Tag: politics

I asked Graeme Edgeler of the Legal Beagle blog to work out the seat distribution in feasible scenarios involving Hone Harawira winning Tai Tokerau, Peter Dunne losing Ohariu and the Maori Party holding their seats in Te Tai Hauauru and Tamaki Makaurau.

One of the reasons National won the election was due to its success in counter messaging – and the way so many media commentators ran with th the right-wing spin.

The possibility that Scotland will vote for independence this Thursday has panicked the British establishment.

The new “anti-terror” laws proposed by Tony Abbott should alarm New Zealanders.

This week it was good to see our Parliament speaking out strongly against the Israeli attack on a UN-run school refuge in Gaza. Meanwhile our Foreign Minister, Murray McCully continued to prevaricate on Gaza, saying little that could upset Israel.

It’s good to see the Sunday Star-Times attempting to get more information from government agencies about Daryl Jones, the Kiwi killed in a US drone strike in Yemen. The paper is right to complain about the government’s refusal to provide anything.

Why, in our news media, is an Israeli with a gun a “soldier”, but a Palestinian with a gun a “militant”, or even a “terrorist”?

Last week the State Service Commission issued a strongly critical report on our spy agencies. It concluded that there is ”urgency” for “a huge amount of change to be undertaken”. The agencies’ “national security and intelligence priorities are inadequately defined”; vetting systems are not up to scratch, and the public is kept too much in the dark about what the spies do.

Our PM has given Obama a green light to start bombing ISIS. In John Key’s simplistic schema (repeated on Q and A and the Nation) ISIS is a terrorist organisation and its ok to drone kill anyone whose a terrorist. So much for real political solutions.