A Report from the New Conservative meeting in Christchurch

August 23, 2019 by

by BYRON CLARK. Originally published at his Patreon.

“They are coming for your children!” boomed the man on the stage. He projects his voice across the hall, he is emotional, but clear. He could be a stage actor.

It’s almost frightening.

I’m not frightened of anyone coming for our nation’s children. But I’m frightened for some of my friends.

I expected this topic would come up at this meeting, because I’ve followed this group for a while. The MC had hinted at it too:

“I’m a teacher, and I got involved because I’m very concerned about some of the stuff in the curriculum.”

At that comment, one of the young men in front of me had leaned to his friend beside him and whispered “trans stuff”.

Before telling the audience “they are coming for your children” the speaker had read aloud from a copy of Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.

The passage he read was a transgender teenager talking about some of their early sexual experiences. He sounds like an American style evangelist, expect he’s Polynesian.

“The book is called Beyond Magenta. On the other side it says ‘central’, ‘Christchurch City Libraries’, your rates – you fund it! It’s in the youth department! They are normalising paedophilia!”

The party’s Facebook page had shared a photo of this page earlier this same day. In the following paragraph, after talking about their experiences with other children the same age, the writer talks about unwanted sexual attention from adults. I doubt anyone reading the full page would come away with the impression the book was supporting paedophilia.

“It took me one minute to find it,” pipes up the MC from the floor.

“Our children need protection!” screams the speaker. “And this type of government is making an environment that is effectively unsafe!”

He’d brought up the government earlier, claiming that changes to the Human Rights Act protecting gender identity would result in people being charged for misgendering someone: “just as it’s happening in Canada!”

I remembered this story, it made it’s way around conservative news sites last year, and opposing the Canadian bill that added human rights protections for transgender people helped turn psychologist Jordan Peterson into something of a minor celebrity.

No one has been arrested or changed for misgendering someone in Canada though. Could it happen? “Absolutely not a chance,” according to University of Toronto law professor Brenda Cossman. “There is no criminalization of the misuse of pronouns,” she told the Associated Press.

My stomach churned at the speakers remarks. I’ve heard from older people about the “gay panic” in the nineteen eighties, when politicians and religious leaders claimed homosexuals were a danger to children.

The panic has been rehashed for a twenty first century audience. And this audience, which skewed mostly male but had a bigger range of ages than most political meetings, seemed to be receptive to the speaker’s fear-mongering.

I started following the New Conservative Party because they appear to have close links to the far right. They played a major role in the campaign against the UN Migration Compact in this country. That campaign was started by the far-right Austrian group Generation Identity.

Following the events of March 15 in Christchurch, where a terrorist killed 51 people in two mosques, it came to light that the shooter had previously donated to Generation Identity. He had also written “here’s your migration compact” on one of his weapons.

The two speakers fudged their answers to questions about this link: “The whole white extremist if you’re conservative, it’s just one way that the media want to label us so they can degenerate and devalue us, and we’re just not going to play their game,” says the leader, a middle aged Pākehā man, before moving on to a less challenging question: “What is the best way we can support and grow this party?”

New Conservative appear to be distancing themselves from the campaign they played such a huge role in last year, but have not said being involved was a mistake.

The party still appears to be courting an alt-right audience. On April Second, the party’s face book page shared a video promoting Douglas Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. The book claims European civilisation is under threat from Muslim immigration, and is a far right favourite. New Conservative described it as “a powerful understanding as to why our culture is suffering,” and noted: “We absolutely agree.”

Elliot Ikilei, the Polynesian man with the booming voice, seems to have a lot of friends on New Zealand’s far right. Speaking at a “Free Speech” rally in Auckland on August 10th, he noted that many in attendance were there to honour the memory of Jesse Anderson, “a good man who suffered trauma in his life”.

Anderson was another organiser of the campaign against the Migration Compact. His message for immigrants at one of the rallies made headlines: “Integrate, or get out!”. Anderson, who went by the handle “@extremerightboi” on Twitter, took his own life in the midst of a custody battle.

While his death is a tragedy whatever your political views (he was just twenty-four years old, and now will never have the opportunity to renounce his involvement in the alt-right scene that many young depressed white men gravitate to), it’s surprising that Ikilei brings up their friendship when speaking publicly.

But maybe not when he’s in front of this audience. When asking the crowd who has a firearms license a woman says “Oh, no not me”, presumably after raising her hand. “Kym has no firearms license,” laughs Ikilei. 

Kym is Kym Koloni. She’s not a New Conservative member; she had been a New Zealand First candidate before getting offside with the party, and starting One Nation NZ. That party didn’t have much of a presence outside of Facebook, and now it’s not there either. The page, along with Kym’s account, were removed after repeated violations of Facebook’s terms of service around fake news and graphic violence. 

One Nation NZ had shared the footage from the Christchurch shooter’s livestream, alleging that the victims were “crisis actors”.

The other speakers were Paul Davie, best known as the real estate against who was terminated for what the New Zealand Herald described as “racially charged” social media posts that disparaged Africans, Muslims, multiculturalism and Māori culture. Davie had been a candidate for the Conservative Party, before they re-branded with the “New” prefix, but these days has his own group called One New Zealand Party. Davie prattled on about Halal certification and supposed “no go zones” in the UK where “sharia law” is in force.

Also speaking was Lee Williams, who had travelled from Christchurch especially. Williams runs a YouTube channel called “Cross the Rubicon” where he promotes the idea that Jacinda Ardern is a “cultural Marxist” and “shadowy globalists” plan to “flood all western nations with mass migration from the third world”. Williams activism has attracted the attention of police, likely for it’s rhetorical similarity to the conspiracy theories that inspired by the Christchurch shooter. 

At the Auckland rally Williams spoke mostly about the “lying mainstream media” in particular signalling out Patrick Gower, the Newshub Journalist who did a series of stories on white supremacy in New Zealand. Williams, who was flanked by notorious white supremacist Phil Arps when speaking at a rally in Christchurch last year – a rally New Conservative leader Leighton Baker also spoke at – believes allegations of white supremacy in New Zealand are just slander by the leftist media to demonise conservatives. 

One of his YouTube videos on this theme was shared by the New Conservative Party on Facebook last month. The post described it as “an intelligent and succinct review, with a profound, poignant conclusion” Some of those at that meeting tonight might start to read up on the New Conservatives, maybe, I hope, they’ll come to realise that the threat our world is facing today is not “transgender ideology” but the rise of the far-right, something New Conservative might know a thing or two about.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Crowdfunded magazine on Syrian revolution to be launched at SYRIA SPEAKS meeting

July 24, 2019 by
Cover of the Arabic version of the magazine

Fightback’s crowdfunded magazine on Syria: Revolution and Counter-Revolution will be launched at a meeting in Auckland on Friday July 26th, where Syrians in New Zealand will speak about the uprising against the Assad government, the violence that has followed, the role of foreign governments in the conflict, and what New Zealanders can do to help.

(This meeting was originally scheduled for March 15 this year, but was postponed after the massacre that day of 50 worshippers at Christchurch mosques, some of whom were Syrian refugees. The meeting is co-sponsored by Organise Aotearoa – views of speakers do not necessarily reflect the views of either Fightback or Organise Aotearoa.)

Venue: The Peace Place, 22 Emily St, Auckland City

Time: Friday 26 July, 7pm – 9 pm (Facebook event)

Speakers:
ALI AKIL came from Syria as a teenager and has lived here for two decades. His father was an activist against the Assad regime who was imprisoned, tortured and narrowly escaped execution. Ali was the founder of Syrian Solidarity NZ, which was established in 2011 in response to the dignity uprising in Syria.

MIREAM SALAMEH (by Skype from Melbourne) was born in Homs, Syria in 1983. When the Syrian Revolution broke out in 2011, Salameh was persecuted both as a revolutionary and visual artist. Miream, with her friends, founded a magazine called (Justice) in which they documented Assad abuses in the city of Homs. Due to her involvement in anti-government activism, she was forced to leave her homeland after regime forces made threats of rape, arrest and murder against her, looting and destroying most of her artwork. With her three remaining artworks, she fled her homeland to Lebanon in 2012 and came to Australia in 2013 as a refugee. Miream’s artwork addresses issues of social justice, freedom and the suffering of the Syrian people, who are being violently oppressed for resisting dictatorship. Miream is also the translator of Fightback’s new magazine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Preserving Aotearoa/NZ’s revolutionary literature

February 4, 2019 by

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Radical Aotearoa Digital Archive (or RADAR) is a project to preserve the publications and media of the radical left in New Zealand. This archive is intended to serve as the central hub for efforts to digitise the many print publications of the radical left in New Zealand produced over the years – from the major newspapers & magazines, to individual pamphlets or leaflets, and eventually perhaps even rare books. Daphne Lawless, member of the Fightback editorial group and former editor of Socialist Worker Monthly Review and UNITY (2005-2011), was invited to give a talk to the launch of RADAR in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 2 February – the following message was read out.

Revolutionary greetings to comrades and friends at the launch of RADAR. I would have liked to be there, but travel expenses with a wife and toddler in tow were prohibitive.

For my sins, one of the many tasks with which I have burdened myself is cataloguing and sorting the Red Kiwi Library – the books and periodicals collection of the Communist Party of New Zealand and its successor, Socialist Worker, of which I was a leading member. To some extent, for me this has been similar to sorting through the effects of a deceased relative. Nostalgia, combined with occasional delight of discovery, and sadness for what might have been.

I caught myself wondering on several occasions – is this what nearly 100 years of revolutionary socialist activism in Aotearoa/New Zealand amounts to? A hundred or so boxes of paper, much of it nothing but trash, most of the rest only of interest to sad obsessives like… well, like the people who’ve made it here today?

“Publishing the revolutionary paper” has been a nostrum of Lenin’s school of revolutionary politics since its beginning. The idea was not only the question of getting The Truth (or, in the Russian, pravda) into the working class’s hands, but that writing, producing, distributing and financing the paper were the “scaffolding” around which a revolutionary party might be built that would seize state power.

Far too often, though, The Paper (and revolutionary publishing in general) became not a tool for building the party; rather, the party becomes a mechanism for keeping The Paper alive, and thus giving a few committed socialist writers/editors something to do with their spare time. You’ve got to wonder: what is the point of a “revolutionary paper” which is funded by the revolutionaries themselves, rather than by the audience they hope to reach? The financial question is a political one.

I was part of the last major attempt at a mass socialist paper in this country, Workers’ Charter. I personally believe it was an excellent broad-left paper. But the working masses who read it clearly did not think it was vital enough to support it financially – and we quickly ran out of our own resources.

Clearly basing our activity around a paper publication would be woefully insufficient in the Internet era. (Workers’ Charter didn’t even have a website!) Gone are the days when we could sneer at social media and websites as “petty bourgeois”, the kind of thing that REAL WORKERS don’t waste their time with. Workers under 30 are digital natives. And workers over 30 are increasingly having to catch up with them. (One interesting tangent is how the online growth of conspiracy theory can be traced to people who grew up pre-Internet getting online late in life – without having developed the ability to recognize trolling, scamming and disinformation.)

To be frank, these days a Facebook post will probably reach as many workers as standing on a street corner selling a newspaper – and it takes less time, effort and expense. So is revolutionary publishing dead? Well, as I see it, it’s a lot like the music industry, and not just because it seems to rely in practice on exploiting the labour of the young and enthusiastic. No, it’s because it requires alternative revenue streams to function. Crowdfunding, Patreon and similar online initiatives are one possible solution to this. But there’s also the issue that it’s hard to get people to pay money for a non-physical good. So, the link between support for the content and handing over some capitalist currency so it can keep being produced needs to be re-established.

I would also say that one advantage that paper has over electrons is permanence. Electronic publications can be reproduced infinitely at no cost. But storage and bandwidth do cost, and are impermanent. On my office desk now are CPNZ publications going back to 1934. They sat in various offices for 85 years, gathering dust but otherwise intact. Can we be sure that the YouTube videos and podcasts which are now the cutting edge of leftist media outreach will even be still available in 10 years, let alone 85? The impermanence of the online medium is actually considered a benefit for people who don’t want to have their teenage Xena: Warrior Princess fan-fiction following them around as adults. But that’s the opposite of what socialist publishing needs.

Because there is another major problem in the actually existing socialist movement, and that is the lack of continuity. Over the last 10 years in New Zealand politics, all but one of the major revolutionary socialist groups collapsed. To make a broad summary: the “baby boom” generation who’d been carrying these organisations on their backs for 50 years were not able to continue, and the “Millennial” generation weren’t interested in carrying on in the old ways. (And there weren’t nearly enough of the in-between sort, like myself.)

New organisations and media projects have arisen. But there’s no organisational continuity. The “tacit knowledge” that literature on education in organisations talks about hasn’t been passed down. And most of the “explicit knowledge” contained in publications isn’t read by the younger generation. They don’t think they need it. It’s almost like 1969 again – “never trust anyone over 30” (and also, all the people who were anarchist hippies yesterday seem to be turning into Marxist-Leninists!) We seem to be re-inventing the wheel in some cases.

Which is where RADAR comes in, by at least providing some kind of permanence to electronic revolutionary publications in Aotearoa/New Zealand over the last 25 years. I hope that there will be synergy between this project and my own of making the “Red Kiwi Library” available to the movements once again. There’s a hell of a lot of dusty old polemics sitting in my office that could use scanning. Since the revolutionary groups have either collapsed or ossified, it seems to be left to us (amateur) historians and archivists to keep the ideas of the past alive.

A website of ancient blog posts, or a bunch of dusty old boxes of books, might not be a great legacy, but they are what we have. And you know what they say about people who forget the past.

The struggle continues.

Filed Under: Activism, Culture, Revolutionary History

Fightback’s Pre-History in the New Zealand Left

December 2, 2018 by

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by DAPHNE LAWLESS

Since Fightback’s analysis and articles have been getting more attention from international comrades, we regularly get questions asking what “tradition” or organisational pedigree we belong to – are we Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, left-communists, or what? This very brief historical sketch aims to show how messy and complicated our background is. We feel, though, that this is a source of pride rather than embarrassment – in intellectual tendencies as with animals, hybridity often leads to vigour, while a “pure” pedigree is another word for inbreeding!

Fightback traces most of its ancestry back to the original Communist Party of New Zealand, founded in 1921. During the splits between the various Communist-led states of the 1950s-1970s, the CPNZ distinguished itself by being the only CP in an advanced capitalist country to side with China against the Soviet Union; and was even more unique in siding with Enver Hoxha’s Albania after its split with China in the late 1970s.

The paradox of taking such a hard-line “Stalinist”/”anti-revisionist” line was that the CPNZ’s brand of “Hoxhaism” was forthright in condemning both the USSR and China as imperialist countries, not dissimilar in their global role to the US-led bloc. After Hoxhaist Albania surrendered to liberal democracy in 1991, after a period of confusion, the CPNZ produced an analysis (not dissimilar to that of another ex-Hoxhaist party in the US, the Communist Voice Organization) that all the so-called Communist countries had in fact been state-capitalist bureaucratic dictatorships since the time of Stalin.

This formerly super-Stalinist party had therefore came to the same conclusion as several tendencies coming out of the Trotskyist tradition. In a huge historical irony, after decades of strident anti-Trotskyism, in 1995 the former CPNZ, now known as the Socialist Workers Organisation, formally adopted the analysis of one of these state-capitalist tendencies with roots in Trotsky’s analysis – the International Socialist tendency, led by the British Socialist Workers Party. However, the SWO was always something of a “black sheep” within that tendency, in that it steered a very independent course from the London “mothership”, and at various times included members openly identifying with different Marxist trends, including from an “orthodox” Fourth Internationalist background.

Meanwhile, in 1990 CPNZ veteran Ray Nunes – who had split over his old party’s Albanian turn – formed the Workers’ Party of New Zealand, which described itself as “Marxist-Leninist, pro-Mao but not Maoist”. Over the years it continued CPNZ tradition by railing against their former comrades in the SWO for their capitulation to Trotskyism… Until in the 2000s, in another historical irony, the WPNZ fused with a “pro-Trotsky but not Trotskyist” group around the magazine revolution. (Some documents from the WPNZ before and after its fusion with revolution can be found on the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online.)

Both parties reached a crisis in 2011-2012. Socialist Worker had broken with the authority of the British SWP, but could not come to a consensus on a new political line and strategy, and decided to wind itself up in 2012. Meanwhile, the former leading group of the Workers Party – from both “Mao-ish” and “Trotsky-ish” tendencies – had decided that building a Leninist party in New Zealand’s contemporary conditions was impossible, and had quit in 2011.

At that point, after decades of hostility, several former members of Socialist Worker realised that they had a lot in common with the remaining Workers Party members – in particular commitment to a non-dogmatic revolutionary socialism, which combined activists coming from several different Marxist traditions and sought an analysis unique to Aotearoa/NZ’s conditions. The combined organisation renamed itself Fightback in 2013.

Filed Under: History, Revolutionary Strategy

Housing accessibility and human rights

October 16, 2018 by

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by NIKKI STOKES

This article will appear in Fightback’s upcoming September issue on Accessibility. To support our work, consider subscribing to our e-publication ($NZ20 annually) or print magazine ($NZ60 annually). You can subscribe with PayPal or credit card here.

When our landlord issued a 90 day notice of intent to take back occupation of the home my young family had been renting for two years, I did what most people in my generation have had to do at some point; I spent hours of my time desperately scouring real estate websites, publications and new paper listings in hopes of finding another home to rent at a time when demand significantly outstrips supply.

Unlike the majority of hopeful tenants, however, I dismissed most of the available properties without forwarding an application. Instead I went into the Ministry of Social Development and applied for social housing in hope they could make up for the lack of private rental houses that would be even minimally accessible to my mobility impaired daughter.

I was advised to continue looking for private housing and to keep my daughter’s disability a secret to prevent any discomfort from potential landlords. The wait time for social housing would be months, perhaps years, and emergency housing providers would unlikely be able or willing to accommodate a family with our requirements.

By luck we were able to secure a private rental and with some hefty funding for a temporary ramp, hoist system and fancy shower chair, the house was made minimally accessible to her basic care needs.

Housing and erasure

While stories like this are seldom heard in the well chewed-over discussions on housing challenges and solutions, they are hardly isolated.

In October 2017 the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing presented a report on the right to adequate housing for persons with disabilities1. The report highlights the fact that globally, the right to adequate housing remains beyond reach for most persons with disability and that legislation and policy have generally ignored the need for action to protect the right to housing for disabled people.

For people with disabilities, being unable to access suitable and secure housing compromises the choices available to them within their communities. If housing cannot be secured, a person may be forced into living with family members beyond a time period that they feel is appropriate. If housing is not suitably accessible, or cannot be reasonably modified to enable independence, a person may find themselves reliant on disability support workers. If housing is not located convenient to community facilities, support, employment or reliable and accessible public transport, a person with disabilities may find themselves isolated and struggling to participate fully in society.This creates vulnerability as disabled people are forced into situations where they cannot fully exercise their human rights. and reinforces harmful narratives of the burden of disability on society.

In such a society disabled people are actively erased. While 2013 census data estimated that a total of 1.1 million people, or 24% of New Zealanders were disabled it is estimated that only 2% of our housing stock is accessible. As the United Nations report says: “Most housing and development is designed as if persons with disabilities do not exist, will not live there or deserve no consideration”.

While numerous organisations and consumer groups representing various disabled groups have highlighted the urgent need for minimum accessibility standards and action for access to adequate housing, little meaningful action has occured at Government level. Housing accessibility is protected in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities2, to which New Zealand is a signatory. It is therefore fundamental to our responsibilities to Disabled People that any future policy or initiatives intended to address housing be centred around ensuring a minimum level of accessibility.

Is KiwiBuild accessible?

The term “universal design” was coined by the architect Ronald Mace to describe the concept of designing all products and the built environment to be aesthetic and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone, regardless of their age, ability, or status in life3. When comparing the cost of incorporating Universal Design into new builds against the cost of retrofitting those same builds, it soon becomes clear that failure to ensure accessibility in housing policy and initiatives is not only creating undue hardship to to persons with disability, but it is a poor economic choice in the longterm. According to the research, testing and consulting organisation BRANZ (www.branz.co.nz), building using concepts of Universal Design would add little additional cost (around $3,000 per dwelling). Yet retrofitting a building that has not been built to an accessible standard may well cost over $20,000.

The much-lauded KiwiBuild programme has made no assurances to or carried out consultation with any of the organisations representing disabled people. This seems at best counter productive to the purpose of state funded housing projects, and at worst a significant breach of Human Rights. A society that intends to be inclusive must begin with fully accessible communities, including access to housing for disabled people, and also “visitablity” – the ability to access the homes of friends, family and community members to ensure full and uncompromised participation in society.

The costs of not building new homes or carrying out renovations to a minimum standard of accessibility are significant, and in New Zealand that cost falls upon our already very stretched Health system. Funding for modifications is difficult and time-consuming to access, has strict limits that place financial burdens on disabled people and their families, and is not accessible to people who are unable to secure stable long term accommodation.

Recently Phil Twyford, the Minister championing the Kiwibuild programme was invited to speak at the Universal Design Conference of 2018. While his speech conveyed his recognition of the challenges of access to housing to that disabled people face and a need to ensure a diversity of housing stock to meet a diversity of need and family structure, it is concerning that no firm commitment has been made to ensure that a minimum standard of accessibility will be applied to the Kiwibuild programme.

Community connections

It was also announced in September this year that a new social housing development has been planned for Otara, incorporating features to meet the needs of disabled tenants. While 71 apartments have been planned for the development, only seven ground level apartments have been specifically planned to accommodate mobility impaired individuals. While there are many disabilities and needs beyond mobility impairment, this does not reflect that 14% of New Zealanders (over half of the disability community) have a mobility impairment.

Moreover, for people with disability, the ability to maintain connections with their communities and supports are vital. Creating separate communities for disabled people to exist in, rather than ensuring all housing provides the ability to accommodate all disabilities, forces people with disabilities to be cut off from their supports, their communities and to remain invisible.

As a carer the strain of inadequate housing cannot be understated. It has created an ongoing cycle of instability and crisis for our family. The struggle to find adequate housing in our local community has forced us to sever ties with our support networks, deal with transfer and inconsistency of service provision and case management, feel frequently vulnerable and exposed having unfamiliar care staff coming into our home, and struggle to find inclusive social situations. The lack of access to fully accessible housing or to state funded modifications has required that my physical safety and the safety of my child be compromised in the process of providing basic care.

Leaving disabled people vulnerable and without choices, and placing additional strain on their families and carers by failing to ensure adequate housing, continues to result in terrible human rights abuses for people with disabilities. We have a responsibility and the capability to ensure that adequate and secure housing is an accessible right for all.

Filed Under: disability and accessibility, Housing, Uncategorized, Welfare
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