Aotearoa New Zealand’s opposition – and poll leader — National Party’s three biggest donors have a combined net worth of $15 billion.

The bottom 50 percent of NZ has $23 billion.

The top 5 percent of New Zealanders own roughly 50 percent of New Zealand’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of New Zealanders own a miserable 5 percent.

IRD proved NZ capitalism is rigged for the rich and business columnist Bernard Hickey calculates that if we had had a basic capital gains tax in place over the last decade, we would have earned $200 billion in tax revenue.

$200 billion would have ensured our public infrastructure wouldn’t be in such an underfunded ruin right now.

There are 14 billionaires in NZ plus 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with more than $50 million each. Why not start start with them, then move onto the banks, then the property speculators, the climate change polluters and big industry to pay their fair share before making workers pay more tax.

Culture War fights make all the noise, but poor people aren’t sitting around the kitchen table cancelling people for misusing pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bills.

‘Bread and butter’ pressures
“Bread and butter” cost of living pressures are what the New Zealand electorate wants answers to, and that’s where the Left need to step up and push universal policy that lifts that cost from the people.

The Commerce Commission is clear that the supermarket duopoly should be broken up and the state should step in and provide that competition.

We need year long maternity leave.

We need a nationalised Early Education sector that provides free childcare for children under 5.

We need free public transport.

We need free breakfast and lunches in schools.

We need free dental care.

We need 50,000 new state houses.

We need more hospitals, more schools and a teacher’s aid in every class room.

We need climate change adaptation and a resilient rebuilt infrastructure.

Funded by taxing the rich
We need all these things and we need to fund them by taxing the rich who the IRD clearly showed were rigging the system.

That requires political courage but there is none.

No one is willing to fight for tomorrow, they merely want to pacify the present!

Just promise me one thing.

Don’t. You. Dare. Vote. Early. In. 2023!

I can not urge this enough from you all comrades.

Don’t vote early in the 2023 election.

Secrecy of the ballot box
I’m not going to tell you who to vote for because this is a liberal progressive democracy and your right to chose who you want in the secrecy of that ballot box is a sacred privilege and is your right as a citizen.

But what I will beg of you, is to not vote early in 2023.

Comrades, on our horizon is inflation in double figures, geopolitical shockwave after geopolitical shockwave and a global economic depression exacerbated by catastrophic climate change.

As a nation we will face some of the toughest choices and decision making outside of war time and that means you must press those bloody MPs to respond to real policy solutions and make them promise to change things and you can’t do that if you hand your vote over before the election.

Keep demanding concessions and promises for your vote right up until midnight before election day AND THEN cast your vote!

We only get 1 chance every 3 years to hold these politicians’ feet to the fire and they only care before the election, so force real concessions out of them before you elect them.

This election is going to be too important to just let politicians waltz into Parliament without being blistered by our scrutiny.

Demand real concessions from them and THEN vote on Election Day, October 14.

If the Left votes — the Left wins!

Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The government of Tokelau has declared the results of the 2023 national general elections.

Voting took place on all three atolls, and also in the Apia office of the administration on January 23.

The final results for the election of 20 members of the General Fono, declared under 16.1 (b) of the Tokelau National Election Rules of 2022, are as follows:

Vote counting was challenging due to poor internet connectivity. The phone tower has also been playing up.

A government spokesperson said the election team was crowding around printers late on Thursday night waiting for votes to come through one by one.

RNZ Pacific has been told there was a “real buzz about Nukunonu”, the largest atoll in Tokelau on national election day – 30 people voted from home, including elderly.

Tokelau is a realm nation of New Zealand and also has an Administrator but the New Zealand government says it respects the traditional governance structures that are “integral to community life in Tokelau”.

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

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Papua New Guineans, your future is in your hands, vote wisely.

As the campaign trail wound up its last hours at the weekend, voters were being urged to keep their future in mind when choosing and voting this election starting tomorrow.

Alvin Gia Huk, an independent candidate, and runner up in the 2017 National General Elections for the Mendi-Munihu Open seat in Southern Highlands Province is encouraging voters to not repeat the mistakes made in the past when electing people who didn’t have their interest at heart.

He said voters needed to make wiser decisions for long term benefits for their children, the district and the province as a whole.

“Don’t follow money and materials today and spend the next five years being neglected of your basic right to services. You have the power to change your course in the next week, to receive what is rightfully yours and have a better quality of life,” he said.

Among other policies, he said a change in voters’ attitudes was what he had been promoting and encouraging throughout the campaign period.

“I have been educating voters since last elections to not vote with a cargo cult mentality or based on family lines, tribal ties and vote for quality”.

He admits it has been a challenge breaking the cargo cult mentality but he sees some progress from the previous elections.

Voters have become more educated and aware of what they deserve and what qualities they want in their leaders.

The PNG elections run from July 4 to 22.

Asia Pacific Report’s coverage of the PNG general election is being boosted by partnerships with media groups such as the independent Inside PNG, The National, PNG Post-Courier and RNZ Pacific. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Sadly, the Philippines has sold its soul. Thirty six years ago a People Power revolution ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos after two decades of harsh authoritarian rule.

Yesterday, in spite of a rousing and inspiring Pink Power would-be revolution, the dictator’s only son and namesake “Bongbong” Marcos Jr seems headed to be elected 17th president of the Philippines.

And protests have broken out after the provisional tallies that give Marcos a “lead of millions” with more than 97 percent of the cote counted. Official results could still take some days.

Along with Bongbong, his running mate Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, daughter of strongman Rodrigo Duterte, president for the past six years and who has been accused of human rights violations over the killings of thousands of alleged suspects in a so-called “war in drugs”, is decisively in the lead as vice-president.

On the eve of the republic’s most “consequential election” in decades, Filipina journalism professor Sheila Coronel, director of practice at the Columbia University’s Toni Stabile School of Investigative Journalism in New York, said the choice was really simple.

“The election is a battle between remembering and forgetting, a choice between the future and the past.”

Significantly more than half of the 67.5 million voters have apparently chosen to forget – including a generation that never experienced the brutal crackdowns under martial law in 1972-1981, and doesn’t want to know about it. Yet 70,000 people were jailed, 35,000 were tortured, 4000 were killed and free speech was gagged.

Duterte’s erosion of democracy
After six years of steady erosion of democracy under Duterte, is the country now about to face a fatal blow to accountability and transparency with a kleptomaniac family at the helm?

Dictator Marcos is believed to have accumulated $10 billion while in power and while Philippine authorities have only been able to recover about a third of this though ongoing lawsuits, the family refuses to pay a tax bill totalling $3.9 billion, including penalties.

In many countries the tax violations would have disqualified Marcos Jr from even standing for the presidency.

“A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran – but Marcos stole more and he stole better,” according to The Guardian’s Nick Davies.

“Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief.”

Tensions were running high outside the main office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Intramuros, Manila, today as protests erupted over the “unjust” election process and the expected return of the Marcoses to the Malacañang Palace.

The Comelec today affirmed its dismissal of two sets of cases – or a total four appeals – seeking to bar Marcos Jr. from the elections due to his tax conviction in the 1990s.

Ruling after the elections
The ruling was released a day after the elections, when the partial, unofficial tally showed that the former senator was on the brink of winning the presidency.

It wasn’t entirely surprising, as five of the seven-member Comelec bench had earlier voted in favour of the former senator in at least one of the four anti-Marcos petitions that had already been dismissed

One further appeal can be made before the Supreme Court.

As mounting allegations of election fraud and cheating greeted the provisional ballot trends, groups began filing formal complaints.

One watchdog, Bakla Bantay Boto, said it had received “numerous reports of illegal campaigning, militarised polling precincts, and an absurd [number] of broken vote counting machines (VCMs)” throughout the Philippines.

STATEMENT ON THE MAY 9, 2022 PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS – Fraud, violence, electioneering, and unreliable voting machines have stained the 2022 Philippine national elections#BaklaBantayBoto2022 pic.twitter.com/vWqhmVgwii

— Bakla Bantay Boto (@baklabantayboto) May 9, 2022

“Intensified violence has also marked today’s election. Poll watchers have been tragically killed in Buluan, Maguindanao and Binidayan, Lanao del Sur, while an explosive was detonated in a voting centre in Kobacan, Cotabato.

“The violent red-tagging of several candidates and party lists [was] also in full force, with text blasts to constituents and posters posted within polling precincts, insinuating that they are linked to the CPP-NPA-NDFP [Communist Party of the Philippines and allies].”

Social media disinformation
Explaining the polling in the face of a massive social media disinformation campaign by Marcos supporters, Rappler’s livestream anchor Bea Cupin noted how the Duterte administration had denied a renewal of a franchise for ABS-CBN, the largest and most influential free-to-air television station two years ago.

This act denied millions of Filipinos access to accurate and unbiased news coverage. Rappler itself and its Nobel Peace laureate chief executive Maria Ressa, were also under constant legal attack and the target of social media trolls.

A BBC report interviewed a typical professional troll who managed hundreds of Facebook pages and fake profiles for his clients, saying his customers for fake stories “included governors, congressmen and mayors.”

Meta — owners of Facebook — reported that its Philippines subsidiary had removed many networks that were attempting to manipulate people and media. They were believed to have included a cluster of more than 400 accounts, pages, and groups that were violated the platform’s codes of conduct.

Pink Power candidate human rights lawyer Leni Robredo, who defeated Marcos for the vice-presidency in the last election in 2016, and who was a target for many of the troll attacks, said: “Lies repeated again and again become the truth.”

Academics have warned the risks that the country is taking in not heeding warnings of the past about the Marcos family. An associate professor of the University of Philippines, Dr Aries Arugay, reflects: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”

As Winston Churchill famously said in 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Prime Minister James Marape has called on Papua New Guineans not to vote for “money, relatives or cargo” in the country’s 2022 general election that kicks off later this month.

He made the call yesterday on the third anniversary of his resignation from the O’Neill-led government on 11 April 2019 due to “sheer frustration” at the way the country was being run.

Marape on that day in 2019 had resigned in protest at the way he said at the time Peter O’Neill was running down the country.

Reflecting on that occasion, Marape urged the people “to exercise your right to vote wisely in the 2022 elections”.

“Don’t vote for money, don’t vote for relatives, and don’t vote for people or parties who have sold your birthright,” he said.

“If I have not done well for this country, if I am not the leader of your choice, then vote in someone else who can do better.

“Pangu Pati, and the coalition that I have worked with over the last three years –– including National Alliance, United Resources Party, United Labour Party, People’s Party, Liberal Party, National Party, People’s Movement for Change, Allegiance Party, Triumph Heritage Empowerment Party, One Nation Party, People’s Labour Party, Social Democratic Party and others –– have tried our best to stabilise our economy and restore credibility for this country.”

‘Steadied the ship’
He said so much had happened since that fateful day on 11 April 2019.

“I never knew I was going to be Prime Minister. I resigned [as] one man because I was fed up with the way Peter O’Neill was running down our country.

“Yes, he was doing some good, but the greater part of him was for personal gratification and gain and I could not knowingly remain in his government.”

Marape said the country had been through a lot of political turbulence since he took office, the most-infamous being the failed no-confidence vote of November 2020, spearheaded by O’Neill.

“There were political challenges right up until the 18-month grace period of my election as prime minister was up in November 2020,” he said.

“There were economic challenges, there were covid-19 challenges, but we have prevailed through the Grace of God.

“We have steadied the ship.”

The writs are issued on April 28, and voting is due June 11-24.

Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

There has been little real debate on an important Government announcement made last weekend. Justice Minister Andrew Little said the Government had decided to give the right to vote back to prisoners with sentences of three years or less.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that there was no great reaction. After all, the change affects so few prisoners – about 1900 – and is likely to have no real electoral impact. And, in fact, the Government was probably keen for as little publicity as possible, given their fear of any negativity from conservative voters about being too liberal on crime.

For the details, see Isaac Davison’s Prisoners serving sentences of less than three years to vote at 2020 election. And for a background to the issue, see my earlier roundups: Will the Government reverse the “fascist” ban on prisoner voting?, and Suffrage reality check – prisoners still can’t vote.

There was certainly something for progressives to celebrate in the Government’s decision. This announcement was the culmination of a long campaign by justice reformers, including some maverick prisoners – see Andrew Geddis’ The reversal of the prisoner voting ban is a big move, and especially sweet for two men.

The National Party sought to create a backlash over the issue, with leader Simon Bridges calling the decision “soft on crime” and promising to reverse the decision once in government. But, despite the rhetoric, there isn’t actually a huge difference between the major parties on the issue, as Labour has decided to retain the voting ban on prisoners with longer sentences. Essentially, they’ve agreed to revert to the pre-2010 situation in which only those prisoners with sentences of more than three years are prohibited from voting.

I’ve written about this today in the Guardian, arguing that this amounts to a half-measure, and is the bare minimum the Government could get away with given recent declarations against the ban from the Waitangi Tribunal and the Supreme Court – see: Ardern’s prisoner voting compromise exposes the cynicism of NZ politics.

I argue this compromise “solution” falls short of what progressives might really want: “Progressives – and possibly even most Labour MPs – support all prisoners being given the right to vote. But the government fears this would be too unpopular and so has compromised, hoping to appease progressive voters with an improvement, but not scare conservatives by retaining the voting ban for the worst criminals.”

Essentially the Labour-led Government is allowing the National Party to set the agenda on law and order issues, and it “doesn’t augur well for next year’s election campaign, which could descend into an auction of awfulness on crime and punishment.”

Other commentators have also lamented that the Government hasn’t been braver. Blogger No Right Turn says the decision “raises a number of questions. Most obviously, why they’re not going the whole way, and restoring voting rights to every prisoner, rather than just going back to the status quo ante? Because the arguments for short-term prisoners being able to vote apply just as powerfully to long-term ones. But Labour is the government of half-measures, so I guess that’s all we’ll ever get from them” – see: Erasing the infamy.

Former Alliance MP Liz Gordon has challenged the decision to re-introduce the three-year prison sentence as the threshold for voting rights: “While National can be criticised for its essentially nonsensical position, the Labour coalition really are not much better.  What the government has done is applied exactly the same test as National but simply drawn the line higher. Those people sentenced to more than three years in prison are beyond the pale. They should not be allowed to vote. Really? Why three years, and not two or four?” – see: Votes for all.

Gordon ponders whether Labour’s argument for excluding some prisoners from voting amounts to some sort of slippery slope: “Are ‘prisoners’ the only category we may want to exclude? How about ‘white supremacists’, for example, or men who watch child pornography. That’s the tricky thing about values – they are a slippery slope down which the principles of a universal suffrage can quickly disappear.”

Similarly, Gordon Campbell puts the case against the three-year “arbitrary” threshold for human rights: “Usually when the state imposes subsequent restrictions on rights in the wake of criminal sentences being served – eg on the future ability to own weapons, or to drive vehicles – there is a direct connection between the original offence and this subsequent restriction of rights. Cancelling the right to vote though, bears no such connection to the original offence. It seems utterly gratuitous” – see: On restoring prisoners’ right to vote.

Of course, it was a difficult decision for Labour. Writing prior to the announcement, the Herald’s Audrey Young explains that the party “has to balance its reforming instincts with the electoral reality” – see: Labour squeezed from all sides on prisoner voting ban, no one happy (paywalled).

A moderate path had to be found, because “the Labour Party again finds itself in a halfway house pleasing no one between the ‘hard on crime’ coalition partner New Zealand First and the ‘soft on crime’ confidence and supply partner in the Greens.”

Elaborating on this, the Otago Daily Times pointed out earlier that liberalising too much would be seen as “soft on law and order” and would not be “a winning strategy” – see the editorial, Prisoners and the right to vote.

The newspaper endorsed a compromise solution: “The middle road, that established before 2010, might not satisfy the purists on each end of the debate. But sometimes such approaches are pragmatic and as just as possible.”

The Herald appeared to take a similar position, believing that a middle road should be taken by reverting to the 2010 status quo – see the editorial, Voting ban on prisoners is all stick, no carrot (paywalled).

But is the issue even that important? Not according to talkback radio host Andrew Dickens, who says Anger over prisoner voting rights is a lot of hot air. He says both sides of the debate are engaging in “hollow virtue signalling” over something of little consequence – especially as few prisoners are likely to take up the opportunity to vote anyhow.

Similarly, columnist Martin van Beynen thinks it’s a non-issue: “The kerfuffle reflects a trend where a minor issue distracts from more important problems much more deserving of attention. Those relatively trivial issues then become like a scout badge for the bleeding heart left, another box to tick to prove their empathy with the oppressed” – see: Prisoners have forfeited the right to vote.

Van Beynen also succinctly explains why prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “Some have asked what purpose the disfranchisement serves. Pretty obvious, I would have thought. A prison sentence is essentially treating adults like naughty and sometimes dangerous toddlers.”

Liam Hehir gives a more theoretical explanation: “The basic premise of the social contract is that people exchange total freedom of action for the protection the rules the legitimate government. If you are found unwilling to adhere to those rules, being stripped of your right to influence them for the period of your ostracisation. After all, what is prison but a period of suspended freedom? When the prisoner is restored to the community, he or she is then, of course, permitted to participate in the act of governing once more. The return full democratic and civil rights is mark of the former prisoner’s restoration to society” – see: Prisoner voting ban: Not required; not not required.

But what does the public think about the issue? According to a recent Colmar Brunton survey, there’s a majority in favour of liberalisation: “The poll found 26 per cent of people believed all prisoners should vote and 28 per cent wanted just prisoners serving sentences with three years or less to be able to vote – pulling total support for sentences three years or less to 53 per cent. Forty-four per cent were against any prisoner voting” – see 1News’ Pressure to reinstate prisoner voting rights grows as 1News poll reveals over 50 per cent public backing.

What do the prisoners think? According to one report, there is a desire to participate – see Denise Piper’s Prisoners want to vote in council elections, general election.

One prisoner is quoted, making the case against the prisoner voting ban: “I’ve voted in every other election prior to coming to jail and I had hoped that my human rights would have been upheld… It raises the concern that if they’re willing to overlook our human rights, who’s next? People in the community – the disabled, mental health facilities – who else is at risk of losing their vote?”

Finally, with the general political climate on crime and punishment heating up, it’s worth looking at satire on the issue – see my blog post, Cartoons about the politics of law and order in NZ.