Women stand up!

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Many women I know are livid that the NZ coalition government’s Pay Equity Amendment Bill was passed this week by Parliament.[i] This has brought back Fair Pay Agreement processes, as previously laid out in the Equal Pay Act, to a grinding halt. The outcome is the cancellation of 33 claims being currently negotiated, along with several tighter restrictions making it much harder to make such claims in future.

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War – what is it good for?

We cannot understand the waves and forms of Palestinian resistance unless we understand the inter-generational effects of the initial forced displacement of Palestinians and the obliteration of all vestiges of Palestinian occupation of the land followed by a rewriting of history through a Jewish supremacist and anti-Arab lens.

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On peeing, pronouns and politics

A recent debate on The Standard about trans rights touched on a range of  issues – dead naming, the use of preferred pronouns, the actual incidence of sex self-ID related harm to women since the passing of legislation, access to toilets, and so on. If this was a 1960s British comedy, it would be titled Carry On Up The Cul-de-sac.
The issue of female-only facilities such as public lavatories1 changing rooms, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons has to be placed in both an historical and a contemporary context.

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Feminism is for all women, not just the privileged few (NZ election) Pt 2

The NZ Green Party have some very good policies for women and low-income people, particularly ones that will help a fair number of women struggling to pay essential bills.  However, they have significant silences, confusions, and/or contradictions in their policies and plans that will have a negative impact on females.
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Feminism is for all women, not just the privileged few (NZ election) Pt 1

We are living through a time of turbulence, instability, and uncertainty. The decades long neoliberal dominance within Western-European patriarchal capitalism is under extreme pressure. The four biggest political parties in NZ have all been infected to a greater or lesser degree by neoliberalism, with National and the ACT parties being the most deeply contaminated.
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WLA submission to the Safer Online Practices and Media Platforms Consultation

This is the WLA submission to the NZ government, Safer Online Practices and Media Platforms Consultation. The government was asking for feedback on their proposal, which is to be made into a Bill in 2024. They are proposing to have a government appointed regulator to set codes of practice for social media and the NZ media. But, who will be watching the watchers?
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