AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The New Zealand government has joined 27 other countries calling for an “immediate end” to the war in Gaza. The joint statement says  “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths”.

It goes on to say that the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.

But many of the countries that have signed this statement stand condemned for actively enabling Israel to pursue its genocidal assault on Gaza. Countries like Britain, Canada and Australia, continue to supply Israel with arms, have continued to trade with Israel, and have turned a blind eye to the atrocities and war crimes Israel continues to commit in Gaza.

It’s more than ironic that while Western countries like Britain and New Zealand are calling for an end to the war in Gaza, they continue to be hostile toward the anti-war protest movements in their own countries.

The British government recently classified the protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” group.

In New Zealand, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, has denounced pro-Palestine protesters as “left wing fascists” and “communist, fascist and anti-democratic losers”. He has pushed back against the growing demands that the New Zealand government take direct action against Israel, including the cutting of all diplomatic ties.

The New Zealand government, which contains a number of Zionists within its cabinet, including Act leader David Seymour and co-leader Brooke van Velden, will be more than comfortable with a statement that proposes to do nothing.

‘Statement lacks leadership’
Its call for an end to the war is empty rhetoric, and which Israel will duly ignore — as it has ignored other calls for its genocidal war to end.  As Amnesty International has said, ‘the statement lacks any resolve, leadership, or action to help end the genocide in Gaza.’

New Zealand has declined to join The Hague Group alliance of countries that recently met in Colombia.

It announced six immediate steps it would be taking against Israel. But since The Hague Group has already been attacked by the United States, it’s never been likely that New Zealand would join it.

The National-led coalition government has surrendered New Zealand’s independent foreign policy in favour of supporting the interests of a declining American Empire.

Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The New Zealand government has given its full blessing to Cook Islands and Niue establishing diplomatic relations with the United States.

At the US-Pacific summit on Monday (Washington time), President Joe Biden said he recognised the two island nations as sovereign and independent states, an announcement which the US Embassy in Aotearoa has labelled as “historic”.

Both countries are self-governing in ‘free association’ with New Zealand.  

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins acknowledged that and responded to questions around what the US’s move means for both countries’ relationship with Aotearoa.

“That’s the way that the American system works,” Hipkins said.

“So in order to recognise those specific countries, the wording that they use is they recognise their sovereignty but actually they also recognise, through diplomatic channels, the unique constitutional relationship that those countries have with New Zealand as well.”

The establishment of diplomatic relations does not change the constitutional relationship Aotearoa New Zealand has with either the Cook Islands or Niue, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said.

“Aotearoa New Zealand welcomes the establishment of diplomatic relations between US, Cook Islands and Niue,” the MFAT spokesperson said.

Diplomatic relations
“The Cook Islands has diplomatic relations with 61 countries, and Niue has diplomatic relations with 21 countries.

“[The NZ government] expects that the establishment of diplomatic relations[with the US] will better enable close engagement.”

In his speech, Biden said building a better world started with stronger partnerships.

“And that’s why the United States is formally establishing relations with the Cook Island’s . . .  and Niue,” Biden said.

Pacific Islands Forum chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown has hailed the move as a milestone that marks an “era of change”.

He said Niue and the Cook Islands were “celebrating”.

“These milestones celebrate era’s of change and demonstrate that with unshakable resolve and leadership, remarkable achievements are possible,” Brown said.

Brown thanked the US President for his elevated level of engagement with the Pacific over the last year.

Development funding
Massey University’s defence and security analyst Dr Anna Powles said formalising diplomatic ties was “very much about ensuring that Cook Islands and Niue are able to receive development assistance funding”.

“There’s obviously also a strategic benefit from the United States perspective to have diplomatic presence, or at least diplomatic reach, into both of those countries.”

On top of the diplomatic ties talk, Biden also announced climate assistance at the summit.

He told Pacific leaders more than US$20 million is being injected into climate assistance.

The announcement for climate support and affirming the US’s commitment to climate action comes just days days after he was slammed by Pacific youth climate activist Suluafi Brianna Freuan following the UN Climate Ambition Summit.

Suluafi said not all nations were being ambitious enough when it came to climate ambition.

“What are the commitments that they will make to financing those most vulnerable to climate change, including those in their, their very ocean, their neighbours in the Pacific,” Suluafi said.

“[Countries] really need to talk about how they will phase out fossil fuels.”

But President Biden wanted to be clear that the Pacific’s stance on the climate crisis was the US’s position too.

‘I hear you’ – Biden on climate crisis
“I want you to know I hear you, the people in the United States and around the world hear you,” Biden said.

“We hear your warnings of a rising sea that they pose an existential threat to your nations. We hear your calls for reassurance that you never, never, never will lose your statehood, or membership of the UN as a result of the climate crisis.”

The President also announced the doubling of US-Pacific exchange student spots.

He committed to a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific region.

Biden also plans on investing US$5 million into co-funding a fisheries and ocean science vessel.

It is expected to be used to manage the region’s tuna resources and for ocean science research.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

You first have to lose an election on principle if you want to win one on principle.

This was how Labor rationalised the miscalculations that led to its “Don’s Party” disappointment in 1969, followed by the 1972 triumph of the “It’s Time” campaign.

Half a century later, the idea of sticking with unpopular policy seems romantic, unthinkable. Principles are not just old-hat in an era of professionalised politics, but absurd.

Swamped by voter-attitude metrics, modern democratic leaders are not leaders in the traditional sense. Rather, they are followers.

Followers of market researchers and media proprietors who disabuse them of ambitious conceits like national leadership, or anything that might tempt them to make changes based on electoral judgment, the national interest, or even ideology.

Still, a few months ago, one starry-eyed fool (to wit, this author) described the looming 2022 federal election as the most important national choice to be put before voters since that 1972 hinge-point.

If it was an invitation to Labor leader Anthony Albanese to paint in bold brushstrokes, he didn’t receive it.

Instead, Labor’s risk-averse policy presentation has largely mirrored the reform-shy government it seeks to replace. This makes for the least policy-divergent choice in the 50 years since 1972.

The 2022 election more closely resembles a velodrome match-sprint where the two riders have almost stopped on the banked section, each terrified of leading off and being overtaken in the final dash for the line.

Whitlam’s re-imagining
The 1972 comparison gets even harder when you look at former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s first month in office.

He promised to establish diplomatic relations with Peking (now Beijing), following his audacious trip to “Red China” in 1971. Imagine this (or any) opposition making a play of similar foreign policy gravity today.

Whitlam’s bold Australian re-imagining, which historian Stuart McIntyre later characterised as “a nationalism attuned to internationalism”, kick-started a lucrative economic co-dependency that has propelled Australian prosperity to this day. Hungry for commodities and services imports, China’s staggering growth has also insulated Australia through global shocks like the Asian Financial Crisis, Global Financial Crisis, and the covid-19 pandemic.

While the Coalition would no doubt have come to it eventually, Whitlam acted without hesitation or American permission. Crucially, he backed his capacity to explain it to the country, despite the danger of being tagged as soft on communism.

Again, leaders taking decisions and then relying on their persuasive powers to win arguments seems fanciful amid the timidity of contemporary politics.

A shot of adrenaline
In those first days, Whitlam also ended conscription, withdrew from Vietnam, granted independence to Papua New Guinea, and set about ratifying long-deferred international conventions on basic labour conditions, racial non-discrimination, and nuclear weapons proliferation.

With his pared back, don’t-frighten-the-horses agenda, Albanese might have less to do over a whole term, and Whitlam was only getting started.

Before his government crashed, Whitlam would end the White Australia Policy, scrap royal honours, appoint the first women’s adviser, reform draconian divorce laws, champion multiculturalism, dramatically ratchet up funding for the arts and humanities, abolish university fees, revive urban development, and more.

To a slumbering post-war Australia, it was a shot of late 20th Century adrenaline and the results were startling. Australian historian Manning Clark described it as the “end of the Ice Age”.

But in 1975, it ended in ignominy. As McIntyre later observed, “the golden age was over”.

History rhyming, not repeating
So far, the case for equivalence between 1972 and 2022 is not obvious, right?

But what if it is not Labor that now represents the radical option but the status quo? What if changing governments offers the safer, more conventional course for nervous voters? As Mark Twain noted, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.

Labor’s 1972 manifesto was inspiring, but it was the urgency with which its modernising promise was articulated after 23 years of Coalition rule that had impatient voters energised. The McMahon Coalition government was a no ideas factory in the lead-up to the 1972 election, although it did not exhibit the insidious corrosive streak of its modern-day equivalent.

This is the rhyme. While the 2022 election is not about the magisterial reform possibilities of an incoming government, it is about the urgent need to rescue longstanding governing norms around transparency, accountability, ministerial standards, trust and the honesty, and of course, the viability of the public service.

It is in this critical sense that the two elections might be compared.

Divide and dither
The radicalism absent from Labor’s 2022 manifesto is made up for in the unspoken but no-less transformative erosion of standards by the government. The Coalition is primarily intent on the political dividends of division, on courting the applause of media vassals, religious conservatives, and a populist Nationals rump.

Morrison’s approach can be described as divide and dither.

It finds its expression in the Coalition’s reflexive recourse to politics over policy — frequently at the direct expense of the national interest such as in the weaponisation of climate change and more recently, the attempts to weaken the outward presentation of domestic bipartisanship on national security.

The former is a classic of the genre. Morrison’s hollow embrace of net zero by 2050 ahead of Glasgow last year was greeted by political insiders as a triumph of prime ministerial skill, when all it really did was expose how utterly pointless the Coalition’s decade-long negation had been.

Moreover, it brought no revision to interim targets nor adjusted any other policy architecture.

Its real aim — in which it was successful — was the neutralisation of a Coalition stance that had morphed into a clear electoral negative.

The latter, national security, was tickled along last Friday in Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s ultra-earnest press conference transparently called to (re)frighten voters about a Chinese “warship” that was “hugging” Australia’s north-western coast at a distance of 400 kilometres.

Manufactured wars and textimonials
Divide and dither revels in manufactured culture wars over transgender teens and identity politics, fumes about supposed attacks on faith, and white-ants efforts to build support for a First Nations Voice in the Constitution.

Witness the government’s pillorying responses to anti-discrimination campaigners with dismissive throw-aways like “all lives matter”.

Divide and dither’s existence was spectacularly laid bare in a series of explosive “textimonials” regarding Morrison’s character from his own colleagues — people much closer to him than voters, including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. These described him variously as a “hypocrite and a liar”. A New South Wales Liberal senator called him a “bully with no moral compass”.

It’s there, too, in the vicious campaigns against “fake” independent women – simply for standing for office. In a democracy.

The Liberals’ refusal to acknowledge and address female under-representation has invited the very rebellion it now faces from high-calibre female candidates in safe Liberal seats.

The overall impression is of a government shamelessly enabled by a pseudo-independent media that makes no serious attempt to govern for all Australians.

No change means no consequences
In light of these multiple failures, in opting for no change, Australian voters would be saying there is no cost for governing like this.

The Coalition’s take-out would be — keep misleading and pork-barrelling and fomenting useless culture wars.

Keep stacking boards and cutting taxes for the rich and emaciating the public service. Keep denying an anti-corruption commission even as its need becomes ever-more pressing.

Psychologists would call such a verdict “learned helplessness” — an acceptance that such corruptions are inevitable, and no more than we deserve.

Accountable government, national unity, evidence-based policy, and democratic accountability are all on the ballot at this election.

It is not 1972, but the choice might be equally stark, despite Labor’s timidity.

Dr Mark Kenny, is professor at the Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Solomon Islands prime minister came in for searing criticism when he faced a confidence vote in Parliament today.

A motion of no confidence against Manasseh Sogavare was debated amid tight security in the capital Honiara, where hundreds of regional security forces have deployed following major political unrest less than two weeks ago.

About 250 defence force and police personnel from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and New Zealand were on high alert in anticipation of potential unrest around the outcome of the vote.

As expected, the pro-China prime minister survived the no confidence vote with the support of 32 MPs, while 15 voted against him.

Local media reported that numerous local families departed from Honiara aboard interisland ferries to return to home villages to avoid potential unrest in the capital, where many shops and schools had also closed.

The motion was tabled by opposition leader Matthew Wale, who has accused Sogavare of allowing corruption to fester, and of treating the people of Malaita province with contempt.

Malaitans played a central role in the late November protest that sparked the unrest, which left extensive destruction in Honiara, prompting Sogavare’s request for regional security help.

Suidani denies instigation claims
Malaita’s provincial Premier Daniel Suidani, whose administration has fallen out with the national government, especially over the country’s move to switch diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China, has denied claims by the coalition that he instigated the unrest.

Wale told Parliament that the actions of the rioters should not obscure the real issue behind the unrest.

“We must condemn all the criminality in the strongest terms, but it pales, Mr Speaker, in comparison to the looting happening at the top,” he said.

Speaking in favour of the motion, former prime minister Rick Hounipwela described Sogavare as the ultimate opportunist whose accession to prime minister over four stints “has always been under abnormal circumstances”.

Blaming the prime minister for negligent management of the country’s finances, Hounipwela said the country’s corruption problem had deepened under Sogavare’s rule.

“We’ve experienced huge tax exemptions worth millions of dollars given to the people who least needed it, usually the loggers and mining operators.”

In today’s debate on the motion, Sogavare said the motion had been filed against the backdrop of an illegal attempted coup.

‘Stand up to tyranny’
“When we are under attack from forces of evil, we must stand up for what is right, we must stand up to this tyranny. We cannot entertain violence being used to tear down a democratically elected government.”

Sogavare rejected the opposition’s accusation of corruption against him.

Hounipwela, the MP for Small Malaita, accused the prime minister of using the pandemic State of Emergency to give himself authoritarian powers.

He also claimed Sogavare had used police to repress public criticism of his leadership, and of directing foreign embassies and high commissions in the country to notify the government of their moves around the provinces.

“To vote against [the motion], members would be aiding and abetting his zeal for power and to rule this country with an iron fist. That’s what we see as a track record,” Hounipwela said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz