Croz Walsh's Blog -- New Zealand and Fiji: How Much Fairer They Could Be

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Ambae is Vanuatu’s story, not just a global media backdrop By Pacific Media Watch -
October 5, 2017 0 9 SHARE

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POLITICS The end of ‘neither left nor right, but Māori’By Morgan Godfery | Contributing writer
September 30, 2017
Morgan Godfery looks back at the four term history of the parliamentary Māori party, 2005-2017. Te Ururoa Flavell, the former Minister for Māori Development, school principal, charity boxerand “Iron Māori”, is out of Parliament after twelve years representing Waiariki, a four-term run that saw him expand Whānau Ora – his party’s signature achievement – reform gambling laws, improve access to housing grants, and hand iwi and urban Māori the power to set the government’s direction on te reo Māori. “A gentle man who cries at happy news,” Flavell is vowing to stand down from his party’s co-leadership after a devastating election night where party supporters, pale and mute, watched Labour’s Tamati Coffey take Waiariki with a more than 1000-vote majority. “New Zealand has spoken,” party co-leader Marama Fox told The Hui on Sunday morning, her voice crackingas people shuffled past he…

Jeremy Corbyn has described the “chilling wreckage of Grenfell Tower” as a monument to a failed economic and housing system in the UK as he set out Labour plans for city-wide rent controls and a crackdown on gentrification projects. The Labour leader used his speech to his party’s first annual conference since stripping Theresa May of a parliamentary majority to deliver his long-held ideological vision for Britain, declaring the neoliberal economic model “forged by Margaret Thatcher many years ago” as broken. Corbyn said his views, once seen as on the fringes of the Labour party, now represented the centre ground, which he said had shifted from where “establishment pundits” claimed it to be. “This is the real centre of gravity of British politics. We are now the political mainstream,” he said, contrasting Labour’s enthusiasm with a Tory party he claimed was “bereft of ideas and energy”. Jeremy Corbyn's speech to Labour conference: key points Read more In a deliberate break from the…

This is an article I wrote 20 years ago that was intended for publication in The Fiji Times. The statistics are dated but the theme and possible solutions are as valid now as they were then. And they are just as relevant to New Zealand. Croz

(Unused article prepared for the Fiji Times, based around my presentation. Journalist attended instead, and wrote a very unbalanced article which caused a backlash from the Wesleyan church.)

Asking how many poor people there are in Fiji is like asking how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. If we accept that there are angels, any number could be the correct answer, but we would have no way of knowing if our guess was correct. Angels are not a daily-sighting in Fiji. Sadly, the same cannot be said for poverty.
The UNDP/Government of Fiji Poverty Report published in 1997 said ten percent of the population did not have enough money to meet basic food needs; 26 percent could not afford basic general needs; and a further 33 percent could easi…