secret Power and, again, with all Nicky’s subsequent books, was both ethical and practical — is the exposure of secret or private information justified? It is, only if it is clearly in the public interest, which is also the primary legal defence should that be necessary.
In the process of publishing Secret Power we developed our own organic publishing model, used a number of times over the next 20 years to get Nicky’s risky books successfully into readers’ hands and to minimise the danger of being stifled by a High Court injunction, the most likely tool the subject of a book would use to prevent publication. This involved producing the books at breakneck speed to reduce the chance of being discovered.
Printed in absolute secrecy
After the book had been written, Nicky would work intensively alongside an editor over a week or two; I would lay out and proofread the book in two or three days, and then print in absolute secrecy.
When printed, we would drop them via overnight courier into bookshops nationwide without any prior warning, explaining to booksellers why we were doing this and offering to take back at our expense any they didn’t want. It meant that the book was already available to readers just as Nicky started to create a media firestorm thereby significantly reducing the window for legal action to be successfully launched: by the time an injunction could be drawn up and submitted to the court, widespread availability meant it would be pointless and therefore unlikely to be granted.
Secret Power proved to be an internationally significant book — it led to an enquiry in the European Parliament at which Nicky testified, and could be regarded as the forerunner to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the workings of the US National Security Agency in 2013 and the subsequent global debates about mass surveillance and information privacy.
Three years later Nicky came to me again with Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-environmental PR Campaign, which he co-authored with the Australian environmentalist Bob Burton. Based on a leak from a concerned whistleblower, the book exposed how the government-owned Timberlands was secretly using taxpayer money to run an undercover public relations campaign to justify its logging of native forest on the West Coast.
This greenwashing broke a fundamental public service rule — government departments and state-owned enterprises cannot secretly run campaigns to help further their own agendas — and the story blew up exactly as the authors and I hoped.
By complete coincidence, we happened to publish on the same day as the launch of the National Party’s 1999 election campaign. It completely destroyed their media splash, and they were furious — I know this because [co-publisher] Craig Potton happened to meet a National Cabinet minister, with close ties to our area, in Wellington airport the next morning. He lost it, and had to be physically restrained by his aides after he shoved Craig in the chest.
Then, when Helen Clark and her Labour government came to power later in the year, the logging of native forest on the West Coast was stopped. Timberlands had badly overreached.
Things didn’t go well
Nicky’s next book, Seeds of Distrust, published in 2002, which detailed how the then Labour government had covered up the illegal planting of GE corn in New Zealand after intense lobbying from big business; the controversy known as Corngate. Seeds of Distrust was essentially about accountability and transparent government, but while the book was accurate, things did not go well for us.
TV3’s John Campbell ambushed Prime Minister Helen Clark about the issue in a television interview, and she responded by calling Campbell a “sanctimonious little creep”. It was a lesson in the perils of crossing a furious Clark, and her government managed very effectively to cloud the issue with technical arguments.
The book was a distressing and sobering experience as we lost the PR battle, with the media uncertain about the veracity of Nicky’s work.
I went on to publish a number of other important books with Nicky, all of them focused on speaking truth to power. The Hollow Men, in 2006, was an inside look at then leader of the opposition, Don Brash, and the questionable tactics he and others in the National Party employed as they sought to gain power. Brash had heard rumours that someone was leaking his personal emails, so he successfully sought an over-arching injunction preventing publication of this material.
He had no idea, however, that only a few kilometres away in Kaiwharawhara, we were just finishing printing 5000 copies of The Hollow Men, based in large part on these leaked emails.
The injunction was a disaster for us, as it meant that we could not sell the books and would potentially have to pulp them, so with nothing to lose we decided to try to pressure Brash to lift the injunction. Nicky called a press conference, and he and I fronted the Wellington media.
With a small pile of printed copies of The Hollow Men on display, we explained that people were not able to read this book even if it was in the public interest that they should. The tactic worked spectacularly — the frenzied response by the media, and the pressure bought to bear on Brash, forced him not only to resign as leader of the National Party but also to lift the injunction.
We were then able to release the book, an instant bestseller, which revealed, among many other things, that Brash had misled the public about his relationship with the Exclusive Brethren, who had secretly given the National Party a substantial donation.
Exposing john Key’s ‘dark tactics’
Nicky’s next book, the equally explosive Dirty Politics, was published in the middle of the election campaign in 2014, and exposed the dark tactics of John Key’s National government. An anonymous hacker, Rawshark, had been so enraged by the behaviour of Cameron Slater, the right-wing blogger behind the Whale Oil blog, that he managed to hack into his Facebook account and extract a large tranche of Slater’s communications.
After a long process of winning Rawshark’s trust, Nicky was given this information, and it became the foundation of the book. Dirty Politics laid out in startling detail how unscrupulous Key and his operators were in feeding Slater with inside information and using him to attack their political enemies. It remains a shameful stain on the Key government.
It also led to another grubby incident when, in the wake of the book’s publication, the police, perhaps in an attempt to please their political masters, raided Nicky’s house and illegally obtained his personal financial records, all in a fruitless attempt to discover Rawshark’s identity. Nicky took action in the High Court, winning an apology and substantial damages from the police.
We have published two others of Nicky’s books on security issues: Other People’s Wars in 2011, a large, supremely well researched book on New Zealand’s unseen role in the so-called war on terror; and, with Jon Stephenson, Hit & Run in 2017, detailing a Defence Force cover-up of a New Zealand SAS operation that killed civilians in Afghanistan.
For me, this strand of publishing has frequently been terrifying, given the potential for legal action lurking behind every book that could destroy the company. It has always been ameliorated, however, by the privilege of being able to publish Nicky’s remarkable books. Having the freedom to take them on feels like the ultimate gift of being an independent publisher.
It says everything about Nicky’s extraordinary dedication and research skills, quite apart from his courage, that despite the endless vitriol from his detractors, we have never ended up in court over one of his books — the passage of time has always revealed the accuracy of his work. Consequently, my trust in him is absolute.
His most powerful weapon, and one that lies behind everything he does, is his integrity. His sole motivation is to make the world a better place, and money and power simply do not matter to him. In my view he is a national treasure.
An extract with permission from the newly published Bushline: A Memoir, by Robbie Burton (Potton & Burton, $39.99).
EDITORIAL:By Fiji Times editor-in-chief Fred Wesley
Democracy! We may differ in how we understand and value democracy. But what is the essence of democracy?
On this special day, when we are reminded about democracy, perhaps it is apt that we should hear out the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
This day — September 15 — is listed by the United Nations as the International Day of Democracy.
Whatever your take is on this special day, whatever it means to you, and whether there is value in it, perhaps we need the space and time to understand it. Perhaps we may then place appropriate value on democracy, understand it, and appreciate what it stands for.
The UN states this day “provides an opportunity to review the state of democracy in the world”.
In his speech for the 15th anniversary of the day, Guterres said: “Yet across the world, democracy is backsliding. Civic space is shrinking.
“Distrust and disinformation are growing. And polarisation is undermining democratic institutions.”
Raising the alarm
Now, he said, was the time to raise the alarm.
He said it was time to reaffirm that democracy, development, and human rights are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. He said it was time to stand up for the democratic principles of equality, inclusion, and solidarity. He spoke about the media and its place in society.
“This year, we focus on a cornerstone of democratic societies – free, independent, and pluralistic media,” he said.
“Attempts to silence journalists are growing more brazen by the day – from verbal assault to online surveillance and legal harassment – especially against women journalists.
“Media workers face censorship, detention, physical violence, and even killings – often with impunity.
“Such dark paths inevitably lead to instability, injustice and worse.
“Without a free press, democracy cannot survive. Without freedom of expression, there is no freedom.
Joining forces for freedom
“On Democracy Day and every day, let us join forces to secure freedom and protect the rights of all people, everywhere.”
In the face of all that, we remind ourselves of our role as a newspaper company.
We are sure about where we want to be, and the role we can play to move our beautiful country, Fiji, forward. We are comforted by the fact that thousands of people place great value on democracy and on information.
We know we can be a forum where issues that are relevant to our multiracial mix of people can be raised, discussed and debated.
We appreciate the fact that there must be value placed on the dissemination of information that is fair, credible and balanced.
That would mean placing on a very high pedestal the importance of news that will inform, educate, and create awareness of issues pertinent to our various communities, and ultimately nurture or trigger important discussions, irrespective of where it is you sit on the political divide.
Democracy! How important is it in the greater scheme of things? Do we understand it? How much value do we place on it? Today is a special day!
This Fiji Times editorial under the title “Value on democracy” was published on 15 September 2022. Republished with permission.
As I think about generations gone by, the values people held, the moral compasses that guided them, I can’t help but wonder what our ancestors would say about the mess this country is in today. Somewhere along the line, I think, a paradigm shift occurred: We stripped this country down and sold every scrap of society and community to the highest bidder, while the things that we used to hold near and dear withered and rotted like old fruit. We’ve forgotten what the Constitution of this great nation says, we hate each other for our differences rather than embracing them, and our leaders—the purported champions of the oppressed, the self-styled protectors of all things fair and just—have become our enemies.
I implore you to listen to any railroader out there. Talk to us, even just for a few minutes. You’ll see who the real villains in this story are, and you’ll understand why we were, and are still, prepared to strike.
The corporations controlling next to every facet of our daily lives are well aware of this, and they are actively capitalizing on the chaos at our expense. Sowing division and pitting working people against one another is good business, even if the “cost” of doing such business is the unraveling of our social fabric. I can see this happening every time I turn on the TV and watch talking heads telling us how racist and smug we ordinary Americans are, how we cling too tightly to our guns and religion. And I could see this happening this week, in real time, as the business class, along with the corporate media and bought-off politicians who serve them, worked overtime ahead of a potential national rail shutdown to convince the public that we, the nation’s freight railroad workers, are somehow the villains. But I implore you to listen to any railroader out there. Talk to us, even just for a few minutes. You’ll see who the real villains in this story are, and you’ll understand why we were, and are still, prepared to strike.
Once upon a time, I took pride in my work, enjoyed what I did, and felt like part of something greater. I don’t feel that way anymore.
Even as a kid, I was always fascinated by trains—every aspect of them. I love them. Growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, I remember making my mom and grandma run with me to the local station down the road in Hanover to watch the train pass through every night at 11 o’clock. Now, as an adult, I’ve spent the past two decades working on the railroads, and I’ve given everything I have to this industry. But, as if that wasn’t enough, the rail companies want to take more: they want more job cuts; they want single-man crews operating these giant locomotives; they want to automate more jobs by relying on unproven technology that puts not only us, but the American people, our country, and our economy at risk.
Once upon a time, I took pride in my work, enjoyed what I did, and felt like part of something greater. I don’t feel that way anymore.
How can I, after bearing witness to the devastation that voraciously profit-seeking companies have wreaked upon the industry I love, the supply chain we all depend on, and the people I work with? How can I, after the rail carriers—in a now-infamous passage that is seared onto the brains of every railroad worker—told President Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) that “capital investment and risk are the reasons for their profits, not any contributions by labor”? In a statement on the PEB’s official report released by Railroad Workers United, an inter-union, cross-craft solidarity “caucus” of railroad workers, words like “unappreciated,” “vacant,” “betrayal,” “discontentment,” and “bitter” highlight the frustration and defeat we are feeling. However, I know that we, the people who make the railroads run, are feeling the same thing that so many other hardworking Americans feel in their daily lives and at their jobs, and we are fighting the same corruption and corporate malfeasance that has destroyed this country.
Many of us across the nation—and, indeed, within the rail industry—are feeling the crushing weight being placed upon the backs of middle- and working-class America by our corporate overlords. Right now, all around us, people are suffering, trying to determine how they will pay their bills and what they can afford to eat this week. The things that shouldn’t matter as much as they do today are robbing us of the time we should be spending focusing on our loved ones and our time together. All the while, for the most part, our government sits idly by. (The only time most of us hear from politicians, it seems, is when their midterm ad campaigns berate us on the TV, on the radio, and online.)
It is for this very reason that I can understand why people around the country are concerned about the calamitous impact a national rail strike or rail lockout could have on the economy and an already-creaking supply chain. What I hope people understand in return is that railroad workers are the ones fighting to save what’s left of the supply chain from the same corporate greed that has upended the nation’s freight rail industry. If you stand with us, we can win. Working Americans share so much more in common than we realize. This cancer has just about beaten us—this relentless corporate pillage, this squeezing of the American worker for every last drop of productivity, has already taken so much from us, and this may be our last chance to unite and fight back as a collective group.
How can anyone look at the behavior of these large corporations and not deem them a domestic enemy?
America’s rail companies are on the verge of driving their employees to a strike, but as I described recently on two podcast appearances, they have been driving us to this point for years. This week, in a characteristically underhanded move that put their crooked dealings on national display, they have been ignoring their common carrier obligations and placing embargoes on interstate commerce in the form of supply chain stoppages, causing havoc for customers, shippers, travelers, and our already fragile economy still reeling from COVID-19. Of course, this begs the question: If the deadline for a strike or a lockout was set for Sept. 16, is what the railroads were doing ahead of that deadline legal? At the very least, it was reckless and irresponsible. At worst, it was “corporate terrorism.” They have been holding the supply chain hostage to get what they want.
So what the hell has Congress been doing about it? Is it not the job of Congress to ensure the safety and viability of our nation? Are they not employees and servants of the American people? Have they forgotten the oath of office that they took to defend the nation from enemies both foreign and domestic? If that is, in fact, the case, how can anyone look at the behavior of these large corporations and not deem them a domestic enemy?
At some point in its life cycle, everything we use and consume touches a train somewhere. To say America will be crippled by even a short railroad shutdown would fall woefully short of describing the devastation: Grain would rot inside railcars; refrigerated foods would spoil as chilled cars run out of fuel; gasoline and other fuels normally delivered to market would become scarce because refineries would close due to lack of raw materials; chickens and other livestock would starve to death or be euthanized; and countless other atrocities would take place at the hands of these corporate elitists. And will anything happen to them? Will they face any consequences for what they’ve done?
At this point, I believe a strike is nearly impossible to avoid. I believe the railroads think we won’t do it, or they are confident the government won’t permit it. They’re playing a game of Russian Roulette—it’s a calculated risk that they smugly believe won’t come back to bite them in the ass.
Yes, the White House announced yesterday morning that a tentative agreement has been reached between the carriers and union leaders to avert a shutdown, but a tentative agreement is just that—tentative—until the rank-and-file members have their say and vote on it.
Yes, the White House announced yesterday morning that a tentative agreement has been reached between the carriers and union leaders to avert a shutdown, but a tentative agreement is just that—tentative—until the rank-and-file members have their say and vote on it. I don’t know what will happen in that regard, but I caution readers to not be so sure that this deal will be ratified and a strike will be avoided. It is also worth noting that just about everything being reported by mainstream media is inaccurate and heavily biased. The railroads are being hailed as heroes in this mess while the employees are villainized. And Congress has predictably sided with the corporations throughout all of this, which shows that neither party is really for the working man. We had hoped that the combination of a Democrat-controlled legislative and executive branch would bring about meaningful and real change, but we were wrong. Only Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Peter DeFazio have stood alongside us through this difficult bargaining process.
As we inch closer and closer to a national rail shutdown, it has become clear every step of the way that the railroads and corporations at large are testing our resolve. They are playing the long game with their union-busting tactics and emotional abuse in the hopes of breaking the spirits and backs of their workers. They’ve already broken the backs of so many families in the railroad towns that they’ve decimated in the name of Wall Street, desecrating the legacies and history written generations ago by men and women who built our nation. It is with this in mind that I implore my fellow Americans who are suffering to unite behind this movement, the workers’ movement. If we don’t do something to stop this, who will?
Never in my adult life have I felt a greater sense of urgency concerning our future than I do now. In our leaders, from the local to the national level, we see callousness to our plight and self-serving malfeasance the likes of which is nearly incomprehensible. The very fabric of our great country is being unwoven before our eyes while the top 1% hoards 99% of the wealth. President Biden said he will be the most “pro-labor President you ever had.” Well, we’ll see how “pro-labor” our government officials really are when we, the rank-and-file railroad workers, get to look at the details of this tentative agreement.
Meanwhile, deep inside the hollers of America, across the corn fields of the Midwest, the valleys of the Northeast, and the mountains dividing sea from shining sea, a growing movement is forming. A rumbling of activity one could liken to distant thunder, or the imminent eruption of a volcano, is signaling the storm that is about to be unleashed upon those who have awoken a sleeping giant. No more shall the underrepresented be oppressed, the underpaid be spat upon, the overworked forgotten, or the working American be thrown to the wayside. We are America, and we will win this war.
He must not have an easy ride, at least not nearly as easy as his life during his 73-year apprenticeship. The truth is, the king has to go, and so does the institution of monarchy. And no amount of monarchist (or republican) moralism about timing, or respect, or most laughably their ‘service’, should stop us saying it. Anything which inspires the bizarre queue – a sort of idiot ‘Human Respectipede’ – currently winding its way through London’s streets needs to go in the bin.
Immoral or ignorant?
That said, republicanism in mainland Britain is in a shocking state – despite a decent amount of support for it. Up to a quarter of Brits want an elected head of state – this goes up to 40% among young people. Meanwhile, 36% of Scottish people say the end of the queen’s reign should usher in a republic. These are sizeable minorities which are given few platforms in the mainstream media or public narrative.
And they are right to oppose it. The monarchy is a ridiculous and oppressive institution built on violence. There is no nuance to be had here: if you are a monarchist, or waver and drip over the question of monarchy (in which case, you may well be a monarchist), you are either immoral or ignorant.
If you can see the monarchy for what it is and don’t care, you’re clearly immoral. If you refuse to stop being spoon-fed lies about the British empire, you’re purposely ignorant. At least the latter category might be redeemable through education, but not with things as they are.
The only specific organisation which speaks to this grand old strain of UK politics is Republic. Liberal, reformist, and flaky, its first call upon the death of the queen was instructive: let’s hold fire on debate until a more appropriate time:
There will be plenty of time to debate the monarchy’s future. For now, we must respect the family's personal loss and allow them and others to mourn the loss of a mother, grandmother and great grandmother.
This should not shock. It is a feature of liberal republicanism that it is almost as twee and deferent as monarchism itself, and about as likely to seriously oppose the Royal institution. And this is nowhere more apparent than in the main organisation meant to oppose the Royal racket.
Left republicanism
There isn’t really a question about whether we need to get rid of the monarchy. It’s about how we oppose it in an invigorated and non-deferent way.
The questions of land ownership, foreign policy, democracy, landlordism, equality, climate change, and more run smack bang through the middle of the monarchy – the ridiculous medieval core of what purports to be a modern state. That is not to say its ideal replacement is a president. No capitalist state can ever be good enough. But a fierce new republicanism can start to address and oppose our own unique, and uniquely perverse, systems of power.
Republicanism, rather like free speech, is simply too important to be left to flaky liberals and self-assured Tories. It must become a key part of any strategy to increase working class power and confidence.
The Rojava revolution, which broke out with the onset of the Syrian Civil War brought freedom to millions of local Kurds, Arabs, and minorities, and hope to many more people across the globe. But it also showed that the Western left could not be trusted. In the UK and elsewhere, many comrades failed to stand in solidarity with the revolutionary element in that terrible conflict.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, the same sections of the left are repeating the same cruel, cynical slogans. As in Syria, we must listen to local leftists who are taking a principled, democratic stand in the face of the onslaught of imperialist violence by Putin’s Russia.
A failure of solidarity with Rojava
In the course of the Syrian conflict, we learned the hard way that the British left can struggle to take a stance on issues which should be trivially obvious. Some elements of the left struggled to condemn ISIS, framing their rise as the sole result of Western intervention in the region. The authoritarian left struggled to condemn the Assad regime, responsible for mass butchery and the bulk of war crimes committed in the country.
On the other hand, leftists of all stripes found reasons to condemn the Kurdish-led Rojava revolution. Some attacked the direct-democratic political project in North and East Syria (NES) for working alongside US airstrikes to defeat ISIS. Some attacked it for coordinating with the Assad regime to ensure continued supply of basic essentials to civilians in the region under its control.
Neither side stopped to look at the other and realise that the situation in NES was far too complicated to fit their black-and-white narratives. Meanwhile, comrades on the ground were sacrificing their lives, and making whatever tough compromises were necessary, to keep their people alive.
I once heard the region’s top political figure Ilham Ahmed tell a roomful of conservative sheikhs who had happily worked with ISIS but were now complaining about Rojava coordinating with the Syrian government in Damascus:
I know how brutal the regime is. They have tortured and killed my friends. But I will sit down and negotiate with anyone who isn’t actually trying to cut my head off.
No one can claim this is not a courageous or principled position. It is easy for Western leftists to sneer at comrades overseas, to wallow in purity politics which get them off the hook from actually doing anything. It’s difficult to do what Ilham and her comrades are doing. Our job is to stand alongside them and support them.
Standing with comrades on the ground
The conflicts in Syria and Ukraine are linked. Each forms a part of the ongoing contest between hard Russian imperialism and the USA’s subtler attempts to remain the dominant force on the global stage. The USA keeps troops in Syria not only because of the region’s paltry oilfields but in order to maintain a beachhead disrupting the Russian-Iranian axis of influence in the Middle East, while the Ukraine war has drawn previously recalcitrant European powers closer to a US-defined regional policy. Meanwhile, Russia’s naked aggression has darkened the skies in both Ukraine and Syria.
There is not an obvious revolutionary third line in Ukraine, as there is in NES. Nonetheless, we must recognise Russia’s invasion for what it is – the bloody and destructive expansion of a capitalist regime. We do not need to think NATO or the Ukrainian government are worthy of support in and of themselves to recognise the need to stand with Ukrainian people.
As such, we must support comrades working to stop or mitigate the brutal invasion – on both sides of the frontline. Like our comrades in the Rojava revolution, Ukrainian socialists and anarchists are not only risking their lives, but setting aside their own ideological disagreements with the Ukrainian state to fight for what is self-evidently right.
Even if they are not willing to listen to comrades from the region when they call on the Western left to avoid “leftist Westsplaining” and ‘moral relativizing’, anyone who sits in their bedroom in the UK and praises Assad or Putin in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’ need only count the bodies.
Resist Russia in Ukraine and the West at home
We live in a world of uneven but multiple imperial capitalist poles, of which the USA is the richest, most powerful, and all-pervasive, and Russia the most brutal on the battlefield. In the Syrian conflict, Russia and its allies have been by far the most brutal on the battlefield, bearing responsibility for the majority of civilian deaths outside of the Syrian regime itself. Meanwhile post-Iraq the USA has adopted a subtler military doctrine of proxy warfare and power projection. Each must be resisted in their own way. Supporting the resistance against Russia does not diminish our efforts to challenge Western capitalist hegemony at home.
In different ways, both the Ukranians and the Kurds have felt the sting of Western indifference, exceptionalism, and – in the Kurds’ case – orientalism. At the same time, the Rojava revolution reawakened a spirit of socialist internationalism in this country and elsewhere. In this spirit, we must stand alongside our comrades making tough choices in Syria, Ukraine, and across the globe.
Featured image via the author, courtesy of the Internationalist Commune of Rojava
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