PRESS RELEASE:

Invercargill mayor and 1960s protest figure Tim Shadbolt and distinguished NZ film-maker Gaylene Preston have added their names to the list of those calling for the administration at Victoria University to lift the two-year trespass ban it imposed recently on Wellington workers’ rights activists Joel Cosgrove and Heleyni Pratley.

Cosgrove, a former students association president, and Pratley, a former student executive member, were trespassed for taking part in a protest against fee increases by the University Council. At the protest Cosgrove threw one egg, which he later cleaned up, and Pratley held a sign calling for free education.

The pair were then arrested and charged with trespass when they tried to deliver a petition signed by academics and trade union figures calling for the trespass order to be lifted.

“It seems that Victoria is keeping up its reputation as the most uptight University in New Zealand. I remember in the late 60s we had a University Arts Festival there and a small group of us went to sleep in the Common Room and were all arrested for trespass. Universities should be the last bastion of free speech and democracy,” said Mayor Shadbolt, in a message of support to the campaign to get the trespass orders lifted.

Cosgrove and Pratley have welcomed the support, saying that the longer the administration maintain the trespass order the more draconian and silly it makes the University appear. END

The SPARK interviews long serving anti-imperialist activist and Workers Party secretary Daphna Whitmore

Spark: It’s been 8 years since New Zealand troops were sent to Afghanistan – why did the Labour-Alliance government send them in the first place?

It needs to be understood in the context of New Zealand’s involvement with US and British imperialism. New Zealand is a partner in this bloc, and Labour enthusiastically signed up to the so-called War on Terror. When it comes to involvement in military adventures Labour governments have been just as warmongering as National.

Daphna Whitmore (left)at May Day march 2009

The Alliance Party split over the issue of support for the invasion of Afghanistan, with the majority of its members rejecting the war. It highlighted the problem of being in government with an outright capitalist party like Labour.

Spark: New Zealand companies aren’t trying to make major sales in Afghanistan – why all the risk and expense over such a long period of time?

 In its last term the Labour government did scale back the involvement, recalling the SAS and sending instead “reconstruction” forces. This tended to obscure the reality – that these are military forces, participating in an occupation. It dressed it up to look like it was simply a humanitarian mission.

Now Obama, facing a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, is sending in more troops. His call has been heeded by the National government. As you point out, there are no major sales in Afghanistan; it is much more a case of being on board with the strategic goal of subjugating the region. It’s tricky for the NZ ruling class, because while they are aligned with US interests, there are also interests they have with European powers. Having a foot in both imperialist camps was something that Helen Clark was a master at.

Spark: why have successive governments kept up involvement in the war?

To withdraw and accept the Taliban’s resumption of power would be a major climb down for the US, Britain and its allies. They invaded for strategic reasons, and to show who was boss in the world, and to demonstrate the US had gotten over the Vietnam complex. It was important for them to beat the guerrilla forces on the ground. Of course, they have shown again how the world’s most powerful army can be tied up for years by a determined guerrilla resistance. That the Western powers are being beaten by the Taliban and other local forces in Afghanistan is humiliating for them.

Spark: What about the argument that these troop deployments are helping make the world a safer place by slowing down the terrorists?

The Taliban were never a force outside of Afghanistan, just as there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. All wars of aggression have their pretexts.

When you see pictures of villages bombed, and whole families killed by the occupying forces in Afghanistan it’s clear who are the terrorists.

Spark : New Zealand has a name for being anti nuclear warships – how does that sit with your description of it as “imperialist”?

There was a mass movement in New Zealand, which was part of an international movement, for disarmament. The movement succeeded in New Zealand in banning nuclear warships; and it is such a popular position that no government has dared to revoke it since. However, it proved to be a concession that the ruling class (in NZ and the US) could live with. There was no blockade, no US led coup or any response that you’d typically see when an oppressed nation stands up to the US. And the reason was that New Zealand was an imperialist partner – not an oppressed country.

The same government that banned the visit of nuclear warships carried out a harsh neo-liberal programme, selling off state assets, privatizing services and slashing the living standard of working people. That Labour government was one that Margaret Thatcher would have felt at home in.

Spark: Labour is saying that it was right to send NZ troops 8 years ago, but its not appropriate today – has something changed?

They are in opposition, and words are cheap. If they wanted to get out of Afghanistan they had 9 years to do so.

Spark: If it’s so wrong for NZ troops to be in Afghanistan why aren’t more people protesting about it?

It seems a world away to most people. The Taliban and the various war lords in Afghanistan do not inspire people in the West, understandably. While the Taliban and the Afghan resistance are playing a positive role resisting the invasion, they are not a socially progressive movement. Also, the way the invasion has been dressed up as a humanitarian effort, and one that claimed to be about modernizing society and liberating women, concealed the true character of the war. In New Zealand the minimal troop involvement has meant that most people are barely conscious of this country’s involvement.

Spark: What does the Workers Party think should be done about NZ overseas troop commitments? What about the deployments of peace keeping troops?

Imperialism uses both the carrot and the stick. In the seventies and eighties Washington wielded power by backing military dictatorships throughout Asia and Latin America. When these became thoroughly discredited it adopted a humanitarian face and conducted invasions under the banner of “democratization”.

New Zealand has no business invading and occupying other countries, even under the guise of peace keeping. We need to consistently oppose all these military adventures, whether they are “legal” or “illegal”; sanctioned by the UN or not. They are unjust wars and are not liberating.

Spark: You’ve been agitating against NZ imperialism for two decades. That’s a long time and some would say not a lot has changed. What keeps you motivated and what changes do you expect to see in the future?

Vietnam showed that the US – the biggest power in the world – could be beaten. The resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan have again shown that military might is not invincible.

The decline in of the secular, progressive and Marxist movements in the world is a challenge facing us today, but there are some promising signs. In Nepal, and in Venezuela there is something like dual power where the old rulers are being overthrown. In the Philippines, and in parts of India communist movements have held their own and are growing.

The resistance of oppressed people is a constant source of inspiration.

The Workers in New Zealand Campaign of Solidarity with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) expresses outrage at the ongoing ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Israeli state against the people of Palestine. The campaign provides an opportunity for New Zealanders to support the PFLP in resisting the racist state of Israel and its policy of house demolitions and settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The “Peace Process” which has seen the conditions for the Palestinian population in the occupied territories deteriorate dramatically, while ignoring the right of return of 5 million Palestinian refugees and the plight of Palestinians living within the racist state of Israel. The “Peace Process” has seen them forced into Bantustans, oppressed by the Palestinian Authority’s co-operation with the occupier, enclosed behind an annexation wall and the continuing lose of land via colonisation through settlement building and forced population transfer.

In New Zealand we are raising political awareness of the Palestinian struggle and raising funds for the PFLP through a t-shirt campaign. Since the National Campaign Launch there has been local launches in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland. These launches have been followed up by street stalls, university campus meetings and film showings. These events have seen a demand for the t-shirts including international interest from Germany, Malaysia, Denmark and the United States.

All profits raised by the campaign go directly to the PFLP to help fund all aspects of their struggle against the Zionist state of Israel both politically and militarily. The PFLP sees the path to liberation and an end to the conflict, as a single secular state in all of Palestine, with the right of return for Palestinian refugees and where all people regardless of race or religion have equal rights.

Our campaign supports PFLP calls for:

1.    The demand for the immediate lifting of the PFLP from the so called “terrorist list “in the EU and North America. This is an important and historical task for all progressive movements, for their resistance and it is a battle that we must win against capitalism and imperialism.

2.    The demand for the immediate release of comrade Ahmad Sa’adat, General Secretary of the PFLP. Comrade Sa’adat is being has been held in Israeli prisons since March 14, 2006 and he was transferred to Al Majdal (Asqlan) prison where he is in solitary confinement.

Aid as imperialism: the role of NGOs in global capitalism

Tuesday November 10th, 5:30pm, Southern Cross.

Discussion, biscuits and tea afterwards.

Solidarity.

On the eve of Halloween there was a carnival atmosphere as people marched up Queen Street Auckland.

The march was part of Unite’s campaign to get 300,000 signatures on our petition for the minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour. If that target is reached by May next year the government will have to hold a referendum on the question of whether the minimum wage should be lifted to $15 an hour.

A vampire boss effigy was burnt at the stake, to cap off the night.

Reprinted from Electronic Intifada. To support the WP Palestine solidarity campaign, click here.

From 1994 — shortly after the Oslo Declaration of Principles was signed — to 2006, when Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, international donors gave $8 billion in aid to the Palestinians, making them one of the most subsidized people on Earth. This aid ostensibly had three purposes: to support the peace process leading to a two-state solution, to foster economic and social development, and to promote institution-building. Yet, many years and billions of dollars later, Palestinians are poorer and further from statehood than ever before, and their dysfunctional national institutions face an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy.

In her first monograph, international relations specialist Anne Le More seeks to answer a straightforward question that ought to be of profound import to scholars, activists and decision makers: how and why did this happen? Along the way, International Assistance to the Palestinians after Oslo, the first in Routledge’s Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict series, provides an important critique of the belief that reconstruction, development and humanitarian aid form essential counterparts to political processes aimed at resolving longstanding violent conflicts. Le More’s study focuses solely on the Occupied Palestinian Territories; the questions it poses, however, could offer a template for exploring the extent to which “aid” has become the means to repackage Western military occupation and dependency as “state-building” and ”independence” in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kosovo.

In the Palestinian case, aid functioned not as a catalyst but as a substitute for politics. Donor policies were driven not by Palestinian needs as much as by dynamics among donors, on the one hand, and between donors and Israel, on the other. Thus, aid to the Palestinians was only ever marginally about the Palestinians themselves. As the prospects for achieving a political settlement receded, especially after Israel escalated its violent repression of the intifada after 2000, donors failed to adjust their policies in light of developments on the ground — especially Israel’s fragmentation and isolation of the occupied territories. Rather, “[s]upporting the ‘peace process’ had become the dominant, immovable paradigm, to the point of tautology” (14), which meant an ever-greater focus on providing short-term emergency aid and chasing the latest ephemeral diplomatic “game in town” (14). Excluded from a political role by Israel and the United States, the European Union (EU) — the largest aid donor — hoped “that the provision of assistance and funds to the Palestinians would in turn give donors ammunition to influence American unilateral mediation efforts and Israeli policies on the ground” (173). But “courting the Americans and appeasing Israel” (173) did not have the desired effect. Instead, financial aid became a “fig leaf” (13) for the absence of a political process to resolve the underlying causes of conflict; it subsidized Israeli occupation and colonization, and donors knowingly bankrolled a Palestinian regime that was ”authoritarian, unaccountable and repressive” (169) — and completely dependent on subsidies.

Le More does a masterful job placing ostensibly technocratic donor mechanisms in political context (brief appendices providing flowcharts, financial summaries and abbreviations are welcome companions, though maps, reproduced from B’Tselem, would be more useful if the labels could be read with the naked eye). She analyzes how donors’ discourses obscured and undermined international humanitarian law (IHL) and examines how prolonged aid in the context of military occupation may itself have violated and materially contributed to Israeli violations of IHL. Many of the roots of the recent intra-Palestinian split can be traced to donor policies designed specifically to support Fatah and its leaders at the expense of all other Palestinian factions, not least among them Hamas. Donors viewed financial enticement — shrouded in a benign technocratic and developmental discourse — as a means to shift the Palestinian national movement from the goal of liberation toward a role as security subcontractor for Israel, conceding key Palestinian demands.

Many of Le More’s criticisms of the post-Oslo dispensation are familiar. But her account of the role of donor aid in creating the current, disastrous situation is original, drawing on extensive analysis of documents produced by donor bureaucracies and interviews with dozens of American, European, UN and other officials who ran them, albeit with their confidentiality protected.

A recurring theme in current polemical and academic discourses is that the Palestinians themselves — and to a much lesser extent Israel (“the parties”) – are to blame for the failure of Palestinian state-building, with external actors posing as well-intentioned but largely powerless bystanders. Claims that the United States is an “honest broker” are more transparent given that country’s massive military and economic subsidies to Israel. But for many years, the EU states, Canada and Norway — the main donors to the Palestinians — posed as counterweights, even allies, of the Palestinians. One conclusion we may draw from Le More’s important study is that by effectively enabling Israeli colonization, so-called development aid proved over the long term no less destructive to the Palestinians than the weapons sent to Israel by the United States.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). This review originally appeared in The Journal of Palestine Studies, Issue 151, Volume 38, Spring 2009, and is republished with the author’s permission.

by Daphna Whitmore

In the run up to the last general election the Labour Party enthusiasts who hold so many of the top posts of unions were giving dire predictions that a National government would take NZ back to the dark ages as far as workers’ rights were concerned.

The Workers Party, in constrast, didn’t think Labour had ushered in a golden age, nor did we think National were planning on a major attack on unions. What was likely, we said, was that it would be business as usual.

The CTU leaders got to hear that from the horse’s mouth when Key spoke at their conference last week.

Key said that in this term there would be no major changes to industrial legislation. Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

“In our first 11 months in office we have progressed two key areas of employment law reform.

The first was the introduction of a 90-day trial period for smaller employers.

I know your unions opposed that law. Well, let me give you my take. I think it’s working. It’s helping to ensure that those on the margins of the workforce, who might otherwise struggle to get a shot at a job, are getting a go.

The Government has also put together a working group to look at how we can make the Holidays Act work better for employers and workers. I’m pleased the CTU is on that working group.

It reports back in December and it’s my hope it will come up with sensible recommendations that will protect workers entitlements while making employers’ obligations clearer.

Beyond these two areas the National Party’s election policy outlined some other possible areas for employment law reform. I know you are keen to hear how that work is progressing.

Again, let me be upfront. I understand the Minister of Labour has taken a first look at these issues. The Cabinet is yet to consider any recommendations however. The fact that these issues have not been progressed more rapidly reflects where they sit in the Government’s agenda – they’re not a driving priority.

That’s not to say the Government is ruling out any future changes to employment law. We are a solutions-focused government, so if we can see employment law is causing serious problems for people, we will be prepared to look at it.

When I travel around the country people do raise employment law concerns with me from time to time. The most common problems they point to are with the confusing aspects of the Holidays Act, the lack of flexibility in the rest and meal breaks legislation and the potential abuse and costly nature of personal grievance processes.

The Government has responded to the first, we are responding to the second, and I’m flagging today that the Minister of Labour will take a look at personal grievance processes as well”.

Key is a pragmatist and has no big union-busting agenda. Even the 90 day legislation, abhorrent as it is, in practical terms has changed very little. There has not been one case of a 90 day sacking that has been brought to the CTU’s attention to be fought and campaigned against. No doubt the sackings are going on, as they did before. But they are in small un-unionised workplaces that tend to be a law unto themselves.

So far, Key has shown that he is not going to be an easy target for his critics in the union movement.

When Labour-sympathisers at the CTU conference growled at Key about conditions for workers in NZ Key pointed out he’s been the PM for a matter of months in a recession, while Labour governed in better economic times. The problems facing workers have been around a lot longer than this National government, he said.

To really attack Key will require a criticism of the economic system, which also requires a criticism of the Labour government.

Media Release: Dairy Workers Union

The month-long lockout of workers at Talleys-owned Open Country Cheese is over after workers have secured their goal of collective employment agreement to cover their jobs.

“The members of our union at Open Country Cheese have stuck together right through this very difficult dispute,” Dairy Workers Union National Secretary James Ritchie said.

“All that these workers wanted was some basic job security through a collective employment agreement and they were illegally locked out for standing up for their rights.”

The company’s restructuring at the plant greatly reduced the number of positions available and a confidential settlement was reached for workers whose jobs have disappeared, he said.

“The workers were buoyed on by the very strong support of the Waharoa and wider Waikato community, and the solidarity of the union movement. Their stand for fairness at work shows that workers are stronger when they act together in unions,” James Ritchie said.

Ed note: The Workers Party does not necessarily endorse Moore’s analysis in full.