Tag: politics

I’m afraid John Key has failed the empathy test. He knows that thousands of refugees have been fleeing persecution from Sri Lanka, Burma and elsewhere, many dying at sea. Yet all he can see in the possibility of one boat making it here is a threat, justifying the legislation he passed allowing the asylum seekers to be imprisoned on arrival.

According a recent Herald-Digipoll 28% of New Zealanders don’t have confidence in our intelligence services. It will be good if their concerns are elaborated in submissions to the government’s intelligence and security review, scheduled to begin next month and run through until February.

New Zealanders should ask themselves: do they want our GCSB providing vital intelligence information to torturers and murderers? Because this is exactly what the GCSB has been doing.

As far as I can tell New Zealand (which has a representative on the UN Security Council) has yet to condemn the raids, which constitute illegal aggression against a neighbouring country.

It’s common for governments to spin a story to make the indefensible sound defensible. Usually it is the government putting the best light on some commonly agreed facts.

Hager and Gallagher revealed in the Herald on Sunday that New Zealand was specifically targeting the emails of Solomon Island Prime Minister’s chief advisers, the Cabinet secretary and non-government political players.

There are so many reasons why it is wrong for New Zealand to engage in “full-take” surveillance of the electronic communications in the Pacific Islands, as show in documents released by Nicky Hager and Ryan Gallagher and David Fisher in this morning’s New Zealand Herald.

If Andrew Little studied the history of US bombing missions in the Middle East he would have to admit that Dunne and Norman are right.

Air strikes don’t make us as sick the stomach as the ISIS beheadings. Following an air strike we never see the blood-splattered bodies on the ground or hear the anguished groans of the injured. Most of the casualties of these air strikes are inevitably civilians,