There’s a storm brewing
What the local elections foretell I am one of the large majority who did not vote in the recent mayoral and local elections in New Zealand – not because I […]
Category Archives: censorship
Name and prosecute the cops who killed Shargin Stephens!
It is now six years since the police tormented Rotorua man Shargin Stephens day and night for more than a month with incessant and utterly unjustified ‘bail checks,’ and then, […]
Two wars over Ukraine
Pacifists and liberals are fond of repeating the old adage that ‘the first casualty of war is the truth.’ In fact, the exact contrary is far closer to the truth: […]
A witch-hunt devastates the Auckland art world
If the artists responsible for the Mercy Pictures exhibition “People of Colour” were setting out to shock and provoke, they certainly succeeded. The show, which recently closed in Auckland, was […]
Toppling statues, censorship, and erasing history
The first brass head has toppled in New Zealand. On 12 June the Hamilton City Council removed a statue of… Hamilton! British naval Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton, veteran of […]
Arthur Thomas, the presumption of innocence, and the dangers of name suppression
If anyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence today, it is Arthur Allan Thomas. In 1971, and again at a re-trial in 1973, Thomas, a Waikato dairy farmer, was […]
Defend the right of women to meet and organise politically!
Massey University capitulates to the self-appointed censors – and another democratic institution slides towards the abyss In an extraordinary display of political cowardice, Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, has […]
If this is how you propose to defend free speech, then freedom of speech is in grave danger
An open letter to Jan Thomas, Vice-chancellor of Massey University. Massey University in Wellington is the venue for an event on 13 November called Feminism 2020, organised by Speak Up […]
The Holodomor in Ukraine and the obfuscations of “Mr Jones”
Few countries in the world suffered more than Ukraine in the twentieth century. One of the nations of the Soviet Union favoured with fertile soils and bountiful agriculture, geography made […]
Land, labour, and epidemic diseases – two articles on capitalist penetration of the Pacific
When the deadly epidemic of influenza swept the world in the months following the end of the Great War of 1914-18, the toll it took in the Pacific Islands was […]
A worker at large 