Grid of posts 2×3

  • Workers Party leaflet against proposed Arts Cuts at Canterbury University

    Once again, whole departments and their staff (academic and general) and students are under attack at Canterbury – and other universities. The attempt by Canterbury management to abolish American Studies and Film and Theatre Studies, while also wielding the axe against Classics and Art History is an attack on jobs, knowledge and students. Universities in… Read more

  • Australian Labor Government looks to preserve most of Howard’s industrial reforms

    In November last year the Australian Labor Party was elected to office on a tidal wave of opposition to the previous Howard government’s industrial reforms, which had threatened to scrap award conditions as well as undermine collective bargaining rights. However, just like the New Zealand Labour Government’s introduction of the Employment Relations Act shortly after… Read more

  • World and NZ economy: as good as it gets under capitalism

    John Edmundson and Philip Ferguson In late 2006. IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan declared, “The global economic expansion has been stronger in this period than at any time since the early 1970s.” Yet barely a year later, media reports are regularly speculating about upcoming economic disasters. Recent economic woes in the United States have impacted… Read more

  • Afghanistan, East Timor and the failure of “humanitarian” military intervention

    Tim Bowron Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. -Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) Since Labour took office in 1999, New Zealand military forces have been deployed overseas on… Read more

  • The first Black president? Barack Obama: The talk and the walk

    Don Franks “The presidential nomination of the Republican Party is up for grabs among a motley collection of mean-spirited law-and-order fanatics, anti-immigrant bigots and warmongers,” commented the US Socialist Worker of January 11. “This is the consequence of the crisis of the Bush administration – mired in Iraq, distrusted for its shredding of the Constitution… Read more

  • Women’s liberation: time for a new movement?

    To mark the 100th International Working Women’s Day (March 8), a women’s liberation activist of the 70s, Jill Brasell, reflects on progress since then. Ask a young woman today what she thinks about women’s liberation, and she’s likely to say either “What’s that?” or “We don’t need that any more – we’re liberated now.” She… Read more