Ae Marika! Tribute to Mike Kyriazopoulous

April 16, 2013 by

AE MARIKA is an article written every week by Hone Harawira, leader of the MANA Movement and Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tokerau. This tribute, to Fightback comrade Mike Kyriazopoloulous, was originally published on Mana.net.nz

On Saturday night I was privileged to host my first ever citizenship ceremony as a Member of Parliament. The ceremony was for a good friend of mine, Mike Kyriazopoulos and his wife Joanne. Mike is a mix of Greek and Jewish ancestry, and used to live and work in England where he met his wife Joanne.

Their citizenship application was finally approved a couple of weeks ago, and the ceremony was held at the Auckland Trades Hall in Auckland as part of a special tribute evening for Mike who is a committed socialist, a union activist, and chairman of the MANA branch of Te Raki Paewhenua.

Mike gave his oath of allegiance in Maori and followed that with his own personal vow to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the principles of international socialism.

The tribute part of the evening was because Mike has motor neurone disease which causes nerve cells to degenerate and muscles to waste away. Sufferers invariably end up unable to walk, speak, use their arms and hands, or hold up their head. It has no known cause and is invariably fatal. Mike is not expected to live much longer.

Tributes flowed in from union activists and socialist comrades from around the world and from the many gathered for the evening, and ended with my wife Hilda getting all these staunch socialists to hold hands and each say something nice about Mike as part of a big karakia for him.

Mike is not a man given to much emotion, and his speech was one urging everyone to have clear purpose and a strong commitment to the future.

A sad occasion but a great celebration nonetheless.

And then on the Sunday I was out at Piringatahi Marae in West Harbour where the body of another good friend, Wiremu Hamahona (Samson) was lying in state.

Wiremu is from Pawarenga but born and raised in Auckland. His family had gracefully agreed to my request that his body be released from the funeral home so that he could spend his last night with us, and MANA activists and friends and whanau came from far and wide to pay their final respects to a man who had been the backbone of MANA Waitakere for the past couple of years.

Wiremu was a complex guy – very intense, very loyal and totally committed.

He was training to be a teacher and some of his teacher mates came to farewell their friend. But to most of us, Wiremu was the guy who took charge of putting up my billboards right across Waitakere during my by-election in 2011 and the general election later that year, and him and his boy Davian would often be out all hours of the night in the cold and the rain, repairing billboards, refacing the defacing, “removing” obstacles, and making sure that regardless of how little money we had, MANA’s presence would be as strong as everyone else’s.

Wiremu once told one of the brothers that he wasn’t much into politics, but that MANA gave him heart and purpose and a reason to live. I’m glad that we were all there for him on his last night – to share the many hilarious stories that gave context to his life and hopefully gave warmth to his mum.

By his will, Wiremu was cremated and his ashes remain with his family.

Wiremu was like the sun. Regardless of how bad yesterday went, you always know that he would be there to warm your soul tomorrow. Haere e te rangatira, haere.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

April issue of Fightback online

April 15, 2013 by

Welcome to the second issue of Fightback, newspaper of Fightback (Aotearoa/NZ). Fightback is a socialist organisation with branches in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch.

Child poverty has continued to feature in headlines this year with at least one in five children living in poverty. Fightback participates in MANA, supporting this party in the struggle for reforms while maintaining the need to build a socialist party. Grant Brookes discusses MANA’s Feed The Kids bill, and calls for a collective approach which reinforces that children are part of a wider community and we need to ultimately end poverty in general.

Socialists support struggles for living wages while recognising that “fair wages” are ultimately unachievable under capitalism. Ian Anderson reviews previous struggles for a living wage and covers the current campaign backed by the Service and Food Workers Union.

Full employment is a key to ending poverty. Jared Phillips covers recent attacks on the unemployed and beneficiaries by the National government and the need for socialist solutions.

Fightback is an internationalist organisation, which recognises workers in Aotearoa/NZ must stand with the Pasifika working class. Byron Clark covers a leaked video of police brutality in Fiji, and the hypocrisy of our government condemning this brutality while approving the abuses carried out by its allies in the region.

Socialists must reassess some parts of our understanding of capitalism in the “age of the geek.” Daphne Lawless argues that information workers are part of the working class and discusses the implications of this for socialist transformation in the 21st Century.

Socialists argue that class solutions are required to combat climate change. Ian Anderson covers the impact of climate change on increasing drought risk, and conflicting approaches to water conservation.

Fightback comrades have a range of socialist perspectives on history. Mike Kyriazopoulos revives a piece of lost history, the 1939 condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Finland by Wellington seafarers, and suggests that this offers a glimpse of what socialist politics could look like in Aotearoa/NZ.

2013 April Fightback

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Margaret Thatcher dies

April 14, 2013 by

street party

Byron Clark

On April the 8th former British Prime Minister Maragret Thatcher died at the age of 87. Described by media as a “controversial figure” Thatcher was possibly Britain’s most loathed politician. Her death was celebrated with street parties and Glasgow and Brixton, and following a social media campaign Brits purchased the song “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” in an effort for it to be the number one hit on the charts the week of her death.

While she left office in 1990, few have forgotten her decade in power. The Thatcher led government enacted a series of neoliberal economic reforms, the likes to which soon became vogue around the world as the end of the long economic boom following World War II meant that capitalism was no longer productive enough to provide a welfare state. The tax burden was shifted from the rich to the poor, state assets were privatised- including social housing, and the labour movement was crushed.

Before Thatcher and the conservatives came to power in 1979, 13.4% of the British population lived below the poverty line. By 1990, it had gone up to 22.2%. Unemployment hit levels not seen since the Great Depression, inequality rose and health outcomes became worse after cuts to the Nation Health Service and the deregulation of school meals. Famously she also ended a scheme that gave free milk to children, earning her the moniker “the milk snatcher” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Events

Racism in Aotearoa/NZ

April 13, 2013 by

class struggle not racist scapegoating chch

by Byron Clark

On March 23rd Christchurch witnessed the spectacle of a white pride demonstration. In a Saint Albans park, with plans to march down Papanui road, approximately thirty people gathered. Mostly young men, they wore military style garb, many of them adorned with swastikas. Organisers of the demonstration advertised it as a family friendly outing, advocating “white rights” and pride in one’s ethnicity, but the rank-and-file of the white nationalist movement didn’t want to leave their neo-Nazi regalia at home, and couldn’t resist the temptation to make sieg heil salutes.

The local community was out in force to oppose racism, around a hundred people gathered in a counter demonstration. Many of them residents of St Albans who wanted to make it clear that racism is not welcome in their community and the white pride demonstrators did not represent their views. In a fact that should embarrass most of this city’s residents, Christchurch is only city in Aotearoa with an active white supremacist movement. The Te Ara encyclopaedia entry on the city notes that a white supremacist subculture emerged here in the 1990s, and members of it would periodically attack ethnic minorities.

Although many of the people on the demonstration would have been just children at that time, white supremacy is still a violent movement today. In 2010 white supremacist Shannon Brent Flewellen was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Christchurch court for the brutal murder of South Korean student Kim Jae-Hyeon. The judge noted that Flewellen “regarded [the victim] as not deserving of the same dignity and respect as a white person.”

There was no outright violence at the recent white pride rally, although one of the demonstrators was arrested at the beginning of the demonstration for a prior incident, and near the end a carload of white supremacists grabbed a sign from one of the counter-protesters as they drove past yelling “white pride!” injuring the woman’s arm. It’s no surprise that few people from ethnic minority groups joined the counter protest. While they would have agreed with its aims they would have been putting themselves at a greater risk than the Pakeha protesters.

Counter protestors successfully cut the white pride march short, blocking the footpath making the white supremacists change direction and return to the park. The action has solidified a core group of anti-racist activists, who have since held meetings to plan further anti-racist activities. It’s a big  task, opposing racism means more than just opposing  the Right Wing Resistance, the group behind March’s white supremacist rally.

No one is born racist. We need to be asking ourselves what it is about our society that has allowed a white-supremacist movement to grow in this Christchurch. Part of it is demographics. While in other cities the working class is made up largely of Maori and Polynesians, Christchurch still has a predominantly white working class. With unemployment high, and the state of many poorer suburbs following the earthquakes, it’s unsurprising that working class Pakeha are feeling abandoned, looking for something to join and someone to blame. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Racism

Teachers and public education under attack

April 12, 2013 by

christchurch-schools-protest

Rachel Broad, Fightback Hamilton branch, Aotearoa/NZ. Originally published by the Socialist Party of Australia.

Teachers in  New Zealand are facing a perfect storm. For the time being they have faced down government attempts to increase class sizes but have also had to contend with school closures and mergers in Christchurch and a move to introduce charter schools.

At the same time large numbers of teachers are going without pay or getting paid incorrectly thanks to the failure of their national payroll system. This is creating huge amounts of stress. Tensions are on the increase between teachers and the government, and the public are increasingly siding with the teachers.

Government’s failed attempt to increase class sizes

In mid 2012 the Ministry of Education attempted to introduce a new policy that would change teacher-student funding ratios in schools and would have increased class sizes and created job losses. Some school principals said that they would have to cut up to three jobs in each school if the policy was carried out. The student-to-teacher ratio would have been standardised at 27.5 students per teacher for year 2 to year 10 classes.

The policy was deeply unpopular. Some polls showed up to 89% of people in opposition to the policy. Teachers and many members of the public rallied against the proposed changes.

The government tried to carry out the changes within both primary and secondary schools at the same time. Usually, using divide and rule tactics, the government has attacked the primary and secondary sectors separately. By attacking both sectors at the same time the government had bitten off more than they could chew and were forced to back down.

These events were the beginning of a sharp decline for Hekia Parata, the Minister of Education and puppet for the government’s education plan. Parata was paraded by the ruling National Party as a high-flying Maori MP and was quickly promoted to cabinet.

During one teachers’ meeting about class sizes where Parata was under constant fire she condescendingly lectured teachers by telling them that one of the main problems with the education system was not underfunding but that many teachers don’t pronounce Maori and Pacific Island children’s names correctly. Without hesitation this divisiveness was roundly rejected by broad layers from the Maori and Pacific Island communities. Parata is now deeply unpopular. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Education
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