Pacific Panthers and International Solidarity: An interview with Teanau Tuiono

November 3, 2016 by

Fightback sat down with educator and Pacific Panther Teanau Tuiono to discuss his experiences, and lessons, as a political activist.


How has your whakapapa factored into your political work?

I had a bicultural upbringing. On the one hand I’m a first generation pacific islander in Aotearoa: my family migrated here from the islands for work and educational opportunities. I am also tangata whenua from Ngāi Takato and Ngāpuhi with connections throughout the Tai Tokerau including Ngati Hine.

Within our own communities we are the norm. We have our languages and our cultures. But I am acutely aware that I am from two minorities. So I’m quite used to comparing the differences and similarities between the two cultural groups that I come from. Moving between them is something I’ve done my whole life. People who are both Pasifika and Māori will know what I am talking about. Navigating how you interact with the majority culture is something that you must learn as a minority. My grandfather would tell me stories about when he first came to NZ, and how tricky it was because he could not speak English well.

Sometimes when you are a minority you try and find the corners and the cracks to hide. It’s the whole idea of the Other, something Edward Said talks about. Othering in colonialism is habitual between marginalised peoples and colonisers. The Other is seen as inferior and in need of “educating or saving”. Colonisation seen through that lens is benign, as opposed to being incredibly violent to indigenous peoples. This is something that Gramsci also touches on when he talked about cultural hegemony.

 

What have you learnt from the experience of the Polynesian Panthers, and what is new about this project? Tell us about the Pacific Panthers.

The Polynesian Panthers are an inspiration, particularly for us NZ Born Pacific Islanders. Staunch Islanders with leathers and afros – standing up for our communities. I fucken love that shit. Their political activism, running of food co-ops and homework centres, advocating for tenants and promoting Pacific languages are things to continue to aspire too. I was a kid during the Springbok tour protests of 1981 and I lived in the inner city Auckland. The polynesian panthers were active in those protests in the patu squad challenging both the racism of the apartheid regime of south africa and the racist NZ muldoon government.  In those days the inner city suburbs like Grey Lynn and Ponsonby was full of immigrants and minorities it was alive and bustling with diversity. These days it has gone completely to the dogs and is full of rich white yuppies sipping on $20 lattes. The Pacific Panthers came out of a fono we had out of Palmerston North it was to learn about the past struggles and look at how we can move at Pacific peoples in our activism.


The Polynesian Panthers drew inspiration from the Black Panthers in the US. How do you think the interface works between international inspiration and local adaptation?

 

I can’t speak for the Polynesian Panthers and I was a child during that time period. I imagine that they saw themselves in that struggle. Poor brown kids getting kicked around by the government – much as it is here. For myself most of my activism has come from meeting the people themselves either while travelling or being with them in their homelands and learning from them directly. I guess you can learn a lot of this stuff from books but you can’t pick up every nuance, the smell and feel of a place or the hospitality of people if you go there and meet them. The interface then is when you see yourself in each other’s struggles – not the appropriation of other people’s struggles – because that’s just going to piss someone off sooner or later, but rather a genuine recognition of mutual solidarity and respect.


You are a climate change activist. What is the intersection of ecological violence and colonial violence in the Pacific?

 

I don’t think there is an intersection as such – it’s the same bunch of wankers really. People may remember news headlines from last year that focused attention on Ioane Teitiota, a self-identified climate change refugee. Teitiota was imprisoned in Aotearoa, where he had sought refugee status after fleeing his home on Kiribati.  

 

As a part of the Cook Islands diaspora living in Aotearoa I am acutely aware that the borders separating the Cook Islands from Kiribati are a part of New Zealand’s colonial history in the region. Teitiota’s ability to stay or not stay in the country is dependent upon who drew the colonial borders around our Pacific nations. The government ultimately deported Teitiota back to Kiribati. The question of movement of peoples is also a question of decolonisation. Our assertion of our whakapapa (that is our connections with each other) and the need to dismantle the borders and barriers that separate us. We need to understand why those colonial lines have been drawn and at the same time erase them.


Can you tell us about your time in Cuba? What did you learn during your visit?

This was 20 years ago so the memory is a bit fuzzy. I had just finished uni. I had been staying with First Nations people just North of Albuquerque. I made my way down to Texas and walked into Mexico. I remember crossing the border over the Rio Grande which was more concrete and barbwires than river – and there was a massive mural of Che Guevara painted facing the American side with some anti-imperialist slogan. I figured I was going the right way. I made my way down to Mexico City met up with Communist comrades from Aotearoa and we flew into Havana. At that time Cuba had just come out of the special period – the Berlin wall had fallen just 7 years or so before and with the collapse of the Soviet Union – Cuba’s dependant economy collapsed with the US embargo still in place since the revolution they had to be heavily self-reliant particularly with nothing coming in and out of the country in terms of imports and exports. I had a job one day straightening nails because they had to reuse them – no hardware store up the road where you could buy straight nails. They also had all these old classic cars still running on the roads – no one makes parts for them so every time something broke you had to find someway to fix it. The people I met were proud of who they were, hardworking. I learnt about their struggle, drank rum, and smoked cigars with all the other politicos I met there. They took us up to Sierra Maestra mountains where they based the revolution in its early years – the rich history of the place is something to be appreciated.  One of the most interesting conversations I remember was with a Cuban diplomat, Miguel Alfonso Martinez, he heard that I was a Māori and was interested in the Treaty of Waitangi – all the way in the Caribbean and we were talking about Waitangi. Cool. He talked about ‘the old man’ Che Guevara. His boss when he was younger was Che Guevara. It was 2 years or less after NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising. He said the British used to talk a century or so ago about the ‘Freedom of the Seas’ and that’s because they had the biggest navy,  same thing with trade. Those that push ‘Free Trade’ or advocate for some freedoms over other types of freedoms do so in line with their power interests.

I bumped into him years later in Geneva at a UN meeting. At the United Nations he was a founding member of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations. He wrote an influential document called the “Study on treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements between states and indigenous populations.”

 

 

 

How does capitalism impact on Pacific communities?

Well when I lived in the Islands for a short time as a child – I went there after the Springbok Tour – it was an agricultural economy – plantations that sort of thing. We’d go to school and then work in gardens after the disaster that was the 4th NZ Labour Government – the relationship with agricultural goods disappeared. Suddenly the Cook Islands had to change into a tourist industry. The impact on our communities both here and back in the Islands are dictated by the whims of the white settler states of NZ and Australia. I hate that shit.


Filed Under: Oppression & Liberation

Socialists retain seats in Australian local body elections

November 2, 2016 by
sue-bolton-free-the-refugees

Moreland councillor Sue Bolton speaks at rally against racism.

Article by Bronwen Beechey.

Local body politics has been traditionally regarded as being about roads, rubbish and rates. However, empowering communities is an important factor in building resistance to neo-liberal capitalism. In Australia, a number of socialist councillors have been standing up for the rights of those usually ignored by local bodies.

In Victoria, recent local council elections saw two socialists re-elected. The Socialist Alliance’s candidate Sue Bolton, standing in the North-East Ward of Moreland City Council, was re-elected with the second-highest primary vote in the ward. In Yarra City Council, socialist Stephen Jolly came first in the Landridge Ward and was re-elected to a fourth term on council.

Bolton faced a tough battle, with 20 candidates (seven Labor, three Greens and four right-wing independents) standing for four positions. The elections were based on compulsory preferential voting, with other candidates swapping preferences and none directing preferences to Bolton. In the end, second preferences from mostly Green and Labor voters were the deciding factor in Bolton’s re-election. Her primary vote was 13.3 per cent, compared to the 9.5 per cent she won when first elected in 2012.

Bolton also faced a campaign against her by the conservative right, local traders and the Herald-Sun newspaper over her opposition to racism. In May this year, she initiated a rally against racism in the ethnically diverse suburb of Coburg, calling for an end to the closure of aboriginal communities, a treaty between the government and aboriginal people, allowing refugees held in detention to settle in Australia and an end to Islamophobia. While the rally successfully attracted several hundred people, media attention focused on a smaller confrontation between racist groups and anti-racist activists which occurred nearby. The Murdoch-owned Herald Sun took the lead in blaming Bolton for the violence, although she had neither organised nor endorsed the action. A number of local traders also blamed her for loss of business due to the police closing off the Coburg mall. During the election campaign, a number of Bolton’s election posters were defaced.

On her Facebook page, following her victory, Bolton commented:

“The racists and the Herald Sun don’t win all of the time. The racists wanted to make me pay for organising a rally against racism by campaigning to vote me off council. They systematically defaced and ripped down my posters around the centre of Coburg. But they didn’t win. I make no apology for standing up against racism. We need to make a stand against racism wherever we are.”

Bolton’s election campaign was run on a tiny budget and relied on street stalls and door-knocking to get the message out. She commented:

“There were so many different parts of the community who were involved in helping my re-election campaign – Socialist Alliance members, independent socialists, trade unionists, anti-development activists, residents networks, First Nations activists, the Muslim community, Urdu communities, the Nepalese community, the Kurdish community, environmentalists, pensioner groups, parents of children with disabilities, the Itiki sports club and many others.”

As well as her stand against racism, Bolton’s achievements on council include reinstatement of after-hours respite care for parents of children with disabilities which the council had cut, reinstatement of the council’s climate budget, preventing the sale of a significant Aboriginal site, and opposing the sale of land to private developers rather than being used for public housing. She also helped found a local campaign against the East-West link, a proposed freeway with tunnels that would have cut through parkland and caused increased traffic congestion in Moreland and surrounding areas. Along with other public transport groups, the campaign was successful in stopping the proposed link. Bolton also held regular ward meetings and gained a reputation as an honest councilor who “got things done”.

In a video for her campaign, Bolton said that the best part of her role on council was “being able to work with residents to create community campaigns, so that residents get treated seriously by council. People get bureaucratically dismissed as not having genuine or realistic concerns, so people often feel very powerless or disenchanted. As an activist councilor you can help people get organized, and also raise residents’ issues within the council, and often get victories, which actually helps the residents’ campaign to move forward and win their demand.”

Stephen Jolly was first elected to the Yarra Council in 2008, and has been re-elected twice. He has stated that he wants the area to be a community ““where families and those on low incomes can afford to live and more easily access services, like child care”. Like Bolton, Jolly has been active in campaigning against the East-West Link, against the privatisation of services like rubbish collection, and for more public housing . He has also been active in campaigning against racism, and has been subjected to harassment and death threats by racist organizations. Jolly was a long-time member of the Socialist Party (a Trotskyist group affiliated to the Committee for a Workers International) but resigned earlier this year along with a number of other members, over allegations that the organisation had covered up allegations of abuse of a female member.

The six other socialist candidates who ran on the same ticket as Jolly also received a high level of support, although not enough to be elected to council. Four Green members were also elected, meaning that with Jolly’s support they could form a majority on the 9-person council. Jolly told Green Left Weekly that he is keen to work with the Greens and called for public discussions on a common program.

Socialist Alliance also has another local councillor, Sam Wainwright, who was elected to the Fremantle City Council in Western Australia in 2009, and re-elected in 2013 with an outright majority of 58.33% in his Hilton ward. Wainwright has been involved in campaigning against a number of proposed freeway projects and for expanded public transport services, telling Green Left Weekly in 2014: “What is called transport planning in this country is mostly endless subsidies to the road transport, road construction and fossil fuel industries – at literally any cost to the public purse, environment, urban form and human health. Stopping endless freeway construction is not some NIMBY thing, it’s about creating people-friendly cities.”

Wainwright also campaigned for better conditions for council workers, and was successful in getting the council to adopt a policy that recognised union rights and permanent work instead of contracts.

Earlier this year, Wainwright successfully moved that Fremantle council support protests for refugee rights, call for the end of the offshore mandatory detention regime and boat “turnbacks”, and boycott any companies who are contracted to run detention centres.

The success of the socialist councillors is due to a number of factors. All are long-time activists with a history of living in and involvement in their local communities. They have all been uncompromising in defending those communities from cuts to services, inappropriate developments, gentrification and racism, and in standing up to attacks from right wing groups and media. At a time when many on the left are feeling demoralised and isolated, their success shows that it is possible to gain support for openly socialist politics among ordinary working people and in diverse communities.

For more information on the socialist councillors:

Sue Bolton: https://www.facebook.com/SueBoltonForMoreland/

Stephen Jolly: https://www.facebook.com/stephen.jolly1

Sam Wainwright: https://www.facebook.com/FreoReport/?fref=ts

Filed Under: Elections

5 Myths about the Syrian revolution

November 1, 2016 by

regime-death-toll

“The start of solidarity is correcting the narrative.”

-Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and Civil War.

Since the Syrian revolution began in 2011, a mixture of propaganda and conspiracy theories has obscured the nature of the conflict. As the Syrian conflict is the biggest refugee crisis in a generation, we cannot stand by and let these myths go unchallenged.

  1. It’s just a sectarian conflict

As with many conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, Syria’s conflict is often depicted as a solely ethnic/sectarian conflict. The spectre of Arabs, and particularly Sunni Muslims, with guns is stereotyped as only religiously motivated.

However, the beginning of the revolution in 2011 was profoundly democratic and secular. All ethnicities and religious denominations took to the streets, as part of the broader regional upsurge dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’.

In the squares, Syrians chanted ‘One, One, One, the Syrian people are One’ and ‘Sunnis and Alawis are one’, referring to the oppressed Sunni majority and the dominant Alawi minority (of whom President Bashar-Al Assad is a member).

In seeking to crush the democratic movement, Assad deliberately provoked sectarian conflict. Regime death squads primarily targeted Sunnis, and the regime released salafists (militant Sunnis) from jail to add fuel to the fire. While sectarianism has grown since then, the responsibility lies with the regime, which deliberately sought to undermine the secular nature of the revolution.

The democratic current that emerged in 2011 still exists, albeit besieged from all sides.

  1. The Syrian rebels are a US proxy

Conspiracy theorists argue that the revolution was simply a CIA-funded proxy from the start. A more nuanced take holds that the US has since hijacked the revolution. Indeed, the US has in the past funded coups, dictatorships, and Islamist movements in the region.

However, there is a fundamental difference between a US-backed coup, and a popular democracy movement calling for international support.

Assad shot first. When the revolutionaries were forced to arm in self-defence, they had woefully inadequate weaponry. Their call for international support must be understood in this context.

Obama stated that chemical weapons attacks were a ‘red line’ that he would not allow Assad to cross. When Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack in Ghouta in 2013, Obama’s regime failed to act. This led to a sense of betrayal among Syrian revolutionaries.

Assad and his Russian backers continue to rain fire on the Syrian people. In Aleppo, Syrian children burn tires so that the fumes will create a makeshift No-Fly Zone. The US refuses to impose a No-Fly Zone on Assad, or grant anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian rebels (perhaps fearing that the revolution would turn against the USA and Israel). The revolutionaries remain woefully outgunned by Assad.

If we cannot offer any alternative to the Syrian rebels, we have no right to preach to them about their decision to call for any support they can get.

  1. ISIS is the only alternative to Assad

Many commentators say that Assad is the lesser evil, as ISIS is the only alternative.

However, there are alternatives to both Assad and ISIS within Syrian society. In fact, ISIS did not originate among the Syrian people. Rather, the group formed in Iraqi jails, before recruiting disenfranchised Muslims from around the world. In Syria, ISIS are essentially a foreign occupying force.

By contrast, the Free Syrian Army and its allies have fought both Assad’s and ISIS’ forces. In liberated areas of Syria, democratic Local Coordination Committees remain as an alternative to both Assadist and Islamist dictatorship.

A Free Syria would be governed by the people, not by dictators.

  1. US and Russian intervention are equally to blame

It is no secret that US intervention has torn apart much of the Middle East and North Africa. From backing Israeli colonisation, to funding the Afghan mujahideen which would later morph into the Taliban, and more recently occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has pursued an imperialist policy that continues to destroy lives.

However, Syria is not Iraq. We cannot show meaningful solidarity with the Syrian people if we fail to explain the political conditions they face.

Assad’s regime has killed overwhelmingly more Syrians than any other force involved. Putin’s Russia, in militarily intervening to support the criminal Assad, simply wants a proxy in the region. Any attempt to depict this as ‘anti-imperialism’ makes a mockery of the term.

The United States is not the only evil on the world stage. Rising Russian imperialism poses a similar threat, backing genocide in Syria, just as the United States backs genocide in Palestine.

5. The only people worth supporting in Syria are the Kurds.

Many Western leftists, confused by the supposed “sectarian” nature of the Syrian conflict, have latched onto the Kurdish forces as the only “good guys” in the struggle. The Kurdish enclave of Rojava, ruled by the PYD (Democratic Union Party), is touted as some kind of “anarcho-feminist” safe haven of rights and democracy. This romanticisation of Kurdish culture as somehow superior to other Syrian nationalities is quite silly and somewhat racist, and leads to willful blindness to the negative side of what Kurdish forces are actually doing.

While Rojava’s leaders talk of “democratic confederalism”, PYD forces have ethnically cleansed Arab villages and shut down other Kurdish political parties. The PYD’s fight against ISIS has been supported by both United States AND Russian firepower – a real problem for those who otherwise talk about “foreign intervention” as the real problem in Syria.

Most disturbingly, the PYD have not been above actually working with the Assad dictatorship. The regime actually handed over large parts of Rojava to the PYD without a fight, and continues to pay the wages of the civil servants there. The PYD also holds parts of the northern suburbs of Aleppo, where it has helped the regime forces in the Western suburbs against rebel-held Eastern suburbs.

The Kurdish people in the north of Syria – as well as those in Turkey, Iraq and Iran – have been fighting for their right to self-determination for nearly 100 years, and of course they should be supported in this struggle. But the PYD are no more spotless angels than anyone on the Free Syrian side. Any democratic solution will have to include Syrian Arabs, Kurds and all other ethnicities joining to put an end to the Assad regime.

“When people ask ‘Who should we support in Syria?’ I should say: in Syria no political party, militia or army is worthy of our wholehearted or uncritical support. No ideology either. What we should support are the community-grown democratic and quasi-democratic institutions and the civilian communities they represent. These people deserve support which is both critical and absolute. Critical because nothing should be uncritical. Absolute because these survivors inside are under continuous and full-scale military assault, beleaguered and at risk of extinction.”

-Robin Yassin-Kassab

What can we do?

As Aotearoa/New Zealand has diplomatic ties with Russia, our responsibility is to challenge the Russian role in the conflict.

We can also donate to humanitarian groups like the White Helmets in Syria, and call on our own government to accept refugees.

For more information please:

  • Like ‘Syrian Solidarity New Zealand’ on Facebook.

  • Read the book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and Civil War, by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab. This book is based on extensive interviews with Syrians on the ground.

Filed Under: International, Internationalism, Syria

Green Vomit and statistical nonsense: the lies you hear about immigration and the Auckland housing crisis

October 22, 2016 by
hanson-farage-trump

Uncomfortable bedfellows: NZ Greens’ James Shaw joins Pauline Hanson (Australia), Michael Gove (UK) and Donald Trump (US) in an international trend of xenophobic scapegoating.

 

Article by Tim Leadbeater. Reprinted from the International Socialist Organisation (Aotearoa/NZ).

A few days ago the Labour party announced a new policy of increasing police numbers by 1000. I groaned at this news but it didn’t really surprise me. Then yesterday I heard of the new Greens policy on immigration, with James Shaw calling for a drastic reduction in numbers. Is New Zealand First calling the shots here, aided and encouraged by a compliant and uncritical media happy to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon? The Greens and Labour will almost certainly need the support of NZF to form a government next year, and Winston really just hates those hippy-dippy lentil munching do gooders. James Shaw knows this, yet needs to send a very clear signal to Peters that the Greens are willing to compromise. Immigration is a hot topic, and Shaw can easily frame the issue in terms of “sustainablitity” and “infrastructure”. No need for racist dog-whistles or Chinese sounding surnames, this is Sensible and Practical Greens policy, easily digested by sensitive liberals turned off by the crude nationalistic appeals of NZF.

“We think that the country needs a more sustainable immigration policy, so what we’d do is set a variable approvals target based on a percentage of the overall population. That would be at about 1 percent of the population, which is historically how fast New Zealand’s population has grown.”

Mr Shaw says the policy would even out peaks and troughs in annual migration numbers.

“You’ve also got to cater for changes in infrastructure, and because our population has historically grown at about 1 percent the country is set up to absorb that,” he says.

“Suddenly double that number, and you’ve got a problem like we’ve got at the moment, where you actually can’t meet the demand.”

Hmmmm. Sounds sensible enough. It’s not that we are racist or anything mean and horrible like that, it is just that we have looked at it very carefully and the numbers just don’t add up. One percent is all that the infrastructure can handle – just look at the housing crisis for proof, even if we wanted to we just couldn’t build enough new houses that fast. The government isn’t switched on like we are, they are letting in huge numbers and now people are sleeping in their cars! Etc, etc.

Curious about this one percent growth claim, I searched for the population data on Statistics New Zealand and came up with this graph:

population-graph

It is sort of true that the New Zealand population has grown at around 1% per year, as you can see for the period from the 1990s up to 2015, the line fluctuates above and below 1%. If you were a statistician paid by Winston Peters you could cut the time period to 1980 and onwards, and very easily draw a steadily increasing trendline through the periodic peaks and troughs. Look! The line is going up, we don’t have enough houses! The line must be flat, we must flatten the line! One percent is an absolute maximum!

The really strange and scary thing is to consider just how New Zealand survived throughout those extreme and rabbit-warren like years after the second world war. Those baby boomers were just popping them out without any consideration for New Zealand’s fragile infrastructure, pushing 3% for a couple of years and then a period of about 20 years with that line well in the red zone (and it was so sudden! How did they cope?). Then there was that period in the late 60s and early 70s when the line went into the 2% Danger Zone for about 3 years. Those damn hippies, what were they thinking?

Cheering for the Greens new anti-immigrant stance, Martyn Bradbury from the Daily Blog conjures conjures up some even more gratuitously false statistics to make the case:

Here is the grim truth about our current immigration settings. It’s not the 70,000-90,000 who become permanent residents that we need to be concerned about and it’s not their families joining them that we need to be worried with either, the real problem is our scam work/study visa scheme that sees 250 000 desperate students coming to NZ for bullshit ‘education’ programs that end up as bonded servitude with exploitative employers who hold onto their passports.

These 250 000 work hard jobs, many on less than minimum wage and pay tens of thousands for education schemes that are glorified english courses all for the promise of becoming permanent  residents.

A quarter of a million students paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn English, and getting exploited at the same time by ruthless bosses! And all of them putting massive stress on our infrastructure! They’ll never ever go back to where they came from because their bosses have stolen their passports!! We’ll be doing the country a favour as well as fighting for worker’s rights if we just stop them staying here! A double whammy:

We need to stop exploiting these people and stop promising them permanent residence via education. If they wish to come here for education, fine, that’;s their decision, but putting in place the pathway from education or employment to residency is exploitative and creating huge pressures on an infrastructure that can’t take anymore.

When I first read this blog I was struck by the twisted moral “logic” of Bradbury’s anti-immigrant stance. Like James Shaw, he wants to save the ‘infrastructure’ from the hordes of foreigners swamping our fair land. But he wants to present this as simultaneously saving the immigrants from exploitative bosses. If only they knew how exploitative and nasty kiwi bosses were, they would never have come in the first place. (Working conditions in places like India, of course, being obviously superior). I started pondering the strange and only barely coherent motivations for this ‘argument’, then my head started to hurt so I gave up. What then struck me was Bradbury’s figures. Where on earth did he get that figure of 250,000 ‘desperate students’?

He links to another blog by Mike Treen, which states that “250,000 people are granted student or temporary work visas each year.”. There are no sources given for any of these numbers, so I dug around the Statistics New Zealand and MBIE sites for up to date data. Treen’s figure of 250,000 is most likely based on data for the 2014/2015 year, in which 84,856 international students were approved for New Zealand courses, and 170,814 people were granted a work visa.

Let’s start with the temporary work visas. It is difficult to know exactly how many of these people are or were international students. There are several categories of temporary visa, and a set of complex rules and regulations surrounding each category. I didn’t spend enough time on this problem to come up with an exact number, but I did take note of the clearly spelt out fact that the biggest single source country of those gaining temporary work visas was the UK. And the fact that the biggest visa category (61,404 people) was ‘Working Holiday Schemes’ (think backpackers). How many people were granted visas in the ‘Work to Study’ category? Exactly 13,688. There are other categories international students might have applied under, but this is the most obvious candidate.

How about those 84,856 international students? Again I didn’t dig long enough in the data to work out how many of these students worked, or intended to work after studying. Fairly obviously the 18% of them who were under 16 will not be working, which leaves us with 69,582 who might get part time work alongside their studies. There is no denying that for a significant chunk of these international students (and ex-students), exploitative and often illegal work practices are a major problem. But the numbers involved are nowhere near the idiotically false figure of 250,000 which Bradbury confidently puts forward without any reservations.

Are these just careless mistakes made a by blogger who thrives on the hot air of passing controversies, or is there something else going on here? I’m aware that Bradbury operates a blog rather than an academic journal, but the brazen sloppiness regarding statistics is surely a big issue. The internet allows you to check numbers very quickly and easily, so why not back up your statistics with actual sources?

There are definitely some impressive numbers out there which at first glance appear to back up the argument for cutting immigration. According to Statistics New Zealand, surely a source far more credible than Bradbury’s blog or Green Party press releases, Auckland’s population grew by a massive 2.9% in the 2014 – 2015 year. This growth accounted for over half of the population growth for the entire country. Alongside these facts it would not be a difficult task to present a series of familiar and undeniable truths about the problems with Auckland’s infrastructure: the housing crisis, inadequate public transport, congested roads and so on. Shortly after the release of this data in July 2015, there was a Stuff article with the headline “NZ migration boom nears 60,000 a year, as Indians and returning Kiwis flood in”. Like many other similarly hysterical media reports, immigration is presented as a major causal factor of the housing crisis. With almost no attention given in the mainstream media to alternative points of view which question this received wisdom, the truth of the claim ‘immigrants cause housing crisis’ has apparently become established through constant repetition. In this environment, it is possible to make outlandishly false statistical claims about immigration without stirring any controversy.

The most insightful piece I have read about this issue is Peter Nunns’ transport blog article ‘Why is Auckland Growing?’. Nunns points out that net migration is extremely volatile, being dependent on both the numbers of Aucklanders leaving for places such as Australia and the numbers of people coming in from overseas. Much more constant and statistically significant is the natural population increase due to Aucklanders having babies. If we can get past the hysteria of the 2015 figures and look at the past 24 years for a broader and more robust view of the situation, the statistics tell a different story: in 18 of those 24 years, natural increase was a bigger contributor to growth than net migration. The significance of this is that even if regulations on immigration were tightened considerably, overall long term population growth would be roughly the same as if the status quo rules remained. Nunns demonstrates this with a simulation comparing a projected Auckland population growth with a 50% reduction of net migration to one without such a reduction. His prediction is that by the year 2043, the 50% reduction version of Auckland would have a population of about 2.1 million, whereas the status quo Auckland would have a population of about 2.2 million. The conclusion he draws is that Auckland faces some major tasks around preparing its infrastructure for population growth, so it needs to do things like build more houses. Cutting immigration is simply not a solution.

I can’t resist another conclusion: none of this pedantic analysing of facts and figures really matters all that much. What does matter is all those times you get on board an Auckland train in the morning and there are no seats left, and you are surrounded by lots of Indian and Asian young people. When you get on the bus and have to listen to all those conversations in Chinese. Then you get off on Dominion Road and basically every sign is written in Chinese, and they don’t even bother translating them into English. All those bright and hard working Asian students who get most of the academic prizes in the secondary schools. These very pertinent experiences and anecdotes build on each other, so when you read the outlandish and ridiculous sentence “the real problem is our scam work/study visa scheme that sees 250 000 desperate students coming to NZ for bullshit ‘education’ programs that end up as bonded servitude with exploitative employers who hold onto their passports” you don’t even blink, it just sounds about right.

As a socialist I am for internationalism, solidarity and a world without borders. In this article however I have restrained myself from using any of the perspectives, values or arguments which inform these positions. The mainstream left in New Zealand appears to be lacking in both statistical literacy and the spirit of the famous phrase ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’. If we can’t communicate to them the spirit of solidarity, the least we can do is point out their mathematical failure.

Filed Under: Electoral Politics, Green Party, Racism

Syria Solidarity: National day of action 29th October

October 20, 2016 by

day-of-rage-for-aleppo

Civilians in Aleppo and across Syria are being intensively bombed by Russia with bunker bombs, phosphorous bombs, napalm, thermobaric and cluster bombs; and by the Syrian regime with chlorine containing barrel bombs; targetting homes, schools, hospitals, rescue teams, and underground shelters .

Like many Syrian cities, Aleppo has been under a starvation siege. The regime and Russian have even bombed the city’s water supply.
Despite these atrocious crimes against humanity, Aleppo’s people show tremendous solidarity and caring for each other, as they work to find the wounded under the rubble, and rush them to undergound clinics for treatment. Hundreds of democratically run community councils have been formed across Syria in the liberated areas. They have produced a tremendous amount of art, literature, music, and electronic media documenting the revolution and counter revolution in Syria.

The “peace” talks have broken down. It is clear that Russia and the Assad regime are looking for a military solution to enable the genocidal Assad regime to continue in power.

Most of the fighters killing Syrian civilians are not Syrians. They include soliders from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, many of them conscripted or desperately poor with no other options for a living.
The Assad regime and Russia have killed half a million Syrian people. The genocide has to stop! The regime regularly uses rape and torture as weapons.

The war started because people across Syria went onto the streets to demand democracy, and instead were shot, rounded up, tortured, raped and killed. So the people took up arms to defend themselves. The Assad regime has vowed to continue to obliterate the population until it accepts his rule.

Both the United States and Russia have re-defined the people’s struggle for democracy as a “war on terror” and are both responsible for killing civilians.

Isis grew in Syria with the encouragement of the Assad regime. Assad deliberately released extremists from his jails, who went on to join Isis in Syria. The regime leaves Isis alone, and Isis is continually attacking the democratic opposition groups. The democratic opposition has been forced to fight on two fronts, against the attacks from the regime and from Isis. Despite the evils perpetrated by Isis, it has killed a fraction of the number of people, that the Assad regime has. The Assad regime with its Russian and Iranian allies are the greater evil.

Stop the bombing! Troops out!
No more genocide! Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution!
Victory for Syrian people now!

Wellington action:
2-3pm 29th October, Russian Embassy, 57 Messines Road, Karori
[Facebook event]

Auckland action:
2-3pm 29th October, Aotea Square
[Facebook event]

Filed Under: International, Internationalism, Middle East, Syria
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