Keith Rankin, 3 July 2026 – Last week I posted these two charts (Terms of Trade and Import Volumes) which presented, for New Zealand, a long-run view of two critically important (though under-reported) economic indicators. The terms of trade chart suggests that New Zealand has enjoyed unprecedented boom-times this century. The imports chart confirms this, revealing that – for more than three decades, starting in 1986 – import volumes increased by six percent per year; that is, import volumes have grown much faster than the New Zealand economy has grown.

(For New Zealand’s economic growth since 1990, see my NZ Economic Growth over the Medium Term Scoop 2 July 2026.)

In my text (see New Zealand Economy: Boom or Bust in Early 2026? Scoop 25 June 2026) I noted that, in 1985, a year before the dramatic change in New Zealand’s terms-of-trade fortune, New Zealand’s new political class launched a financial scheme – effectively creating an entity which might have been called New Zealand Financial Incorporated 1985 Ltd. The New Zealand economy then became – at least in significant part – a successful Ponzi scheme.

As we can tell from the case of the Icelandic national Ponzi scheme (associated with the regime of Prime Minister Geir Haarde) which began in the mid-2000s and ended late in 2008, the New Zealand scheme might have been equally short-lived. New Zealand’s scheme was rescued more by good luck (a terms-of-trade turnaround, starting with the substantial 1986 fall in global oil prices) and by a suite of foreign purchases of New Zealand assets accelerating in 1989. (New Zealand import volumes were 29% higher in the year-to-June 1990 than three years earlier; and, through the following deep recession, imports held up over the next three years.)

The principal feature of a Ponzi scheme is the promise, to investors, of high interest rates.

A Ponzi scheme is a consumption mechanism which masquerades as an investment portfolio. To fully understand what a Ponzi scheme is, it is necessary to know what isn’t a Ponzi scheme. A useful metaphor for consumption is ‘putting food on the table’.

Meeting the economic challenge: ways to put ‘food on the table’

There are a surprisingly large number of ways that economic entities – households, businesses, governments, whole nations – can ‘put food on the table’; meaning to provide for themselves.

The first way is subsistence. In a pure subsistence economy, there is no marketplace nor ‘legal tender’ money. Households hunt, fish, gather, garden, and/or corral animals; they may do this on a mix of private and common ‘land’ (considering the sea as a form of ‘common land’). A subsistence country, without imports and exports, is known as an autarky.

The second way is through transfers. I identify four basic types: gifts, theft, taxes, and inheritance. Gifts are not always altruistic; for example, slaves – human livestock – are provided for by gifts (as are other prisoners). Gifts and common theft are ‘current transfers’. Inheritances are ‘capital transfers’. Taxes are legally mandated transfers to sovereigns; they put ‘food’ on governments’ ‘tables’.

The third way is through ‘paid work’; receiving remuneration for work or the sale of goods or services produced. This kind of remuneration can be summarised as labour income; wages and salaries, including the implicit salaries paid to self-employed people. (Though most executive ‘salary packages’ are not labour-income in the usual sense; they represent portions of their employers’ profits.)

The fourth way is income derived from capital; contractual remuneration paid on account of the possession of many real and financial assets. Machinery and buildings – and canals and railways and airports – are real assets which may be leased or rented out. Bonds, bank deposits, and company shares are financial assets. Intellectual property is a bit of both. Privately-owned real estate is both. Categories of capital income include dividends (from profits), rents, royalties, and interest. Income accruing to assets is called ‘yield’. (Gold is also a financial asset, though is not income-bearing; as such, it has no associated yield. Money is a financial asset. Money – unless in an interest-bearing account – does not have yield; nor does crypto-currency, which can be thought of as ‘virtual gold’.)

The above four ways of putting ‘food-on-the-table’ are essentially current methods of provision for an economic entity such as a household. The exception mentioned so far is inheritance, which is a transfer of capital. If the economic entity is a nation state, the equivalent of income is export revenues.

There are also four capital methods to put ‘food on the table’.

The fifth way of putting food on the table is through the sale of assets. In principle, anything listed above as an asset can be sold; the potential cost is the loss of income deriving from such assets. A special example of an asset sale is the withdrawal of money from a bank deposit; that is, the drawdown of savings.

The sixth way is to borrow money and to use it to buy ‘food for the table’. That creates a debt; a liability which would normally be serviced from future current income such as wages. (Though a bridging loan would be serviced by a subsequent asset sale.) Compounding economic growth, in principle, facilitates wages rising more than enough to counter the compounding interest burden of debt; that allows the debt to be serviced and eventually repaid. Historically, much debt has been deflated by inflation (or, to a lesser extent, by bankruptcy); much historical debt has thereby been converted into transfers (the second way), enabling plenty of food to have been placed on the tables of many people born in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

The seventh way is capital gain. If a recently acquired asset appreciates in market value, it can be sold, and the proceeds of that sale may be used to put food on the table. Alternatively, new loans can be taken out, allowing unsold assets to accrue capital gain (as collateral). The new loans put food on the table, in the full expectation that such new debts can be retired in the future through the sale of the collateral assets. (This can of course go awry if those capital gains prove to be ephemeral, meaning that the collateral becomes insufficient to repay the compounding debt.)

The eighth way is Ponzi finance. One version is to accrue unsecured debt (and to spend some or all of it on consumables such as food on the table), and to service that debt in the future by acquiring further unsecured debt. This becomes fraud – a form of theft – if the creditors are deceived with manipulative intent by the debtor entity. If the debtor entity has ready access to borrowed money, that access to future debt serves as an alternative to collateral. (Banks, necessarily, have privileged access to future debt; especially central banks such as the Reserve Bank. Nonbanks may have to secure future debt by offering to pay above-market interest rates.)

We note that, whenever a nonbank entity borrows money – eg from banks – then, from those lenders’ points of view, they have invested in the entity.

Thus, the more general way to think of Ponzi finance is through the concept of ‘investment’, in both the economic and speculative senses of that word. The economic meaning of investment is to purchase a new asset, to purchase on a primary market. The speculative meaning is to purchase an existing asset, to purchase on the secondary market; to purchase (say) a house or company shares or bonds on the resale market, either to gain a yield or in the hope of a capital gain. A new bank deposit is not in itself an economic investment – it’s saving, not investment – but it may facilitate a loan by the bank to another customer; such a loan would be an investment by the bank.

Many economic entities, probably most, finance current spending – put food on the table – through the use of more than one of these eight methods. For example, a superannuitant may receive a transfer payment, some wages, and some provision in the form of interest or rent or capital gain; or might have a reverse mortgage, whereby food on the table is funded by secured debt.

Ponzi Schematics

We note first that the word ‘scheme’ has pejorative undertones and overtones (like the words ‘regime’, ‘proxy’ and ‘propaganda’ for example); so, having a discussion about the possible benefits of Ponzi schemes runs counter to entrenched narratives, ie before any discussion has even started. (And of course the name Ponzi is also entrenched in our cultural ‘Book of Bad’.) Nevertheless, counternarrative discussions are what the world urgently needs; and on all manner of topics. Many things that are labelled as ‘bad’ are not entirely bad.

(A scheme is simply a proposal or a program. A regime is simply a government or an administration or a constitution. A proxy is an ally, a smaller participant in an alliance; the United States has numerous proxies. Propaganda is a narrative, drawing [as narratives typically do] more heavily on normative criteria – beliefs, and managed perceptions – than on verifiable evidence. To use the regime vis-a-vis government example: when we use this example of value-loaded language, regimes ‘scheme and propagandise’, whereas governments ‘administer and inform’.)

From here on, I may use the word ‘entity’ (‘Entity’ for a formal organisation) rather than ‘scheme’. A Ponzi entity would normally have the trappings of a business, though it could be that financial mechanism adapted by a country or a government.

Investors ‘invest’ in the Ponzi entity, essentially by lending it unspent money, and securing a contract to gain a yield; and having the invested money able to be withdrawn on relatively straightforward terms. (This contrasts with retirement-pension finance in which the yield or capital gain is compounded, and the ability to withdraw each ‘investment’ is strictly limited.)

The owners – or principals – of the Ponzi entity would themselves spend on themselves (rather than ‘invest’ in the economic sense) much of the money that’s paid to them; the rest of the money paid into the scheme would be held as a ‘liquid’ cash reserve. Thus, the Ponzi entity is essentially a consumer (like a household) rather than an intermediary (a bank or a vanilla finance company) or an ordinary business (which is a producer).

Investors in the Ponzi entity will be paid out – yield and repayments – from a cash reserve which is dependent on incoming funds from new investors (or additional ‘investments’ from existing ‘investors’). Thus, the Ponzi entity is commonly understood as a kind of financial perpetual-motion machine. It is like a time machine – not a time-travel machine – which works by continually borrowing energy from the future; and, as the future is infinite, there is no necessary endpoint when the machine stops working.

A Ponzi entity is able to continue to function so long as sufficient new investments are forthcoming. That ongoing functionality is facilitated by investors who infrequently withdraw their ‘savings’ and/or who are content to let their yields – their interest – compound; miserly investors, in other words, who deposit much and withdraw little.

The Ponzi entity fails when withdrawals exceed its ability to secure ongoing investments. Unusually large numbers of withdrawals can be called ‘capital flight’.

Harms and Benefits

In itself, a Ponzi Entity is an enterprise; a fraudulent enterprise if there is deceptive intent on the part of the principals. It transfers consumption from ‘investors’ to company ‘principals’. But these businesses can only thrive if there are investors who are simultaneously frugal and greedy; people who do not want to spend their money (or at least not for a while), but who also demand returns that are both high and liquid. (By liquid, we mean able to access their ‘money’ – interest or capital – on call and with minimal risk of capital erosion.) Such investors are frequently hoarders (maybe they are ‘insurance hoarders, saving for a rainy day’) – rather than people who save for particular short-term purposes – who expect to receive high amounts of interest in return for their hoarding; noting that hoarding is, in and of itself, a deadweight cost on the economy. (Hoarding – distinct from both economic investment and short-term saving – is a circulation blockage, much as fatbergs are blockages in the sewerage system.)

Under these conditions, the Ponzi entity is able to re-inject hoarded funds into the economy, negating the deadweight cost associated with miserly hoarding. Ponzi entities act to restore the circular flow of money in the economy; effectively removing or by-passing a circulation blockage (much as a stent might do with respect to a sclerotic patient with circulatory disease). Consumer spending – food on the table, to persevere with that metaphor – facilitated by Ponzi finance acts essentially as current transfers from miserly contributors to spendthrift principals. Ponzi principals compound debts which are neither serviced nor repaid; rather they are rolled over into either perpetuity or bankruptcy.

So, the harm is the spending of invested funds as if they were gifts; and the potential for the investors to lose their money. Ponzi finance is a victimless crime, so long as the investors (whose current needs are being satisfied by other means) continue to get what they want; which is an accumulating – that is, compounding – on-call savings balance. It’s victimless theft; that is, victimless until the scheme falls over and the investors lose their money.

It’s like much ‘benefit fraud’; a kind of fraud which helps to keep the economy ticking over and thereby generates about as much public revenue as it depletes. Indeed, maybe more revenue is generated than depleted. So the benefit of Ponzi spending is its inherent counter-recessionary nature; hence Ponzi schemes are most likely to thrive in circumstances of inequality, and may indeed stave off otherwise-immanent recessions.

When the Ponzi entity is a country; a nation-state

In this case, the investors are foreign entities: households, organisations, governments. The domestic economy is the Ponzi entity; resident households, organisations and governments are together the beneficiary principals. Though some beneficiaries may be more equal than others; New Zealand’s stunning growth of imports since 1985 has been distributed far from equitably.

In this nation-state case, it is extremely unlikely that the only way a country puts imports on its table is through the Ponzi scheme. Exports always continue to play some role in funding imports. Further, a Ponzi scheme is not the only way through which debt may be used for consumption and then subsequently not repaid. Inflation is another. (Those who have historically benefited from inflation are typically the parents of those who now rail against inflation. Indeed, there are stabilising benefits to inflation not unlike those circulatory benefits arising from Ponzi finance; that’s why inflation is regarded as compulsory, noting that New Zealand and many other countries have a policy requirement that annual inflation should be between one and three percent.)

Any country which has had continuous – or near-continuous – current account deficits for forty or more years can be said to be beneficiaries of a long-running Ponzi environment. New Zealand is very definitely one such country. Australia used to be such a beneficiary, too. The United Kingdom almost certainly is, though that country’s economy is obscured by the financial roles played by its many realm countries – including the likes of Jersey, Gibraltar, Bermuda, Virgin Islands, and Cayman Islands. Canada may be undergoing relatively recent ponzification.

A special case of a Ponzi country is the United States, to which the international community has granted specific stabilising privileges. The United States’ [Ponzi] economy is comparable to the giant black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. It separately involves both its longstanding current-account deficits (funded in perpetuity by foreign investors) and its longstanding federal fiscal-deficits (funded by both those self-same investors; and, critically, by the United States Federal Reserve Bank).

New Zealand

The last year in which New Zealand – very much one of the world’s consumer nations – did not enjoy a current account deficit was 1973. The circumstances from 1974 to 1984 were non-Ponzi; they reflected both an acute and a secular decline in New Zealand’s terms-of-trade through which New Zealand had no choice but to resort to overseas-sourced credit. There was no way during the decade from 1974 that any country facing such circumstances could export enough goods and services to pay for its imports.

Nevertheless, New Zealand’s policymakers did their very best to meet the challenge of ‘putting food on the New Zealand table’ through the diversification of income and the challenge of import-substitution. That is, until 1985, under the auspices of the ‘new-broom’ Lange-Douglas government.

Roger Douglas’s pre-election devaluation policy was most probably intended as a means to meet that challenge of more exports and fewer imports; this was a key feature of Douglas’s 1981 book There has got to be a better way. Douglas was not an innate Ponzi-schemer; he was largely played, a victim of the 1970s and 1980s global resurgence of financial liberalism. His tenure as Finance Minister thus came to be characterised as a period of over-valued rather than under-valued exchange rates, despite the principal talking-point of his book. Even more than a history of perpetual current account deficits – which is also a historical feature of developing economies – a multi-decade history of an appreciating exchange rate in a country with a floating currency is also a feature of international Ponzi finance.

In the first half of 1985, a very deliberate policy of financial deregulation was implemented; and so quickly that doubters had no time to mount a defence. The expectation at the time was that New Zealand’s traditional commodity-export-based economy was in terminal decline, and indeed suggested by the Terms of Trade chart. Little attention had been paid by the new elites to the substantial and mostly market-led restructuring of the tradable sector; restructuring that had already taken place, under duress, in the years from 1974 to 1984.

The initial flagship component of the new policy was the floating of the New Zealand dollar (NZD). The exchange value of the NZD would have to be defended by a monetary policy of unprecedented high interest rates. In other words, this was a Ponzi scheme; arguably a scheme with fraudulent intent. Those interest rates were nectar to foreign speculative investors; many of those investors actually being intermediaries such as pension funds and their likes, guardians of the captive funds of foreigners saving for their retirements. The overall intent – established through the revamped 1980s’ rhetoric of economic liberalism – was to treat the tradable sector (exports, and import substitution) with almost complete contempt.

And indeed there was a substantial disintegration of the tradable sector, which had been constructed for over a century, since the days of Sir Julius Vogel. Examples which some may remember were the near-collapse of sheep-farming, with some farmers diversifying into a short-lived goat bonanza. And there was the 1980s’ ocean-fishing expansion, including the rapid exploitation and depletion of the orange roughy fishery.

New Zealand’s increasingly competitive manufacturing sector went into steep decline before recovering at a permanently lower share of GDP. One example of this was the Whangarei Engineering Company which built excellent tugboats – and the Bounty replica – but which went under because New Zealand buyers were encouraged to favour imported tugboats subsidised by foreign governments (in this case, Australia). New Zealand became religiously opposed to any kinds of subsidy or assistance to the tradable sector; almost unique in the world.

(On this matter of nation-state Ponzi schemes with arguable fraudulent intent, the classic case is that of Iceland from 2006 to 2009. Other Nordic countries – Finland and Sweden – did something similar in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and, like Iceland in the 2000s, they got caught out. Also, and again like Iceland in the 2010s, they recovered relatively quickly; though they became Ponzi investors rather than Ponzi principals, contributing to the circulatory instability which has plagued the world since the 1980s. Sweden in particular continues to amass huge and ongoing current account surpluses, the exact opposite of New Zealand. Another country – like New Zealand – which continues to have Ponzi-structured finance as part of its ‘putting bread on the table’ mix is New Zealand’s south seas’ neighbour, the Kingdom of Tonga.)

In 1986, a year after the high-interest Ponzi scheme was established, something remarkable happened. The longstanding secular decline in New Zealand’s terms of trade reversed; a circumstance of fortune which eventually (ie in the 21st century) became equivalent to Norway’s 1970s’ discovery of huge oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

So New Zealand’s Ponzi economy, established in 1985, came to be blessed with an unanticipated windfall; a windfall large enough to facilitate the building of a new export-oriented tradable sector despite the high interest rates and overvalued exchange rate. (The overvalued exchange rate probably helped; many of the costs of this new sector were internationally priced, meaning that the high exchange rate became like a subsidy; especially as the expanding pool of rich foreign buyers were themselves relatively insensitive to the prices they were paying.)

Thanks to that change of fortune – which first began in 1986, and re-began around 2001 with the growth of the China market – New Zealand was able to fund an astonishing four-decade import spree, funded this century from a mix of bonanza-like export prices and Ponzi-style investments. These ‘investments’ were in large part financial inflows, drawn-in – more than anything else – by New Zealand’s attractive-to-investors monetary policy settings from 1985 to 2023; and supplemented by booming real estate markets in the 2000s and 2010s. Despite slow income growth, New Zealand consumers have had plenty of food on their tables; though more tables than ever also went without, due to increased inequality. New Zealand now imports most of its staple granular foods; in the language of the classical economists, New Zealand – a protein-food-exporter – has become a corn-importing country.

Government Ponzi finance

New Zealand as a Ponzi entity may be called New Zealand Financial Inc. The government is not a Ponzi principal – the New Zealand government has low debt by international standards – but does whatever it can to attract ‘private investment’ to support the national Ponzi scheme. And it prioritises monetary policy (while delegating it), which means that there is an understanding that interest rates will – whenever necessary – be raised to continue to be a drawcard to attract funds from the world’s less spendthrift countries.

A country very different to New Zealand is Japan. The world’s fourth largest nation-state economy, it has a long history of high personal savings and of current account surpluses. Its people don’t like paying taxes. Japan went through a shocking decadus horribilis in the 1990s, following a brief few years in the late 1980s of a financial bonanza underpinned by massive though illusory capital gains and an overvalued exchange rate.

As a result, Japan pretty-much invented a new macroeconomics, and it works. It is a macroeconomics, pioneered without acknowledgement or recommendation by the United States as a result of its post-WW2 status as the world’s financial centre of gravity (though most Americans fail to see how global prosperity – including their own prosperity – hinges on United States debt); a macroeconomics predicated on high levels of government debt and perpetual public-sector financial deficits. (Such deficits need not all be spent on infrastructure or bureaucracy or military capacity; also, they can be recycled back to people – in a way that poor people get the same dollar or yen amounts as rich people – as a contribution to some form of universal income, resulting in more private prosperity and less inequality.)

The Japanese government operates a virtuous domestic Ponzi scheme; the Government is the principal, and the citizen taxpayers are the investors. In essence, the people lend their money to the government at zero or near-zero interest rates, as an alternative to paying more taxes to the government. Indeed the Japanese get to ‘eat their cake and have it’. The government spends the citizens’ surplus cash, which still remains there for the citizens to spend as well and at will, should they need to or wish to spend it. Japanese householders will never all want to spend all their money invested with their government all at once.

(Modern fractional banking, likewise, is based on more than one party being able to spend the same pool of funds; this is reality, not magic.)

Finally

The beneficial reality of Ponzi finance is that, so long as there are many people with money they either don’t wish to spend or (as in KiwiSaver) are not allowed to spend or have so much money that they simply cannot spend it all, then there can also should be Ponzi schemes to accommodate them. In the case of Japanese savers, they much prefer – than the alternative, which is to be taxed more – to invest their money in a safe Ponzi scheme; that scheme is their own government.

Japan runs on government deficits and current account surpluses. Japanese citizens invest in both foreign and domestic Ponzi entities without coming a cropper. Others eat their cake, while they continue to have it. The Japanese government can remain a secure Ponzi principal because it has the sovereign privilege of being able to raise taxes; a sovereign right that it is unlikely to have to effect anytime soon because it has had a well-functioning economy of circulation, low non-stimulatory interest rates, and optimal inflation.

Will the New Zealand Ponzi scheme – established 1985 – ever fold? Maybe not. New Zealand is small and the world is large. Indeed those who have invested in New Zealand, a Ponzi entity for four decades, have generally done well for themselves. So far, the only significant casualties have been lower-income New Zealanders who have been priced out of the labour market and the housing market; not the scheme’s foreign investors.

But a trend-change in the terms-of-trade – meaning persistent falling terms of trade in future decades – could certainly trigger a demise of the scheme; so could an inability to continue to attract sufficient investors for any other reason. The challenge then would be to look to the many new New Zealanders – many who are internationally well-connected – to reestablish a balanced trading economy, and for New Zealand citizens and denizens to accept significantly reduced levels of imported goods and services. And to embrace a model of public finance which works for rather than against the people.

About the writer:

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.

“No one living today ever imagined they would witness a genocide that would continue for 1000 days. Yet here we are. One thousand days of unbearable loss. One thousand days of children buried before their dreams could begin,” writes the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

ANALYSIS: By Hossam Shaker
Once again, the United Nations reminds us that genocide is taking place in the Gaza Strip.
A report issued on 23 June 2026 by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory documented what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people, especially children.
This followed an earlier report from the same commission on 16 September 2025, which found that genocide was taking place, as well as the report of the UN special rapporteur issued on 20 October 2025.

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Chris Sidoti on UN inquiry into Palestinian rights
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But what can meticulously documented international reports do in the face of those who have insisted on averting their eyes from declared Israeli intentions to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, comprehensive destruction and horrific starvation — not to mention the torrent of live images transmitted around the clock to mobile devices from the field of atrocities over the course of two full years?
Specialised UN reports, testimonies by international rapporteurs and experts, assessments by the most prominent global human rights organisations, and even Israeli testimonies have followed one another, all confirming the reality of the genocide committed by Israel under the eyes of the world since October 2023.
In contrast, most European and Western states have clung to a rigid position that ignores this glaring truth, despite genocidal intentions being openly expressed in advance by senior Israeli leaders, who continued to boast of what their army and authorities were doing on the ground.

Official western comments on those reports were often absent, unlike what would have happened in other cases
Avoided the term ‘genocide’
Is it not worthy of condemnation that senior European and Western officials have persistently avoided using the term “genocide” in relation to these systematic and horrific Israeli practices?
It is as though the word were a firmly established taboo in European and Western political, media and cultural discourse whenever Israel is concerned.
This taboo exerts its power over those officials and commentators who, in this way, give reason to suspect that acknowledging genocide depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the status of the victims.

Double standards
It is entirely understandable that the allies of a regime of occupation and genocide, or those who consider themselves Israel’s partners and friends, would avoid issuing a clear condemnation of conduct they themselves helped support and encourage, directly or indirectly, even if only through silence and denial of its atrocities.
Throughout this prolonged season of horrors, the Israeli side has enjoyed military and political backing, as well as propagandistic cover, through carefully crafted formulas uttered by senior European and Western officials.
These amounted to evasive justifications for whatever war crimes and grave violations an occupying authority and its military forces might commit against a population left utterly exposed to continuous bombardment.
This may be inferred from the phrase that has become a staple of Western speeches: “Israel has every right to defend itself” — words that Israeli leaders understand simply as advance legitimation for a policy of mass killing and comprehensive destruction on the ground.
Naturally, no mention is made in this context of any right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves, for example, or of their right under international humanitarian law to resist the military occupation entrenched on their land.
States, governments and political leaderships — joined by elites in the fields of thought, culture and media — insist on ignoring the reality of genocide against the Palestinian people, or conceal it through a tendency toward genocide denial, as though all the serious international efforts of documentation and investigation had no value for them.
Denying a genocide that has unfolded before everyone’s ears and eyes simply means minimising its confirmed atrocities. It also entails direct or indirect encouragement of this pattern of horrific violations, so long as they are met with such shocking laxity.
Clinging to outright denial
Moreover, clinging to outright denial encourages the perpetrators to resume committing appalling war crimes, so long as these crimes are not named as such. Which Western leaders — apart from a handful, such as Spain — have described what the Israeli leadership and its army have committed as “genocide” or “war crimes”?
It must be recalled that the centres of Western decision-making, including the European Union and its leading bodies crowned with slogans of noble values and human rights, became implicated in a sweeping display of bias when they chose very mild or evasive terms to describe Israeli war crimes that the entire world followed in images, sound and live broadcasts.
Leaders and spokespersons resorted to cold expressions such as the ploy of “expressing concern” and voicing “sorrow” over the victims, often without naming the perpetrator, because the perpetrator was the Israeli leadership and its army, whose brutal policies and measures were visible to all.
Observers around the world have noted how the charge of “double standards” clings to European and Western political discourse.
This is precisely what the former Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, warned his EU colleagues against — in full view of a world that notices the grave moral gap between European positions on Ukraine and Palestine. He issued that warning days into the war, at a Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg on 23 October 2023.
One would not be exaggerating to conclude from these contradictory positions that they place some human beings above others in status, degree of concern and human dignity, so that the lives, safety and security of Palestinians are placed lower in rank than those of others.
Thus comes the tolerance of the crushing of children, mothers, the sick and the elderly in the Gaza Strip, without serious positions being taken to restrain the machinery of genocide.
The margins, not the centre
Those faltering positions gave the strong impression that they were conferring moral immunity on the perpetrator, namely the Israeli leadership and its regular army.
Prevailing European and Western criticism was limited to only two reckless ministers from the Israeli government, which amounts to little, since Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich are already constantly criticised within Israeli circles.

The narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a ‘humanitarian crisis’, as though the programmed genocide were merely a natural disaster
Meanwhile, the government and the political leadership more broadly continue to escape direct criticism, even after the accumulation of filmed atrocities and the issuance of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.
This evasion becomes even clearer when criticism, along with some sanctions of limited effect, has been confined to settler gangs and their leaders, without any verbal reproach or punitive gesture directed toward the Israeli army.
The latter not only sponsors and protects settlers on the ground but also directly commits grave violations, appalling war crimes and campaigns of ethnic cleansing within the context of a horrific genocide.
This contradiction betrays a firmly rooted European and Western position intent on exempting the state, its leadership and its regular military and security apparatuses from any clear criticism, explicit condemnation or accountability, while merely formal positions are issued concerning the margins rather than the centre: some settlers instead of the army, and only two ministers instead of the government.
Evading a simple question
Political Europe, and many elites in public life across Western states, have even evaded confronting a simple question: does what Israel has committed against the Palestinian people constitute genocide?
Denying the genocide committed in Gaza requires wilful disregard.
It begins by brushing aside these war crimes and behaving as though they merit no attention. The adopted narrative has been shifted into familiar terms about a “humanitarian crisis” and “alarming” conditions, or a show of concern for “civilian suffering” — as though the programmed genocide, reinforced by declared intentions to commit it, were merely a natural disaster that befell the place.
The states and governments that boast of their commitment to moral positions, human values, international law and human rights were supposed to honour those commitments. They should have warned against the campaign of genocide in its earliest stages, stripped it of political and propagandistic cover, and supported the enforcement of international justice and the cases filed over genocide against the Palestinian people.
Foremost among these is the case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), on the basis of Israel’s violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Instead, campaigns of moral targeting, incitement, intimidation and even the imposition of unjust sanctions on prosecutors have escalated, affecting international justice bodies and their personnel, as well as UN rapporteurs.
Thus, it becomes clear that complicity with the genocide committed against the Palestinian people goes ever further in undermining international law and threatening the foundations of international action and the protection afforded to its institutions and authorities.
Hossam Shaker is a journalist and an author who has extensively covered the topic of migration in Europe.This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/04/gaza-genocide-how-many-un-findings-will-the-west-ignore/

By Johnny Blades of RNZ Pacific

Fears of yet another escalation in military conflict in Indonesia’s Papua region have risen after an American pilot flying a small aircraft into a remote airstrip in Highland Papua province was killed by West Papuan militants.

The West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) has claimed responsibility for killing Nicholas F Gosselin after he landed a small aircraft in remote Sobaham District, Yahukimo Regency, on Thursday.
Gosselin had just flown seven passengers to Yahukimo from Wamena, Highland Papua’s major town, in an aircraft which belonged to a small Indonesian airline, PT AMA. The militants also burned the plane.

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The TPNPB has repeatedly warned foreigners not to fly into the region if they were working with Indonesia’s military, which they are fighting for independence.

Eneko Bahabol, a human rights defender with the Papua Council of Churches who works in this remote region, said the other people on board were local Papuan villagers. He said they were understood to have escaped without injury.
He said it was widely known that Indonesia’s military relied on small airlines to fly into remote airstrips in Papua’s interior, where its larger aircraft could not land.
“We have seen the call from the TPNPB not to transport military personnel. We have followed this in every one of their releases, but we see that the companies and the pilots do not listen to it, and this applies to all pilots transporting military personnel,” Bahabol said.
However, this is not the first case of the TPNPB burning planes which have flown into the Highlands region, nor of targeting pilots.
In February 2023, the TPNPB kidnapped a New Zealand pilot, Phillip Mehrtens, after he landed a small plane belonging to commercial airline Susi Air in Nduga Regency of Highland Papua. They freed him 19 months later.
The Indonesian military has reportedly denied that the AMA plane attacked on Thursday was used to carry troops.
Fears of more violence
Bahabol said civilians in Sobaham’s Balinggama village have fled to neighbouring districts because they were afraid there would be a military operation in response to the attack.
Jakarta has been increasing its troop deployments to the Papua region and now has at least six times more military per capita in Papua than any other region in Indonesia.
This comes amid an upsurge in violent incidents in recent months in Highland Papua related to the long running conflict between Indonesia’s security forces and the TPNPB which have left many civilians dead or injured, and displaced thousands.
Bahabol said on behalf of the Papua Council of Churches, he urged both Indonesia’s military and the West Papuan militants to step back from violent conflict.
“Stop the military operations because they do not solve the problem. I ask both parties to stop the conflict and pursue a dignified dialogue through international mechanisms,” he said.
Bahabol also urged a pause in “the use of civilian aircraft for military purposes”.
Meanwhile, he said it was expected that the pilot’s body could be evacuated on Friday, depending on the weather, and the ability of Indonesian military and police to access the airstrip area.

Killing ‘a message to US’
A spokesperson for the TPNPB, Sebby Sambom, said the killing was a message to the United States which brokered the 1962 New York Agreement which paved the way for the former Dutch New Guinea to fall under Indonesian control in the 1960s, without genuine consultation with Papuans.
“We also convey to the United States of American government, through its embassy in Indonesia and to UN member states, that the shooting of the American pilot is pay for a mistake by the Indonesian, United States of America, Dutch government,” Sambom said.
He said the message was also directed at the United Nations “for failing to address the root causes of the conflict in Papua between the Indonesian military and the West Papua National Liberation Army, which has been ongoing for 64 years”.
A spokesperson for the US State Department told RNZ Pacific they were aware that Indonesian authorities were investigating the reported death.
The spokesperson said they were in touch with the authorities and the man’s family, and were closely tracking developments, but had no further comment.
After an American man, Rick Spier, was violently killed in Papua in 2002 in a shooting attack that was investigated by the FBI, the US suspended some military assistance to Indonesia.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/03/fears-of-more-conflict-in-west-papua-after-american-pilot-killed/

Keith Rankin, 2 July 2026 – Two weeks ago I published a chart showing New Zealand’s latest economic growth, showing the whole of the last two years compared to the whole of the previous two years. This gives a better picture than the usual charts which look at simple annual growth. If an economy is barely larger in the 24 months to March 2026 compared to the previous 24 months, then it’s too early to pronounce a return to ‘economic growth as usual’, let alone the success of a ‘growth strategy’. As it turns out, while 2025 GDP (gross domestic product) may have been bigger than 2024 GDP, it was hardly bigger at all than 2023 GDP.

My new chart uses the same data, but focusses more (and differently) on the latest 12-month period and placing that in a medium-term context.

Short-Medium and Long-Medium

These days ‘short-term’ change usually means very recent change (ie within the last 12-months), or – at most – comparing the most recent 12-months with the previous 12-months.

So I call the black plotted-line ‘short-medium’; looking back from 2025 or 2026 to 2023. The most recently-plotted point represents GDP for the year-to-March 2026 compared to GDP for the year-to-March 2024. (Points have been plotted every three months, so the previous point is the year-to-December 2025 compared to the year-to-December 2023.)

The black plotted-line shows that, from the year-to-June 2025, New Zealand’s total GDP (not GDP per person) has been lower than the whole year two years earlier. (Only slightly lower, and subject to revision; but lower nevertheless. GDP under National’s political watch has been lower than it was under Labour’s watch; despite National’s claim to giving priority to economic growth as a KPI [key performance indicator].)

We note that the three previous major downturns in the black plotted-line are clearly identifiable as the Asian Financial Crisis of the late-1990s, the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s, and the Covid19 Crisis of the very early 2020s. (None of these were attributable to wars.) On the other hand, the current recession and the early 1990s’ recession have been clearly connected to New Zealand’s macroeconomic-policy environment.

The early 1990s’ recession followed on from a recessionary period which began in 1986. This pattern of chronic recession is rare; it is more normal – in New Zealand and especially in other countries – for a recession to be immediately followed by a period of above average growth. (This is because post-recession growth is ‘low-hanging-fruit’, driven by reducing labour and capital surpluses, rather than being dependent on productivity growth.)

So, the very-early 1990s should have been a period of high growth. Eventually that very rapid post-recession growth did take place from 1993 to 1996, in the wake of a prolonged ‘double-dip’ recession.

The experience of the early 1990s gives context to the early 2010s; under a National-led government, as is the present non-growth experience. In the early 2010s, the recovery in New Zealand from the Global Financial Crisis was surprisingly slow; was significantly slower than it should have been.

These findings – relating to the early 1990s, the early 2010s, and now the mid-2020s – suggest that there is something fundamentally anti-growth in National governments’ policy-frameworks during the post-1984 neoliberal era. Growth-prioritisation rhetoric is not enough to actually achieve economic growth.

Labour-led governments – on the other hand, and without prioritising economic growth – have consistently achieved normal levels of growth (around three percent); indeed despite the Covid19 crisis and the Ukraine-Russia war which began early in 2022. The look of this chart is that, in practice if not in rhetoric, that National is anti-growth and Labour is not anti-growth. (My suspicion is that Labour, by running a larger governmental apparatus, inadvertently facilitated the circulation of money. While productivity did not grow remarkably under Labour; at least aggregate demand held up, enabling normal growth to take place.)

Smoothed Plots

The shortcoming of the black-line plot – and just about any other published growth plot, except in academic economic history – is that the earlier period being compared to the more recent period is itself only 12-months, and may in some cases lead to misleading results. Indeed we see this for the Covid19 period; with growth for 2022, in which 2022 is being compared to 2020, showing as artificially high.

The best way to address this is to compare a more recent period of one-year with earlier data that covers much more than one year.

So, consider the grey-plotted line. For this plotted line, annual data are compared to averaged five-yearly data. We see that the growth peaks and troughs are significantly less; that’s what smoothing does, to reveal the medium-term more and the short-term less.

The grey line confirms the same stories outlined above. But it shows the early-2010s’ malaise rather better than the black plot; the black plot overstating the recovery in 2011 and 2012. And it shows that the growth experience of the mid-2000s (under Labour) was more substantial than that of the mid-1990s (under National).

Now consider the blue-and-red plotted line; this represents the longer medium term. This compares the most recent year of data with five-years of data averaging eight years prior. (Eight years represents three inventory cycles of the New Zealand economy; inventory cycles are short-term growth spurts and pauses, which average at about 32 months.)

With the blue-and-red line, the shorter term growth fluctuations are ‘ironed-out’, and we see very clearly that economic growth operated at normal levels (three percent annually) while Labour-led governments were in power. And persistent below-normal growth ‘performances’ under National-led governments. (2016 medium term growth was, for example, surprisingly low, given the fact that the Global Financial Crisis was at the centre of the period being compared to 2016.)

Finally, we note just how little the Covid19 pandemic affected New Zealand’s economic growth. The present downturn, under National’s watch, looks like its heading for eight-year lows comparable to 2013 and 2014, or less.

Do we really care about the long term?

Many policy positions these days are claims that New Zealand must make policy for the long term rather than for short-term “sugar hits”. This item – Spend Today, Save Tomorrow: Budget 2026 Promises Restraint, Eventually – was almost certainly prepared by Ruth Richardson, who was Minister of Finance in the early 1990s (the Ruthanasiaperiod; see the chart above), and who is the current ‘brains’ behind the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union.

Indeed, the National Party has a (KiwiSaver) savings’ policy whereby the government will put money in babies’ bank accounts at birth; money which they will only be able to access in or after 2093, and even that is contingent on the government not raising the ‘retirement age’. Long-termism gone mad!?

But our governments these days almost never look back; credible long-termism means looking back, critically appraising historical narratives and omissions. Last week I posted two charts which look back to 1957, and they tell a disturbing story about the real reasons for the prosperity of a significant minority of New Zealanders today. The Government has no idea about these facts; and I do not expect that anyone close to the government will have reflected upon my charts.

(Indeed the government has never informed New Zealand citizens the realised quantity and quality of the promised – eg $10 billion suggested in 2012, John Key reveals plan for asset sales, Stuff 6 Sep 2012 – gains to education, healthcare, and infrastructure spending arising from the ringfenced half-sales of our big electricity gentailers in 2013 and 2014. Stories about the gentailers include: Profit taking as thousands sell power shares RNZ 30 Nov 2015, and Four big gentailers face new competition rules in bid to level playing field RNZ 26 May 2026.)

Whereas the present government may be more interested in the 2090s than the 1990s, there is a movement on the political right to ‘reclaim’ history. See this item about David Seymour’s new friend (refer ACT’s David Seymour on latest weather events, climate change, RNZ 27 Jan 2026) Javier Milei: Javier Milei’s far-right rewrite of the past, The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 30 June 2026.

The takeaway from the Listening Post report is: ‘whoever holds power in the present has the opportunity to distort the narrative of the past, and whoever controls the past (to a significant extent) determines the future’. (The exact quotation is: ‘George Orwell wrote in 1984 “Who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future”‘.) We note that such distortions are most potently done by omission rather than by commission. Thus, it is up to people like me to post reminders about forgotten facets of the medium- and long-term past.

If we are going to play the long-term game – as John Key did, cynically, in 2012; and as politicians today do, when they repeat finance-industry talking points about retirement savings – then our powerbrokers should be urgently pressed into some reflective intercourse with the past, at least over a comparable timeframe. Thus, if we are to enact policies with the 2090s in mind, we should be looking back – critically – to at least as far as the 1950s. (It’s hard to do in New Zealand, though, because the 1950s to early 1980s are the least digitised part of New Zealand’s historical record; time-pressed academics often eschew such periods to study.)

About the writer:

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.

Executive director of the Jewish Council of Australia, Sarah Schwartz, has told the Bondi Royal Commission of sustained abuse by pro-Israel activists. Michael West Media reports.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Stephanie Tran

Giving evidence before Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer, said attacks from pro-Israel groups sought to delegitimise Jewish people who criticise Israel.
“They rest on the idea that Jewish identity is inherently tied to Israel, and therefore Jewish people who don’t support Israel or who criticise Israel are not really Jewish and are traitors,” she told the commission last Thursday.
Schwartz said she had been referred to as a “self-hating Jew”, “Hitler’s Jew”, “kapo” and “Judenrat”, and had been depicted using Holocaust imagery, including “on a train to concentration camps” and with the yellow Star of David imposed on Jews under Nazi rule.

READ MORE: ‘Unconstitutional’ – NSW court strikes down Minns’ draconian anti-protest laws
Other Bondi Commission reports

Holocaust weaponised
She said the atrocities of the Holocaust were a motivation for her Palestine solidarity work and the weaponisation by pro-Israel accounts of Holocaust imagery was “incredibly disturbing”.
“I was taught that never again meant never again for anyone, and that’s why I do the work that I do,” Schwartz said.
“To have the symbols of the Holocaust and Nazi imagery and Jewish persecution used against me has been incredibly disturbing and distressing, and I think it

sends a chilling message to other Jewish people when they want to speak out.
Schwartz said the stereotype that all Jewish people are politically aligned with Israel “causes immense harm”.
“I speak … almost every day to Jewish people who contact me and who are terrified of speaking out, because they know that if they speak their political convictions, they face the risk of a similar sort of abuse and vilification and targeting that I have experienced.”
Murdoch media coverage fuelled abuse
Schwartz told the commission that reporting by The Australian undermined her safety and ultimately led her to abandon a police application intended to protect her from ongoing harassment.
She recounted an incident in March 2025 after police applied for a personal safety intervention order (PSIO) on her behalf against lawyer Zara Cooper, who targeted Schwartz on Instagram under the pseudonym “@clammy_fraud”.
Schwartz said she first learned of the application through a journalist from The Australian, who contacted her to say the newspaper was preparing a story.
“I informed him I hadn’t been informed of the nature of the PSIO,” she said.
“When I asked him if he could provide me with a copy, he said he couldn’t provide me with a copy … because I didn’t know its contents, I also couldn’t really respond to a lot of it, because it was a police application.”

Schwartz said the following day’s front-page article ($) incorrectly suggested she, rather than police, had initiated the proceedings in an attempt to suppress free speech.
Free speech for me, not for thee
She told the commission that The Australian subsequently published further articles about the case, including reproducing images and slurs that formed part of the material relied upon by police in seeking the intervention order.
“What was most distressing to me is The Australian chose to republish some of the offensive imagery that was the basis on which police applied for the PSIO,” she said.
“[The Australian] republished content that took my image and placed it on a train to concentration camps, content calling me a kapo and other various slurs.”
Schwartz said the coverage convinced her that pursuing legal protection would expose her to further public attention and place her at greater risk.
“It became very clear to me after that coverage that this was becoming a media circus,” she said.
“Having reported these matters to police … was actually something that was

going to make me less safe because of the media coverage.
She subsequently told police she no longer wished to proceed with the intervention order, and the application was withdrawn. She has since been reluctant to report further incidents because she fears doing so would attract similar publicity.
“It’s become very clear to me that, because of the media interest in me as a person, but particularly because of News Corp’s targeting of me, it’s not going to be safe for me to engage in reporting,” she said.
She also expressed concern that republishing the abusive material normalised antisemitic attacks against Jewish critics of Israel.
“I think that media reporting really normalises the use of these terms against other Jewish people … people see that coverage and think that it is legitimate to call a Jewish person Nazi-aligned or to place our face on a train to concentration camps.”
Being pro-Palestine is not antisemitism
Schwartz dispelled suggestions that pro-Palestinian activism is a significant driver of antisemitism, stating that, despite attempts to portray Palestine solidarity spaces as hostile to Jews, that had not reflected her own experience.
“I know that there is a lot of public discourse … that suggests that human rights spaces and Palestine solidarity spaces, in particular, are spaces that might be hostile to Jewish people,” she said.

That hasn’t been my experience at all.
Instead, Schwartz said she had received “many messages of support and clear condemnations of antisemitism” from Muslim colleagues following the Bondi terror attack on 14 December 2025.
Government response
Schwartz criticised the government’s responses to antisemitism, which have disproportionately focused on the Palestine solidarity movement, including the banning of protest slogans.
“I think that government responses, which locate the source of antisemitism within the Palestine solidarity movement, suggest for Jewish people who are also part of that movement that either we’re not really Jewish or that we are somehow against Jewish people in our own communities.”
Asked what measures would most effectively combat antisemitism, Schwartz said governments should prioritise addressing far-right extremism and

avoid conflating antisemitism with the Palestine solidarity movement.
“It’s really important for us to take the threat of far-right extremism really seriously … we know that it’s rising and it’s becoming more mainstream,” she said.
“It is critically important that governments and institutions don’t adopt policies in response to antisemitism that engage in that form of conflation itself that suggests that antisemitism is coming from the Palestine solidarity movement.”
She also called for progressive Jewish organisations to be included in policymaking on antisemitism.
“It’s really important that organisations such as the Jewish Council and other progressive Jewish organisations actually have a seat at the table” she said.
“It shows the broader community that

the Jewish community, like every community, has a diversity of opinions.

Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/02/vile-abuse-and-targeted-by-murdoch-media-the-cost-of-speaking-out-against-israel/

ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

For four decades, the West presented Iran’s regional strategy as the work of a rogue state exporting revolution and chaos. They never told you about the CIA coup that destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953.
They never told you that America armed the man who gassed Iranian soldiers. They never showed you the map — the ring of American military bases on every border, the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the Israeli aircraft that bombed Iranian assets with impunity and assassinated Iranian scientists on Iranian soil.
Iran built the Axis of Resistance and the Mosaic Defence as its answer to that encirclement.

READ MORE: ‘Technical’ talks under way in Doha as Tehran demands action
Other Lim Tean articles

Now, with the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess the full doctrine — what it achieved, where it was tested to its limits, and what it tells us about the future of Iranian sovereignty.
This is the story they spent decades trying to prevent you from understanding.
The fortress and the forward shield: How Iran built the architecture of survival
Look at a map.
Not the map the Western press shows you — the one that marks Iran in the colour reserved for rogue states, surrounded by the clean borders of American allies and reasonable nations.
I want you to look at the real map. The strategic map below.
This is the map that every Iranian general, every Iranian strategic planner, every Iranian Supreme Leader has looked at every morning for the past four decades.

What the map shows is not an aggressive power projecting menace outward. It shows a nation under siege — encircled, threatened, and facing an existential choice that empires have always forced upon those they cannot fully control: submit, or build the architecture of survival.
Iran chose to build.
What follows is the story of how — and why. And now, in the wake of the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess that architecture under the most severe test it has ever faced.
1. The doctrine born from betrayal
To understand Iranian grand strategy, you must first understand what Iran learned — not from ideology, not from theology, but from history. From its own history, written in blood and betrayal.
Lesson One came in 1953. Iran had a democracy. A real one — a Parliament, a free press, a Prime Minister of genuine popular legitimacy who had committed the unforgivable act of returning Iran’s oil to its own people.
The West destroyed it. Not with armies, but with money, propaganda, and hired mobs. The CIA and MI6 removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed a pliant Shah who would keep Iranian oil flowing to London and Washington.
The lesson Iran drew was stark and permanent: the West does not want Iran strong, sovereign, or self-determining. It wants Iran “manageable”.
Lesson Two came in the 1980s. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 with the tacit blessing of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran in 1979 as a strategic opportunity.
For eight years, Iran bled. Perhaps one million lives. And when Iranian forces began pushing back, Washington made its choice. It provided Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions. It supplied the precursor chemicals for the weapons Saddam used to gas Iranian soldiers on the battlefield — mustard gas, tabun, sarin — in one of the most extensively documented war crimes of the modern era.
American officials knew. They continued regardless.
The lesson Iran drew from those eight years was equally stark: when your existence is threatened, no one will come. Not the United Nations. Not international law. Not the conventions against chemical weapons. No one.
These two lessons — the 1953 betrayal and the 1980s abandonment — are the foundation of everything that follows. They are not ideology. They are experience. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed: the life of the law — and we might add, the life of strategy — is not logic. It is experience.
Iran’s grand strategy is the experience of a nation that has been betrayed, encircled, and attacked — and has drawn the only rational conclusions available to a sovereign state determined to survive.
2. The encirclement — what Iran actually sees
Before we examine what Iran built, we must understand what Iran faces. Because the architecture of Iranian strategy makes no sense without the map — the real map, not the sanitised version.
To Iran’s east, American forces spent two decades in Afghanistan — on Iran’s longest land border. To Iran’s west, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein but replaced him with a country that became host to the largest American embassy on earth, a vast network of military bases, and tens of thousands of American troops — sitting on Iran’s western doorstep.
In the Persian Gulf — Iran’s southern maritime frontier — the United States Fifth Fleet operates from Bahrain, a permanent naval presence of carrier groups, destroyers, and the full apparatus of American maritime power.
At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, America maintained the largest US air installation in the entire Middle East — a facility capable of projecting devastating airpower across the region within hours.
In Kuwait. In the UAE. Across the Arabian Peninsula, American bases formed a constellation of military power that, viewed from Tehran, looked less like a defensive alliance and more like a slowly tightening noose.
This is not Iranian paranoia. This is Iranian geography.
Any strategic planner in any country — American, British, Chinese, Indian — looking at that map would draw the same conclusion. Iran had been encircled with a precision that left nothing to chance.
The message was unambiguous: the United States had positioned itself to strangle Iran economically through Gulf control, to strike Iran from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do so from bases close enough to minimise warning time and maximise devastation.
Iran looked at this map. And Iran made a decision.
If the Americans intend to make the Persian Gulf an American lake, Iran will ensure that lake has a price. If American power is to sit on every border, every border will become a potential front. If encirclement is the American strategy, Iran’s answer will be to make that encirclement so costly to act upon that it becomes, in practice, a cage with open bars — present but unusable.
The Axis of Resistance was not born of religious fervour or ideological ambition. It was born of that map.
3. The Israeli dimension — the undeclared nuclear power that bombs its neighbours
And then there is Israel.
The Western framing of the Iran-Israel confrontation presents it as Iranian aggression against a peaceful democratic state. This is such a complete inversion of the actual sequence of events that it requires dismantling with some care.
Israel is, by the near-universal assessment of the international intelligence community, a nuclear power. It possesses an estimated 90 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has never submitted to international inspection.
It maintains what is called a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying what the entire world knows to be true. And it directs its considerable diplomatic energy toward ensuring that no other state in its region acquires the same deterrent capability it has quietly accumulated for itself.
This is the context in which Iran’s nuclear programme must be understood. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Its programme operated under international scrutiny that Israel’s never has.
And yet it was Iran that was presented as the existential threat, Iran that was sanctioned, Iran that was threatened with military strikes — and ultimately, Iran that was bombed.
But the nuclear dimension was only the beginning. Israeli planes repeatedly struck Iranian assets in Syria — military installations, weapons convoys, advisers — hundreds of strikes over a decade, conducted with complete impunity.
Israeli intelligence assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil. In April 2024, Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus — sovereign Iranian territory under the Vienna Convention — killing senior commanders.
In July 2024, Israeli intelligence assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran itself.
In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and America followed with Operation Midnight Hammer — the first direct US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, targeting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
Then, on February 28, 2026, came the full assault: Operation Epic Fury, a joint US-Israeli campaign of nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iran’s missiles, air defences, military infrastructure, and leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Dozens of senior officials perished. Iran’s nuclear programme was severely degraded.
The doctrine that Iran had constructed across four decades — forward defence through the Axis of Resistance, interior resilience through the Mosaic Defence — was now facing its ultimate test.
Hezbollah had served as Iran’s most elegant strategic instrument — a deterrent positioned on Israel’s northern border, ensuring that any strike on Iran carried automatic, unavoidable cost.
For 30 years, it worked. Every Israeli military planner understood that attacking Natanz meant absorbing tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets into northern Israel simultaneously. That deterrent logic held — until 2024, when Israel called the bluff.
Yet even after Nasrallah’s assassination and the degradation of Hezbollah’s arsenal, the organisation demonstrated remarkable residual fighting capacity. When IDF ground forces attempted to push into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah gave them a drubbing — inflicting casualties, destroying armoured vehicles, and forcing repeated tactical withdrawals that exposed the limits of Israeli conventional military power on the ground.
The shield had been damaged. It had not been broken.
4. The Axis of Resistance — architecture of Forward Defence
With the American encirclement and Israeli threat understood, the Axis of Resistance reveals itself not as an Iranian imperial project but as a coherent strategic architecture built on a single organising principle: make the cost of attacking Iran prohibitive, by ensuring that any attack triggers consequences across the entire region simultaneously.
The components of that architecture were distinct in character but unified in purpose.
Hezbollah was Iran’s most sophisticated instrument — battle-hardened, institutionally deep, politically embedded in Lebanese society, and at its peak possessing an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles.
It is not a militia in the casual sense. It is a military organisation with combat experience forged across four decades, in Lebanon’s civil war, the Syrian conflict, and multiple wars against one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world.
Despite the severe degradation it suffered in 2024 and 2025, Hezbollah remains a potent force — as the IDF discovered when its ground forces pushed into southern Lebanon and were met with fierce resistance, tactical ambushes, and anti-armour fire that forced repeated withdrawals.
Iran’s first line of forward defence has been bloodied but not destroyed.
Hamas was a different and more complicated case — Palestinian in origin, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition rather than Shia political theology. But Iran adopted the Palestinian cause with strategic intelligence, recognising that support for Palestinian resistance gave Tehran something invaluable: moral legitimacy across the entire Muslim world, Sunni and Shia alike.
Supporting Hamas cost Iran relatively little. It purchased Iran enormous influence and the one thing that money and missiles cannot buy — the genuine sympathy of the Arab street.
The Houthis of Yemen were the most recent and surprising component. Not originally an Iranian creation, they were driven into Tehran’s strategic embrace by the Saudi-led war in Yemen — backed by American weapons, logistics, and political cover.
The Houthis’ capacity to threaten Red Sea shipping and strike deep into the Gulf transformed them from a local insurgency into a regional strategic asset of considerable importance. Their intervention following October 7, 2023 demonstrated reach that surprised even optimistic Iranian planners — and their continued operations through the 2026 war demonstrated a resilience that confounded repeated predictions of their swift neutralisation.
The Iraqi militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces and their various components — completed the architecture. Born from the chaos of the American invasion and consolidated during the fight against ISIS, these forces represented Iran’s most direct penetration of a neighbouring state’s security structure, giving Tehran influence over the country on its western border through which any American ground offensive would necessarily pass.
Together, these components formed what Iranian strategists called the “ring of fire” — a constellation of armed, motivated, battle-tested forces positioned around Iran’s primary adversaries. Not an empire. A defensive perimeter, constructed outside Iran’s borders precisely because Iran’s borders had proven, twice in living memory, to be insufficient protection against the ambitions of external powers.
5. The Mosaic Defence — making Iran unconquerable
Forward defence alone — however sophisticated — was always only half of Iran’s strategic architecture. Iranian planners understood that the outer ring could be degraded. Proxies could be weakened. Forward positions could be overrun. The question that preoccupied Iran’s military establishment for four decades was this: if the forward shield fails, what then?
The answer was the Mosaic Defence.
The concept is as elegant as it is ruthless. Iran deliberately, systematically, and over decades decentralised its entire military infrastructure across all 31 of its provinces. Missile arsenals were not concentrated in single facilities but dispersed across hundreds of sites — underground, mountainside, desert — spread across a country the size of Western Europe.
Command and control was distributed rather than centralised, designed to survive the decapitation strikes that destroyed Iraq’s military capacity in 1991 and Libya’s in 2011. Defence industries were deliberately dispersed so that no single strike, however precise, could eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce and deploy weapons.
The underground dimension was particularly significant. Iran invested enormously in what it called its “missile cities” — vast subterranean complexes buried deep enough to survive all but the most specialised munitions. The 2026 campaign tested this directly.
Despite nearly 900 strikes in the opening 12 hours and CENTCOM ultimately claiming over 11,000 targets struck across the entire war, a preliminary US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment — leaked and characterised by the Trump administration as “political” — concluded that Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the strikes began and that the underground facilities had not been collapsed.
The CIA subsequently disputed this, claiming severe damage that would take years to rebuild. The truth, as is so often the case in the fog of war, likely lies somewhere between these assessments.
What is beyond dispute is this: the logic Iran applied — the logic of a student of history who had watched what happened to states that presented centralised targets — proved partially vindicated. The 31-province dispersal model meant that even 11,000 strikes could not deliver a clean, decisive blow. Iran was damaged. Iran was not defeated.
Centralisation is a vulnerability. Dispersal is survival.
The Mosaic Defence and the Axis of Resistance were never separate strategies. They were two halves of a single, integrated doctrine. Attack Iran’s periphery — and the Axis activates. Penetrate to the interior — and the Mosaic ensures there is no clean, decisive blow to be struck. The 2026 war demonstrated both the power and the limits of that doctrine.
6. The 2026 War — the ultimate test
Intellectual honesty requires confronting what Operation Epic Fury achieved — and what it did not.
What it achieved was substantial. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes — a decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership of historic proportions. Dozens of senior IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and regime officials perished. Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure was severely degraded. Its air defences were systematically dismantled. Its navy was effectively destroyed.
The Iranian economy, already strangled by decades of sanctions, went into free fall. Its currency collapsed. Protests that had begun in December 2025 spread across the country as the regime’s authority visibly cracked.
What it did not achieve is equally instructive.
Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile — the IAEA had confirmed 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent purity before the war, sufficient for multiple weapons if further enriched — could not be fully accounted for.
Two military campaigns left that stockpile harder, not easier, to locate. Iran had anticipated decapitation. Within 30 minutes of the opening strikes, Iranian forces launched simultaneous retaliatory attacks across multiple fronts without waiting for centralised authorisation — precisely the pre-delegated response architecture that the Mosaic Defence doctrine had prescribed.
The regime was headless. The military machine kept fighting.
Iran’s response was devastating to the American strategic position in the region. It closed the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply passes — triggering a global energy shock and fuel crises across Asia.
It struck American bases across the Gulf simultaneously: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. It bombarded Israel with over 525 ballistic missiles. It struck oil infrastructure across the Arabian Peninsula. Thirteen American service members were killed. The regional war that Iran’s forward defence doctrine had always promised to trigger — the promise that had deterred attack for thirty years — was fulfilled.
The ceasefire that followed told its own story. After 40 days of sustained combat, with both sides exhausted and the global economy convulsing, Pakistan brokered a conditional truce on April 8, 2026.
The highest-level direct US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution followed — JD Vance meeting Iranian counterparts in Islamabad. On June 17, 2026, Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian signed the Islamabad Memorandum, with Trump signing at the Palace of Versailles, establishing a 60-day framework for further negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.
Read that again. The United States of America — which had launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and declared regime change as its explicit objective — ended up negotiating. Not dictating. Negotiating. With the Islamic Republic it had sought to destroy.
The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — son of Ali — approved the memorandum, noting he had “a different view” but accepted it in the national interest. Iran committed to reaffirming it would not develop nuclear weapons. The US committed to lifting sanctions and removing forces from Iran’s proximity after a final deal.
Iran’s nuclear programme — battered but not eliminated — remained. Its missile programme was explicitly declared off the table for negotiations by Tehran. And critically, Iran extracted from the world’s most powerful military the one concession that no amount of technical language could conceal: America negotiated.
That fact is irreversible. And every adversary of American power on earth has filed it carefully for future reference.
7. The Strategic Verdict — doctrine under fire
Here is what four decades of Iranian grand strategy achieved, assessed without sentiment.
The Axis of Resistance was degraded — Hamas devastated in Gaza, Hezbollah bloodied in Lebanon, Iranian assets struck across Syria. The Mosaic Defence was tested as never before — 11,000 targets struck, nuclear facilities damaged, leadership decapitated.
The forward shield failed to deter the ultimate assault it was designed to prevent.
And yet. Iran survived.
The Islamic Republic — written off by analysts for decades, subjected to the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, struck by two rounds of devastating military campaigns — survived. Its military kept fighting after its Supreme Leader was killed. Its enriched uranium could not be fully accounted for. Its proxies continued operating. The Strait of Hormuz became a weapon that brought the global economy to its knees.
And ultimately, America came to the table.
This is not the outcome of a state that built the wrong strategic doctrine. This is the outcome of a state that built remarkable strategic resilience — imperfect, costly, and tested to its absolute limits — but resilience nonetheless.
The Mosaic Defence’s dispersal across 31 provinces meant no clean killing blow. The pre-delegated command authority meant no paralysis after decapitation. The Houthis’ continued Red Sea operations meant the economic pressure never relented. The Iraqi militias provided Iran with leverage in negotiations.
And the nuclear stockpile — unaccounted for, potentially dispersed before the strikes — remained the ultimate trump card that no military campaign could eliminate with certainty.
What Iran demonstrated in 2026 was not the invincibility its doctrine promised. What it demonstrated was something perhaps more important: the cost of attacking Iran is catastrophic, even in victory.
America got its strikes. It killed Khamenei. It damaged the nuclear programme. It triggered regime change of a kind — though Mojtaba Khamenei is hardly the pro-Western successor Washington imagined.
And what did it get for all of that? A fragile ceasefire, a 60-day negotiating framework, an unaccounted nuclear stockpile, a Strait of Hormuz that remains contested, a global energy shock, thirteen dead Americans, and a region convulsed by war.
Mosaddegh was destroyed because Iran was weak — because it had no forward shield, no interior fortress, no capacity to make its destruction costly. The Iran of 2026 is not that Iran.
The wound of 1953 was the education. The architecture of survival — tested, battered, partially broken — was the graduation.
The lesson of Iran’s grand strategy is ultimately this: a nation that cannot be cheaply destroyed cannot be permanently dominated. Even after the most severe bombings, Iran extracted a negotiation. Even after decapitation, its military kept fighting. Even after 11,000 strikes, its nuclear stockpile remained unaccounted for.
That is not the record of a doctrine that failed. It is the record of a doctrine that made Iran’s destruction more costly than any power was ultimately willing to pay.
In a future article, I will examine Iran’s nuclear programme — not through the lens of Western proliferation anxiety, but through the strategic logic of a state that watched what happened to countries that disarmed, and has now watched what happened to itself when it did not yet possess the ultimate deterrent.
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/01/the-west-called-it-terrorism-iran-called-it-the-architecture-of-survival/

Asia Pacific Report

The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULWP) has accused the Indonesian military of shooting and wounding two teenagers in Titigi village, Intan Jaya, and causing other casualties on Monday.
The pair have been identified as 18-year-old Duad Hagismijau and Kiko Hagismijau, 16, and they are now being treated in hospital, alleges a statement by the ULMWP.
The statement said the two teenagers were working on building St Francis Xavier Titigi Catholic Church in their village when the attack began.

READ MORE: Two teenagers in Intan Jaya reportedly shot
Other West Papua reports

More than 2000 villagers have been displaced by this “latest display of colonial violence”, adding to more than 122,000 internal refugees spread throughout West Papua, the statement said.
“Intan Jaya is a warzone. The Titigi assault was followed by further drone attacks on Danggoa village — already the site of a previous drone-executed civilian killing — and Dangomba village in Hitadipa district,” said interim ULMWP president Benny Wenda.
Wenda also stressed the important historical date today, which marks 1 July 1971 — the 55th anniversary of the declaration of independence by the OPM (Free West Papua Movement) at Markas Victoria.
“This historic declaration, the second in the history of West Papua, was a critical moment in our struggle — a powerful rejection of Indonesian colonisation and the Act of No Choice that enabled it,” Wenda said.
“As enshrined in our constitution, the ULMWP recognises all such declarations as legitimate.”
‘Ongoing brutality’
Wenda said the “ongoing Indonesian brutality” reminded Papuans why they must “uphold the spirit of 1971”.
Also on Monday, the TNI (Indonesian military) was alleged to have opened fire on two Papuan civilians near a military base by the Dogabu river, in Hitadipa, the ULMWP statement said.
One of them, a minor named Sandibega Agimbau, was reportedly hit by an Asoka mortar shell. The other, a shepherd called Edianus Agimbau, suffered gunshot injuries and later died of his wounds.
His last words were that “I cannot walk any further”.
Later that day, the military claimed yet another victim, this time in Tolikara Regency, the ULMWP statement said.
A man named Krona Penggu was shot and killed by Indonesian soldiers near the Tolikara border.
“The ULMWP demands that Indonesia immediately withdraws its colonial military from Intan Jaya and across the highlands, in order to allow refugees to return to their homes,” Wenda said.
“They must also immediately cease using drones to drop bombs on Papuan civilians, a direct contravention of international law.”
Indonesian authorities have so far made no comment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/01/indonesian-soldiers-accused-of-wounding-two-papuan-teenagers-in-titigi/

By Johnny Blades of RNZ Pacific

Explosive activity has picked up in recent days at Bougainville’s Mt Bagana volcano.

Papua New Guinea’s Rabaul Volcanological Observatory declared a Stage 1 Alert for Bagana amid its most notable upsurge in activity for two years.
The observatory’s principal geodetic surveyor, Steve Saunders, said activity at the volcano had been ongoing for several years, but last week the activity increased.

READ MORE: Lack of monitoring meant PNG volcano was missed by agency
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“There was a large eruption, it was basically the dome collapsing down the east flank. It was very spectacular but it was in uninhabited areas so didn’t really cause much of a problem.
Noting continuous lava activity at the summit, Saunders said there was “a red glow and rocks rolling down the side every few weeks”.
“There was some dust downwind etc, but it looked worse than it was.”
Social media comments about the volcano indicated dust issues impacting crops to the south in Torokina, on Bougainville’s east coast.
PNG’s National Information Centre said the Department of Community Government and District Affairs Disaster Office were in touch with Torokina and other areas impacted, and monitoring the situation.
Pumice issue
Meanwhile, in another part of PNG’s Islands region, Manus Province, Saunders said big rafts of pumice from an active submarine volcano in the Bismarck Sea had started to disperse.
Since May, pumice created by the so-called Titan Ridge volcano had been carried by tides and currents into Manus Island’s south coast, impacting sea life and marine traffic.
However, Saunders said there was little pumice being produced by the volcano now as its activity has abated in the past week or two, and that pumice rafts around Manus Island had now mostly washed away with currents and winds.
But locals in Manus have told RNZ Pacific that pumice is still a problem, and that pumice has also increasingly the province’s smaller, outer islands.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/01/bougainville-volcano-ups-gears-as-titan-ridge-submarine-volcano-cools-off/

By Justin Wong,em]:font-sans-italic [&>strong]:font-sans-semibold [&>em]:italic”> Local Democracy Reporter

An ACT candidate has withdrawn from a new Wellington electorate race at November’s election, after failing to declare her previous membership of a Chinese political group linked to the country’s ruling communist party.
After Local Democracy Reporting sent questions about Lyra Yan Zhang’s background on Monday, the party confirmed on Tuesday the Kenepuru candidate had resigned – a week after her unveiling.
“All of our candidates are asked to disclose previous political party memberships. Ms Zhang did not disclose her previous connections, and [on Monday] she decided not to continue with her candidacy,” an ACT spokesperson said in a statement.

READ MORE: Other Local Democracy Reports

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/01/act-candidate-resigns-in-nz-after-chinese-political-group-link-revealed/

By Patrick Decloitre of RNZ Pacific

The official results of New Caledonia’s provincial elections held on Sunday were proclaimed last evening.

In a comprehensive document, the French High Commission in New Caledonia has published the key election figures, which confirm the tendencies observed immediately after the vote on Sunday.
This includes the final makeup of New Caledonia’s Territorial Congress, which results from the proportional representation in the French Pacific territory’s three provinces (Northern, Southern and the Loyalty Islands).

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In the Southern province, which is New Caledonia’s most populated and affluent region, the results confirm a clear victory for the “Strong and United” list made up of pro-France parties Les Loyalistes and Le Rassemblement.
Under outgoing provincial President Sonia Backès, they have reached 28 of the 40 seats and collected 50.4 percent of the suffrage.
The pro-independence list for FLNKS, headed by Johanito Wamytan, will get seven seats (15.59 percent of the vote).
Eveil Océanien’s list (Another World is possible), headed by Milakulo Tukumuli, has five seats (10.2 percent).
In the Northern province, pro-independence UC-FLNKS (headed by Pascal Sawa) and Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance (UNI) headed by Paul Néaoutyine are neck-and-neck, with 10 and nine seats.
The remaining three seats go to the small list “Let’s Act together for the North”.
In the smallest province, the Loyalty Islands, seats are divided between pro-independence lists “Nation Autochtone” (Indigenous Nation) and UC-FLNKS, respectively headed by Omaira Naisseline and Mickaël Forrest.
Another pro-independence party, the PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) now holds the two remaining seats.
Congress and three provincial assemblies to elect their presidents
The three provincial assemblies are now scheduled to hold their inaugural sitting on Friday.
They will elect their respective presidents.
At the territorial level, the Congress is scheduled to hold its inaugural sitting on July 10 with the election of its President and its bureau.
At New Caledonia’s Congress, Loyalists-Rassemblement will have 24 of the 54 seats.
Eveil Océanien reaffirms itself as the main central block in New Caledonian’s political chessboard: it has gained more seats (4) compared to three in the previous legislature (2019-2026).
This brings the Wallisian-based party, created in 2019, to position itself once again as the “kingmaker” as no single party in New Caledonia’s Congress is in a position to rule on its own.
The pro-independence block can now rely on 16 seats from UC-FLNKS (the pro-independence movement’s hard-line component), 7 from UNI-PALIKA and 3 from Dynamique Autochtone (Indigenous Dynamic).
Talks have started, behind the scenes, between parties, in order to form alliances ahead of the vote.
After the Congress President’s election, a “collegial” government will be formed, consisting of the allocation of ministerial portfolios on the basis of proportional representation.
Talks with Paris
Also based on the election of the new Congress, the French government is planning to resume talks with New Caledonia’s politicians in order to finalise a consensual document that would serve as a blueprint for New Caledonia’s political future.
Such talks, over the past five years, have failed to produce a result.
The most recent attempt, which materialised into a document called the Bougival Agreement (in July 2025, followed by more negotiations under the name of Matignon-Oudinot in January 2026) was rejected by the French Parliament on April 2.
New Caledonia’s main parties have already indicated their intentions, if they were to be convened for new talks by French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
Whereas UC-FLNKS seems to favour a short-term process for New Caledonia’s independence, UNI also promotes independence for New Caledonia, but in some kind of association with France.
UNI had pledged to support the Bougival process, which is now defunct.
The Bougival process was one of the main fracturing factors within the pro-independence movement, especially between UC-FLNKS and UNI.
On the pro-France side, they consider that concessions had already been made as part of the Bougival talks and that there were red lines they were not ready to cross.
Three referendums
They also insist that New Caledonia has held three referendums on New Caledonia’s independence between 2018 and 2021 and that these resulted in three rejections (however, the last referendum was boycotted by the pro-independence groups due to the covid pandemic).
Pro-France MP in the French National Assembly Nicolas Metzdorf said at the weekend that if they were called to sit at the negotiating table again, they would take part. Buy they would not budge from their anti-independence posture.
Another scenario was for New Caledonia’s parties — especially pro-France — to refrain from entering any political agreement until the French presidential elections are held in April 2027.
“We’ll wait for the presidential elections… to make sure New Caledonia remains French,” he told public broadcaster NC la Première yesterday.
Ahead of the Congress President’s elections next month, Metzdorf also confirmed that talks with other parties would start “this week”.
“It will be either with Eveil Océanien or with UNI, but we won’t talk to UC-FLNKS.”

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/30/official-results-confirmed-for-new-caledonias-provincial-elections/

COMMENTARY: By David Robie, Pacific Media Watch

A friend and colleague, Solidarity columnist Eugene Doyle, posed a brief question on the Facebook media page Kiwi Journalists Association last week.
“Kiwi journalists . . . is there a reason for so little solidarity with Palestinian colleagues,” he mused over a haunting portrait of emaciated Palestinian journalist Mujahid Abu Mufleh showing his appalling state after 14 months inside an Israel torture prison.
“No trial. No conviction.”

READ MORE: Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
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This is what Palestinian hostages look like after release: emaciated, exhausted, and visibly scarred by prolonged detention.
Occupied Palestine has become the deadliest place for journalists in the world. Yet merely three media people responded to Doyle’s question.
Broadcaster and singer Moana Maniapoto (Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa)
summed up the cruel image as “journacide”, citing the use of the label by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese: “Absolutely shocking.”
Journacide is a neologism used by scholars, journalists, and human rights experts to describe deliberate mass killing and hunting down of journalists and media workers in conflict zones. It is also the title of a harrowing new documentary on the topic: Journacide: The War on Truth.
Courage and fortitude
Community broadcaster and educator Victoria Quade commented: “I think few people living and working in relatively protected environments like New Zealand can imagine the courage and fortitude it takes to be a journalist under an oppressive regime where reporting on those regimes can be physically dangerous.
“And, if they can imagine it, would be able to match that courage in their own lives.”
A third comment was posted by communications adviser and journalist Susan Belt: “I think people are battle-worn after so much general genocide, kids and press included, on the part of Israel. There’s so much press targeting etc that it almost becomes ridiculous to keep posting on it. Stuff and NZME keep running Gaza, Lebanon stuff but because our govt like some others has not made much of a fuss about Israel’s illegal civilian and press killing in Gaza and its unprovoked attack on Iran and illegal forays into Lebanon, it leaves people feeling hopeless.
“I am very pro-Palestinian rights and have been since the 1970s but even my Facebook friends despair at the sad postings I seem to always be doing. They know it’s very bad behaviour but we’re in a trance at the hopelessness of it. When our ally the US is backing Israel (though cooling of late) our govt is too scared to say what’s right because it doesn’t want to offend Trump’s team.”
These comments reminded me that I have been puzzling over the generally poor and weak response from New Zealand journalists over what is currently the toughest moral and ethical challenge of our times. Yet, instead of facing up to the Gaza genocide and the accompanying journacide, most of our media colleagues have preferred to look away and remain silent.
The prevailing attitude is that it is something remote and of little relevance to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a response of denial, astonishing given that there have been protests across the motu against the Israeli genocide — and lately the unjustified US-Israeli war on Iran and fragile peace — for the past 142 weeks: by far the longest and sustained political protests ever in this country, yet largely ignored by the media.
This has led to many public protests over media coverage. These too have rarely been reported.

Genocide in plain view
My own articles on the topic on Aotearoa and the Pacific, while stirring responses internationally, have barely raised a ripple in this country. Shameful responses to a genocide — at least 73,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, 20,000 of them children — revealed daily before our very eyes. Even since the sham ceasefire declared in October, more than 1000 people have been killed.
And the cost in lives of hundreds of Palestinian journalists trying to bear witness on the annihilation of their own communities is deeply shocking. Yet this barely raises a shrug from New Zealand journalists.
In a report released last week by the Freedoms Committee of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a chilling new statistic was revealed — out of an estimated 1200 journalists in Gaza between 60 and 75 percent of them have lost their homes or been forcibly displaced since 7 October 2023.
The report, titled “Media Without Walls”, also said that approximately 265 journalists had been killed since the start of the conflict, by far the highest death toll recorded globally against journalists in a single conflict.
More than 80 percent of media offices and institutions had been completely or partially destroyed, leading to an “almost complete collapse” of journalistic infrastructure, it said.
The report added that journalists in Gaza no longer work from newsrooms but from tents, footpaths and shelter centres, with mobile phones as their primary production tool and intermittent internet dictating when they can publish.
“I lost my home and my office in the same week,” said one displaced journalist, Dr Ahed Farwana. “I no longer have a place to write, but I write from my phone among people, sometimes while searching for water for my family.”
‘Trying to concentrate’
Another Gaza journalist, Ola Kassab, said: “I work from inside a displacement shelter, choosing the quietest corner I can find. The hardest part is not the bombing itself, but trying to concentrate amid the overcrowding and fear.”
Photojournalist Wisam Zughair said: “The camera is no longer the heaviest thing I carry; it is the feeling that I may also be documenting what could happen to me.”

Just two weeks ago, an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Ahmed Wishah, 25, was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. He was the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza since 2023.
His targeted murder came just weeks after his brother Mohammed Wishah, who also worked for the Doha-based global television network, was killed in a deliberate Israeli shelling of his car.
In an interview after his brother’s death, Wishah called on the world to stop the killing of journalists.

“Let the martyrdom of Mohammed Wishah be the end to the killing of journalists. This is my message to the world . . . Stop the Israeli occupation from targeting journalists.”
Smearing journalists
The routine response of Israeli military authorities is a hamfisted attempt to smear all Gazan journalists as “Hamas terrorists”. There is never any credible evidence to back this up and it is shameful that New Zealand media simply echo these lies from a discredited regime whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a “false balance”.
The New York-based Committee to Protest Journalists (CPJ) and Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have frequently condemned the “smearing of killed Palestine journalists” with “baseless claims”.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said it condemned the Israeli occupation army’s “baseless accusations”, which sought to “justify its crimes against Al Jazeera journalists and cameramen in Gaza, most recently the killing of cameraman Ahmed Wishah”.
“Since October 2023, the Israeli campaign of incitement has relentlessly spread false allegations and baseless accusations against Al Jazeera staff. The Network considers this smear campaign a transparent and futile attempt to justify the deliberate targeting of journalists and cameramen whose only ‘crime’ has been their courageous determination to document and expose the genocide being perpetrated by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip.
“These attempts deceive no one and cannot obscure the truth witnessed by the world.”
Al Jazeera called on press freedom organisations and “people of conscience around the world” to take urgent action to safeguard all journalists in the Gaza Strip and ensure their safety.
Reporters Without Borders has filed at least five complaints with the ICC over alleged war crimes against journalists, and together with other media freedom groups such as the Foreign Press Association, has repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought an Israeli Supreme Court ruling overturning the IDF’s ban on global journalists being allowed into Gaza to see the reality for themselves.
Gaza bloodlust spreading
Another disturbing factor about the slaughter of journalists is the fact that the Israeli bloodlust against journalists in Gaza is spreading also to the illegally occupied West Bank and the invaded Lebanon.

Journacide: The War on Truth                                    Video: Democracy Now!
Irish filmmaker Seán Murray has investigated Israel’s killings of journalists in his new feature documentary Journacide: The War on Truth, which was featured by Democracy Now! earlier this month. Murray says the term “journacide” applies to Israel’s military actions because of the “explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists” as a way to silence the truth.
The filmmaker describes it as “the Gaza doctrine that is now being applied in Lebanon”.
Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman highlighted the attempted killing on June 15 of Iranian journalist Hadi Hoteit, who was working for the news outlet Press TV in southern Lebanon. He was attacked by an Israeli drone while reporting live for his network at Kafr Tebnit.
Although he survived the attack, he was struck by six pieces of shrapnel.
With the latest invasion of Lebanon by Israel, the death toll of journalists has now topped 29.
Murray investigated the killings of four of those journalists for his documentary Journacide.
On March 28, journalists Ali Shoeib and brother and sister Fatima and Mohamed Ftouni were killed — all together — in an Israeli drone strike on their car.
The following month, on April 22, Amal Khalil was injured in an airstrike and died from her injuries after waiting for hours inside a bombed building as rescuers awaited clearance from Israeli forces to reach her, reports Democracy Now!
About the silence
In a trailer for the documentary, Murray says the film is not about war, it is about the silence. “As Lebanon burns, silence has now become the greatest weapon of oppression. This is a tale of those that fought different, the story of the gatekeepers of truth.”
In the Democracy Now! interview about his film, Murray explores the lengths that Israeli military authorities go to create false narratives about journalists, even to falsifying documents and creating fake images.
“I think Journacide effectively gives the explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists. I think that it fits perfectly. Not only do we see the targeting of journalists, but it’s the double-tap strikes that we see with the Gaza doctrine, that is now being applied in Lebanon.
“So, in the case of Ali, Fatima and Mohamed, the original strike killed Ali and Mohamed, and it was a double tap then that killed Fatima, Mohamed’s sister, in the second strike.
“This is a deliberate targeting of journalists. The reasons behind that is to, of course, silence what is happening in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing that’s going on, the mass war crimes that’s being committed.
“But Lebanon is a little bit different. Israel doesn’t have the geographical repressive abilities that they did in Gaza. And we see that now playing out.”
A wake up call surely for the Middle East realities for New Zealand journalists.
David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/29/the-gaza-doctrine-israeli-journacide-and-the-muted-nz-media-response/

A recent United Nations report has detailed serious allegations of Israel deliberately targeting Palestinian children during the conflict since October 2023.

The report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, which has been rejected by the Israeli government, documents harrowing child deaths. It describes the scale of the deaths as “unprecedented”.
Legally, the report itself does not prosecute anyone, but it can have major consequences by adding to a growing record of international law evidence.

READ MORE: Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children
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Other Gaza genocide reports

An independent investigation
The commission is a standing investigative body created by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021 after the escalation in Gaza and East Jerusalem that year.
Its mandate is unusually broad and ongoing. It is tasked with investigating all alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, identifying root causes and preserving evidence for accountability.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, the commission has published several reports on the conflict, including on the deaths of Israeli children.
This latest report is significant because it focuses specifically on children, examining the impact of Israeli military operations on Palestinian children between October 2023 and March 2026.
The report notes that the commission sent requests for information to the State of Palestine, the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli government. The first two responded, but the latter did not.
Four major findings
The commission’s report makes four highly significant findings.
1. The scale of child deaths is unprecedented
The report finds more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.
The commission says the “overwhelming scale and rate of children killed and injured in Gaza have been unparalleled across modern conflicts globally”.
UNICEF describes the Gaza Strip as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.
2. Evidence of deliberate targeting
This is the report’s most legally explosive finding. It documents repeated incidents of children being killed by single sniper or drone shots, often in the head or upper torso, suggesting deliberate targeting rather than incidental harm.
Cases such as Hind Rajab and other children shot while evacuating or sheltering are central examples.
Doctors on medical missions in Gaza reported to the commission that it appeared Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers were engaged in a “game” of target practice with “different body parts being targeted on different days”.
The commission concluded that based on forensic evidence and military analysis, there are reasonable grounds to believe some children were deliberately targeted.
3. Systematic attacks on child-essential infrastructure
The report documents attacks on hospitals, schools and orphanages, which enjoy special protection under international law. The commission found these attacks have directly contributed to preventable child deaths, long-term disability and educational collapse.
The commission’s findings raise serious questions about whether those special legal protections were respected, especially where attacks disrupted paediatric care, neonatal treatment and emergency surgery.

4. Arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence
The report documents patterns of child detention, ill-treatment and abuse in custody.
The commission noted that dehumanising rhetoric by political leaders, soldiers and public figures has normalised violence against Palestinian children and contributed to an environment where such harm becomes acceptable.
How do these findings fit with international law?
This report is important because it reframes the war not only through the lens of civilian casualties, but through special legal obligations owed to children.
International humanitarian law and international human rights law apply concurrently in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This is because Israel retains effective control over its borders, airspace and territorial waters, and has re-established military control on the ground.
As an occupying power, Israel has specific obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention. These include ensuring food, medical care and the protection of civilians, especially children.

Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Israel must protect children’s rights to life, survival and development. It must prohibit arbitrary detention, torture and deprivation of life. It must also ensure the best interests of the child remain a primary consideration in all actions affecting them.
The commission’s conclusions are stark: children have not simply been caught in the crossfire of war. Many appear to have been deliberately targeted, denied essential care, detained, tortured, displaced and subjected to conditions that threaten their survival.
It reframes the suffering of Palestinian children not as collateral damage alone, but as a possible site of serious international crimes.
Serious legal questions
Many of the acts documented in the report amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
If children were deliberately targeted, this would constitute a grave breach of the international humanitarian law principle to distinguish combatants from civilians.
The sheer scale of child deaths raises serious concerns about whether Israeli forces have been adhering to the proportionality analysis: if civilian harm is excessive compared with the concrete military advantage anticipated, the attack is unlawful.
Parties must take all feasible precautions to minimise civilian harm. The report argues Israel’s use of heavy explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas indicates repeated failures of precaution.

Israel at the UN: “This council has heard the same accusations against us again & again.. that Israel intentionally targets doctors, aid workers & journalists”

Yes, because you’ve murdered hundreds of doctors, aid workers & journalists. pic.twitter.com/9gMhanyYBa
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 30, 2026

Adding to the evidence record
In international law, accountability is often slow, but reports like this help build the legal architecture for future prosecutions.
The findings may feed directly into ongoing investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into alleged crimes in Palestine. The commission explicitly recommends further scrutiny by the court.
States could rely on this evidence in domestic prosecutions under universal jurisdiction. This allows domestic courts to hear cases alleging international crimes, regardless of where the crimes occurred, or the nationality of the victims or perpetrators.
States may also impose targeted sanctions or arms embargoes based on credible findings in UN reports documenting serious violations of international humanitarian law, even without a court ruling.
The findings could shape arguments in existing and future proceedings before the International Court of Justice, particularly around genocide and occupation.
Under international law, children are supposed to be the most protected people in war. The children of Gaza have not just suffered in the war, they have become one of its defining legal fault lines.
Shannon Bosch is associate professor (law) at Edith Cowan University. Republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/30/a-un-report-details-the-overwhelming-scale-of-children-killed-in-gaza-it-raises-grave-legal-questions-2/

Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa

The Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) has warned that a planned AI data centre in Southland would consume up to 25 percent of New Zealand’s annual electricity output and push power prices higher for Kiwi consumers and businesses.
CAFCA organiser Murray Horton said in a statement that data centres consumed a “phenomenal amount” of electricity.
“The proposed $5 billion foreign-owned Datagrid AI centre near Invercargill would require 1 gigawatt of electricity to operate,” he said.

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“That is nearly twice as much as the 570 megawatts that Rio Tinto’s Tiwai Point aluminium smelter consumes.
“Currently the smelter takes 13 percent of all the electricity New Zealand produces. If the data centre is built, we would have to sacrifice more than one third of the power we produce to supply just two foreign-owned businesses.”
Horton said CAFCA had long targeted Rio Tinto’s smelter near Bluff, labelling it New Zealand’s “biggest corporate bludger”.
“It pays a secret, super cheap price for power that is not available for any other user. All other electricity users in Aotearoa therefore subsidise the power that the smelter consumes and exports in the form of aluminium,” he said.
Textbook example
“Rio Tinto’s smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand, but this new data centre would take this to another level. It would use twice as much power and would require it 24 hours a day, every single day of the year.
“In a dry winter the smelter can turn off one or two of its pot lines to conserve power, but data centres cannot do that. Industry experts say AI computers can be damaged if they are shut down so they need an unending, uninterrupted supply.
“The government’s plans to develop a liquefied natural gas import terminal in Taranaki to provide backup power in lean years have to be seen in this light.
“LNG is environmentally harmful and, as we have seen with the war in Iran, potentially vulnerable solution to a problem largely created by these large power users.
“Without these major consumers, we could use new renewable energy generation and better storage and management of our supply to meet demand in dry years,” Horton said.
Another problem with AI computing centres is that they generated high levels of heat, so they must be cooled using large amounts of water. This is why cool regions such as Southland are sought after by developers.
Heat from data centres can be siphoned off and used to heat urban areas, but this requires significant investment in infrastructure.
‘Insidious nature’
Horton said concerns about electricity and water consumption as well as the “insidious nature of AI” were driving opposition to AI data centres around the world.
“Because it has made a big bet on AI, the United States is at the forefront of this. Many states have used tax incentives to encourage data centres and some AI companies are even developing their own generators to power them.”
Microsoft planned to reopen the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to run data centres in four different states, for example.
“Now opposition to them is growing right across the US. The issue unites people across the political spectrum — from MAGA to the far left. And The New York Times reports there are movements against them in Europe, South Africa, Latin America, India and Southeast Asia,” Horton said.
“There are also concerns about the nature of AI itself. Many people are worried that AI will cause massive unemployment. The military’s use of AI and facial recognition tools create some truly frightening prospects.
“AI is an unprecedented and potentially devastating technology but there has been very little discussion of it in New Zealand.
“The Overseas Investment Office has approved the construction of the data centre in Southland, but that is not a surprise because they approve nearly all projects that foreign companies want to operate here propose.”
Ethical issues
Along with the ethical issues AI poses, the economics of data centres did not add up, Horton said.
While they created jobs during the construction phase, once they were up and running they were virtually automatic and profits flowed to the biggest tech oligarchs in the world.
CAFCA is calling for a halt to major AI data centres in Aotearoa.
“They are being sold to the NZ public as The Next Big Thing, with little or no discussion about their massive impact on our electricity and water resources, let alone any discussion on the bigger issue of highly controversial AI,” Horton said.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/29/time-to-pull-plug-on-power-hungry-bludger-ai-data-centres-says-cafca/

RNZ Pacific

Fiji’s military has hit out against budget cuts it copped last Friday.

In a social media post, the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF), which has gained influence in law enforcement over the last year, issued an apparent warning to detractors to recognise the role they play in Fijian society.
“The RFMF… genuinely respects the concerns raised in public commentary… that military spending should be reduced on the grounds that Fiji is not engaged in conventional warfare,” said RFMF commander Major-General Ro Jone Kalouniwai.

READ MORE: Fiji military puts public ‘on notice’ citing national security threats
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“But we ask those who hold this view to look again.”
In the 2026-2027 Budget, the RFMF lost around FJ$14.8 million (NZ$11.5 million) — a 9 percent cut — and is projected to lose another $1.1 million next year.
Fiji Sun reported that, for Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, the rationale behind the cut was Fiji’s decision to scale back overseas peacekeeping commitments.
But the three-part post, titled “What the RFMF means to Fiji – Beyond the Budget and into the grey zone”, outlined the military’s view of itself as essential in efforts against the drug trade and corruption — and its social value.
“The RFMF has never asked for recognition. But perhaps it is time we offer it anyway,” it read.
Govt revenue falling
“And in doing so, ask ourselves honestly what it would cost us not to have it.”
While announcing the budget, Finance Minister Esrom Immanuel revealed that government revenue was falling while expenditure was climbing.
The country’s budget deficit is more than FJ$200 million higher than last year, due in part to a lower tax take.
Immanuel said the government was shifting cash towards infrastructure projects and private sector development.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/29/fiji-military-defends-national-role-in-society-after-9-budget-cut/

By Patrick Decloitre of RNZ Pacific

The one-round provincial election held in New Caledonia yesterday has produced a few surprises, but essentially maintained the existing blocs between pro-independence and pro-France parties.

In the Southern Province (New Caledonia’s most affluent and populated, including the capital Nouméa), provisional results show half the votes went to the “Strong and United” pro-France camp.
This brought together the Rassemblement, Les Loyalistes parties, headed by incumbent Southern Province President Sonia Backès.

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Her list has obtained the support of 50.4 percent of the votes in the province, according to provisional results last night, which should give it 28 seats in the Southern Province and 24 of the 54 seats in New Caledonia’s Territorial Congress.
Support for the Strong and United pro-France list was not only strong in the capital Nouméa, but also in its three surrounding towns of Mont-Dore, Dumbéa and Païta.
Speaking to a crowd of supporters last night, Backès, 50, hailed the results and her party’s score, saying this was a way for voters to recognise what had been done during the past seven years, marked by several crises — including the covid pandemic and the May 2024 riots.
“The non-independence voters have supported our list at a large majority and I think our choice for unity was important,” she said.
“Also because we were carrying a clear message of support for a New Caledonia within France, as well as a society model we believe in, based on respect for democracy, of merit and equality for everyone.”
Pro-independence Johanito Wamytan (Union Caledonienne-FLNKS) and his list have secured 15.5 percent of the votes, translating into seven seats, one more than during the previous mandate (2019-2026).

He is followed by Wallisian-based centre party Eveil Océanien’s list (“Another World is Possible”), headed by Milakulo Tukumuli (10.3 percent).
In the Southern province, Eveil Océanien gained five seats — two more than during the previous provincial legislature.
This will again make Eveil Océanien as a force to be reckoned with in both the Southern Province assembly and the Territorial Congress, where the party, set up in 2019, has gained the nickname of “king maker”.
Eveil Océanien leader Milakulo Tukumuli said with four expected seats at the Congress, he was pleased to see that his party has “confirmed its place in New Caledonia’s political landscape”.
Northern and Loyalty Islands provinces
Provisional results in the Northern Province showed an almost equal score by the two pro-independence parties — UC-FLNKS and UNI (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance).
The two parties’ list heads, Pascal Sawa (UC-FLNKS) and incumbent UNI-PALIKA Paul Néaoutyine (who has been leading the Northern Province for the past 27 years) have won 10 and nine seats respectively, with the remaining three seats being held by pro-France Vanessa Wacapo (Les Loyalistes-Rassemblement).
In the Loyalty Islands province, two lists headed by pro-independence Mickaël Forrest (UC-FLNKS) and Omayra Naisseline won six seats each in the small provincial assembly.
The provincial elections results need to be officially proclaimed by the French High Commission this week.
The next step, as part of the “trickle down” effect of the poll, is for New Caledonia’s new Congress to convene this Friday, July 3, with the first item on its inaugural agenda being the election the Speaker (President).
Parties represented in the new Congress are expected to enter into negotiations in order to form alliances.
This would be followed by a process of appointment of a “collegial” cabinet which is also supposed to reflect the make-up of the local Parliament.
Low turnout rate
One of the main features of Sunday’s provincial election was also the relatively low turnout rate (an estimated 58 percent of the 192,584 registered voters). This is eight percent less than the previous poll in 2019.
Geopolitical analyst Pierre-Christophe Pantz told public broadcaster NC la Première during election night that “this was to be expected and this raises questions about the meaning of democracy”.
Other experts also started to see in this low turnout a profound disinterest from voters.
University of New Caledonia law professor Mathias Chauchat said the trend was worrying, especially when combined with the “sudden death” five-percent threshold that automatically eliminates smaller lists.
“We end up with a rule that at the end of the day crystallises the forces in presence, to produce a rather conservative and polarised result,” Pantz said.
UC-FLNKS politician Alosio Sako said on Sunday night during a TV live debate: “I hope [the poll results] will enable for a fresh start, to find a new agreement because [New] Caledonians are tired of having to go through this kind of situation”.
Should the rules be changed?
Another compounding factor is that any list that does not collect at least five percent of registered voters is automatically eliminated during this single-round poll.
“This five-percent threshold rule was designed precisely to favour big blocs, to give them time to manage New Caledonia in the long term,” Professor Chauchat said.
He said that instead of discarding all these disqualified votes, it could be an idea to retain some of the ideas brought up during the campaign in favour of younger representatives, based on the principle of participative democracy.
“If you look at it more closely, there are a lot of new ideas from all these emerging small lists.
“It’s a shame that they only appear during election time and then disappear again — like shooting stars.”
Former journalist and TV personality Wallès Kotra, who headed one of the small lists, said he was concerned that the May 2024 riots and unrest should not repeat themselves.
“This has left many traces and fear within the population. And I hope it doesn’t herald more crises,” he said.
“We have to live together. And the two antagonist blocks, for them, it’s time to find an agreement. We must take care of our country.”

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/28/pro-french-pro-independence-blocs-remain-in-new-caledonia-election/