by Susanne Kemp
The Metiria Turei case certainly brought a lot of mean-spirited people with double standards out of the woodwork. People who vigorously defended John Key’s electoral fraud and Bill English’s rorting of the public purse for the polticians’ equivalent of accommodation supplement mounted their moral high horse to condemn Metiria Turei.
Unfortunately, people with these kinds of double standards have the power to inflict them on (more…)
by Socialist Democracy
The announcement by an Irish government minister that “significant quantities” of human remains had been discovered at the site of a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway has brought official confirmation to claims about the disposal of the bodies of babies and very young children who had died there during the almost forty year period it was in operation. Even to a public who have become accustomed to revelations of abuses perpetuated in Church run institutions the treatment of the women and children in the Tuam home were truly shocking.
These mother and baby homes were places where unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth. After birth their babies were then taken from them and raised in a separate part of the home by nuns. These children were later given up for adoption, often without the consent of their mothers. The women remained in the home for a year, working unpaid hours to reimburse the nuns for their “services”. This was the standard practice – not just at Tuam – but across all ten of these type of institutions that existed within the state. It is estimated that 35,000 unmarried pregnant women passed through these homes.
Informed by a warped religious dogma that deemed the sexual activity of females outside of marriage to be a sin, these homes were designed as places of punishment rather than care. This punishment came not only upon the women but also their children who were seen as the products of sin and therefore less than human. While forced separation and adoption is shocking even more shocking is the very high death rate of children born into these homes that meant that most never left alive.
At least 6,000 children died in mother and baby homes throughout Ireland. For many the end was an unmarked burial plot within the grounds – their remains disposed of with those of numerous others in what can rightly be described as mass graves. For others even death didn’t end the exploitation with hundreds of bodies being sent from the homes to Irish medical colleges. These deaths cannot be accounted for solely by the poverty of that time but rather by the conscious neglect and cruelty that women and their children were subjected to.
Investigations
It was claims about the nature of the disposal of the remains of almost 800 children at Tuam – that they were dumped in part of the sewage works – that (more…)
London News Pictures
Statement of November, 2016:
“Grenfell Action Group have reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO (Kensington & Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation) residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.
“We believe that the KCTMO have ensured their ongoing survival by the use of proxy votes at their Annual General Meeting that see them returned with a mandate of 98% in favour of the continuation of their inept and highly dangerous management of our homes. It is no coincidence that the 98% is the same figure that is returned by the infamous Kim Jong-un of North Korea who claims mass popularity while reputedly enslaving the general population and starving the majority of his people to death.
“It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high-density residential property is the most likely (more…)
Protest against NZ role in invasion of Vietnam: NZ imperialism has a long record of attacking other countries and their peoples
by Phil Duncan
The poppies are out again. We’re all expected to give to the RSA and to wear one of their poppies to show our respect for NZ combatants who died in wars abroad. But it doesn’t really take more than a second or two of reflection about Gallipoli, the centrepiece around which war is recalled in NZ and poppies worn, before a couple of questions present themselves.
Why was New Zealand invading Turkey?
What was World War One about?
And there’s the rub.
Was Turkey an imminent threat? Did it have weapons of mass destruction pointed at little ole New Zealand?
The truth, which seems unpalatable for far too many people in this country, is that NZ was the aggressor. We were invading them in a war that was about (more…)
Labour prime minister David Lange and pal Roger Douglas. The fourth Labour government launched the most vicious attack on workers and unions since the Depression. Union leaders put loyalty to the Labour Party ahead of the interests of the working class, as usual.
While trade union density remained similar until the Employment Contracts Act, industrial action by workers fell off dramatically under the fourth Labour government. That government viciously slashed jobs, conditions and wages and commodified large chunks of the old state sector. The union leaderships delivered up the working class to their Labour Party friends. Labour and their union pals destroyed working class resistance *before* National came in to put the icing on the cake for the capitalists.
In 2014 more blue-collar workers voted National than Labour, while large numbers of the poorest workers in the country abstained from voting. In its ongoing attempts to present itself as ‘worker-friendly’ and trick workers into voting for it, however, the Labour Party leadership and its various mouthpieces in the union movement routinely lie to working class audiences about the record of Labour governments in relation to the trade unions and the working class in general. They seem to rely on workers having short memories.
For instance, these creatures talk about the ‘new right’ reforms that slashed workers’ rights and living standards as if they began under National and the fourth Labour government never existed. They also try to make out that National’s Employment Contracts Act was the only viciously anti-union legislation of that period. Side-by-side with this, they either try to airbrush their own Labour Relations Act 1987 out of history or pretend that it was somehow helpful to unions and workers – they assume that no-one is going to dig out what that Act actually did.
As part of our ongoing From the Vaults series, we intend to run a number of pieces on the Labour Relations Act 1987. These pieces are taken from an eight-page supplement and two-page additional insert that appeared in the October 26, 1987 issue of the left-wing working class paper People’s Voice. PV was published fortnightly by the now-defunct Communist Party of New Zealand.
While we at Redline would all have a number of disagreements with and criticisms of the CPNZ[1], it was the most significant force attempting to rally workers against the fourth Labour government and its repressive legislation such as the Labour Relations Act. The CP did a solid job in this area and much of what it wrote on the decade from 1984-1993, in which both Labour and National waged full-scale class war against workers and unions, is well worth reading and studying today. The CP was also the leading force in the trade unions taking on the ‘labour lieutenants of capital’, the bureaucrats who sabotaged workers’ resistance from their privileged positions atop unions and in cahoots with Labour. While very few unions are still affiliated to Labour today, it remains the case that many union officials put the interests of this capitalist party ahead of the interests of workers.
The material below consists of the CPNZ’s synopsis of the 1987 Act and the main article in the supplement.
by Tony Greenstein
If you listen to the pro-Israel lobby group J-Street, which was formed in 2007 as a more ‘liberal’ alternative to the pro-Likud American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other liberal mainstream Zionists, then the nomination of bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, as the new US ambassador to Israel marks the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.
Friedman is on record as calling J-Street ‘worse than kapos’. In an article for the settler news agency Arutz Sheva,1 he responded to criticism by a liberal Zionist, Peter Beinart, by asking rhetorically: ‘are J-Street supporters really as bad as kapos?’ The answer, actually, is no. They are far worse than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps.’
In the same op-ed, Friedman spoke of “how dangerous the Jewish left is to the State of Israel”, describing them as “the lost souls who blame Israel for not making a suicidal ‘peace’ with hateful radical Islamists hell bent on Israel’s destruction.” Bear in mind that what Friedman terms “the Jewish left” is not what most people would consider as being on the left.
The term ‘kapos’ is a favourite insult of Zionists. It used to be reserved for Jewish anti-Zionists but is now increasingly used against liberal Zionists. Anyone who is not an out-and-out racist or Jewish supremacist is in danger of being accused of being a ‘kapos’. The kapos, for those unfamiliar with the term, were prisoners in the Nazi extermination or concentration camps who were made trustees or foremen. In return for a little more food or favourable treatment, they were expected to supervise other inmates, and some of them, not all, developed a reputation for cruelty. If they didn’t beat others, they were beaten instead.
The Zionist use of the term ‘kapos’ is somewhat ironic since Zionism was a movement that voluntarily co-operated and collaborated with the Nazis. The kapos (more…)
Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse still fighting for justice; photo: Joanne Carroll/Fairfax NZ
by Susanne Kemp
On Saturday morning, members and supporters of the families of a number of the Pike River workers who lost their lives in the November 2010 explosions at the mine began a picket outside the mine. Led by Sonja Rockhouse, who lost a son, and Anna Osborne, who lost a husband, the group have been protesting the decision of the mine company, state-owned Solid Energy, to permanently seal off the mine, leaving the remains of the 29 dead workers in the mine forever.
The company’s decision has been made despite the fact that there is (more…)
