Keith Rankin, 2 October 2026 – On 18 September I applied textbook ‘circular flow’ consideration to the New Zealand economy, in the context of plans by Labour and National to expand a savings mechanism at a time when a higher proportion than ever of New Zealanders’ savings are draining rather than feeding the economy. (Refer: Tone Deaf KiwiSaver and the Circular Flow of Income.)

This circular flow analysis is not a hypothesis. It’s a description made more vivid through the use of metaphor and analogy. Like all educational descriptions, it’s a simplification, a ‘model’. A model can never be the whole story. The circular flow model is an excellent way to understand ‘demand-shocks’, ie spending shocks; less useful, though far from useless, for modelling supply-shocks such as big increases in oil prices. Policy induced increases in interest rates are, simultaneously, demand shocks decreasing spending and supply shocks increasing costs.

Applying this mode of understanding to New Zealand at present, the drainage – or leakage – is to a large extent a result of funds managers using the savings of New Zealanders to buy foreign assets rather than to invest in the New Zealand economy. (Circular flow leakage is not only applicable to money going overseas. Hoarding “money in the tin” – as Cameron Bagrie [RNZ, 29 Sep 2026: Labour commits to securing first pay equity deal by next Budget would have the government do] advocates – is a form of drainage in the circular flow model. Money works by circulating, not stagnating.)

The present leakage – the large scale purchases of foreign financial assets by funds managers – is presently relatively benign, in the sense that it is helping to offset a huge inflow of export receipts resulting from high prices for meat and processed milk. (The other major offset to booming exports is of course import spending; there is also a rising interest bill payable ‘offshore’, as interest rates increase on present private and government debt.)

As a result of an export inflow of funds being more than matched by an outflow – especially into purchases of foreign assets, foreign goods, foreign services – the New Zealand dollar is falling in value on the world’s foreign exchange markets. (The NZD fell by 4.8% in a few recent weeks – from 24 August to 30 September – based on a trade-weighted average of 17 foreign currencies. The New Zealand dollar is now 19% lower than it was in 2015, again despite rapidly rising export revenues. Since 24 August, the NZD has fallen against all 17 of those currencies; the biggest fall has been against the South Korean won.)

Commodity export receipts (based on fortuitously high prices) and hot money (meaning money flowing into New Zealand to take advantage of higher interest rates) have been the two main taps – inflow valves – enabling the New Zealand economy to sustain a veneer of prosperity from 1985. The three open plugholes – three significant drains – have been imports, interest and dividends paid to foreign owners, and the purchases of foreign financial assets by funds managers.

New Zealand’s prosperity – inflows arising especially from the abovementioned export receipts – has increasingly taken the direct route rather than the scenic route from the taps to the drains, meaning that large swathes of New Zealand have missed out on that prosperity flow. When spending and income flow through the ‘scenic’ hinterland, as they should, government clips the ticket on each transaction, through especially income tax (including company tax) and GST. That’s good; it’s how governments gain their necessary revenue and thereby fund most of their spending. Circulation drives revenue.

We may think of economic prosperity as being like a spa pool full of circulating water; external (in and out) and internal circulation add to prosperity while keeping income distribution equitable. Taps and commensurate drainage holes – representing exports, imports, and other foreign transactions – keep the prosperity ‘fresh’. An emptying pool, or a stagnating pool, represents economic contraction; a filling pool represents economic expansion over and above natural growth; a spilling pool represents classical inflation.

The big question for New Zealand is: What happens when the stimulatory export tap turns off; or turns down, with inflows reducing to New Zealand’s historical average? The prosperity drains away, like a storage lake during a drought. As evidenced from the exchange rate numbers mentioned above, the external outflow of prosperity already exceeds the inflow. Fortuitously, the falling exchange rate – a market price – serves as a form of stabilising economic feedback.

If the drains remain wide open, the contraction becomes an economic crisis. If unremediated by offsetting policy or by constructive feedback (such as strong private sector responses to rising export and import prices), eventually the economy and the society collapses, dries up. (Will the last person to leave please turn off the lights? To use a phrase used by Rupert Murdoch among others. And used in New Zealand I recall, I believe in the early 1990s.)

We must we careful to understand the spa pool analogy correctly; the prosperity of an economy lies in the flow of spending and income, not the amount of ‘money in the tin’. And – for an economy, if not a jacuzzi – that ‘fluid’ prosperity maximises when there are significant flows through a variety of channels; the scenic route, rather than rapid flow through a single channel from tap to plughole. Spending by retired people represents one of these important prosperity channels.

We can usefully think of irrigated farmlands. The main flows of water through Canterbury are a small number of large rivers. The Canterbury economy is prosperous when that water is diverted through many slow channels, and with the amount of water coming into the system being matched over time by the amount of water going out. An important part of the slow-flow process is the filling of aquifers; nature’s reserve ponds. And the slow channels may provide good habitats for fish, a form of wealth. These channels are internal flows; the system is sustained by external circuits, equivalent to exports and imports. Rain flows into the system, and evaporation from the oceans – the source of rain – matches the flow of water into those seas.

Negative Feedback Processes

The circular flow process is a simple approach to understanding changes in the state of the economy; and conceptualising remedies for a failing or flailing economy.

All of the events noted in my earlier article – leakage and stimulus events – constitute primary change. Primary change induces feedback which is known as secondary change. Such events may start as disruptors within a stable or balanced economy; or such events – especially policy responses, which are themselves a form of feedback – may start within an already out-of-kilter economy. In the first situation, the event destabilises the economy, and the feedback – the secondary change – typically restabilises the economy though at a different point of balance. In the second situation, an appropriate policy intervention should facilitate a desirable correction.

This process of restabilisation is known as negative feedback, and is generally understood to be a good thing. Positive feedback, on the other hand, itself aggravates instability; and is generally understood as a bad thing. (This can be confusing for those of us who tend to associate the word ‘positive’ with ‘good’; and ‘negative’ with ‘bad’. In medicine, recovery from say influenza is a negative feedback process, whereas cancer is a positive feedback disease.)

The principal negative feedback mechanism recognised by orthodox (neoclassical) economists is called the price mechanism. Such economists may also call it the ‘market mechanism’; which can be misleading because markets correct resource misallocation through both price and quantity information. Key quantity words are ‘shortage’ and ‘excess’.

A ‘policy’ to rely solely on negative feedback is a conservative policy. It’s a solution to an economic problem which can be called ‘wait and self-heal’. However the wait may be too long and too uncertain; that’s why Keynes said: “in the long-run we are all dead“. Further, the resulting balance may not be the most desirable correction; for example, it may be unacceptably inequitable. John Maynard Keynes, in the 1930s, showed that something resembling balance could be achieved despite high levels of involuntary unemployment. (The present official definition of unemployment very much assumes the word ‘involuntary’; some economists today regard much joblessness as tantamount to a vacation, and the official definition reflects that view.) Such an undesirable form of balance may be called a rut, and activist fiscal policy is the surest way out of a rut.

Keynes’ solution for a depressed economy (with excess labour, with underemployed plant and equipment, and with unemployed self-regulating automata such as AI) – high ‘unemployment’ in every sense of that word – was for governments to ‘borrow and spend’. The New Zealand government did this in 1936 by borrowing at artificially low interest rates and spending on social housing. This was a major reason for New Zealand’s spectacularly rapid, though late, recovery from the Great Depression. The government intelligently deployed an available mechanism of artificially lowering interest rates.

The feedback mechanism which followed was that output and income increased, unemployed workers became employed, and income tax receipts grew even faster. Thus, by borrowing more and spending more, the fiscal deficit (the government’s budget deficit) decreased within a year or two; by 1938 the fiscal deficit was smaller because in 1936 it was made bigger. This process – by the government injecting new spending into the circular flow – led to a rapid corrective expansion, landing the economy in a good and popular place. (This included a couple of years of double-digit economic growth; 20% over two years instead of the paltry 0% over two years that we have in 2026!)

It was not for nothing that Michael Joseph Savage was widely regarded as New Zealand’s man-of-the-century. This was a negative (ie correcting) quantity (key information was shortages and excesses) feedback ‘loop’ that can be said to have saved New Zealand in the years just before World War Two. The new spending stimulated all corners of the New Zealand economy; it took the ‘scenic route’. Subsequent import controls in December 1938 meant that spending-output-income flows kept emphasising the scenic routes for longer. Other capitalist countries used comparable policies to create their post-war ‘economic miracles’; these policies actually saved capitalism from the fate widely predicted in the 1930s.

In my lifetime, economists have tended to emphasise corrective processes based on the price mechanism; on price rather than quantity information. Thus, when an imbalance occurs – too much leakage or too much stimulus – then the correction is that the prices of some things will go up (so we buy less of them) and the prices of other things will go down (so we buy more of them). (Note my use of the word ‘price’ rather than ‘cost’; today’s overuse of the word ‘cost’ relates to a narrative quite different from that of neoclassical economics.)

A recent example of this price mechanism in action is the substantial growth of foreign demand for dairy and red meat products, two classes of product with which New Zealand has comparative advantage. As a result, these products have become very expensive in New Zealand, so consumers here have switched to other cheaper sources of protein, including a variety of imported protein substitutes. Farmers’ higher incomes have filtered into the wider economy, though arguably not enough; otherwise prosperous New Zealanders have cut back on meat and cheese, on account of their high prices.

Automatic Stabilisation

One important form of stabilisation is known in the textbooks as ‘automatic stabilisation’. Under automatic stabilisation, when an economy contracts, there are forms of income available which automatically mitigate the loss of market income of those people adversely affected. And there is an automatic reduction in tax revenues, creating an automatic and stabilising government budget deficit.

A mix of a comprehensive social security and a suite of income-graduated taxes are the critical automatic stabilisers which have underpinned western post-war prosperity for decades. In New Zealand, a particularly potent automatic stabiliser is New Zealand Superannuation, which takes advantage of the ability of retired people to keep spending during an economic downturn, and to maintain spending from diverse and often scenic geographic locations.

Automatic stabilisers are the economy’s thermostats.

A basic universal income can be an efficient automatic stabiliser; as even former National and Act leader Don Brashrealises, as evidenced from his speaking in favour of a universal basic income at a TOP election meeting in Grey Lynn in 2020. (Does David Seymour know this, I wonder?) A universal income set into legislation – which of course is what New Zealand Superannuation is – serves this purpose well, because it immediately helps people to keep spending, and can be easily raised to create a fiscal injection.

(One easy win, in times like now, would be to create a 60-plus variant of the job-seeker benefit, which would have fewer conditions attached to it than regular job-seeker benefits; and which would have minimal abatement provisions for 60-to-64 year-olds taking on part-time or free-lance work. Additionally, 60-plus beneficiaries could be hired – perhaps on a semi-voluntary basis – to mentor young people starting on their life-journeys as productive workers.)

Fiscal Policy as Destabilising Feedback

My 1930s’ example above showed that, in particular at times of significant unemployment, borrow and spend policies were an important case of initiating a stabilising feedback process; creating eventual fiscal balance, full employment and normal growth. The ‘fiscal balance’ part is counterintuitive, given that the correction started by intentionally aggravating a fiscal imbalance. Yet improved fiscal balance was a result of that feedback process; prosperity was the more important result. The hinterland prospered, and the Treasury coffers filled; the First Labour Government ‘spent money to make money’, as an entrepreneur might say.

This suggests correctly that the opposite policy approach – cut-borrowing, cut-spending – constitutes destabilising positive feedback. Allowing a leaky draining economy to drain faster or to fester, waiting for a very slow price response (or worse, an aggravating private-debt-deflation response as we saw in the early 1930s), is at best government abuse through neglect.

A policy to cut spending in favour of public-debt repayment is a policy to accelerate the drainage of a draining economy. It creates positive feedback, making the existing problem worse. As such, it increases fiscal deficits by reducing government revenue, thereby raising public-debt; and, by decreasing or stalling GDP and possibly creating deflation, it further raises the government’s debt-GDP ratio. As the debt problem becomes bigger, further application of this false solution takes place; thereby escalating the problem, and escalating the policy that escalates the problem. And so on. At some point either the economy breaks (leading to a reset such as what may happen after a great war, perhaps a great levelling), the counter-productive policy is abandoned, or some (exogenous) lucky break from outside puts an end to the process.

Advocates of such downwardly destabilising policies tend also to advocate the removal (or lessening) of the very thermostatic stabilisers which help to maintain a semblance of order in a shock-prone world. The Act Party, for example, seeks a flatter (less graduated) tax scale, and without a negative income tax (as Milton Friedman advocated for in and around 1962) or refundable tax credit or basic universal income to compensate.

Economic Growth

A stabilised economy is not a static economy. It allows for natural growth processes; such as those attributable to improved production techniques, increased societal knowledge, and wider critical literacy. (Critical literacy is a feedback process – voice over exit – whereby participant suggestions are heard and acted upon.) It also allows for natural processes of substitution from income-preference to leisure-preference; productivity processes which were once argued to be the hallmark of fully-developed economic societies.

We note here that income acquisition means the subjugation of a person’s time to employers or clients. Leisure, on the other hand, represents activities or inactivities – the use of time – according to persons’ own preferences. Increased leisure relative to income is a central process of meaningful economic growth.

Some other important feedback processes

Economists these days do not emphasise either of the above-mentioned stabilising feedback processes as much as they used to. ‘Relative prices’ was once the ‘bread and butter’ of economics’ education. Now the big interests are inflation (and inflation psychology) – considered as a positive feedback process, ie a destabilising process – and the supposition that government spending suppresses business investment. (We note that, in late-1930s’ New Zealand, government spending was the critical facilitator which revived business investment.)

And there is the idea that economic success for a nation lies in the quantity of money that comes into a country – through sales to foreigners of goods, services or assets – facilitated by access to sufficient quantities of strategic resources such as fertiliser, diesel, high-tech-batteries, pharmaceuticals, or intelligence (human or artificial). Money that comes into the country through tourism or exports is deemed to be non-inflationary, whereas money created within the domestic banking system is deemed to be inflationary.

The idea of venerating money as wealth is the essence of mercantilism; mercantilism is to economics (a social science) as alchemy is to chemistry (a natural science). Both mercantilism and alchemy idolise gold. Money is not wealth; rather it’s the circulating lubricant which allows economies to function, and which allows economic quantities to be assigned a value.

The global economy is today facing a number of deeply problematic positive feedback processes. One is obviously the ‘arms race’ processes which lead to military escalation. As well as the destruction inherent in the consumption of military products, there are all the greenhouse-gas emissions arising from the production and operation of military goods, and lost opportunities arising from peaceful technology.

Another destructive form of positive feedback is the ‘race to the bottom’. These feedback processes can be well understood through a branch of economics known as ‘game theory’.

The feedback process I emphasise though is that of climate change – increased extremes in temperatures, compromised access to fresh water (drought and flood), and increased wildfires. Our response is to increase energy-hungry air conditioning, thereby exacerbating the problem which we are trying to escape from. This – along with the AI race, which includes unsustainable energy-hungry and water-hungry data centres – is a kind of slow race towards human end times; a race which is being reinforced by the present global arms race, so is very much a virulent form of a race to the bottom.

Further, artificial intelligence is a positive feedback process of ‘recursive self-improvement’ (RSI), a reinforcement learning race between AI agents; that’s what makes it so scary.

Inflation (and deflation)

Inflation is widely understood in economics today – as it was in ‘classical economics’ which had its heyday 200 years ago – as a form of positive feedback, of destabilising feedback; as a process which creates its own dynamic.

The belief today is that certain small policy mistakes (almost always, only evaluated in hindsight as mistakes) – such as allegations of overcooked or undercooked central banks’ monetary policies (eg in the Federal Reserve in 1929, and in the RBNZ in 2003/04 and 2021/22) – created inflationary or deflationary feedback spirals which thereby induced severe difficult-to-tame financial or fiscal crises. (In the early 1930s, the United States Fed committed much of its resources in a futile attempt to reverse deflation through monetary reflation.)

One of our alleged problems is called accelerating secondary or second-round inflation, and it’s presented as a pavlovian consequence – inflation expectations – arising from primary inflation. Primary inflation is anything, be it war or retirement spending, which may provide an impetus to push or pull prices upwards. Second-round inflation then – allegedly, and if untreated – causes the consumers price index to increase by ever-increasing annual percentages in excess of policy-target percentages. (We may note the notion of NAIRU which posits the idea that a certain amount of unemployment is required in normal times to suppress any outbreak of ‘accelerating inflation’.)

Normal neoclassical economics treats primary inflation as a shock or stress that leads to a stabilising price-feedback response. We spend less – not more – when general prices go up, and as a result prices go down again. And, when prices go up, we expect them to go down sooner or later; or to increase more slowly in the near future. New classical economics, on the other hand, claims that if the inflation rate is, say, four percent this year, we expect it to be more than four percent next year, and more again in the years after.

When a war causes the price of wheat to go up, and the price of diesel to go up, we actually expect two things. First, we expect the war to be short-lasting. Second, we expect supply-chains to adjust to the new circumstances; we expect supplies to be redirected or sourced from other places, with resulting decreases in prices, though maybe not all the way back to pre-war levels. (Take 2022 as a perfect example of this, re wheat.) At least, that’s what neoclassical economics – which sees price changes as stabilising rather than destabilising – supposes.

Another example is that, after Cyclone Gabrielle which wreaked havoc on apple orchards in New Zealand, we expected apple prices to go up – which they did; and then the prices came down with supply chain adjustments, and then they came down further as the destroyed crops came back into production. That’s normal market process – and normal market psychology – which is what happened, and the psychology was reinforced by what happened. The new classical monetary wizards, however, told us that, as a result of cost or spending shocks, we would expect all prices to accelerate upwards; unless, that is, they – the appointed wizards or wizardesses – intervened.

Another example was the global disruptions to supply chains caused in 2020 to 2022 by especially the Covid19 pandemic (sometimes called a ‘world global pandemic’, which is of course verbal inflation) and the whatever-scale Russian attacks on Ukraine in 2022. Global primary inflation soared in early 2022, and subsided in most countries by 2024. There is no evidence that there was ever a problem of secondary inflation; only stabilising ‘ripples’. And there is no evidence that policy responses, on the basis of ‘expected’ second-round inflation, made any beneficial difference to ‘cost-of-living’ outcomes.

The overblown concept of ‘problematic second-order inflation’ is important for our understanding of what has been framed across the western world as the ‘cost-of-living crisis’. Any non-wizard knows that there will always be some feedback effects arising from a supply-shock (a cost-shock) or a demand-shock; to expect otherwise would be equivalent to denying that there are ripples when a stone is thrown into a pond. The question is whether these ‘ripples’ of secondary inflation are destabilising or stabilising, are problem or solution. Do ordinary folk expect price ripples to turn into price tsunamis if the monetary wizards are not there to apply their magic? I don’t think so.

The economic orthodoxy for the last forty years says that secondary inflation constitutes destabilising positive feedback; driven by naïve expectations of business principals and wage-workers that ‘hyperinflation [100% or more] must be just around the corner’. Commonsense would suggest that price ripples decelerate – they don’t accelerate – and that when general prices go up we expect at most a slow decline in the inflation rate without having to have that expectation bludgeoned into us. The now-orthodox ‘accelerating-inflation’ hypothesis is completely wrong as a general hypothesis, and is only ever valid in a few highly specific historical cases; there has never been a global hyperinflation.

Inflation itself is an important debt-stabilisation feedback process

While inflation isn’t always a good thing, it can be. Indeed inflation is the solution to the world’s mounting problem of private and government debt; whereby a small investment class of already rich people extract interest from most of the rest of us.

Inflation and economic growth have been the principal mechanisms through which substantial post-WW2 government and private debts were resolved throughout the western world. And inflation – not compound interest – is the principal reason why so many people alive today born between 1925 and 1955 are asset wealthy. Inflation paid their mortgages and other debts. In the absence today of much economic growth, inflation – rising nominal GDP, the denominator used for all meaningful measures of national indebtedness – does the business of servicing debt and maintaining a stable income distribution between creditors and debtors.

In today’s capitalist global economy, interest rates in excess of inflation are unsustainable, inequitable, and systemically destabilising. (In medieval times, such interest rates represented the vice of usury.) Inflation itself is the stabilising price mechanism which makes real interest rates negative; which defuses to ‘usury problem’ for want of a better label. Inflation several percentage points above base interest rates achieves an outcome whereby ordinary people can “get ahead”, as Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon like to announce as their goal for “ordinary Kiwis”. That’s how the grandparents of millennials got ahead.

There is a comedic irony about all this. Two wrongs can make a right. If anti-inflation policy is counter-effective and inflation above policy targets is beneficial, then ‘anti-inflation policy’ makes us better off because it creates the inflation that it claims to cure.

While New Zealand’s relatively low government debt is the envy of most capitalist governments today, a healthy dose of inflation can make significant inroads into that debt. Inflation also increases government revenue even when the economy is struggling, through a process called ‘fiscal drag’ or ‘bracket creep’. (As such, this may be one reason why a democratic capitalist ‘universal income / flat tax’ policy is not favoured by our legacy political parties; a universal income would by its very nature be inflation-adjusted.) In the recent PREFU, the New Zealand government’s revenue was higher than widely predicted, not because of good economic management but instead because of the very inflation which the government says that it is determined to overcome.

Fiscal drag is not a benefit to working people. It is an ‘optical’ benefit to governments pushing the ‘into surplus’ rhetoric while being too afraid to introduce stabilising tax-benefit reforms. These are governments which acquiesce to prevailing class-based narratives, rather than seeking to bend or otherwise contest those narratives.

Interest rates

The mallet – bludgeon – of monetary authorities nowadays is ‘interest rates’. Interest rates are meant to be a critical market price which facilitates the balancing of saving and investment in the circular flow model. That is, if saving (a leakage) gets too high and investment (an injection) gets too low, the balancing price mechanism involves a market-led reduction in interest rates. Interest rates are critical to price-mechanism stabilisation, which is a negative feedback process. Interest rates are supposed to rebalance saving and investment. Neoclassical economics favours both stabilising feedback and minimum policy intervention.

Unfortunately, this particularly critical market price has been hijacked by macroeconomist policy interventionists. Interest is nowadays used as a policy lever to correct us of expectations which we – businesses and workers – never had in the first place. It’s a policy tool that ‘works’ by playing mind games on uncomprehending stakeholders.

The deeper and more tragic irony is that the raising of interest rates through monetary policy is itself a supply-shock – a cost shock, much like escalating diesel prices – which serves to create the problem that it is supposed to be fixing. Hence, the misuse of interest rates – as a blunt lever – reinforces the expectations which it is supposed to be dowsing. By becoming an instrument of positive feedback – rather than negative feedback, creating what it is supposed to be curing – we find the use of that lever escalates, making the cost problem worse, and therefore ‘requiring’ even more use of that lever. This is what is known in geopolitics as an escalation trap; a dangerous positive feedback process.

Escalating interest rates serve as a monetary drain serving the interests of the upper- and upper-middle classes at the expense of the remaining ninety-percenters. In New Zealand and elsewhere, large amounts of New Zealanders’ interest payments are flowing down that drain; increasingly as an external flow into the pockets of rich foreigners rather than to rich New Zealanders.

At some point, this feedback process of escalating interest rates breaks – as all destabilising processes do – and as did happen globally in 2008. The chatter out there in YouTube-land is that it will be significantly worse next time.

Benjamin Button economics: Forward to the Past

New Zealand and other contemporary capitalist economies are now being subject to a particularly virulent form of classical economics – classical economics being the dismal science – which preceded the neoclassical marginal revolution of the 1870s. New classical economics is particularly obsessed with government debt and inflation. Public economists – meaning economists who the public see and hear – have largely abandoned both Keynesian and neoclassical frames of reference.

And humans’ journey into the depths of their modern economic past may not end through re-engagement with the classical economics of David Ricardo and Reverend Malthus. Economic narrative is falling further back into the age of trade mercantilism, which is the pseudo-economics and public policy of Donald Trump and the people he prefers to talk to. (Some claim that capitalism is moving even further back, into a new age of feudalism. Refer Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Capitalism is dead. The new order is a techno-feudal economy’, El Pais, 11 October 2023.)

(While monetary and fiscal probity – small but powerful government – were important features of classical economics, its central thrust was a growth process which took advantage of a prior and fortuitous emergence of a substantial middle class, and proceeded through a growth process which would eventually eliminate that middle class. ‘Winners’ would be those who benefitted through social mobility and gained entry to the upper class; David Ricardo – a successful financial speculator – had already become a landed gentleman by the time he commenced his career as a political economist. Classical economics was a story of transition from one unequal stationary state into another. The offsprings of classical economics were Marxian economics – which would presage a benevolent end state following its harrowing birth – and neoclassical economics which preserved the middle class.)

I don’t think that the current set of opinion leaders and power brokers are deliberately stupid. Rather, their world view is based more around a linear narrative – as the Bible is – than a circuitous understanding of wealth moving within a biosphere which has self-correcting propensities. Economies start, things happen, eventually end times arrive. The winners (or winner) are revealed at the end. By definition, if you are not there at the end, you are not a winner.

Economic narrative is entering an era of financial mercantilism, an era of linear pseudo-social-science in which the goal of humanity is to extract – for no useful social purpose – as much ‘money’ from the Earth-system as humans and other ‘intelligences’ can before that system itself will no longer be sustained. Financial mercantilism describes a game, a race-to-the-end to see who can make the most money.

Musk-win Escalation Race

Races between and among superpower presidents, between super-entitled tech-lords, between Nietzschean Übermenschen; have become quite the topics of present-day chatter. While übermenschen dominate their worlds from within rather than above – including fictional examples such as Rakhmetov and John Galt – there is also today a messianic sense of the world concluding much as it began with a Singularity; ‘one God to rule them all’, to invoke the favourite book of one of the present world’s most notorious dark lords, a lord with a palantír and a New Zealand passport.

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.

RNZ Pacific reporters

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/01/fiji-approves-lifeline-needle-exchange-law-to-combat-hiv-emergency/

By Susana Suisuiki of RNZ Pacific

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/01/american-samoa-environmental-group-sues-us-govt-over-deep-sea-mining-plans/

RNZ Pacific reporters

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/01/tuvalu-appoints-first-woman-governor-general-ahead-of-48th-independence-day/

REVIEW: By David Robie

The seeds of resistance and later community empowerment began in Tāmaki Makaurau in a humble but lively bookshop in a rundown two-storeyed shop at 436 Queen Street. Called the Resistance Bookshop, it became the headquarters for protesters in 1969 for three years as anti-Vietnam War action grew and grew.

This was where many students, workers and radicals gathered — including the young Roger Fowler — to plan their protest action. Many of them lived in dilapidated inner-city flats within a stone’s throw of the bookshop.

As the anti-war movement gained momentum, many young men faced conscription into the New Zealand army and there were fears that conscripts would be drafted to fight in Vietnam — as was their fate in the United States and Australia.

• READ MORE: Other Roger Fowler reports

Fowler, an icon of Aotearoa protest and community empowerment, recalled how those men whose “number came up” in the archaic Compulsory Military Training (CMT) “lottery law” were ordered to report to a special train at Auckland Railway Station.

They were “transported to the Waiouru army camp to endure a harsh, three-month course of military training plus follow-up camps,” wrote Fowler.

“My number was drawn and I refused to go; instead burning my draft card at a demonstration at the US Consul’s Paritai Drive mansion.

“I organised a protest at the railway station, where fellow Resistance supporters and I handed out leaflets, encouraging the young conscripts on the train to disembark and refuse to go.

“I was later arrested for refusing to attend the army call-up, then locked up in Mt Eden prison for about three weeks for refusing the pay the fine.”

Fowler recalled that this period of “defiant non-compliance” by conscripts led to the founding of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS). Eventually, the pressure paid off when the Norman Kirk-led Labour government was elected in November 1972 — and it immediately scrapped CMT.

This saga is one of many stories of the people’s resistance that are recounted in a new book being launched tomorrow, Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, with an overview written by Roger Fowler in the months before he died earlier this year. Many activists from the era, including his wife and fellow campaigner, Dr Lyn Doherty (Ngati Porou and Ngāpuhi), have also contributed.

Arrested 20 times
He was arrested or charged more than 20 times “during those turbulent years”, and was imprisoned four times for refusing to pay fines — a political prisoner.

Reading about this period was particularly poignant for me because in 1969 I was living in Melbourne as the young activist editor of the independent Sunday Observer and being threatened with prosecution for writing an editorial urging young Australians to burn their draft cards.

I didn’t know Roger, Lyn and their whānau then. This came many years later, especially when we crossed paths over our Palestine activism with Roger founding and campaigning with the Kia Ora Gaza project in a sustained effort to break the cruel Israeli siege of the Gaza enclave to deliver humanitarian aid.

Veteran activist Roger Fowler, co-founder of the Ponsonby People’s Union and a founding member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, died on 21 February 2026, aged 77. His whānau have put in tremendous mahi in their effort to try to complete this remarkable book before his death, and it is a compelling testament to his life, and to the comrades and activist supporters.

Fowler’s “vision, energy and guitar helped sustain a remarkable initiative in collective action” for a fairer and better community.

Back to the Resistance Bookshop.

In fact, there were three of them – one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. They were at the “forefront of this vibrant groundswell of protest and rebellion”. Young people, including many students, spearheaded new forms of activism such as “sit-ins, street theatre, graffiti, leaflets, protest songs and pickets”.

‘Bowels of the underground’
Countless leaflets and screen-printed posters were produced from what was dubbed “the bowels of the underground”.

Auckland’s Resistance Bookshop was also a popular rendezvous for Australian and US draft dodgers who had fled to New Zealand to escape the Vietnam War.

The Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) was at the forefront of street protests venting outrage at the pointless slaughter in Vietnam and the “brutal oppression in apartheid South Africa”.

Within walking distance of the Resistance Bookshop — few protesters had cars back then — were two popular hangouts: the Babel restaurant in Victoria Street, and the Kiwi Tavern pub in Symonds Street.

The Vietnam War protests peaked with about 35,000 taking part but eased off as NZ troops were gradually withdrawn from 1971 onwards. Committed activists began looking for a fresh “meaningful direction”.

Many of the serious radicals who had left the bookshop formed an inner city Marxist study group exploring works by Mao Zedong and Lenin, and other more modern authors analysing class struggles against capitalism.

“PMY activist and secretary Cliff Kelsall and I became friends and workmates as labourers on various building sites,” wrote Fowler. ”We started exploring ideas about urban activism, especially inspired by the appeal of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson to ‘bring the war back home’, by Newton’s concept of grassroots community organising, building a global network of ‘revolutionary intercommunalism’, and by Seale’s clarion call to ‘Seize the time’.”

North Vietnamese meeting
In 1972, a group of the “young radicals” were invited to meet a visiting North Vietnamese delegation, including the mayor of Hanoi, at the Auckland University Student Union building.

“Among issues discussed,” recalled Fowler, “I asked about the idea that had been quietly floating about, of organising an international militia to support the Vietnamese struggle — similar to the International Brigades that about a dozen young Kiwis had joined up with in the 1930s to fight Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War.”

Several New Zealand medics had volunteered then too, explained Fowler, including the activist and late Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt’s aunt, Rene Shadbolt.

“The startled visitors politely responded: “Thanks, but no thanks.” The Vietnamese suggested that the New Zealanders should instead support their struggle by building a “homegrown revolutionary movement”.

“Advice some of us took to heart,” noted Fowler.

This led to the foundation of an urban movement to organise around “real life struggles and developing survival skills” — useful for the then working class neighbourhoods of Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Freeman’s Bay and Newton.

From the Resistance Bookshop, the movement had now graduated to become the Ponsonby People’s Union for Survival and Freedom (PU, for short), with its headquarters at 15 Ponsonby Road in a rundown block of shops skirting Western Park, a block long since demolished to provide more space in the reserve.

‘Clear sense of purpose’
“We decided we needed to start with a clear unified sense of purpose,” wrote Fowler. “A Ten Point Statement of Direction evolved, inspired by the Ten Point Programme adopted earlier by the US Black Panther Party.

“This statement was to become our set of guiding principles for positive practical actions and for addressing the key issues facing our community – such as substandard housing, police harassment, poor education and health services, racism, women’s rights, costly food, arbitrary evictions, and the isolation of prisoners, often in faraway prisons, from their families and loved ones, and advancing social cohesion.”

As Fowler summed up the problem-solving objective, “we aimed to advance the wellbeing, resilience, social cohesion and survival of our community and to strive for civil liberties and freedom from oppression”.

Although clearly influenced by Newton and the Black Panthers — but never a “copycat” movement, PU often operated as a “sister organisation” cooperating with the Polynesian Panthers — of anti-Dawn Raids fame — the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ), PYM, Ngā Tamatoa, ACORD and “other left activist groups of the day”.

While deciding on PU’s programmes, Cliff Kelsall and Fowler met Polynesian Panthers leaders at their office in Three Lamps, Ponsonby (honoured today with a pavement panther tile), and forged a warm rapport and community partnership that lasted for the seven-year life of the union and beyond. First up for collaboration was a community food co-op.

“We wanted the co-op to engage with people and encourage them to work together as volunteers around the common goal of sustaining our households with fresh, low-cost food,” wrote Fowler.

And the movement introduced itself in 1972 through leaflets as “a community-based group of people getting together to try to solve common problems and build a real community with control over its own destiny”.

Borrowed old trucks
The Ponsonby headquarters had four upstairs bedrooms and a meeting room (plus garage space and a courtyard), so Kelsall and Fowler immediately moved in with others to help pay the rent — at $15 a week!

To get the food co-op underway, the collective borrowed old trucks from their networks, collated food orders and bought fresh vegetables and fruit in bulk from the downtown Turners & Growers markets each Monday morning.

“By cutting out the middlemen, up to half of the retail prices were slashed. And we knew the goods were fresh,” Fowler wrote.

“We would choose to buy – at rock bottom prices – spotted apples and misshapen pumpkins that no retailer wanted on their display shelves.”

The co-op was an ideal platform for supporting other struggles, especially during the 1977 Timber Workers’ Union dispute — “when we dispatched our truck packed to the roof with donated food to support workers on the picket line at Kawerau”.

The PU also helped about 300 locked out workers at the NZMC Honda car assembly plant and set up a co-op distribution depot at the Panmure Town Hall.

People’s Union activists carried on taking part in anti-Vietnam War protests and over “other issues of the day”. One of the memorable banners read: “Learn from the Vietnamese — unite to defeat our common enemies”.

China ‘educational tour’
In 1975, the NZ China Friendship Society facilitated a “workers’ educational tour” of China, which included six People’s Union activists — including Roger Fowler, his wife Lyn Doherty, and the late mayor Tim Shadbolt of Invercargill: “We visited communal farms, big worksites, and met renowned NZ author Rewi Alley.”

This was six years before I also — now living back in Aotearoa after several years in Paris, France, following the 1968 student riots — went on a Friendship Society visit to China and wrote a series of articles for The Auckland Star.

Now as a semi-retired journalist with also strong beliefs about community-owned and independent media, I was heartened to read Roger Fowler’s chapter on the PU’s independent information efforts.

Fowler wrote about this PU initiative saying: “The People’s Union started to attract the interest of some established media, though unlike other left organisations, we never courted the media. We believed it was more important for people to develop our own independent ‘people’s media’.

“However, a journalist from the Women’s Weekly followed the food co-op for her scoop one day and wrote a sympathetic article.”

In 2016, Roger Fowler and former Polynesian Panther Party members Tigilau Ness and Tuu’ulenana Iluli attended the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In 2025, Fowler and Ness collaborated with a vinyl album, “Songs of  Struggle and Solidarity”.

Prison whānau bus trips
Among the many projects of the PU was in 1972 starting a visitors’ weekly free bus run to Pāremoremo maximum security prison near Albany, and a monthly bus trip to Waikēria Borstal near Te Awamutu.

“These services were very popular, as both prisons were purposely located far away from any viable public transport, making family or community relationships difficult for many,” Fowler wrote.

“We once crowded about 80 people into a 55-seater bus to Waikēria. Polynesian Panther Party leader Tigilau Ness brought along his guitar and would get a big singalong going from the back seat – his ‘American Pie’ got everyone joining in the chorus, ‘Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie . . . “

The People’s Union food co-op became a key organising tool and platform, recalled Fowler, for another important “problem solving” programme – defending tenants. The PU centre became the “go-to place for local people facing issues inflicted by rapacious landlords, a major problem that plagued the area”.

Fowler pays tribute to community activist Betty Wark and her 1976 Tole Street “tent city” occupation of a public park in Ponsonby in protest for “decent housing”.

In a page devoted to her campaigning, Helene Connor is quoted saying; “Housing the homeless and utilising the buildings to their full extent became a passion for Betty. The Tole Street tent ‘village’ kept going for several months while Betty continued to look for suitable accommodation to house the group.”

Vasau family eviction
Fowler recalled “one of our most high-profile housing cases was the eviction of the Vasau family from their home in Norfolk Street, Ponsonby, in 1974”.

“A new owner had told the family to leave their family home of five years, so he could bang the rent up. They had nowhere to go, so had no choice but to stay and fight.

“One day when nobody was home the landlord seized the chance to break in and toss the family’s furniture and belongings outside.”

The People’s Union was called and activists along with neighbours moved the family’s belongings back inside and barricaded the house. Eventually, six months later the landlord returned along with a senior police officer and a court order.

The good news was that the court order along with community support actually helped the family gain a new state house in South Auckland for their home.

Police harassment “was often a problem for some of the people we worked with,” recalled Fowler. A police “task force” would parade through the streets and stop outside local pubs.

“They would intimidate people, usually in an arrogant, racist manner. They called this ‘team policing’, but the People’s Union newspaper compared them to an invading army.”

Defining historical event
The Māori Land March in 1975 “was a defining event in the history of Aotearoa — People’s Union members supported the march in many ways, whether joining with the marchers on the road, feeding them, or supplying the bus so that kaumatua could rest when they needed to”.

Fowler devoted an inspired chapter to the struggle of Takaparawhau–Bastion Point. On 6 January 1977, Ngāti Whātua’s Ōrākei Action Committee “put out an urgent call for supporters to join a tent protest” at Takaparawhau, Bastion Point.

“The vast area of open fields was under direct threat by the Muldoon government, which intended to develop the land as elite real estate for upmarket housing.”

Fowler quoted Sharon Hawke, one of the protest occupiers and the daughter of Joe Hawke, one of the leaders, declaring in Takaparawhau, the people’s story: “This was to become one of the greatest shows of strength in modern [NZ] history.”

“The protest camp evolved into a formidable village occupation that stood firm on the disputed land, until evicted by 600 police 506 days later. The uniting catchcry was: ‘Bastion Point is Māori Land’.”

People’s Union activists were there in the protest from the beginning. The land was “unprotected, windswept terrain exposed to the elements which can be very harsh”. The PU advocated the need to build shelters and huts rather than relying on tents. Some people were able to bring on caravans.

Activists from the PU hired a large rotary hoe to help dig vegetable gardens and the protest community rapidly grew into a “living village” — it was “transformed into a vibrant marae”.

Lyn Doherty and Roger Fowler lived in the protest village “in a little tin shack at the rear of Arohanui [the wharenui] — cooking toasted sandwiches for breakfast on a small methylated spirits burner each morning”.

Shameful Bastion Point raid
On 25 May 1978, a massive police operation moved to evict and demolish the village. On that fateful morning, 222 Ngāti Whātua and supporters were arrested and all the buildings were demolished and removed in a shameful repressive action by the state.

“But although we lost the battle,” recalled Fowler, “we won the war — the land remains as public space under Ngāti Whātua control.”

The Ponsonby food co-op grew until about 600 local households were taking part by the end of the 1970s. But the inner Auckland suburbs of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and their demographics were rapidly changing. Old houses were being sold and renovated as the suburbs were being “gentrified” and rundown shops were being converted into cafes, restaurants and fashion boutiques.

Sadly, the final edition of People’s Union community newspaper in April 1979 announced the closure of the Ponsonby People’s Union, saying “the need for an ‘umbrella’ organisation to coordinate a wide range of community action (from prison visiting to food co-ops) is no longer necessary”.

However, Roger Fowler and whānau expanded their community activism to their new home in Māngere East, where Roger drove buses and was an Engineers Union delegate before managing the Mangere East Community Learning Centre.

In 1999, he was awarded the Queens Service Medal for community service.

Roger and Lyn have four children — Tawera, Hone, Maia and Kahutia — and 11 mokopuna.

Besides the book’s overview by Roger Fowler, there are 22 contributed chapters by activists in an 18-page section titled “Other activists’ voices”. This includes essays by Sir Bob Harvey, David Williams, Dr Lyn Doherty (“The shooting of Daniel Houpapa – a gross miscarriage of justice”), Vivian Hutchinson, Wayne Toleafoa, Rod Davis, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua, Anna and Barry Lee, Catherine Manning (a profile on her mother Pat Hammond), Joris de Bres, Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau, and Tigilau Ness (“A legacy to pass onto our children”).

As well as the historical record of a remarkable era in the 1970s, the book is adorned with a superb gallery of photographs and graphic art. The Fowler whānau have worked extraordinarily hard to bring this publication to fruition after Roger’s death. A labour of love.

Something new that I learned from reading the book is that along with being such an influential activist and strategic organiser, protest entertainer and singer, Roger Fowler was also a gifted political cartoonist. Such extraordinary talent.

In the foreword, Nick Bollinger sums up: “Even though Roger writes in this book that ‘we never considered ourselves as part of a “youth culture” or so-called “alternative counterculture”, when I look back the People’s Union for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most inspiring application of countercultural ideals. I am very glad its story — and Roger’s — is at last being told in these pages.”

And so am I.

• Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.
• Two book launch events: Saturday, 3 October 2026, 1pm-3.30pm, The Ponsonby Community Centre, 20 Ponsonby Terrace, Auckland.
  Sunday, 11 October 2026, 1-4pm, Whare Wānanga, Level 2, Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero – Auckland Central Library, 44/46 Lorne St, CBD.

The post From Resistance to the Ponsonby People’s Union, a courageous tale of struggle for justice appeared first on Café Pacific | David Robie.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/01/from-resistance-to-the-ponsonby-peoples-union-a-courageous-tale-of-struggle-for-justice-2/

RNZ Pacific reporters

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/28/pacific-leaders-urge-jakarta-to-allow-un-rights-visit-to-west-papua/

By Scott Waide of RNZ Pacific

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/28/mother-rescued-after-triplets-die-in-remote-png-community/

The strength of Dirty Work is that it pulls back the curtain to reveal those who prefer to operate in the shadows. And now they’re scrambling to turn off the lights again.

AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The ferocity with which sections of the New Zealand right have moved to discredit Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work before even turning a page tells its own story.

It is the same reflexive hostility that has greeted every major investigation Hager has produced over the past three decades: a rush to delegitimise, to sneer, to dismiss, all before the evidence has been examined.

But this time the haste has been almost comical. Within hours of the book’s release, Newstalk ZB’s Tim Beveridge — who could not possibly have read it — declared it “junk” and banned callers from discussing it on his overnight show.

• READ MORE: Other Nicky Hager reports

Beveridge’s contempt was not grounded in analysis; it was a strike against uncomfortable truths. His close association with Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union, a regular guest on Beveridge’s Saturday afternoon show, only underscores how tightly woven these networks of mutual reinforcement have become. When a book threatens the legitimacy of that ecosystem, the ecosystem responds like a single organism.

National Party MP and former minister Chris Penk, too, performed the same ritual denunciation. In a column for Stuff, he admitted he had not read Dirty Work — then proceeded to attack it anyway.

Penk reduced Hager’s investigation to a caricature: “a person with left-wing views disagrees with people with right-wing views.”

Penk’s dismissal was not an argument; it was another conservative signal that the book should be treated as illegitimate and unworthy of engagement.

But more revealing still was the intervention of Dane Giraud, a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and a committed Zionist defender of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. According to Giraud, those who take Hager seriously belong to an “elite intelligentsia” suffering from something he calls “Free Speech Union derangement”.  This “elite (liberal) intelligentsia” is apparently inherently hostile to an organisation like the FSU because it is an authentic grassroots movement representing everyday working-class people.

FSU’s dishonest portrayal
This is a thoroughly dishonest portrayal of the FSU. It is not a working-class organisation that has emerged organically from within the workplace. It is a rebranded conservative lobby group, born out of the Taxpayers’ Union in 2018 and co-founded by corporate and political operatives including Jordan Williams. Its board includes several committed Zionists, and its campaigns consistently align with the interests of the political right.

To describe such an organisation as “grassroots” is not merely dishonest; it is an appropriation of working-class language for elite political ends. Traditional unions are democratic institutions funded and governed by workers themselves. They exist to bargain collectively, to protect wages, to improve safety, to build solidarity.

The FSU, by contrast, operates as a top-down lobby group focused on legal interventions, media pressure campaigns, and cultural warfare. It is structurally indistinguishable from the constellation of conservative advocacy outfits that have proliferated over the past decade — groups that claim to defend “free speech” while consistently mobilising against progressive movements, academic institutions, and public broadcasters.

Giraud’s rhetorical manoeuvre — painting critics as elitist while presenting the FSU as authentically proletarian — is a classic deflection. It shifts attention away from the organisation’s funding sources, political alliances, and ideological commitments. It reframes scrutiny as snobbery.

But Hager’s work has never been about cultural disdain; it has been about mapping the hidden architecture of influence. Dirty Politics exposed how attack blogs, political strategists, and wealthy donors coordinated smear campaigns. Dirty Work continues that tradition by tracing how lobby groups like the Taxpayers’ Union and their offshoots shape public debate while presenting themselves as neutral civic actors. To investigate such structures is not “derangement”. It is democratic hygiene.

The right’s panic over Dirty Work is therefore unsurprising. Hager’s investigations threaten the mythology that groups like the FSU and the Taxpayers Union depend on: the myth of independence, the myth of grassroots authenticity, the myth of representing “ordinary New Zealanders” rather than well-connected political networks.

When those myths are punctured, the public can see these organisations for what they are — professionalised advocacy machines that weaponise culture-war grievances to advance conservative interests.

A shadow infrastructure
From a left-wing perspective, Dirty Work is invaluable precisely because it illuminates the machinery of contemporary conservative politics. It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated, and how lobby groups coordinate narratives across platforms. It reveals the connective tissue linking talkback hosts, political operatives, advocacy groups, and sympathetic MPs.

Furthermore, it does not claim that these actors are engaged in a grand conspiracy; rather, it shows how shared interests, ideological alignment, and personal networks create a shadow infrastructure of influence that operates largely out of public view.

If the book has a limitation, it is that it stops short of connecting these dynamics to the deeper failures of capitalism itself — the structural incentives that reward polarisation, the economic interests that benefit from deregulation and austerity, the corporate funding streams that sustain lobby groups committed to shrinking the public sphere.

But even without that broader analysis, Dirty Work arms progressives with the factual ammunition needed to challenge the narratives that dominate New Zealand’s political discourse. It exposes the machinery behind the manufactured outrage, the faux-populism, and the relentless attacks on public institutions.

The right’s rush to bury the book before reading it is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of fear. Hager has once again pulled back the curtain, and those who prefer to operate in the shadows are scrambling to turn off the lights.

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

• Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right, by Nicky Hager, 2026 (Potton & Burton).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/27/dirty-work-shining-a-light-on-the-machinery-of-nzs-conservative-politics/

By Ellen O’Dwyer of RNZ and RNZ Digital reporters

Police are considering charges against Greenpeace protesters who occupied a state-owned ship in protest at seabed mining.

A group of activists boarded the Earth Sciences New Zealand owned-Tangaroa in Wellington Harbour on Saturday morning, Greenpeace said.

One of the activists was dressed as US president Donald Trump and flew an American flag from railings on the ship, while another held a banner saying “Don’t Mine the Moana”.

• READ MORE: Q&A: New Zealand complicity in US deep sea mining
• Other deep-sea mining reports

However by early afternoon police said they had removed five protesters from the ship, and were considering charges.

Spokesperson Juressa Lee said the RV Tangaroa had just returned from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific, between Hawai’i and Mexico, where it surveyed deep sea minerals for the company Glomar Minerals, which the environmental pressure group said could lead to a “minerals grab in the Pacific”.

Lee said they did not want a state-owned vessel being used for commercial exploration of the seafloor for a company intending to conduct sea-bed mining, and warned seabed mining could be used to feed into Project Vault, a US government plan to stockpile minerals for military purposes.

“These activists, and thousands of others, don’t want to see our environment destroyed for the purpose of war,” Lee said.

Deep-sea mining destructive
Greenpeace believes deep-sea mining is destructive to marine environments — stripping the seafloor and risking “irreversible damage” to the ocean, she said: “The New Zealand government seems to be aligning with Trump’s imperialist extractive agenda, instead of standing with our Pacific neighbours”.

Minister for Resources Shane Jones said Greenpeace was trying to scare people, and the boat could be used for mineral research. The protest was nothing more than a “parasitic stunt” to raise funds, he said.

“Tangaroa is run by an independent board and a government-owned agency obviously driven to generate revenue as a part of its scientific mandate, and from time-to-time I’ve no doubt the Tangaroa is used for both domestic and international purposes — no one should be surprised by that.”

Jones said the Tangaroa had highly-educated staff doing the work, and their livelihoods should not be “hijacked by Greenpeace”.

“I think Greenpeace are trying to scare and catastrophise and intimidate Kiwis, well Kiwis are about to vote, and they’re going to vote for resource development within guardrails.”

Earth Sciences told RNZ they provide independent scientific research to both national and international organisations, including “internationally recognised expertise in deep-ocean environments, marine ecology and marine geology”.

Questions about the Earth Sciences team’s work for this client should be directed to the company, they said.

Scientific surveys
“Our work includes scientific surveys that collect and analyse data to improve understanding of the deep-sea environment, including its biology and ecology,” Earth Sciences said.

“This research contributes to the scientific evidence needed to understand these environments and the potential impacts of activities within them. This enables stakeholders and regulatory agencies to base decisions on robust scientific evidence.”

RNZ has asked American seabed minerals company Glomar Minerals for comment.

Earlier, Glomar said a team from their subsidiary UK Seabed Resources (UKSR) left Tahiti on July 29 to head to the Pacific Clarion-Clipperton Zone to survey for polymetallic nodules in its licence area.

It was running the 65-day survey with Earth Sciences NZ, on the RV Tangaroa, which it said was “one of the most capable deep ocean research vessels in the world”.

“UKSR’s two International Seabed Authority CCZ licence areas cover approximately 133,000 sq km of deep seafloor, an area comparable in size to Louisiana, covered in polymetallic nodules containing manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths in a single ore,” the company said.

The research was “moving the company closer to the integrated dataset needed for commercial recovery”.

The research findings would be shared, adding to Glomar’s record of transparency and contributions to marine science, Glomar chief executive Chris Williams said.

Earth Sciences was formed last year, when NIWA and GNS science merged.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/26/greenpeace-seabed-mining-activists-protest-on-board-nz-research-vessel-tangaroa/

Pacific Media Watch

Al Jazeera has rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack against the network during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, the news channel reports.

In a statement on Friday, Al Jazeera Media Network said it “categorically rejects” Netanyahu’s remarks, regarding them as the latest example of Israel’s “sustained campaign against Al Jazeera and its journalists”.

In his address at the UNGA on Thursday, where he attacked critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu singled out Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera rejects Netanyahu’s remarks about the network in his address to the UN General Assembly
• Al Jazeera decries ‘unfounded’ Israeli claims about its Gaza journalists
• ‘Baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide’ – Mayor Mamdani hits back after Netanyahu’s attacks during UN speech
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

He called the network one of the world’s “toxic media outlets” that intends to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel”.

Al Jazeera said Netanyahu wanted to stop the outlet from “reporting facts from the ground, documenting events, providing context and ensuring that a range of voices and perspectives are heard”.

Further rejecting Netanyahu’s verbal assault, Al Jazeera said the fact that “such rhetoric was delivered from the podium of the United Nations is a matter of particular concern, given the threat such rhetoric poses to the safety of Al Jazeera journalists working in the field”.

“This rhetoric cannot be separated from the heavy toll borne by Al Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza,” the network’s statement added.

Israel’s war on journalists -targeting Al Jazeera               Video: Al Jazeera

270+ journalists killed in Gaza
More than 270 journalists have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal onslaught. At least 12 of the victims had been reporting for Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera said the network “has lost a number of journalists and camera operators while they were carrying out their work. Some were subjected to campaigns of incitement and vilification before being targeted”.

Of the more than 75,000 people killed in Gaza, at least 706 are family members of journalists of Palestinian journalists, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

Israel has repeatedly cracked down on Al Jazeera and used pressure campaigns against Qatar.

Two years ago, Israel’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the network’s broadcasts. This came after Israel’s Knesset passed a law allowing the government to temporarily close down foreign media outlets it deemed a “threat to security”.

“These measures do not target Al Jazeera alone; they also undermine the right of every person to access truthful information and independent journalistic coverage,” Al Jazeera said on Friday.

It added that “the role of journalism is to provide the world with facts and context, while respecting the right and ability of individuals to assess sources and form their own opinions.”

Republished by Pacific Media Watch from Al Jazeera.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/26/al-jazeera-rejects-netanyahus-attack-on-journalists-in-un-speech/

ANALYSIS: By Raewyn Kapa

The recent trip by a group of Māori individuals to Israel — publicly framed as a “Māori delegation” — has raised significant contention across Aotearoa and rightfully so.

At a time when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide, and the United Nations has determined Israel’s
occupation of Palestinian territory to be unlawful, the optics and implications of this visit is fundamentally flawed.

This was not a Māori delegation. It was a political act dressed in cultural clothing — and ALL New Zealanders deserve an explanation of why that matters.

• READ/VIEW MORE: Te Ao with Moana programme on the delegation to Israel
• Māori delegates defend controversial ‘Indigenous’ trips to Israel
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The individuals who travelled to Israel did so without any formal Māori mandate. They were not appointed by iwi, hapū, or national Māori organisations. They did not carry the
authority of Māori governance structures, nor were they empowered to speak on behalf of Māori people.

They were Māori individuals, not representatives of Māori.

Yet their hosts presented them as if they carried the collective voice of Māori. This misrepresentation is politically dangerous. It allows foreign governments to claim Māori
endorsement where none exists, and it undermines the integrity of Māori political autonomy.

It is a responsibility. When individuals allow themselves to be framed as representatives of an entire Indigenous people, without consent or mandate, they participate in a distortion of
democratic and cultural legitimacy.

Turning a blind eye to genocide
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) findings regarding Israel are unequivocal:
1. 26 January 2024: Order on Provisional Measures:
The ICJ found that South Africa’s genocide allegations against Israel were plausible, and ordered Israel to comply with the Genocide Convention, prevent genocidal acts, and allow humanitarian aid.

2. 28 March 2024: Second Order on Provisional Measures:
The Court reaffirmed its January orders and added further measures, including requiring Israel to ensure humanitarian access and prevent destruction of evidence.

3. 24 May 2024: Order Modifying Provisional Measures (Rafah Offensive):
The ICJ ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, maintain open humanitarian corridors, and allow UN investigative bodies access to Gaza.

4. 19 July 2024: Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territory:
The Court ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory — including East Jerusalem — is unlawful, that Israel must end its presence “as rapidly as possible,” and that all states must refrain from recognising or supporting the occupation.

Recent International Findings (2025–2026): What the delegation also ignored, ICJ Compliance Reviews (2025)
Throughout 2025, the International Court of Justice issued several compliance reviews confirming that Israel had not complied with the provisional measures ordered in January, March, and May 2024. These reviews found:

• Humanitarian access was still blocked.
• Civilian displacement and death rates continued to rise.
• Israel failed to demonstrate any meaningful adherence to the Genocide Convention.

These findings strengthened the Court’s earlier conclusion that Israel’s conduct remained in breach of international law.

ICJ Clarification on State Responsibility (Late 2025)
In late 2025, the ICJ clarified that:

• States providing military, financial, or political support to Israel may themselves breach the Genocide Convention.
• States must actively prevent genocide, not simply avoid participation.
• All states must distinguish between Israel’s sovereign territory and the occupied Palestinian territory.

This clarification directly addresses the risks of political legitimisation, including diplomatic visits framed as Indigenous endorsement.

UN Human Rights Council Findings (2025–2026)
The UN Human Rights Council issued two major reports:

• 2025 Report: Concluded Israel’s actions meet the legal thresholds for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide.
• 2026 Report: Found Israel’s occupation policies constitute apartheid, persecution, and systematic demographic engineering.

These findings align with and reinforce the ICJ’s conclusions.

UN General Assembly Resolution (December 2025)
The UNGA reaffirmed the ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion and called on all states to:

• Cease military, economic, and political support enabling Israel’s occupation.
• Sanction entities involved in settlement expansion.
• Uphold obligations under the UN Charter and international humanitarian law.
  This resolution passed with a significant majority, demonstrating global consensus.

UN Security Council Statements (2025–2026)
Despite ongoing vetoes blocking binding resolutions, the UNSC issued Presidential
Statements acknowledging:

•  Israel’s non‐compliance with ICJ orders.
• The catastrophic humanitarian collapse in Gaza.
• The threat Israel’s occupation poses to international peace and security.
  Presidential Statements reflect broad Council agreement, excluding the vetoing state.

CERD Findings (2026)
In 2026, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found:

• Israel’s treatment of Palestinians constitutes racial segregation, apartheid, and systematic discrimination.
• Israel is in breach of Articles 2, 3, and 5 of CERD.
• States must avoid legitimising discriminatory practices — including through diplomatic visits that imply endorsement.

This highlights political risks of the Māori delegation’s visit.

UN Special Committee on Israeli Practices (2026)
The Committee reported:

• Israel’s occupation is now the longest ongoing military occupation in modern history.
• Settlement expansion accelerated in 2025–2026 that forced displacement in the West Bank increased by over 40 percent.

These findings further confirm the unlawfulness of Israel’s occupation.

What does this mean?
1. Israel must comply with the Genocide Convention.
2. Israel must allow humanitarian aid and prevent genocidal acts.
3. Israel must halt its military offensive in Rafah.
4. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory — including East Jerusalem — is unlawful.
5. Israel remains in longstanding breach of international law compliance of genocide to Palestinian state.

These are not fringe opinions. They are the highest judicial determinations in international law. Yet the Māori individuals who travelled to Israel chose to ignore this.They attended with pre‐existing biases, accepted a curated narrative, and returned with statements that contradict the findings of the ICJ, the UN, and global human rights bodies.

To turn a blind eye to genocide is not neutrality — it is complicity.

Why Tangata Whenua/Zealanders should be concerned
1. It undermines New Zealand’s international credibility

• New Zealand has historically upheld international law and human rights.
• When individuals present themselves as Māori representatives abroad — without mandate — they risk creating the false impression that Māori communities support positions that contradict New Zealand’s obligations under the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention.

2. It misuses Māori identity for political propaganda

• Indigenous identity carries moral weight.
• When Māori identity is used to legitimise a state currently under ICJ scrutiny for genocide, it becomes a political tool — not a cultural expression.

3. It risks silencing Māori who oppose genocide

• Many Māori have expressed solidarity with Palestinians, drawing parallels between Indigenous dispossession in Aotearoa and the occupation of Palestinian land.
• The unauthorised delegation’s visit risks drowning out these voices by presenting a false narrative of Māori consensus.

4. It erodes trust in Māori governance

• If anyone can claim to represent Māori internationally without mandate, then the authority of iwi, hapū, and national Māori organisations becomes vulnerable to political hijacking.

What those who attended must now reconcile

• For the Māori individuals who travelled to Israel, they must now confront the reality that presenting themselves — even implicitly — as representatives of Māori, while acting in a private capacity, carries consequences.
• They must now explain better how their personal impressions align with the overwhelming international consensus that genocide is occurring in Gaza.
• If they reject that consensus, they must articulate why — and on what authority — they believe their curated tour outweighs the findings of the ICJ, the UN, and global human rights monitors.
• Collectively they need to redeem themselves better or hand in their iwitanga. Perhaps extreme; but you get what I mean. They shouldn’t have gone and this is why. Because if they didn’t go to offer peace‐change agency committed to alleviating suffering only to be a PR propagandist team of incognisant kumara from the māra (which is seemingly possible!).
• The reality is they were simply tourists of torture, tragedy, and torment, walking through the other side of Gaza Strip devastation without regard for humanity, covered with a temporary state of convenient dismissal of the responsibility that comes with claiming Indigenous representation.
• That surely is not the tikanga on any account.

Raewyn L. Kapa writes from the standpoint of legal research in public international law, international Indigenous law, Treaty of Waitangi, Ngā Tikanga Māori / Māori Customary Law. Her research includes analysis of the International Court of Justice’s genocide findings, the legal status of occupation under international humanitarian law, and the obligations of states under the UN Charter. This article is republished with the author’s permission.

The post Māori identity is not a political access pass: Why the recent delegation to Israel demands accountability appeared first on Café Pacific | David Robie.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/26/maori-identity-is-not-a-political-access-pass-why-the-recent-delegation-to-israel-demands-accountability/

RNZ Pacific reporters

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/26/stop-empty-promises-papua-new-guinea-solomon-islands-leaders-demand-climate-action/

By Tiana Haxton of RNZ Pacific

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/25/they-just-have-to-get-out-civilians-pay-the-price-for-west-papua-conflict/

Pacific Media Watch

With the US midterm elections just weeks away, US President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to put a positive spin on a war with Iran that shows no sign of letting up, reports the Al Jazeera media watch programme Listening Post.

Climbing fuel and grocery prices, the president’s provocative social media posts and the Pentagon’s combative relationship with the media are making that story harder to sell.

Contributors:
Laicie Heeley – Editor-in-chief, Inkstick
Mark Kimmitt – Former US Assistant Secretary of State
Negar Mortazavi – Host, The Iran Podcast
Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On The Line Media

On our radar:
Revelations from Israeli newspaper Haaretz about what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew before the October 7 attacks have ignited a firestorm in the country. Netanyahu calls the reporting fabricated and is threatening to sue. Ryan Kohls reports.

How covid coverage broke trust in the US:
Six years on from the start of the pandemic, covid-19 is back in the headlines — and so are questions about how newsrooms covered it.

The Listening Post’s Nicholas Muirhead on how the pandemic broke trust in the US.

Featuring:
Amesh Adalja – Infectious Disease Physician, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
Frances E Lee – Co-author, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
Jeanne Lenzer – Investigative Medical Journalist

The Listening Post, 13 September 2026.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/25/selling-the-iran-war-purges-polygraphs-and-propaganda/

COMMENTARY: By Brett Wilkins

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit back after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the UN General Assembly podium to accuse him of supporting Hamas and making Jewish New Yorkers “feel unsafe” — remarks that came after delegates from scores of countries walked out of the chamber to protest against the far-right fugitive’s presence.

Refuting allegations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — where Israeli forces have killed more than 75,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,500 children, since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023 — Netanyahu said: “To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you.”

“Mr Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” the prime minister claimed. “It’s no wonder … You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.

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“And that’s exactly what Mr Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.”

Mamdani issued a statement later saying: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide of Palestinians.

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are accused of murder and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, but Israel assassinated them.

Third country arrest
While neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute governing the ICC, the treaty states that people from nonsignatory states who commit alleged crimes in states that are party to the treaty — as Palestine is — can be arrested in third countries and subsequently tried by the court.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Abbas and Netanyahu address the UNGA     Video: Al Jazeera

Mamdani has said that Netanyahu should be arrested and brought before the Hague-based tribunal for trial, but that he lacks the legal authority to apprehend the prime minister in New York.

The International Court of Justice — also located in The Hague, Netherlands — is currently processing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

The case is based on what the ICJ called the “plausibility” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The court has issued a series of provisional orders for Israel to adhere to the Genocide Convention — orders that critics say Israel has simply ignored.

Last year, an independent UN commission of inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a conclusion shared by the International Association of Genocide Scholars and other experts, including many Israeli and diaspora Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others.

As Netanyahu prepared to deliver his UN speech on Thursday, delegates from a reported 77 nations walked out of the chamber in protest.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall — please do so now,” the prime minister said. “Thank you very much.”

While some observers applauded the display of solidarity with Palestinians, others expressed disgust that Netanyahu was allowed to address the world body and that he has not yet been brought to justice.

War criminal Netanyahu has completely isolated Israel at the world stage – When he came today to UN General Assembly podium to speak, there was mass walkout and he was booed. Shamelessly, he called them ‘moral cowards’! pic.twitter.com/w5Oo78SeJv

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) September 24, 2026

UN failure to stop genocidal war
“The head of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime, a fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, was allowed to enter the US and to address the UNGA today, without arrest,” said Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in protest of what he described as the world body’s failure to stop Israel’s genocidal war.

“Netanyahu insulted delegations, openly celebrated the regime’s many crimes, bragged about its terrorist pager attacks on Lebanon, repeated the regime’s debunked genocide propaganda, defended the illegal occupation of Palestine and Syria, lied incessantly, called violent, racist, illegal Zionist settlers ‘peaceful’ and ‘honorable people,’ labeled human rights defenders as ‘antisemites,’ even arrogantly attacked American citizens and officials for speaking out against the regime’s crimes,” he continued.

“This violent psychopath cannot hide behind [US President Donald] Trump’s skirts forever,” Mokhiber added. “He (and his collaborators) must be captured and brought to justice. And the UN must finally act to isolate the regime and hold it accountable. ”

Referring to Netanyahu’s address and Trump’s threat on Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran during his rambling, lie-laden General Assembly speech, University of Colorado Law School associate professor Maryam Jamshidi said on social media, “Between Trump threatening Iran w/annihilation and Netanyahu bragging about Israel’s pager attacks, the UN podium has become a venue for promoting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Meanwhile, people took to the streets of New York to protest Netanyahu’s presence in the city, US complicity in Israeli crimes, and to show solidarity with Palestinians.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside UN headquarters in Turtle Bay for a sit-in demonstration led by Jewish Voice for Peace. Demonstrators blocked roads while chanting slogans including, “Netanyahu you can’t hide, you are wanted for genocide!”

As Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday, more than 100 demonstrators were arrested.

Among those reportedly arrested were progressive congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier; actors Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, and Cynthia Nixon; New York state Assemblymember Emily Gallagher (D-50); Democratic New York City Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés; former Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; and Palestinian American political activist Linda Sarsour.

“I will never, ever be silent,” Sarsour said on Facebook. “I will never just accept the world as it is. I want history to record for future generations of Palestinians that we fought. At every turn. In every way. When it was easy and when it was hard.”

“I want Palestinian girls in Gaza to see me in my hijab and my unapologetic Palestinian blood fighting for them to live FREE,” she added. “This is bigger than all of us. Netanyahu is a war criminal and belongs in The Hague, not the United Nations.”

Netanyahu faces a general election in Israel on October 27.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished from Common Dreams on a Creative Commons licence.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/25/baseless-lies-meant-to-sanitise-his-genocide-mayor-mamdani-hits-back-after-netanyahus-attacks-during-un-speech/