Filipino photojournalist Alex Baluyut: An extraordinary sense of truth in an ailing society

February 28, 2026

OBITUARY: By Joel Paredes

Having known the Filipino photojournalist Alex Baluyut, who died yesterday aged 69, for nearly half a century, I feel that looking at his photos — how he documented the events that unfurled during his lifetime — reveals his own lifelong search for himself.

By documenting the rawest parts of human existence, including war, poverty, and the shifting tides of our history, he was reconciling his own place within those same struggles.

Whether on the frontlines of conflict in Mindanao or the troubled streets of Metro Manila, he wasn’t just looking for a story; he was searching for a sense of truth.

I first knew Alex when he was a photographer for the Associated Press. In those days, film was expensive, but it was not a constraint for him.

Having the resources of a major agency gave him a distinct advantage over his colleagues. I noticed how he loved documenting every movement of a subject, while others were often content with a single “good shot” for the day’s coverage.

It surprised me when, after we were dismissed from the Times Journal for union work and were organising a new daily with the late Joe Burgos, Alex approached me and Chuchay Fernandez. He asked if he can join Pahayagang Malaya.

He didn’t focus on the economic difficulties of a struggling paper, but instead embraced the challenge of being part of the “Mosquito Press” during the darkest days of the Marcos martial law era, especially during the surge of outrage following the death of opposition leader Benigno Aquino.

The 2013 photography book Mysteries of Chance by Alex Baluyut and five other Filipino photographers. Image: Voices of Vision Publishing

Risky coverage
Alex was not just focused on protest rallies, his main assignments then. Together, we planned risky coverage of the underground movement, which took us to dangerous locations, including Mindanao to cover the Moro secessionist rebellion.

During the 76-day war in Lanao del Sur, Alex was hesitant to leave even after we received reports of napalm bombing; he stayed until it became clear the site was impossible to reach.

On one occasion, we braved a torturous hike to reach a MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) camp on the border of Lanao and Maguindanao to take the first-ever photos of their forces in formation at their own campsite.

Even then, I noticed a shift in Alex’s mood. His adrenaline was fueled by a drive to expose the plight of the aggrieved, a mission that eventually brought us to the countryside to cover the communist insurgency.

His photos were not always meant for the newspapers; they were documenting the struggle so that people might understand it. Eventually, the pressure of witnessing the stark truths of an armed struggle took its toll on him.

Interestingly, the photos Alex provided me from his documentation of the underground movement did not show the stark reality of a rebellion, but rather the communities where he was immersed.

He was the best man at my wedding, and my only lament was that he failed to document the ceremony. Instead, he handed me and Merci a photo of a smiling Mangyan — a rare subject given his usual themes.

He told me it was his way of wishing us a happy life.

Mobile kitchen project
Alex also sought to chart a life beyond photojournalism. Driven by his love for cooking, he and some friends set up a small beer garden on the sidewalks of Ermita, which sparked his adventures in the restaurant business.

It was no surprise then that he eventually devoted his remaining years to serving the needy during calamities, co-founding the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen with his wife, Precious.

The news of Alex’s passing from cirrhosis of the liver stunned me, especially knowing the impact our late colleague Tony Nieva had on both of us. Tony also succumbed to the dreaded illness.He was our mentor in the struggle for press freedom and in documenting the lives of the downtrodden.

After Tony passed away, I rarely saw and worked with Alex, except for a few commissioned book projects.

Although I monitored his journey through social media and felt a sense of guilt for not joining his new advocacy, I am grateful to have been part of the life of a man who sought the truth in our ailing society and worked, in his own way, to lift the spirits of the marginalised.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Papuan activist leader Wenda accuses Jakarta of ‘lying’ over shot down plane

By Asia Pacific Report -

February 28, 2026

Asia Pacific Report

A West Papuan leader has accused the Indonesian government of lying over its operations and “masking” the military role of some civilian aircraft.

Disputing an Indonesian government statement about reported that TPNPB fired upon an aircraft in Boven Digoel, killing both the pilot and copilot, United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda said the aircraft was “not civilian”.

Wenda added that the Indonesian government was “tricking the world” about its military operations in West Papua.

“The Cessna plane the TPNPB [West Papua National Liberation Army] fired upon in Boven Digoel was not a civilian plane, as the police spokesman misleadingly stated, but part of a security operation,” Wenda said in a statement.

“Indonesia is again disguising their military activity as [civilian] activity. They are also willfully breaching the no-fly zones established by the TPNPB.”

The occupied conflict areas in which the Indonesian military TNI were “not permitted to fly” had been “clearly marked out by the TPNPB”.

“This is the same pattern Indonesia used in 1977, when Indonesia used a disguised civilian plane to bomb villages across the highlands and massacre thousands, including many members of my own family,” Wenda said.

Clear strategy
He added there was a clear strategy behind this — “Indonesia wants to avoid the attention that would be drawn by a large scale military buildup, so they mask their introduction of weapons and other military equipment and personnel”.

Wenda said they were effectively “using their own people as human shields”.

Indonesian soldiers and equipment next to a civilian aircraft. Image: ULMWP

Indonesian troops boarding a civilian aircraft in the West Papua Highlands. Image: ULMWP video screenshot APR

The TPNPB attacks took place on February 11, with the plane being downed and the pilot and co-pilot being killed.

A second attack took place in Mimika, near the Grasberg gold and copper mine, which has been the cause of so much West Papuan deaths over the past 40 years.

“Indonesia then immediately began operating their propaganda machine, claiming that the planes were simply engaged in civilian and medical supply distribution,” Wenda said.

“The truth is that these aircraft were involved in intelligence and security operations.

Media blackout
“Indonesia is only able to spread these lies and mislead the international community because of their six-decades long media blackout in West Papua.

“No journalists or NGOs are allowed to operate in our land. West Papua is a closed society, just like North Korea. I thank God we have civilian journalists to document their lies.”

By breaching these rules the military were inviting further attacks, Wenda said.

“We must always remember that the Indonesian military uses any armed action by West Papuans for their own gain, as a pretext for more militarisation, more displacement, and more deforestation and ecocide.”

Wenda said their aim was always to escalate the situation as a way of ethnically cleansing Papuans, forcing them to become refugees in their own land, and strengthening their colonial hold over West Papua.

“It isn’t a coincidence that in the week since this incident we have seen an escalation in Yahukimo, an Indonesia-occupied community health centre, and transformed it into a military post, displacing and traumatising local residents.”

Using hospitals and other health infrastructure for military means was a clear breach of international humanitarian law, Wenda said.

Normal for military
In West Papua such behaviour was normal for the military.

“In the same week in Puncak regency, Indonesian military personnel seized a school, preventing students from learning and putting ordinary people at risk of harm. Soldiers are posted in classrooms with guns.”

Wenda called on the Indonesian government to withdraw their troops from occupied West Papua, allow civilians to return home, cease using civilian vehicles as a cover for military action, and immediately facilitate a UN Human Rights visit to West Papua — as has been demanded by more than 110 UN Member states.

“Ultimately, Indonesia must come to the table to discuss a referendum,” Wenda said. “This is the only path to a peaceful solution in West Papua.”

An Indonesian Embassy spokesperson blamed the “armed criminal group”, an expression it uses to describe resistance movement fighters.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

‘We warned you,’ says Iran’s national security chief after Israel-US attacks

By Asia Pacific Report -

February 28, 2026

Asia Pacific Report

“We warned you,” says Iran’s national security commission head after Israel-US missiles attacks on the capital Tehran and other cities.

Al Jazeera reports comments from Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the national security commission of the Iranian Parliament.

“We warned you!” he wrote on social media.

“Now you have started down a path which end is no longer in your control,” he added.

We warned you!
Now you have started down a path which end is no longer in your control.

— ابراهیم عزیزی (@Ebrahimazizi33) February 28, 2026

Explosions were also reported in the cities of Kermanshah, Lorestan, Tabriz, Isfahan and Karaj, according to local news media.

Al Jazeera’s chief US correspondent Alan Fisher reports that people were expecting that there may well be an attack by the United States.

US President Donald Trump had been talking about it.

‘Some US action expected’
“Most people expected some sort of United States action. So there is surprise that Israel has gone first.

“But there will be speculation here in the United States — inevitably — that this is [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu once again trying to force the United States to take action against Iran.

“And the reason he has done this is to try and force their hand.”

News media report US President Donald Trump as stating that the joint Israel-US attacks were aimed at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”.

In an eight-minute video message shared on Truth Social, he said: “Short time ago, US military began major combat operation in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating threats from the Iranian regime.”

Mehran Kamrava, director of the Iranian studies unit at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, said Israel appeared to have “launched an attack designed to derail the [nuclear] negotiations” between the US and Iran. A new round of talks had been scheduled for next week.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Cuban ambassador denounces US aggression and violations of international law

By Asia Pacific Report -

February 28, 2026

INTERVIEW: By Eugene Doyle

This is a moment of great peril for the small Caribbean nation of Cuba. Nothing less than its sovereignty is on the line as the US drives its knee into the neck of 10 million Cubans by means of a crushing air and sea blockade and a set of secondary sanctions designed to muscle the nations of the world into compliance to the hegemon.

The issues are not particular to Cuba; we are in the midst of a militant US that is determined to assert domination through force.

It was therefore a pleasure to spend time this week with Luis Ernesto Morejón Rodríguez, Cuba’s Ambassador to New Zealand in Wellington.

EUGENE DOYLE: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos received considerable attention. He said: “Middle powers must act together because if we are not at the table, we are on the menu.” Cuba has been on the US menu for decades. What would be your message to those who support Carney’s call to “come together to create a third way with impact”?

AMBASSADOR RODRIGUEZ: Cuba believes a genuine “third way” can only exist if it defends the economic sovereignty of states against coercion. For more than 60 years, our country has been subjected to a policy explicitly designed to generate material hardship in order to force political change.

The issue therefore is not ideological but systemic: no nation can claim strategic autonomy while tolerating that another punishes third countries for lawful trade. True multilateralism begins when middle-sized nations act collectively to prevent the global economy from becoming an instrument of political pressure.

How does Cuba intend to use the United Nations General Assembly — where it enjoys near-unanimous support — to challenge the legality of “secondary sanctions” that weaponise the global financial system against trade with third parties?

Cuba will continue using the General Assembly to document and expose the extraterritorial nature of these measures. Each year the discussion goes beyond a vote: evidence is presented of banks cancelling humanitarian transfers, shipping companies refusing to transport fuel, and medical suppliers withdrawing contracts due to fear of penalties.

The objective is to consolidate an international legal and political consensus that no domestic legislation should be globally imposed or obstruct legitimate trade among sovereign states. The process is cumulative — it builds legitimacy and normative pressure over time.

In what other ways will Cuba navigate this latest campaign of maximum pressure by the United States? What support will it seek?

Historically Cuba responds through a combination of internal resilience and external cooperation: diversifying energy and trade partners, strengthening South-South relations, and promoting alternative financial arrangements. At the same time, priority is given to protecting essential social sectors.

Cuba does not seek geopolitical confrontation but economic normality — the ability to purchase food, fuel, spare parts or medicines without third parties being penalized. The support we request is straightforward: respect for our right to trade.

Many people do not follow international news closely. Could you describe life in Cuba today and how the population and government are responding to what must be a severe economic crisis and the threat of US pressure?

Daily life is marked by material scarcity linked to severe financial and energy restrictions. Limited access to fuel can lead to extended power outages; families organise cooking around electricity availability and neighbours share refrigeration space to prevent food spoilage. Hospitals maintain essential services using constrained backup power systems.

Despite this, the state preserves universal health and education, and communities rely heavily on solidarity networks. It is less a conventional economic cycle than a society operating under continuous external pressure.

For an audience in Wellington that might interpret this as a “political dispute”, what does “maximum pressure” mean for a Cuban mother trying to feed her children, or for a doctor performing surgery during a 20-hour blackout?

Maximum pressure is experienced through ordinary situations: planning daily meals around electricity schedules, transporting patients when fuel for ambulances is scarce, or sterilising medical instruments under limited power conditions.

These are not political slogans but cumulative consequences of restrictions that prevent the country from freely purchasing fuel, spare parts or financing. Administrative decisions taken abroad translate into domestic difficulties at home.

In the West we often speak about international law but do not always apply it to ourselves. What is your message to those who want to live in a world governed by law rather than force?

Cuba asks for legal consistency: if international trade is rule-based, no country should be penalised for lawful commerce. We also recognise and appreciate New Zealand’s consistent favourable vote in the United Nations General Assembly in support of the resolution entitled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”

That position reflects a principled commitment to multilateralism. In this context, we have encouraged New Zealand to continue upholding its traditional opposition to unilateral coercive measures and to the extraterritorial application of national laws. Silence regarding such sanctions weakens the very legal principles that protect all small states alike. The issue extends beyond bilateral relations — it concerns the integrity of international law itself.

What is your life like as a diplomat in New Zealand? How is your contact with government officials and the diplomatic community?

Diplomatic work in New Zealand takes place in a serious institutional environment where dialogue exists even amid disagreement. Our exchanges with officials are respectful and professional; positions may differ, but there is willingness to listen and understand context.

Much of our work here is explanatory rather than confrontational: clarifying that the Cuban situation is not merely a bilateral dispute but part of a broader debate about how the international order functions. The diplomatic community in Wellington is active and collegial, allowing frank discussions on global issues such as climate change, development and multilateralism.

The US objective is explicitly described as regime change through economic collapse. If Cuba yielded to these demands, what would the Global South lose?

A crucial precedent would be lost: that a nation can choose its political system without external tutelage. If prolonged economic strangulation succeeded in imposing internal change, it would legitimise a model of intervention applicable to any developing country.

It would no longer be necessary to negotiate with societies — sustained financial pressure would suffice. The Global South would see its effective autonomy reduced.

What is your vision for Cuba? Where would you like it to be in 10 or 20 years?

The aspiration is a fully normalised Cuba within the global economy — able to access financing, trade, and technology without restrictions — while preserving universal social policies in health, education, and equity. Change will continue, but it should occur by national decision, not external pressure.

In 20 years we hope Cuba will be known less for conflict with a major power and more for contributions in medical cooperation, biotechnology innovation, cultural exchange, and regional development. The ultimate goal is not perpetual resistance, but the freedom to choose its own path.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and independent writer based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 26 February 2024.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Keith Rankin Analysis – New Zealand’s Fiscal Crisis

By Keith Rankin -

February 28, 2026

20201212_KeithRankin — Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Analysis by Keith Rankin, 27 February 2026.

Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

I heard this on RNZ News 11am 12 Feb 2026:

“The government’s finances are in better shape than expected due to lower [government] spending and a higher tax take. Treasury figures … show a deficit of $5.2b for the six months ended December, almost $1.6b below the half-year forecast. The tax take was $138m higher, while expenses were about $1b lower, because of lower spending on core government services: health, housing programmes, and the cost of carbon units. Net debt was slightly lower than expected, at 43.5% of the value of the economy.”

It was framed as good news, or at least as “better” news: government spending less than expected (despite the many dire needs for more, better funded, government-funded services and infrastructure) and a higher tax take (despite the needs of many people to have more spendable dollars).

I mention this quote from economic historian Adam Tooze, from his 2018 book Crashed, re the downward spiral that arises from policies of fiscal consolidation.

“Not only was [Greece, in 2010] slow to push through the changes the Troika demanded, but when it did the results were counterproductive; in a classic Keynesian downward spiral, demand fell and unemployment surged further, reducing incomes.”

We note that when private incomes are reduced, then income tax receipts are also reduced, meaning government income is reduced. (In idiomatic vernacular, this is known as cutting your nose to spite your face. “The idiom is often used in political and economic commentary to describe actions by a political actor, party, corporation or nation that appear to damage the actor’s own interests”.)

New Zealand is lucky at the moment in that it is benefitting from record high terms of trade – external stimulus, a commodity-led export-led boom – which is to some extent offsetting the fiscal doom loop that Tooze describes.

What will happen when those record-high export receipts fall-off? Tooze tells us: “a classic Keynesian downward spiral”.

Note that Greece was doing these policies, not out of political free-choice but because the EU Troika demanded that Greece follow this counterproductive policy path. At least Greece resisted, conferring upon itself some dignity.

New Zealand is today implementing similar policies; partly because the government is nominally free to choose, but also because it is heavily influenced by the false narratives peddled by another powerful Troika: the New York troika of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. New Zealand governments would rather lose elections than get on the wrong side of these big three.

Democracy or empire?

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin Essay – Vagrants and a Very Basic Universal Income

By Keith Rankin -

February 28, 2026

Essay by Keith Rankin, 25 February 2026.

Over the last few days, there has been plenty of media chatter in relation to the government’s proposal to pass a law enabling police to forcibly shift street dwellers from Auckland’s CBD. (Refer ‘Move On’ orders penalise those with the least, Scoop 22 Feb 2026.)

While Labour likes to express outrage, neither Labour nor National have given as much as a hint as to a solution they would commit to implementing. National sees street vagrants in much the same way as the Israeli government sees Palestinians; in both cases, they just want the ‘problem people’ to go away.

New Zealand, like most countries, has a long history of vagrancy, and of mean-spirited laws to deal with it. New Zealand, however, in 1938 introduced a universal welfare state; a political contract which gained broad bipartisan support until 1984. Over the 1938 to 1984 period the vagrancy problem was minimal. I remember being shocked at seeing beggars in Ireland in 1976; that was depression-era optics, which I thought had long passed in the developed world.

The most recent time I ventured out of Australasia was in 2019, on a trip to Canada, Scotland, and London. I remember remarking that Vancouver seemed to have fewer homeless people than Auckland. The next day I changed my mind; I discovered that the problem in Vancouver was more on the edge of the CBD, whereas in Auckland it had already become normalised around Queen Street and the city’s main library. I note this point, because the problem cannot be blamed on the Covid19 pandemic, and it was a problem that neither Labour’s Jacinda Ardern nor Phil Goff were willing to prioritise during their terms in office (as Prime Minister, and as Mayor).

(In Scotland, while Aberdeen did have a problem, it was less obvious than in Auckland; and even less obvious in Edinburgh. In London, I stayed in Stepney Green, a social housing area close to Whitechapel, and did not particularly sense a ‘street dweller problem’ there; nor in closer-to-the-City and now-gentrified Spitalfields.)

The current chatter focuses on homelessness, while only noticing in passing that many street occupiers are also beggars; meaning that, at its core, the problem is one of income insecurity.

Hardly anyone has connected the dots between begging and the regression of social security in New Zealand. The universal welfare state has lost its way since 1984. My sense is that many of today’s vagrants are not receiving any social security money; and that that may be in large part because it is too difficult – and humiliating – for them to deal with a Kafkaesque system that calls beneficiaries ‘jobseekers’, and is forever looking for ways to not support vulnerable people into constructive engagement. While the general public would regard vagrants as being unemployed, Statistics New Zealand does not even count them as unemployed. Our governmental systems are oriented around the ‘labour force’, and are largely blind to working-age people ‘not in the labour force’.

It is not my role here to analyse the way that our untweaked version of capitalism creates vagrancy. Rather, it is to note that our vagrants need these three things: an amount of unconditional income, a place better than the street where they can sleep and wash, and something fulfilling – maybe, even, productive – to do.

While, for the rest of this essay I’ll focus on the former, I’ll just mention the latter briefly. Minimum wage laws put most of these people out of the reach of the formal labour market. That leaves them two choices for something societally connected to do; voluntary work, or petit-entrepreneurship (aka non-criminal hustling). (Two other options, both disconnected from mainstream society, are: ‘hanging out’ in ways that intimidate, or participating in underworld crime.)

A Very Basic Universal Income (VBUI)

As our income-tax scale stands at present, a Very Basic Universal Income of $150 – payable to every tax-resident aged over 18 – could be mostly funded by abandoning the 10.5% and 17.5% tax rates. All annual personal income below $78,100 would be subject to a 30% tax rate.

Non-beneficiaries earning less than $53,500 would gain, because their VBUI would be more than their extra tax. (For these people in fulltime work, the gain would be small; $12 per week for a minimum wage worker working 40 hours per week; $16 per week gain for a minimum wage worker working 37½ hours per week.)

In technical economists’ language, the VBUI would be called a ‘refundable tax credit’, or maybe a ‘demogrant’.

People earning more than $53,500 per year – and beneficiaries – would have an unchanged net income situation. (For beneficiaries, the first $150 of their benefits would become universal; an accounting change only, from a costing point-of-view.)

People on benefits would have the first $150 per week of their benefit recategorised. People losing their jobs would continue to receive their VBUI, unconditionally. People not in the labour force would have their VBUI payments made directly, and there would be an opt-out mechanism; not an opt-in.

The biggest gains come to non-beneficiaries aged over 18 defined in the official statistics as either ‘underemployed’, ‘part-time’, or ‘not in the labour force’. The most important gains are that the $150pw VBUI constitutes an unconditional safety-bridge for those in danger of becoming redundant, or of having their hours reduced to part-time; and that it thus acts as an ‘automatic stabiliser’, meaning that people who lose their incomes can still maintain some of their usual spending.

The VBUI also means that people who gain work, or who gain extra work, still get to keep all of their Very Basic Universal Income. There is no income or poverty trap (as there is now), whereby gains in income from a new source lead to reductions in income from existing sources.

And it also substantially reduces the cost of administering social security, if people who lose their jobs automatically retain a very basic income to help tide them over losses in market income. The only information needed about non-beneficiaries in New Zealand would be their date and place of birth, their bank account number, and their immigration status. People receiving no publicly-sourced income other than a VBUI would at no stage be required to provide the authorities with any further information; they would pay tax at the going rate to the IRD based on market income connected to their IRD number.

Very Basic Universal Income is an ‘opt-out’ mechanism, which means that everyone receives it unless they have specifically asked to not receive it. And, even then, opt-outs should be managed as ‘temporary’. (All people legally allowed to earn income in New Zealand would have at least an IRD or NHI [Health NZ] number; ‘bank accounts’ at Kiwibank could be opened by Inland Revenue or Health New Zealand for people without other known access to banking facilities.)

In addition to reduced administration costs, there are several other ways that a miserly government could recoup its not-very-onerous outlays on VBUI. The two most obvious ways would be to raise the company tax rate from 28% to 30%, and to reduce the income threshold for the 39% tax down from $180,000 per year. A centre-right government which has done all these things – all very much consistent with centre-right philosophy – might then aspire to removing the 33% tax rate. That would leave a two-step tax scale: 30% and 39%.

We note that the introduction of a VBUI would, in itself, mean only one change to the existing benefit structure. That one change would be the accounting formality to categorise the first $150 per week of a benefit as a universal income, as a ‘duty-of-care’ income integrated into both the tax system and the benefit system.

A VBUI is not generous, and it’s not a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But it does act as an income that acknowledges both human rights and economic efficiency. Once the mechanism and mindset are in place – noting that the ‘mindset’ issue is analogous with that associated with the introduction of proportional-representation voting in New Zealand in the 1990s – then it becomes comparatively easy to tweak the numbers. In time, the VBUI might become a BUI, a Basic Universal Income; more like $250pw than $150pw. We need to start at a low amount, to sooth the apprehensions of the professional naysayers; those unimaginative people too ready to block social and economic progress.

A Teenage Basic Universal Income (TBUI) for adolescents

Late in 1979, Robert Muldoon raised the universal family benefit to $6 per week – a benefit (which commenced in 1946) payable on behalf of all children without any means testing. If we adjust that $6 by the CPI changes we get an equivalent of $42 today. Or if we adjust by GDP per capita – a better measure than the CPI, a measure which allows for economic growth – that $6 in late 1979 becomes $70 today.

My proposal is to pay a TBUI of either $42 or $70, to all New Zealanders aged from 14 to 17. For many of these teenage recipients, the amount would be paid directly to the recipient, and deducted from the Family Tax Credit payment presently paid to their caregivers.

I have calculated that recipients of a $42 (or even $45) TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 20% of their market income. And recipients of a $70 TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 23% of their market income. I favour fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds – all still legally at school – to receive the $42; and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to receive the $70 and pay a bit more tax.

The TBUI acknowledges that a significant minority of New Zealand’s vagrant population is in the 14 to under-18 age range. They would receive payments in the same way as older vagrants; if necessary, through an account opened for them by the IRD or Health NZ.

Call it ‘pocket money’, if you like. All New Zealand residents would receive this from when they turn 14, unless they opt-out. Fourteen is the age, in New Zealand, when children may be legally left-alone, unsupervised. Thus, it is the first age to directly signal that a young person should have a degree of independence, of economic autonomy.

Finally

All of the payments I have suggested are very basic and somewhat stingy. What matters is that they are unconditional, and confer a sense of citizenship onto our most vulnerable adults and semi-adults. There are no poverty traps; no impediments to recipients from ‘bettering themselves’, from being aspirational. Universal Incomes are not withheld when persons’ circumstances improve.

I personally would prefer less parsimonious payments; deficit-funded payments which would give an underdone economy a necessary bit of stimulus, realising that the arising increase in collective prosperity itself recoups such fiscal deficits. (The 1938 introduction of Universal Superannuation and other reforms turned out to have a fiscal cost significantly less than the projected costs. Refer Elizabeth Hanson’s 1980 book: The Politics of Social Security…) I note that we live in austere times; without really knowing the reason for these fiscal blindspots. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that, even with Scrooge in charge, we can do much better than we do today.

Further, with these universal incomes in place, everyone will know that everyone else will know that all of our vagrant population is in receipt of at least some income. (Refer Steven Pinker’s 2025 book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…) As it is, some of the beggars on the streets may be receiving substantial benefits, while others are receiving absolutely nothing; today we, in the public, are unable to tell any individual vagrant’s actual level of need.

There are solutions to these ‘all-rhetoric no-solution’ difficulties. It just takes the political will to see past our blindspots. Some form of rights-based universal income guarantee is a necessary but not a sufficient solution to the compounding vagrancy problem; and to other problems too, especially those problems affecting young people. (Note: Youth facing more psychological distress…, RNZ, 25 Feb 2026.)

Note on the Politics of Achievement

When Michael Joseph Savage in 1938 proposed (and then legislated for) a universal welfare state – with special emphasis on an initially very basic Universal Superannuation – he converted what could have been a political losing hand in that election year into New Zealand’s greatest ever electoral victory. There were many on the left and on the right of Savage’s parliamentary caucus – political people without political nous – who seemed to be eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fortuitously, Savage was not one of them. By not being one of them, by not losing courage, he became the New Zealander of the twentieth century. Savage didn’t solve every problem. But he did make a difference, for the better; and was loved for that. While a modest man himself, his political leadership for New Zealand was far from austere.

Do our current lot of politicians even want to win in November? My advice to both National and Labour is to pursue the politics of success, and not the politics of nihilism.

(In this regard we might note that the Labour Opposition in 1931 suffered an ignominious election defeat, despite the appalling economic catastrophe which was then taking place. Labour went on to win in 1935, by promising a universal welfare state. It came close to electoral embarrassment in 1938; it came close to failing to deliver on its 1935 promise.)

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin Essay – Milano-Cortina, Pandemic Central

By Keith Rankin -

February 28, 2026

Essay by Keith Rankin, 20 February 2026.

Imagine if the Olympic Games were currently being held in Wuhan, China. There would be widespread mentionings of it having been the starting place of the Covid19 pandemic, in December 2019.

But pandemics (not ‘global pandemics’; pandemics are global by definition, as are world wars) have two places of origin, though those two places could be the one-and-the-same. For Covid19, Wuhan was certainly the first place; the root source, to use a tree analogy. The second source is the base of the stem, the place from where a pandemic fans out and becomes almost unstoppable.

In the case of Covid19, the events in February 2020 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo – the jewel of the Italian Alps – were the origins of the pandemic. Without their role, Covid19 might have been a contained epidemic such as SARS (2003).

Since the near-run-disaster that was the SARS-Cov1 panic in 2003, the amount of useful epidemiological work on coronaviruses has been minimal. There was clearly research work being done, including in Wuhan. But that was mainly on the zoonotic origins of coronaviruses, and not on the administration of outbreaks. SARS-Cov1 was a severe novel coronavirus. Novel respiratory viruses – such as the 1918 influenza pandemic – are lethal, spread fast, and are hard to contain. More lethal than Sars-Cov1 was MERS which emerged around 2012. Yet preparations for a respiratory-illness pandemic were focussed almost entirely on a new strain of influenza. No prep for a new novel coronavirus. SARS-Cov2 was ‘tricky’, in that – less lethal but more transmissible than SARS-Cov1 – it fell on the cusp between being dangerously lethal and dangerously transmissible.

Geographic Analysis

The pandemic events of 2020 were not – at least not in any popular awareness – subjected to a proper geographical analysis. Most of the initial outbreaks of the SARS-Cov2 virus which escaped China were largely contained. There were relatively small outbreaks in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Seattle in the United States’ northwest; in some cases transmitted by passengers from a few cruise ships. And larger but still largely contained outbreaks in South Korea and in Iran. These outbreaks came directly from China. The containment of the Iran outbreak was facilitated by the West’s generally hostile attitude towards that country as a geopolitical ‘bad guy’; Iran was easier than most countries for the West to quarantine.

More problematic were the outbreaks in Spain and Italy, which can also be traced back to January 2020. In Spain the initial outbreak, direct from China, was more in the south; most likely linked to escapees from China. There was relatively little subsequent movement across the land border into France, though Andorra experienced a separate outbreak. The main risk from the south of Spain was the United Kingdom, given that, for many British people, southern Spain is either their first or second home. It would have been relatively easy to quarantine British arrivals from Spain; the British authorities ‘dropped a ball’ by being tardy here.

The main blind spot was that Spain is a western country, and westerners had become ingrained in the supposition that pandemics (and all things bad) come from other countries; or, more accurately phrased, ‘countries of others’. Guard rails that were up for China or Iran or even Japan and South Korea, were not there for ‘threats’ from West European countries.

The notion came about that the pandemic radiated out of southern China, rather than having flowed out of all of the places which had experienced outbreaks. When eyes should have been watching Spain and Italy, they were still firmly focused on China, and in a finger-pointing way.

The West could have learned much from China’s data about the impact of the new virus in terms of the demographics of victims and non-victims, and the extent and duration of their exposures and their symptoms. However, the western countries were more predisposed to put up the shutters with respect to that amazing country.

A large part of the problem in the 1918 influenza pandemic was the high numbers of younger adults who caught it and died from it. Covid19 was never like that. Data from China showed that few younger people had died from Covid19; unless, that is, they had had sustained exposures. For younger people, and for society as a whole, it was better for otherwise healthy non-allergic people to have early and tentative exposures to Covid than to be on tenterhooks awaiting what became the inevitable, and would become worse the longer the wait.

Milano-Cortina

More problematic than Spain was the coronavirus outbreak around and to the east of Milan – the ‘tech’ centre of Italy, and the fashion centre – and the connection of Milan to the ski resorts during the peak of the ski season; indeed during the February school holidays in Europe. Milan is the most monied city in Italy. It is an important entry-point for affluent techies on business, and for sundry one-percenters. Once the epidemic began in Wuhan, many of the monied of and around Wuhan (many were foreign nationals) had the nous to ‘escape’ – including to Macao and Hong Kong – before the Chinese central government closed the ‘stable doors’.

Milan and environs became a hotspot for witting and unwitting coronavirus refugees – affluent exiteers – just at the time Europe’s ten-percenters were heading to and from the ski resorts.

Further, there was the World Economic Forum, at Davos, Switzerland; a one-percenter retreat. A few of the delegates may have, unknowingly, arrived with Covid. Following the Forum, many delegates – coming straight from a transmissible environment – will have visited the other hotspots for the rich and famous; the other alpine resorts, and the principalities Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra. And San Marino, which is a centre for the world’s semi-licit arms trade. All of these places had significant outbreaks of Covid19 during February and March 2020. These were perfect environments for the rapid spread of SARS-like coronaviruses. While coronaviruses are not winter viruses as such – compared to other cold and influenza viruses – they nevertheless thrive in winter when not obstructed by those other winter pathogens.

Essentially the most significant locations for amplifying Covid19 were greater-Milan, the Italian skifields centred on Cortina and Livigno; though Torino in the northwest – host of the 2006 Games – probably experienced its share of the unchecked Italian Covid19 flow. From these places it spread to neighbouring countries: Austria, Switzerland, France, and Bavaria in Germany.

Who else was there at those resorts? The managerial class – the bureaucrat and technocrat nine-percenters of the most affluent cities of northwest Europe, especially those cities hosting international (Geneva, Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg) and national (eg Stockholm for one; and Paris and Berlin of course) governance organisations – were there with their older children. Fly-in, fly-out; a week’s break from the office with the family. In many cases parents on their own with the children while their spouses and ex-spouses enjoyed time apart from their children; elite parents and teenagers who would take the opportunities to socialise during the long après-ski evenings. They would mostly be back in their home countries by the first week of March.

Visitors from the Americas – from those same socio-business milieux – would have also been in these resorts at that time, and also in the capital cities of western Europe.

Covid19 didn’t stream into New York from China or from Seattle. It streamed in from the affluent centres of and close to alpine Europe, and from the business and political capitals of northwest Europe. Covid19 came into the Americas directly or indirectly from Italy to a much greater extent than it came from anywhere else.

Missing Maps

What was needed was good flow maps, much like those devised by John Snow, in London around 1850, to chart the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. Instead, the statistics most available were nationally-compiled accumulations of cases and deaths; not international flow maps showing the sequences as Covid19 moved from some places and then on to other places. Individual countries were making their own imperfect maps, with their own make-believe boundary walls. In reality these European borders were for administrative purposes only. Herein lay the problem of visualising the flows of infection; unjoined maps. Further, these case-maps were often unadjusted for the population sizes of each country or province; many maps simply showed that there were cases where there were more people.

For flow maps, you must remove the dots which represent cases resolved by time or, for a small minority of cases, by death. And you must provide per capita data.

These administrators literally failed to join the dots between their own patches and their neighbours’ patches. A glance at any Europe-wide case-map would have shown, by April 2020, a large cluster of cases from Geneva north towards Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and then west towards Maastricht and Brussels; this cluster straddled six separate national borders. (Seven countries if you include Italy, which is close to Geneva.) The conclusions from such a map would have been as obvious as those revealed by John Snow’s case-map of Soho (London) during the 1854 cholera outbreak there.

In early 2020, it was senior public servants, their families including their elderly parents, their staff, and the people they had meetings (and eatings) with who had been most effectively spreading and succumbing to the virus.

First and Second Waves

By July 2020, the Covid19 outbreak was largely contained in Europe. But at a cost, not only in terms of disrupted income-earning opportunities to the small-medium businesses personnel who contracted the virus from the holidaying returnees and who were most disrupted by stay-at-home orders. And also, the latent cost of the first wave included the loss of those many natural immunisations that commuters in large cities experience most days of their working lives; especially cities with international airports.

Thus, the countries which had experienced multi-month shutdowns rebuffed the pandemic virus at a significant hidden cost; a weakening of the immunity of the population, increasing the susceptibility of the so-far uninfected to a new wave of respiratory contagion. Populations in urban centres – historically, and especially immigrants to those cities from the provinces – have always been vulnerable to transmissible diseases. By August 2020 this was especially so, especially in those countries in Eastern Europe (with older and poorer populations) which had been minimally exposed to both the first wave of Covid19 and the other pathogens they would normally have come into frequent contact with.

While the pandemic was contained in Europe by July 2020, it was far from contained in the United States. In the United States, the covid curve was flattened, but at a high plateau. The downside of flattening-the-curve is that you get an extended curve, creating a pathogen reservoir for a second wave of infections.

The Grand Tour and the second wave of Covid19

In the eighteenth century, a time of very high economic inequality in the British Isles and other parts of Europe, a tradition developed among the sons of the then one-percenters to do a Grand Tour. For a few, that tour was somewhat intrepid; Joseph Banks did his grand tour on the Endeavour with James Cook. Lord Byron was another, whose tour was somewhat intrepid and was never completed.

For the majority of these entitled young men, there was a tourist trail that developed; the grand tour became a kind of hedonist pilgrimage. Principal stops included Paris, the Rhine lands (including Heidelburg) and Switzerland. Some of these early bohemian tourists headed directly from Switzerland to Italy; others ventured into Austria (especially Vienna) and the Bohemian capital of Prague.

In Italy there were several must-visit cities, including Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. The homeward journey likely included Sicily, southern France and places in Spain and Portugal.

Some grand tourists would also visit the ‘Near East’, the areas – including the Holy Land – defined by the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Seas.

The twenty-first (and late twentieth century) version of the grand tour is undertaken by the sons and daughters of American ten-percenters. In the United States in particular, working-life career-building requirements and surprisingly little annual leave strongly encourage this somewhat-elitist comparator to New Zealand’s OE. Young Americans have much less time than young Europeans to travel as tourists during their working lives.

In the modern Grand Tour, which lasts from mid-July to mid-September, young university-educated Americans with both left-elite (nine-percenter) and right-elite (one-percenter) backgrounds descend upon Europe. In 2020, this timing coincided with the re-opening of Europe after what the Europeans optimistically presumed was the end of the Covid19 pandemic. Further, European tourist hotspots were keen to welcome new waves of spending visitors, to help with their economic recoveries.

The second wave of the Covid19 pandemic began in August 2020, though this was not fully apparent until late September. The second wave was much more lethal than the first, and especially in Eastern Europe, where the (generally older) populations had largely escaped the first wave, but were particularly immunity-compromised as a result of the stay-at-home orders during the pandemic’s first wave.

The second wave began in places like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Switzerland, Czechia (especially Prague). And in Israel, another popular destination for American grand tourists. It was the American Grand Tour which brought the pandemic back to Europe, and with a vengeance; and which in turn instigated the further lethal waves of Covid19 around the world in 2021.

Unfortunately, thanks to inadequate specific-location-mapping and flow-mapping of the abundant Covid19 statistics, this flow of infections was only apparent to those who looked under the bonnet. By then, the national Wikipedia sites for Covid19 had lost their energy, showing increasingly outdated maps, and misplaced emphases on first-entry cases during the first wave. The accessible information was either too technical or too stale.

Popular Lore

In popular lore, the Covid19 pandemic was essentially a 2020 phenomenon. TV dramas and documentaries still emphasise that early period of the global crisis.

It was from the lethal second wave that the nasty new variants evolved, in 2021; and spread into and then from India, as the most spectacular example. Remember the Greek Alphabet soup, with the (British) Alpha and (Indian) Delta variants having been especially problematic.

The older Swedish scientists who emphasised the need to take a path – a path which accentuated the need for natural immunity to facilitate an early and complete end to the pandemic’s most dangerous phase – were proved correct as the pandemic raged through its most serious phase in 2021. Though you wouldn’t know it, probably too many interests did not want to make comparisons. Sweden’s politicians had been too slow to address the Stockholm outbreak in early 2020, when that country had an especially vulnerable elderly population; so, it looked as if the world had little to learn from that country. (Sweden had had significantly less influenza than most other countries, in 2018 and 2019; meaning that Sweden had unusually low death rates in the winters of those two years; meaning that they had plenty of ‘fuel’ for a tragic pandemic ‘fire’ in the spring of 2020.)

2021 also became the year of the Covid19 vaccine race; whereas 2020 had been the year of the missing PPE. The public health industry tends to place too much emphasis on immunisation through intervention versus immunisation through monitored natural exposures. This emphasis is valid for the most lethal of infectious conditions; the conditions for which we routinely vaccinate today. But for the below the radar circumstances of categories of common respiratory viruses with high complexity and low lethality – including known circulating viruses such as RSV, coronaviruses (the descendants of previous lethal coronaviruses), rhinoviruses, and influenzas –medicalised immunisations came to be emphasised while, with little awareness, simultaneous processes were lessening immunity to these types of virus. It was like taking one step forward and two steps back.

In the end, the pandemic was resolved through a natural immunisation process. 2022 was the year of Omicron. In 2022 the non-lethal Covid-Omicron variant ‘ripped through’ New Zealand and other places with previous minimal coronavirus exposure. This was a direct result of the failure and subsequent redundancy of the border-quarantine and other barrier methods of protection which were still in force in January 2022. Most New Zealand residents were exposed to covid that year.

Omicron had evolved in southern Africa in late 2021, from the earliest strain of Sars-Cov2. It became a natural immunisation force. Omicron was the invisible cavalry coming to the rescue; favoured in evolutionary terms over the Delta nemesis because it was more highly transmissible while being much less lethal than the previous covid varieties. More like the familiar but under-studied ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. Omicron stopped Delta dead in its tracks; a more effective weapon than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Lessons

I don’t think that western society has learned very much from the Covid19 pandemic. The importance of good mapwork and monitored natural immunisation barely formed any part of the long but largely useless narrative. Sweden’s alternative scientific path was forgotten, or derided, rather than learned from.

The next pandemic will probably also catch us unawares. It will be as different from the contemporary preoccupations of epidemiology, as Covid19 was. It may already be ‘hiding in plain sight’, as the coronavirus threat was in the 2010s. Family doctors should be routinely testing for all the various ‘bugs’ out there, and passing-on data about the various pathogens and cross-immunities which keep us healthy in daily life. We could perhaps have knocked out Covid19 in its early stages, by facilitating natural exposures of healthy people to low doses of already-circulating non-covid coronaviruses.

I think that future government-overreach mandates around lockdowns and mask-wearing will be hard to enforce, given the huge rightwards shifts in western politics this decade. But there may be opportunities for short smart protective measures, undertaken at local levels and in places such as retirement villages and rest homes. In particular, making high-grade (ie the more expensive types of) facemasks available to the vulnerable, with the warning that these should be worn mainly in high-risk environments, and not everywhere all the time.

Meanwhile

It’s great that Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, still popular hangouts of the rich and the not-so-famous, have been able to host a magnificent sporting event. These places have not been tainted by their association with the still recent pandemic. Despite being the places from which an outbreak of a significant new coronavirus fanned out to create a three-year pandemic that changed the world. That outbreak was probably containable, if we had acted with more nous and more knowledge of the common pathogens of daily life.

But who was looking at the Italian Alps in those heady ski-holiday days of February 2020? We were transfixed by China.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin Analysis – Parliamentary Term Length; is New Zealand really an Outlier?

By Keith Rankin -

February 28, 2026

Analysis by Keith Rankin, 19 February 2026

The RNZ news bulletin of 10pm on 18 February stated: “New Zealand and Australia are outliers in having three-year parliamentary terms, with four or five year terms far more common … politicians have over the years expressed frustration at how much can be achieved in a three-year cycle.”

This is a common but not really valid belief. This year the world’s second largest democracy – United States of America – is holding its election for its House of Representatives. That country has – and has had – a stable two-year term. For some reason it is never mentioned in these discussions.

Below is a table showing average term lengths for comparator countries. We note that in countries with flexible electoral terms, which is all of these except United States, it is commonly only the more unpopular governments which go full-term.

Country	Average	Average
	since 2010	since 1950
India	5.0	4.2
Italy	4.5	4.1
Ireland	4.3	3.7
France	4.0	4.1
Germany	4.0	3.8
Sweden	4.0	3.4
UK	3.5	3.7
Canada	3.5	3.1
New Zealand	3.0	3.0
Australia	3.0	2.6
Japan	2.8	2.8
USA	2.0	2.0

We note in particular that elections in the United Kingdom have been on average 3.7 years apart, despite that country having a five-year term limit. And that that country presently has a governing party for which popular support, as consistently measured by opinion polls, has so far registered below 20% for much of the so far short life of its rule. The fact that the likely date for the next election is more than three years away is a major source of political instability there.

Most importantly, in the table above, New Zealand is not an outlier.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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