“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the [working class] movement is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter […]
When I published a post critical of Nicky Hager’s book, Dirty Politics – How attack politics is poisoning New Zealand’s political environment last week, it prompted an exchange on Twitter […]
To begin with the numbers: In the general election held in New Zealand yesterday, the National Party government was returned for a third term with a slightly increased majority. Of […]
The rise of the class-struggle wing of the labour movement in New Zealand in the decade from 1907 was rapid, spectacular – and well-documented. Beginning with the first challenge to […]
Within less than a month of joining the war against Germany in 1914, New Zealand had seized its first colonial conquest from Germany. On August 29 1914 troops from the […]
The period of the Liberal government in New Zealand from 1890 to 1912, was one of unprecedented general prosperity – in comparison with the rest of the world – the […]
Almost the entire left in New Zealand has been giving electoral support to the Mana Party in recent years (and by ‘the left’ I mean groups and individuals who speak […]
Last Friday the New Zealand Herald reported that an unnamed rural GP (doctor) has had her practising certificate suspended for six months for the ‘crime’ of prescribing the drug Misoprostol […]
In the birthplace of industrial capitalism, the young proletariat went through a protracted process of formation into a class. In the first decades the individual wage-laborers were assembled by the […]
My recently-published novel, The Chain, is set in the freezing works (meatpacking plants) of the Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, in the 1980s, and draws on my experiences when I spent […]
