Author: Pete

Almost every day it’s like “idiot government does idiot thing”, but this really takes the cake. The proposal for a four year term in New Zealand is a retrograde step that is not healthy for our democracy.

I was against this when Labour floated it and I’m against it now that National is advancing legislation for a referendum.

Efficiency shouldn’t be the primary motivator. After all, the most efficient government would be a dictatorship.

I don’t want my opportunities for democratic participation to be reduced. This proposal would do that. It is at its core anti-democratic.

We don’t have a system of checks and balances in place in New Zealand. There is no veto option for a head of state, there is no upper chamber, there is no supreme law the courts can apply to strike down unjust laws.

Parliament’s rule is absolute and it can already bypass normal processes under urgency to enact its programmes.

Elections every three years serve as a good safeguard against complacency and bad law in an otherwise fairly lax constitutional environment.

If there were other safeguards in place, I’d reconsider. But given how powerful Parliament is in New Zealand’s system I am strongly against this measure.

I’d like to take a moment to declare that I am a secular pluralist. Secularism – at least in my understanding of it – is the practice that excludes religious influence from civil administration. This is because there are so many diverging positions when it comes to religion that when a civil government imposes the precepts of one religion on the population as a whole it is oppressive to many within that society.

Pluralism is the practice that society accommodates a diversity of religious beliefs. In order for it to do so, religious adherents should not seek to force their beliefs and practices on others. While they can campaign, lobby and protest just as much as anyone else they must accept that their religion is only practiced through their personal conduct. Not through the intervention of the state or other civil powers on their behalf.

This brings us to Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church, elements of which over the weekend invaded a library, disrupted a drag-king event and are alleged to have carried out acts of assault.

Leave aside for the moment that it is an error to conflate drag performers with transsexuals. The Venn diagram does overlap, but it is not a perfect circle (see for example Dame Edna, Monty Python and The Rocky Horror Picture Show). But that’s beside the point. Tamaki and his followers have taken to performing a number of provocative and escalating acts against the LGBTQ+ community in New Zealand. Mountain Tui has a good rundown here.

Certain evangelical types like to revel in the false idea that they are persecuted. They point to the Sermon on the Mount:

(Matthew 5:11) Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of me.

But my source of condemnation is not due to their faith in Jesus. It is due to the betrayal of his teachings. If they have faith in Christ, they have an odd way of demonstrating it.

It’s time for the justice system to take off its kid gloves and protect the rainbow community from the brutal and cruel thuggery of Tamaki and his gang. They’re welcome to believe what they want to believe and protest what they want to protest, but intimidation and violence is where we as a civil society must draw the line.

After a stern show of resistance from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Donald Trump has caved – for a month – and won’t institute his proposed 25% tariff against Canadian and Mexican goods.

He is of course claiming victory, seizing on previously announced Canadian and Mexican border programmes as concessions. But I think we can expect some kind of volatility from month to month. And he also wants to target the EU, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Sooner or later he’ll want to target New Zealand.

It remains my intention to carry out a personal boycott of US goods and services over at least the rest of Trump’s term in office.

The Trump Administration has shut down USAID. It has withdrawn from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. It is engaging in mass-deportations. It has granted Elon Musk unfettered access to the US government’s payment system and personal data held by the US Treasury. It has taken down public information from the CDC and other scientific bureaux. And it has withdrawn support for gender-affirming care for trans youth.  I believe the US has strayed too far from democratic norms and has become an oligarchic state with fascist tendencies.

I’m not Canadian or Mexican, but I am at least one of those people who Trump holds in contempt – a non-American. Trump cannot be seen as a success. And I can’t support economic growth under his regime. The best thing I can do for Americans and anyone else suffering under him is accelerate his failure.

Of course there are limitations and I can’t promise perfection, but there are a number of easy wins I can happily achieve.

• Unsubscribe from the New York Times – I was only subscribed for Wordle and Connections on a $12 per annum deal, but I can live without a couple of puzzles.
• Unsubscribe from Prime Video – Bezos is going to take a big hit from me. He’s already aligned himself with Trump, so he has it coming. This is the only US streamer I currently pay for. I still have my DVD collection – it’s about 1,000 titles – and TVNZ+ is actually very good. I’ll do my best to avoid sailing the salty seas. I want to do this ethically.
• Block Amazon. Make greater use of the public library.
• Do not renew my Adobe subscription. Use RawTherapee instead.
• Don’t buy games through Steam, use GOG instead. I already cancelled Microsoft Gamepass some months ago.
• I don’t use Microsoft 365. My desktop PC has Office 21 and I’ve got Libre Office on my laptop (along with Office 2003 I installed for a lark a month ago). If I really need a modern iteration of Office, I’d buy Office 24 (a one-off payment), rather than subscribe to 365.
• Continue using an adblocker on YouTube.
• Social media: I already closed my Twitter account back in November. Facebook and Instagram are shuttered – I switched to a minimalist launcher on my phone so I don’t get any alerts from those services. I quit TikTok way back in February last year. I do enjoy using Bluesky, though and I’ll make an exception for it. But at any hint of enshittification and I’ll be back on Mastodon.

There’s probably more I can do, but these are the easy wins. In the offline world I need to educate myself on food brands and who owns what. But as I said, I can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and I have managed at least to outline hundreds of dollars worth of cuts that in my own small way will contribute to Trump’s failure. I’m just one person, though. I hope many others the world over are watching him and taking him into account when they make their decisions as consumers.

Donald Trump was sworn in as 47^th President of the United States today. A key ally of his, Elon Musk, delivered a speech in which he performed the Nazi salute twice.

Trump has pardoned the January 6^th insurrectionists. He has issued executive orders to outlaw gender-affirming references in the US government. He has declared an intention to impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada. He is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. And so many other disruptive things.

I can’t spend the next four years in a permanent state of outrage, and as a New Zealander I am shielded by some degree of distance. But this kind of shit spreads far and wide and with our right wing government we’ll see it percolate through more and more.

I cannot change or influence events in the US, except in terms of where I spend my money. Dialing back from Amazon would be a good start, I think.

The best way for New Zealanders to reject Trump is to reject those here who share his views. I won’t play my part as the triggered woke lib whining behind a keyboard as right wingers bait and troll the left. I’ve got more substantive mahi to do.

It’s no great piece of political analysis to say that for those of us on the Left, 2025 is shaping up to be a bad year. Donald Trump’s second term begins in a little over a week, governments are being shaken up in Europe and here in New Zealand we have entered the second year of the most right-wing government this country has seen since 1991.

It’s not a good time. But I do have some hope.

First here in New Zealand we see it in how opposition to David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill has coalesced. Not only in terms of last year’s hīkoi, but also in how many submissions have been made on the bill. Over 300,000. And from my impression of social media, most objectors are not making duplicate submissions, which is indicative of the intensity of opposition. It is not mere slacktivisim where submitters simply fill out a mass-submission.

Another point of protest emerged last year over the government’s proposed cuts to the Dunedin Hospital build, with 35,000 angry southerners – myself amongst them – marching against the government’s broken promise.

My point is citizens opposed to this government are engaged, active and organised. Which I think is rare for a first term government, at least in my experience.

Turning to the broader international context, there really is very little that someone like me in New Zealand could do to impact the American government. Online life in the English speaking world is heavily weighed towards American defaultism. So we tend to pick up American attitudes and points of view even just by osmosis.

The techbro culture that has arisen in support of Trump makes easy targets for me to express my disapproval. And at the same time it offers a way to protect myself from the pessimistic doom-scrolling that I engaged in from 2016-2021. I already ejected Twitter/X from my digital ecosystem some time ago. My final post was in mid 2023 and I finally deleted my account in November.

Facebook is a tougher nut to crack – mainly due to Messenger – but I have deactivated Instagram, cancelled push notifications and removed the Facebook app from my homescreen on my phone.

Amazon is probably the hardest of all, and a complete boycott is likely impossible – consider how many sites use AWS, for example – but I can at least dial back on what I spend there. Instead of making number go up, do my bit to make number go down.

On the whole, though, I intend to stick to my knitting and worry about what I can change here in New Zealand. I’ve always resisted the idea that New Zealanders are insular hobbits with a Shire mentality, but I think it’s time to embrace it.