New Zealand is failing its responsibilities towards the Palestinian people; a people who are dying from the actions of Israel.

Its responsibilities to hold Israel to account are laid out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. States are obliged to prevent and punish the commission of genocide.

This does not require that genocide actually occurs, the obligation is to act to prevent genocide. It is a prior obligation designed to ensure that genocide never exists.

• READ MORE: ‘Serious questions to answer’ – Labour slams Luxon over Israel’s Pacific Islands Forum move
• Gaza mass killing documentary a warning of global dystopian future — David Robie
• Other Gaza genocide reports

New Zealand’s lack of support for South Africa’s petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention and its unwillingness to mirror the sanctions imposed on Russia following it’s invasion of Ukraine, are two examples of inaction.

New Zealand’s passivity reflects other influences, particularly those of the US.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters says as much in his recent speech to the NZ Institute of International Affairs: “An independent foreign policy can never be unidirectional. The left and a large section of the media, they define us acting independently only when we are disagreeing with the Americans.’’

New Zealand, and the US, unlike the UK, Canada and Australia, have not formally recognised the independent and sovereign State of Palestine. Peters curiously argues this reflects an expression of New Zealand’s independence, asserting this doesn’t foreclose alignments with countries such as the US.

Unquestioned alignment with US
New Zealand’s unquestioned alignment with the US is occurring in spite of US agreement to provide a $2.8 billion arms package to Israel.

A movie, now showing in New Zealand, American Doctor adds another dimension to the cruelty occurring in Gaza. It focuses on the work of three American doctors — Perlmutter (Jewish); Thaer Ahmad (Muslim of Palestinian descent); and Feroze Sidhwa (son of Zoroastrian parents.)

American Doctor – a new film.          Video: Democracy Now!

It is harrowing but essential viewing and brings an immediacy to the situation.

The suffering Perlmutter and his colleagues have seen in Gaza hospitals since Israel launched its retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas attack forms the core of the movie. The movie begins with the shredded bodies of tiny children lying on a medical bench – the result of US-made bombs employed by the IDF in Gaza.

The movie documents images of the Israeli military deliberately targeting civilians, hospitals, and hospital staff.

Dr Sidhwa comments:  “People feel like they have to have a PhD in this topic to understand it, or to discuss it sensibly. The question isn’t how well you know Arab-Israeli history.

“The question is: Do you or do you not support the murder of children? Do you or do you not support the torture of physicians? Do you or do you not support the bombing of hospitals?’’

Puzzling NZ not influenced by UK
It is puzzling that New Zealand has not been influenced by one of its closest allies, the UK, when its Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband, says: “The Palestinian people’s suffering is a stain on the conscience of the world. We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank.

“We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.’’

Miliband accepts that the UK has a responsibility to do everything to end the occupation. Hence its decision to ban trade with all illegal settlements.

Such moves by the UK represent a sea change in the struggle to end Israel’s occupation and its programme of annexation of Palestinian land. New Zealand must be part of this change.

So what would a principled New Zealand foreign policy look like on Palestine?

It needs to be put on a firm foundation of the rule of law — stand with South Africa in its case against Israel at the ICJ, support the equal rights of Palestinians to self-determination with statehood recognition being a small step in this direction.

Impose sanctions against the State of Israel (not just against the illegal settler colonial settlements.) Scrutinise Israeli passport carrying arrivals into New Zealand to ensure they have not been part of the IDF acts in Gaza and the the West Bank.

Foreign policy isn’t something New Zealand voters prioritise.

Shameful NZ record on Gaza
New Zealand’s shameful record on Gaza, however, should be top of mind going into the election.

While the government has failed in its response to the horror of Gaza, undermining our standing in the international community, three political parties — Greens, Labour, and Te Pāti Māori — are articulating an approach to Palestine grounded in a morally defensible foreign policy.

All support statehood recognition of Palestine, the imposition of sanctions on Israel and joining South Africa at the ICJ. Labour will require the NZ Superfund and ACC to divest from holdings in companies on the UN list of companies operating in the Occupied Territories.

Whatever shape the next government takes it must shift its approach to one which upholds international law and supports the people of Palestine as their survival in their homeland is in peril.

New Zealanders and our political parties must act and be part of the global momentum to end the brutality in Gaza, to reverse the illegal occupation of the West Bank, support Palestinian self-determination and hold Israel to account.

To do otherwise represents a moral failure as citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand and it will severely damage our reputation among many of our traditional allies, trading partners, and the international community.

John Hobbs is a doctoral student at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

A leading Palestine advocacy group in New Zealand has given the government a “please explain” message after news reports that the Pacific islands Forum (PIF), the region’s main political body, have admitted Israel as a sectoral partner.

According to 1News, the decision was made under a new two-tier partnership model, with Israel engaging at ministerial rather than leaders’ level.

The Forum Secretariat had not publicly announced the decision when the report was published.

• READ MORE: ‘Serious questions to answer’ – Labour slams Luxon over Israel’s Pacific Islands Forum move
• Israel approved as second-tier partner in Pacific Islands Forum
• Israel joins Pacific Islands Forum as development partner
• Other Israel and the Pacific reports

New Zealand, along with Australia, is one of 18 members of the Forum and will host next year’s Leaders’ Summit.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Tel Aviv is widely condemned for its genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza with at least 75,000 people killed.

Both Netanyahu and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon face elections within the next few weeks.

Four questions
Palestine Forum chair of New Zealand Maher Nazzal has called on Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters to answer four questions:

• What position did New Zealand take on Israel’s application?;
• What advice did the Government receive on the diplomatic, legal and human rights implications?;
• Did New Zealand raise Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories during its consideration?; and
• What safeguards will ensure the partnership does not undermine the Forum’s commitments to human rights, peace and self-determination?

“These are reasonable questions, and New Zealanders are entitled to clear, public answers,” Nazzal said.

“Cooperation cannot replace accountability.”

Israel has signalled interest in cooperating with Pacific states on water, agriculture, climate adaptation and innovation.

“These matter to Pacific communities. But technical cooperation must not shield any state from scrutiny under international law,” Nazzal said.

‘Consistent principles’
“PFNZ respects the sovereign right of Pacific nations to make their own diplomatic decisions. Our concern is not with the people of Israel, or with cooperation that genuinely benefits the Pacific.

“It is with consistent principles and meaningful accountability, whichever state is involved.”

Nazzal said Pacific peoples understood what land, identity and self-determination meant. That was why the Palestinian experience of displacement and occupation resonated across the region.

“PFNZ urges the government to show that its commitment to a rules-based order applies consistently, and encourages Pacific civil society and communities across Aotearoa to engage in informed discussion,” he said.

“The question is not only who may join a regional forum. It is whether the principles that guide that forum are upheld consistently.”

INVESTIGATION: By Wendy Bacon

Australia’s Commonwealth and NSW governments are supporting a national local government conference organised by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), whose Israel-based CEO was head of the IDF’s social media unit.

The IDF is widely accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by international bodies such as the United Nations, human rights organisations, and legal investigators.

The key goal of CAM, which operates in 40 countries, is to enforce the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism across all fields and levels of government;

a definition which restricts criticism of Israel.

• READ MORE: Other Wendy Bacon reports
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

CAM’s global headquarters are in Kansas, with CEO Sacha Roytman running the show from Tel Aviv. Chairman of its board of advisors, Natan Sharansky, was Deputy Prime Minister of Israel.

In a submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Roytman accused this publication of attacks on the CAM Summit and its organisers, among other unsubstantiated claims and imputations of antisemitism.

The submission went on to claim that “the publications that attacked the event” did not contact CAM beforehand.

This is false. In line with standard journalistic procedure, Michael West Media tried to contact CAM on multiple occasions and sent questions prior to publication of the story to its chief executive, Sacha Roytman, which received no response. Here are the questions:

MWM also tried to contact CAM organiser Justine Williams by LinkedIn and another organiser by phone on more than one occasion.

Further, we also endeavoured to contact chairman of the board of advisers, David Gonski, who is co-chairing this year’s conference. Having been directed to UNSW Media for a response, we sent questions to UNSW Media and UNSW Media did not respond.

The lead author of CAM’s submission to the Royal Commission is Sacha Roytman — a Belgian communications expert who made Aliyah to Israel in 2004.

The second author is Israeli Yigal Nissel, who is currently CAM’s executive director in Australia. In 2015, he was sent to Australia as an”’emissary” for the Jewish National Fund (JNF Australia). He returned to Israel and has been working for the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Antisemitism’s Mosaic Project until he returned to Australia to work for CAM.

Planning for the last Australian CAM conference became public in January 2025 when the then Deputy CEO of CAM, Yigal Nissel, published a story, “From Paradise to Peril,” in the Jerusalem Post, stating,

“Thousands of [Australian] extremists, spanning the radical left, the far right, and parts of the Muslim community, seized on the conflict in the Middle East as a pretext to unleash their latent antisemitism.”

As reported here last year, Nissel, who was based in Israel, announced that a CAM conference of hundreds of mayors would address the problem. Previously, Nissel was the Israeli “emissary” to the Australian branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

Envoy Jillian Segal to co-host
The conference will kick off with messages of support from the Commonwealth and NSW governments. The first speaker is Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australia Jewry (ECAJ), who labelled thousands of Australians who marched for Palestine last weekend as “obsessive, extreme and hateful”.

The conference follows the initial CAM Local Mayors’ Summit held on the Gold Coast last September. This year’s event will be held in Sydney on November 26 and 27 at a location that has not been publicised.

It will be co-hosted by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal and delivered in partnership with Waverley Council.

This week Segal addressed a meeting of the global network of Special Envoys supported by the World Jewish Congress calling for the enforcement of her National Plan at an international legal. CAM is a “trusted US State Department partner” within the Special Envoy network.

Pro-Israel conference sponsors include ECAJ, the Dor Foundation and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, which last week received a grant of $100,000 from the NSW government to contribute to the conference.

Sheina Gutnick, whose father died in the Bondi massacre, was appointed CAM’s public affairs officer in March and since then has been the public face of CAM. She told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that she has been the victim of many antisemitic attacks since then.

Labor backing council campaign
Recently, she has been collecting supportive videos from councillors and MPs, including the federal Minister for Local Government Kirsty McBain, who urged CAM to “take back Bondi”. McBain is not attending the conference.

Two Labor mayors, the Inner West’s Darcy Byrne and Bayside’s Christina Curry, are speaking at the conference. Lord Mayor Clover Moore will not attend, which is scarcely surprising given that CAM organised a rally at which Moore was attacked as a terrorist sympathiser because she joined last year’s March for Humanity.

The City of Sydney told MWM that the Labor Deputy Mayor Ollie Arkins will attend. While it presents a bipartisan image, CAM is being driven, both internationally and in Australia, by some influential conservative Zionists with a right wing agenda.

The players behind CAM
CAM Australia claims that its activities are funded by its Australian partners but MWM has been unable to find any business name, company or charity which accounts for its finances. There is a board of CAM Australia which is chaired by the hugely influential businessman David Gonski.

We sent questions to CAM including asking which entity the board governed but got no acknowledgement or reply.

Gonski is close to Jillian Segal and heads the Special Envoy’s Education task-force. He was recruited to CAM by Yigal Nissel who was moved to CAM from his job at the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Antisemitism and sent to Australia to help organise CAM’s first conference. He was dispatched back to Australia this year to head CAM in Australia.

Alex Polson is CAM’s senior advisor. He was originally a national officer of the Australasian Union of Jewish students. After that for eight years he was an advisor to Liberal ministers and MPs.

PRs, astroturfers and lobbyists
In early 2024, Polson established his boutique advisory and investment company DBK. DBK registered the name Better Councils and Polson was the key Liberal organiser of the major parties’ “Put the Greens Last” astroturfing campaign for “Better Councils”, and its successor for the Federal election “Better Australia”. (ALP member Sophie Calland was the Labor end of Better Australia.)

Bipartisan Better Australia raised at least $1.3 million (with no donors disclosed) much of which must have been spent on its slick electoral materials. For this, Better Australia partnered with strategic communications company Agenda C.

Agenda C was established by strategist Carrington Brigham in 2019. Earlier, Brigham developed his skills working under Yaron Finkelstein at Crosby Textor, known for its role in conservative electoral wins in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Finkelstein was a founding member of NSW Liberal Friends of Israel and played a powerful role in the Morrison government as the PM’s personal private secretary. After the Coalition defeat in 2024, Finkelstein worked for NSW Premier Dominic Perrotet and then founded Society Advisory Pty Ltd, which has been granted a $200,000 contract to advise Special Envoy Jillilan Segal until April 2027.

Trickery claims
Polson and Brigham worked together on the  Better Australia campaign. Finkelstein attended a meeting where campaign materials and a detailed campaign strategy were discussed with Labor party members of Better Australia. Everyone listed as present was a committed pro-Israel Zionist — but the campaign messages were

“Don’t be Tricked by Teals” and “Put the Greens Last”.

Agenda C claimed its campaign successfully defended four major seats and won back another four.

Brigham celebrated when his friend Tim Wilson narrowly defeated Teal Zoe Daniel in Goldstein after his campaign branded her as untrustworthy.

With the success of Better Australia behind them, Alex Polson and his DBK consultancy again linked up with Brigham and Agenda C for the CAM’s first conference. Polson and Brigham both signed the media release for the conference, along with a PR person in the US.

Agenda C aimed to deliver a “fully integrated, multi-channel strategy that positioned the summit as a credible, necessary platform for national leadership.”

Agenda C and CAM continue to work together, partnering on exclusive polling for The Sunday Telegraph about levels of fear in Australia, which was featured in a piece promoting the CAM conference.

CAM’s political agenda
The 2026 conference programme promotes CAM as being all about interfaith, inclusive and sharing cultural approaches. Everyone is expected to commit to goals in the final session.

There are no speakers from Jewish, Palestinian or other human rights organisations that favour broad anti-racism strategies and do not accept that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism (unlike CAM).

CAM’s actual political agenda is clarified in its submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which was published on the commission’s website in mid-September.

The CAM submission has four authors — the first is CEO Roytman and the second is CAM’s Australia CEO Nissel. Nowhere is it mentioned that Roytman is in Israel or that Nissel is on leave from an organisation that partners with the Israeli state. The other authors are Polson and Gutnick.

Despite their “grassroots” talk, CAM’s agenda is a top down one.

CAM wants the Royal Commission to recommend training police to enforce IHRA as it is doing in several US states where CAM trains police in “evolving forms of antisemitism”.

It favours passing laws which prohibit posting online material viewed by CAM as antisemitic. It wants a National Local Government Partnership Against Antisemitism and for Social Cohesion, delivered through Australian Local Government Association LGAs built on CAM’s Action Plan’s four pillars.

Even by Zionist standards, CAM’s version of IHRA is wide. A symbols document that they distributed to conference attendees last year is attached to their submission. It takes in everyday symbols like “keffiyehs” and “watermelons” and a broad range of pro-Palestinian slogans.

In the submission, CAM attacks union and activist campaigners who wrote letters (including one to Darcy Byrne signed by 700 people) urging a boycott of last year’s conference.

They accuse them of intimidation, harassment and antisemitism — for example by referring to a Zionist Lobby or Israeli propaganda. It asks the Royal Commission to conclude that the albeit peaceful action of critics demonstrates the need for a Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

Peace protesters ‘to blame’
CAM blames peaceful protesters for costing them thousands of dollars and forcing them to bring in a counter-terrorism squad.

One of these protesters was Jewish anti-Zionist Veronica Sherman. Sherman told MWM that she was one of about five people who “travelled independently from around Australia to protest outside the conference …

“nothing about us could be described as intimidating.”

“Even the cops told me how surprised they were at how few protestors there were because they had been told there would be hundreds if not thousands. Which explained why there was such a heavy police presence. Including helicopters,” she said.

Protesting is a “basic Australian and democratic right. It’s important that Australians know that the Zionists don’t represent all Jews which is one of the reasons I flew up to hold a banner peacefully outside the venue”.

Pressure and complaints
Recently Polson exercised his democratic right to write on behalf of CAM to the organiser of an event at the University of Tasmania at which Nick Hanna, co-founder of the Civil Defence Legal Centre and lawyer at Hanna Legal was delivering the keynote address.

CAM claimed that Hanna had produced an antisemitic video and asked the university to reconsider its invitation. The university rejected CAM’s argument and said the event would go ahead. Hobart Synagogue, which is supporting the CAM conference, then wrote a letter complaining that while Hanna sounds “calm and reasonable” he is “extremely dangerous” for its Jewish community.

In releasing his video about this behind the scenes pressure, Hanna says it showed that people can resist pressure and win.

Polson has high hopes for the November conference, hoping that it will “scale a national movement already underway”.

But MWM hears applications to attend the conference, which this year costs $600 without accommodation, are slow — and a new campaign to discourage councillors from attending has just begun.

Detailed questions for this story were put to CAM, Polson and Waverley Council but we received no reply or acknowledgement.

The New Zealand government must turn concern for besieged Palestinians into urgent, practical action, says a Palestinian advocacy group.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the government to take “immediate diplomatic and financial action” following the UN World Food Programme’s announcement that 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza will lose their monthly food assistance because of lack of funds.

“This is not an abstract budget issue. It is a decision that will affect the daily survival of hundreds of thousands of people who have endured years of war, displacement, destruction and deprivation,” said Palestine Forum chair Maher Nazzal in a statement.

• READ MORE: Gaza malnutrition and starvation at ‘catastrophic’ levels: Health Ministry
• Other Gaza genocide reports

He said the World Food Programme had warned that its assistance was being severely reduced just as winter approached.

“Food rations are being halved, cash assistance is being cut, and the provision of hot meals is being reduced,” he said.

Meanwhile, about 1.4 million people in Gaza continue to face crisis-level food insecurity or worse.

“No family should be left wondering where their next meal will come from because the international community has failed to fund humanitarian assistance,” Nazzal said.

What the Palestine Forum seeks
The Palestine Forum of New Zealand has called on the New Zealand government to:

• Provide urgent additional humanitarian funding for the World Food Programme and trusted humanitarian organisations delivering food, clean water, medical care and essential supplies to Palestinians in Gaza;
• Mobilise international support by working with like-minded governments to close the WFP’s funding gap and ensure that humanitarian assistance is sustained rather than progressively reduced;
• Use New Zealand’s diplomatic influence to press Israel to ensure the safe, rapid and sustained entry and distribution of sufficient humanitarian aid throughout Gaza, without arbitrary restrictions or obstruction;
• Demand full implementation of the ceasefire and protection of civilians, alongside compliance with international humanitarian law and the removal of barriers preventing Palestinians from accessing essential supplies; and
• Adopt a sustained humanitarian response, with transparent commitments and regular public reporting on New Zealand’s contributions and diplomatic efforts to address the crisis in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory.

“New Zealand cannot resolve this crisis alone, but it can make a meaningful contribution,” said Nazzal. “It can provide funding, mobilise other countries and use its diplomatic relationships to press for action.

He said the international community must not “allow a fragile improvement in food security to be reversed because humanitarian funding has fallen short”.

Humanitarian assistance needed to be based on need, “not donor fatigue or shifting political attention”.

“Palestinians in Gaza are not statistics. They are human beings, families, children and older people who deserve food, safety and dignity,” Nazzal said.

COMMENTARY: By Shalveen Chand

I have encountered two types of dictators in the Pacific. The first was in my home nation when a military leader overthrew the government at gunpoint and ruled with an iron fist, his rule spanning from 2006 to 2014.

The second is a democratically elected leader whose rule highlighted the blatant lack of accountability and transparency. His grab for power literally defines the phrase “absolute power absolutely corrupts”.

There is definitely a difference in how Fiji’s Voreqe Bainimarama and Samoa’s Laaulialemalietoa Leuatea Schmidt have come to be in power, but what makes them similar is the blatant disregard for accountability and transparency — the “my way or the highway” attitude — sacking of people who do not agree with their goals, disregard for the rule of law and, above all, media censorship and attacks on journalists.

• READ MORE: RSF calls on Samoan PM to lift ‘unacceptable’ ban on Samoa Observer
• Other Shalveen Chand media freedom reports

Bainimarama was clear and deliberate about restricting media freedom. He set up censors in newsrooms who would stop the publishing of articles that would be deemed anti-government and later enacted the draconian media law that governed media in Fiji.

That law, repealed in 2023 by the current Fijian government, led to the persecution of journalists and the self-censorship mentality that is still practised in some newsrooms in the country.

Laauli, on the other hand, made a promising start when he was elected prime minister in Samoa in September 2025. In his first press conference, he made a promise to be transparent and accountable. A promise that he never intended to keep, which has now resulted in the banning of Samoa’s only independent publication, Samoa Observer, from government events, government officials not being accountable to the media, bullying and assault on journalists, including on me in front of his house.

This intimidation was among the reasons I left Samoa and my job there to join Cook Islands News as a senior journalist.

Serious breaches
There have been serious breaches of due process, including in top-level government appointments. It is worrying when merit is no longer a requirement to hold a top civil service position. Nepotism is rife, and his own children are acting as if the nation were the family business.

This was seen a few weeks ago when Laauli’s son snatched a camera off a reporter and deleted photos, saying it was against the law to photograph his father. Last time it was checked, no such laws existed.

While Bainimarama used guns and the might of the military, Laauli uses a new tool: social media. Fake accounts carry out his propaganda and target journalists and their families with attacks. My toddler and wife have often been victims of these attacks, even though my spouse’s political allegiance is with Laauli.

Yes, she’s Samoan, and she occasionally reminds me of how “Sleeping with the Enemy” can be viewed in a whole new context. But I am thankful that despite being critical of the media, she has always stood up for me whenever I have been targeted, either physically or on social media.

People have approached and questioned me on why I was against their prime minister. It is hard to make some people understand that it was no personal attack on the leader but a journalistic attempt to keep him honest, accountable and transparent. Many times, these physical confrontations have been met with my personal bodyguard, my wife, willing to throw a few combinations like David Tua.

Similar attacks have been levelled against journalists who were part of the newsroom I managed in Samoa. Their families and children were targeted and sometimes maligned to their worst.

One of the things that sadden me the most is how the rule of law has been compromised in Samoa. Corruption was already rife; however, when you add in a leader who believes he is above the law, the rule of law starts becoming non-existent. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has dubbed Laauli as the “Trump of the Pacific”, and his behaviour often mirrors that of the American president.

Judiciary independent
Thankfully, one of the arms of the Samoan government, the judiciary, remains uncorrupted and has stood as the final wall in the attack against the rule of law, media freedom and the rights of citizens.

However, the judiciary is powerless when the enforcement agency does not do its work. Such was the case when I was assaulted outside Laauli’s house by a relative of his. A police complaint filed on 14 November 2025, the day of the incident, has not moved forward because the police officers who witnessed the assault do not want to give a statement for fear of retribution or losing their jobs.

I clearly remember the attack. The demeanour of the prime minister’s relative and his henchman gave away what they were going to do next as they rushed outside to where I was standing on the roadside. I came to drop off a camera lens for my journalist, who was trying to get comments from Laauli. The newly elected Samoan leader had just spent several weeks in New Zealand on a medical trip without communicating with the people of Samoa after photoshopped images of him were published by the Samoan government.

The two men rushed towards me. Their body language and aggression had been something that I had experienced during Fiji media’s dark days when the nation was under the control of the military junta. The haunting assaults and bullying by the security forces, and then having to spend a few nights in a police cell for highlighting a miscarriage of justice, came rushing back.

I braced for impact and told myself not to retaliate. The relative of the prime minister shoved me twice, trying to force me into my car. This was followed by him pushing the car door at least three times in my face. While he carried on, his short and fat henchman, probably another relative of the prime minister, held me by the collar and threw a few slaps.

A police officer aided the two relatives as well, shoving me into the car while throwing punches to my abdomen. All this was witnessed by at least six other police officers, my young journalist and a senior travel writer from the British Broadcasting Corporation. The words of the journalists were not enough to lead to any formal charges — instead, the young journalist was charged with criminal trespass.

This was the start of Laauli’s restriction on free and independent media who were trying to hold him accountable and get him to talk. This has now led to the continued ban on Samoa Observer and attacks on its journalists.

Many hoodwinked
It was also surprising that there were people who still support the Samoan leader’s actions. Many are hoodwinked by the social media propaganda. This was reflected when Samoa slumped to 59 out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.

There are still a lot of people who do not realise that freedom of the press is a right and that a government should not interfere with this freedom or censor media critical of state power. For years, freedom of the press has been an essential part of democracy. A democracy cannot exist when people’s voices are stifled.

A free press fights for the truth, whether it is Fiji, Samoa or the Cook Islands. A free press uncovers the truth. A free press holds power accountable.

Many entities can benefit from the truth staying hidden, including governments. One of the free press’ main missions is to serve as a watchdog on power. The press is the bridge between the people and powerful entities. If the press is not free but instead beholden to power, it simply serves as an extension of that power.

As I begin a new chapter with the Cook Islands News, I hope that the weight currently being accorded to media freedom and accountability in this nation only improves. This is one of the best ways a government can serve its people.

Shalveen Chand is a former editor of the Samoa Observer and now works for Cook Islands News as senior journalist. This article is republished from CIN with permission.

Fiji’s constitutional reform process has brought the question of who is or can be a “Fijian” back to the fore.

Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s coalition government has begun the public consultation process on the Constitutional (Amendment) Bill 2026 in its efforts to replace the 2013 Constitution — a document widely criticised as being imposed on the country by the previous Bainimarama administration.

Public consultations on Rabuka’s bill started last week, two days after the country marked its 56th independence anniversary. It was tabled by the government earlier this month and passed its second reading for the Fijian people to give their feedback.

• READ MORE: ‘Respect the people’ – Fiji coalition clash over Rabuka’s fast-tracked constitutional referendum
• Other Fiji constitution reports

However, the consultations last week spotlighted why ethnic anxieties remain one of the most sensitive issues in the country, even four coups and four constitutions later.

Local media widely reported on submissions made by ordinary Fijian citizens as well as community and national leaders.

A large cross-section of society remains divided about who should be called a “Fijian”, as well as the role of traditional chiefs in Fiji’s governance and politics and whether Fiji should be a Christian or secular state.

These three pillars are the defining features of the 2013 Constitution, but also remain issues that were not debated during the FijiFirst administration’s time in power.

Equal national identity
One prominent political figure with a minor party declared that the iTaukei (Indigenous) people faced a “technical genocide” because Voreqe Bainimarama’s government created an equal national identity which made all citizens “Fijians”.

Some want the Great Council of Chiefs (or the Bose Levu Vakaturaga) — another Indigenous institution that was removed by Bainimarama and has no constitutional legitimacy under the current constitution — to be given its rightful place in Fiji’s governance framework.

Submissions from Fijians of Indian descent have also been equally staunch, calling for several elements of the 2013 Constitution to remain, including keeping “Fijian” as a shared national identity for all citizens.

Fiji’s population is made up of two main ethnic groups: the iTaukei and the Indo-Fijians. While the Indigenous Fijians own 90 percent of all land, the economic power, historically, has stayed in the hands of Indo-Fijians, mostly a handful of families.

The bread-and-butter issues, like the cost of living, lack of meaningful employment opportunities, and access to housing, affect all communities, but the Indigenous population is more affected, despite being resource-rich.

But constitutional reform and the question of who is a “Fijian” have enveloped much of the political debate under Rabuka’s coalition, after initial gains in human rights protections and opening up civic space for people with opposing views to be able to express themselves without fear — something which was not possible during the Bainimarama-era.

Unity call on social media
Fiji’s Deputy Speaker Lenora Qereqeretabua urged unity on social media over the weekend: “We need less division and more understanding. We are all Fijians,” she wrote.

The process, which is branded by its opponents as “rushed”, is expected to wrap up ahead of the next Parliament session in the first week of November for the bill’s third reading. If it passes, Fiji is set to hold its first national referendum on December 9.

Rabuka has received flak for announcing the referendum date prematurely.

For his part, the prime minister, who is the chair of the special parliamentary committee on the bill, has defended the constitutional reform process, downplaying concerns about it being rushed or lacking democratic principles.

He continues to urge the Fijian people to constructively participate in the process aimed at discarding a constitution that was “not accepted by the people”.

COMMENTARY: By Mary Kostakidis

Three very apt words — Truth, Trust and Tribalism. Much of what I say will focus on the last. Because of it, the first and second often become casualties.

Our Holy Grail of journalism centres on four pillars: objectivity, impartiality, balance and neutrality. Four pillars that are all too often weaponised in the service of gatekeeping the Overton window, so that establishment interests aren’t threatened by a restless citizenry.

While this has operated somewhat more subtly in the past, it has become a charade in which allies who wield enormous power on the global stage, have dropped their masks — they have shed pants as well — and it has become harder to drink this glass of milk because there are big fat flies floating on the surface.

• READ MORE:  Israel funded the legal assault on Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis
• Other media diversity and Gaza reports

The world order intended to be based on international law, and one that has often failed to deliver accountability in the case of the most powerful, has now been comprehensively debased.

In examining the media’s role and its pretence at neutrality and balance — when it actually behaves in a most tribal, partisan way — I’ll share with you some of my own experience over decades, including where I have failed.

I will argue an important weapon in our arsenal are the principles of our shared humanity that underpin universal rights, and that adherence to those principles necessitates an ability to view and analyse the world through multiple lenses, not just that of the Global North.

This is not something we need permission to do. It is part of the core business of being a journalist if we are serious about impartiality and objectivity. It is also part and parcel of diplomacy, and should also be integral to the work of leaders, otherwise we have no chance of bringing an end to forever wars, to collaboratively resolve matters in a manner that has regard to equality, freedom and dignity for all.

Injustice perpetuated
In understanding conflict and embarking on an assessment of a situation, objectivity and impartiality are vital. However, it is not necessary for an experienced journalist to remain neutral in interpreting the significance of events. Indeed, most memorable works of journalism, such as Robert Fisk’s The Great War For Civilisation, cannot be described as “neutral”.

To hold journalism in a perpetual state of neutrality and continue to provide selective “balance” (there is little to no “balance’”in the coverage of China, Russia, Iran or Israel) is to render plausible deniability, to shield crime, to deliver impunity and to compound and perpetuate injustice, as has occurred in the way Israel’s actions have been historically and predominantly reported in Western legacy media.

This era is unprecedented — there has not been such widespread repression throughout the West, and not only in our profession — it is society wide. And what strikes you of course, is that contrary to this oft weaponised Code of Ethics, what operates — with a few notable exceptions — is an unacknowledged partisanship, as tribal as geopolitical protagonists themselves.

While we have achieved diversity in the media in terms of presence and visibility, we have not yet succeeded in injecting the diversity of perspectives required. Other than in independent media, we still must all use one lens: that of the Global North.

I had certainly hoped we would have multiple lenses in our toolkit when we started up SBS in 1980. It was, however, too ambitious, and we settled for the possible. And so here we find ourselves today.

I don’t wish to diminish the significant impact of the second public broadcaster. But our task is to look critically at our industry and how it serves the Australian public, our democracy, and how it equips us to be global citizens, in addition to being Australian citizens.

In today’s world, this type of dual citizenship is mandatory if we are to have any chance at putting an end to forever wars and belligerent partisanship to move to more respectful relationships as a multipolar world community, to look out for the survival of our fellow human beings and planet, where interests can coalesce rather than collide.

After seeing its identity and purpose reflected solely in the eyes of the British Empire, and moving seamlessly into subservience to the US, and after doing away with the White Australia Policy, our country went through interminable navel gazing in the media — who are we? What is our identity as a nation?

The answer it landed on, was “Multicultural”. Yes, we came from many cultures, and wasn’t that fab.

Hoped for something more
“Multiculturalism” was a word I studiously avoided including during my almost three decades at SBS. Not because I was a closet Pauline Hanson. But because in the very early days at the broadcaster, I had hoped for something more.

One of the early on-air promotional campaigns was centred around the Overton window metaphor: “Channel O — a Window to the World’. I was banking on a Door.

It was not to be. The debate settled on whether what was being provided was “ethnic” or “multicultural” television. Cosmopolitanism, a prism conducive to the practice of journalism, was a bridge too far for Australia in 1980. We were to celebrate our particularity — our food, dance, music and movies, but the serious work demanded by our shared humanity and diverse perspectives lay dormant.

I recall Melbourne ABC radio broadcaster Jon Faine asking me when I was appointed to present SBS World News, whether it would cover stories from a different perspective. It was a question I studiously circumvented by banging on about running background stories, which were in my view one of our strengths. I knew that our lens captured a greater part of the world, but feared it’s portrayal in the end remained comfortably within the Overton window.

On Day 1 of my induction to the newsroom, the then-chief producer made a remark I considered a statement of the obvious — that “One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter”. But it proved not to be obvious at all and it was soon forgotten. And she and it went the way of those background stories we used to run. We gradually transitioned from the possibilities and potential understanding offered by the perspective epitomised in that adage, to dividing the world into our allies versus an “Axis of Evil” against which a “War on Terror” needed to be fought.

This occurred in stages and among the various contributing factors was the purging of full-time staff in favour of contractors who were less likely to raise objections due to job insecurity, as well as selecting out anti-establishment views in executive roles which is the natural state of institutions. And the broadcaster slid into the natural state of the media club in manufacturing consent.

Validation was sought in sameness, the assurance you have got it right. An at times bellicose partisanship bubbled to the surface, due to both overt support for establishment views as well as a subliminal cultural bias, all of which became more pronounced with the passage of years as the organisation went through multiple changes.

SBS could have made a difference
There were times when SBS could have made a difference but chose not to, and I see that also as a personal failure. While I did not have editorial control, I did have influence.

It is true that decision makers in the newsroom were almost exclusively Anglo-Celtic, but the Board was not and we know culture is determined by the government-appointed Board which selects the CEO who appoints those beneath him or her etc.

Ethnic diversity on the Board did not prevent the organisation heading down the path it did. Visible diversity was an achievement, but it was a mere beginning, not an end in itself. It did not deliver the next stage because its ambition was limited. Whatever I did, it was not enough to have the impact required. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

In October 2006 (I left in 2007), you may recall The Australian sent a young Arabic-speaking reporter to a Lakemba Mosque expecting he would document incitement to terrorism by the Imam. He returned empty handed, but his translation of the sermon included a reference to women who do not dress modestly as “uncovered meat”. The story was front page news in The Australian and subsequently across all media mastheads and platforms in the country, including the SBS World News bulletin I presented, despite attempts on my part to explain this sort of comment was hardly unusual, didn’t merit singling out given what is routinely said by preachers of other faiths.

The incident was nevertheless used to fan the flames of strong anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of 9/11 and in support of US-led wars.

The atmosphere in the newsroom was at fever pitch, it was part of a pack that smelt blood. It was a day of great shame for me personally. I’d had two experiences with another organised religion that were significantly more egregious, but comments around acceptable standards of modesty, whether you adhere to them, or think they are backward and damaging for women, did not warrant singling out for public humiliation as a serious, unacceptable and unique threat to Australian society, posed by Muslim rhetoric.

The speech of Greek Orthodox Sunday school teachers or rabbis was never subjected to a public microscope.

Exceptional pressure
During my almost three decades at SBS, first in management and then in the newsroom, in discussions with the heads of programming, news, and television, I was aware of the exceptional pressure brought to bear on decision-makers when it came to purchasing and broadcasting a film, or running a story, that portrayed a Palestinian point of view as opposed to the non-negotiable version of the Israel lobby.

The programme would have to be of a higher standard than usual to justify the resources that would inevitably be required to defend it.

After a staff meeting in the newsroom in 2004, at which I argued strongly that we had to run a particular story that the news director had been asked to pull, he told me he believed his days were numbered. There would be retribution for him after the election if the Coalition won, because in the end, he had defended our right to run the report.

This marked the end of an era of possibility, with more evident influence of editorial staff by the Israel lobby.

The imbalance in our coverage became even more pronounced and entrenched and it became virtually impossible to include the perspective of Palestinians. For many years, we crossed to an Israeli spokesperson, usually an IDF or former IDF member — for a long time Mark Regev — for “an update” as if it was to a neutral observer.

I well recall an occasion during my last year when I suggested to the on-duty chief producer that we have a Palestinian on for a change. I have not forgotten his short response, though 20 years have passed. “Why? They’re all mad.”

He had just returned from a junket to Israel, par for the course for senior journalists across media organisations. Some years earlier, I had been baffled by the boasting of another chief producer about the size and quality of the steak and bottle of red he had just consumed in a long lunch shouted by an Israel lobbyist, before returning to his shift.

Legacy media struggled over Gaza genocide
It’s not surprising that legacy media has struggled with reporting on the Gaza genocide — even without using the word — because for decades we overlooked Israel’s modus operandi for demographic engineering, either in ignorance or complicity — both inexcusable.

Small victories in resistance to this diminished, along with the dilution of solidarity on the floor. In my specific role, I resorted to a kind of reverse weaponisation of neutrality. Because of my role as anchor, I argued, I could not use expressions like the much-loved “War on Terror”, it had to be “George Bush’s War on Terror”, or a dead pan “the so-called War on Terror”.

Personal family history led me — since childhood — to want to understand how power was exercised because of the catastrophic consequences for ordinary people. Interrogating the nature of identity and the function of tribalism were pieces in that puzzle, as my grandparents had come from a multiracial society at a time when such societies were being transformed into ethno-states.

The heritage of pluralism remained in my DNA and a cosmopolitan outlook was to remain my prism. Ethnic particularity, however, was just one aspect of pluralism, as it was also only just one aspect of personal identity. Furthermore, the centrality of ethnic particularity was a core characteristic of ethnonationalism and often provided fertile ground for chauvinism and racism.

So I was somewhat of a Martian in the newsroom because my background provided a perspective that my contemporary environment had no time for. In 1967, when Israel took the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights — which it ethnically cleansed, wiping out 100 villages — my generation at age 13 were reading The Diary of Anne Frank, soon followed by Leon Uris’s Exodus which documented the noble struggle of Jewish pioneers forging a new life, taming “a barren” land, creating an “egalitarian” society in “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

On this cultural and formal education, British historian William Dalrymple says he was “sold a lie”. This was the prism through which the creation of Israel was seen. Arabs were an inconvenient peripheral menace. How many adults in the Western world went on from Exodus to read Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine or Ghada Karmi’s Married to Another Man, or any of the books by Ilan Pappe? How many Western journalists?

For a variety of reasons, the media’s treatment of Israel is most exceptional. In general, holding our allies to the same standards as our foes would be laughed out of any newsroom — let alone questioning why said countries are considered “allies” to begin with. An attitude unhealthy in an ethnonationalist state, but in a multicultural one, it seeded problems that can’t be swept away.

Spawned discontent can’t be controlled
Certainly not with motherhood statements by politicians who avoid accountability for their policies or their obligations under international law. And the discontent spawned can’t be controlled with repressive institutional behaviour and authoritarian legislative measures.

Just as you can’t stop an oppressed group of people from rising up against its oppressors, the rest of us can’t allow our conscience to be criminalised, and so we will not be intimidated into silence.

I have made my anti-establishment views known across a raft of matters and have been trenchant in my criticism of the US government as well as our own government, but Israel was a no-no, no matter how flagrant its conduct.

The first “public” shot across the bow in this stepped-up phase of cancellation since October 7 was the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf. I say public because there are many cases that are not known about.

I was chosen because of my public profile and reputation, because I dared step outside the narrow Overton window we must all remain within at all cost, particularly in the case of Israel. I’m aware that my sharing of articles by many Jewish journalists and a range of other reputable experts who have been either shut out of mainstream media or would never get a look in, was making Zionists apoplectic.

The newly-minted young CEO of the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) and a compliant journalist in the legacy media decided they would smear me as an antisemitic rape denier and fruit loop conspiracy theorist. And because no decent smear ends without references to Holocaust denial, one of the two “exclusives” remarkably managed to end on that note.

Radio silence from that masthead ever since. They all have egg on their face because the ZFA had to drop the case knowing they had no prospect of winning.

Israel getting some of its own medicine
The two posts they selected for the alleged breach were a clip of a speech by the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah; one post with a comment from me that the Israeli government was getting some of its own medicine and that Israel has started something it can’t finish with this genocide; and the other a mere retweet of a post by British journalist Richard Medhurst who simply reported Nasrallah’s words.

It was an interesting choice for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Medhurst was arrested three weeks after the case against me was filed.

The affront at these posts was because I had the temerity to share a clip of Nasrallah himself — a listed terrorist in Australia — and draw some sort of moral equivalence between his threat and the conduct of the Israeli government, and to indicate the consequences of that conduct would continue to escalate. How dare I compare a threat by a listed terrorist with the conduct of a terrorist state.

But Israel must be spoken of with reverence while it couches its erasure of Palestinians and theft of their land as defending itself, and those defending Palestinians must be roundly condemned as terrorists and part of that Axis of Evil, when they are seen as neither by many millions of people around the world.

That we, as journalists, must take this position as if we were mouthpieces for the US alliance or the Australian government, let alone Israel, is preposterous. It dispenses with our capacity to view our own country’s perspective and that of our allies as critically as we would any other country’s, and to have media organisations participate in this journalistic malpractice as openly as they have is astonishing.

You will be familiar with directives and guidance given to staff here, and recall The New York Times leaked memo in early 2024 directing journalists to avoid even the use of the term “Occupied Territory”, and CNN staff revealing pressure resulting in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives, with similar pressures reported at the BBC.

Over the last decade we saw distinct fragmentation of the audience — some still relying on legacy media while others accessing information and perspectives from independent media where we have seen an explosion of outlets including YouTube channels where experts and scholars publish information and commentary.

Two very different perceptions of reality
The result has been two very different perceptions of reality. However, this chasm between segments of the public is closing for large numbers of people as the situation in Gaza and in other spheres reach such extremes. Israel’s brutal colonialism in the West Bank and Lebanon, Donald Trump’s overt gangster-capitalism and proxy war on Iran, and the rise of the far-right cannot be glossed over with a comprehensive avoidance of reality in legacy media.

The consequences are too visible and too extreme.

We can take heart that on the whole the courts won’t back the suppression of political speech — with the exception of the disappointing Jayson Gillham decision where the judge did not have a problem with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra discriminating in the colour of political comment it endorsed, legitimising support for Ukraine as policy but not so for Palestinians.

NSW Supreme Court Justice Desmond Fagan’s judgement on the heels of this decision is a masterclass in calling out the lack of common sense, gaslighting and utter bullshit.

Mary Kostakidis is an Australian journalist, political commentator, and activist. She was a member of the management team that developed SBS Television in 1980. She anchored its World News bulletin for almost 2 decades before becoming an independent journalist. This address to the Media Diversity Australia Symposium was delivered on 13 October 2026 and republished from Deepcut News.

The Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) has condemned Australia and Indonesia conducting joint military exercises while Indonesian security forces have been conducting military operations against Papuan civilians.

About 1000 Australian Defence Force (ADF) military personnel with a similar number of Indonesian soldiers have been taking part in Exercise Keris Woomera 26 which began earlier this month and is due to end tomorrow.

It is this year’s largest overseas joint training activity for the ADF.

• READ MORE: Other West Papua reports

In a statement, Joe Collins of AWPA said Australians received the “usual mantra/statements from government” about how the exercise would “reinforce the strength” of Australia’s security relationship with Indonesia.

Collins said Australians were told: “Indonesia is an essential and enduring partner for Australia and it is significant that we share our largest overseas training activity for the year with the TNI and our ability to work together on this exercise reinforces our deep and longstanding partnership with Indonesia, underpinned by trust, mutual respect and close cooperation etc.”

However, “not so far away, the Indonesian security forces are conducting military operations against Papuan civilians and Australia says nothing”.

The Evangelical Christian Church (KINGMI) has called on the Indonesian government and humanitarian organisations to address reports of civilians fleeing their homes amid alleged military operations in the Korowai region.

The church’s Department of Justice and Peace (DKP) said it had received reports of increased military activity between October 12 and 14 in Danowage village, Yaniruma district, Boven Digoel Regency, and areas bordering Yahukimo Regency.

‘State of panic’
According to a Jubi report, the Head of the GIDI Department of Law and Human Rights, Reverend Jimmy Koirewoa, said that information from the indigenous Korowai people and other Papuan residents living in the area indicated the local population was in a “state of panic and had begun to flee”, fearing the impact of military operations.

“During military operations, local people flee because of their fear of the Indonesian security forces,” Collins said.

“They flee to the forest and can face starvation because they are afraid to go back to work in their food gardens. Each military operation creates more internal refugees.”

In an August update, Human Rights Monitor reported that there are more than 127,031 civilians across multiple regencies in West Papua remaining internally displaced due to military operations and armed conflict.

The GIDI Department of Law and Human Rights urged the Indonesian government and all relevant authorities to immediately halt the movement of troops — who are allegedly preparing for military operations within the civilian settlements of the Korowai people — and to withdraw forces from civilian areas where their presence is not required for legitimate operations.

They have also demanded that no military actions be taken that could endanger the safety of the community, incite fear, force residents to abandon their homes, or disrupt the daily lives and activities of the indigenous people.

“We emphasise that places of worship, residential homes, educational facilities, healthcare facilities, and other public amenities must be protected,” Collins said.

‘Traumatised civilians’
In a media release, the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) reported from Danowage village that following an Indonesian military deployment on October 12 and 13, the authorities immediately began a military operation the next day on October 14.

The operation “traumatised civilians”, who began fleeing that night to forests in the Boven Digoel, Oksibil, Mappi, and Yahukimo areas.

The Central High Command of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) has also appealed to President Prabowo Subianto and his staff to immediately allow access for the International Red Cross, foreign journalists, and international human rights organisations to enter the armed conflict zone in Papua to address the humanitarian crisis and displacement of indigenous peoples in various regions of Papua.

REVIEW: By Alex Salmon

An American photojournalist getting viciously beaten up the West Bank by settlers is small potatoes in comparison to the hundreds of journalists who have died in Gaza, let alone the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been slaughtered (and continue to be).

However, a group of young thugs pounding the crap out of a petite woman in her late 60s and taking her camera while the IDF stands by and doing nothing to stop them is a snapshot of the toxic country that Israel has become.

Heidi Levine, a celebrated photographer who at the time was shooting for The Washington Post, was taking pictures of masked Israelis setting Palestinian olive groves on fire as part of a surge in settler violence.

• READ MORE: Israeli settlers attack EU diplomats during West Bank olive harvest
• US ambassador urges Israel to prosecute attackers of American photojournalist
• Other Palestine genocide reports

“People who were at the scene described a mass-coordinated attack in which dozens of men in black came down from a hilltop settlement near the village of Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, where Palestinian families were picking their olives,” says The Washington Post.

“The settlers hurled stones with slings and set the groves on fire, chasing a group of journalists about 80 yards from the scene.

“Levine described being overtaken by a group of attackers, hit and knocked to the ground.

“A video taken by another journalist shows her being struck repeatedly while she is on the ground.

“They just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times,” Levine told reporters.

Netanyahu defends thugs
Not surprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — defended the thugs who attacked both the olive groves and Levine, claiming “Arabs and far-left activists confronted approximately 40 Israeli youths”.

“We will not allow disputed incidents to be exploited to demonise the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu said.

What a crock! Under what circumstance is it justified for Zionist hoodlums to beat the shit out of a tiny woman approaching 70 who dared to turn a camera on their criminal actions.

Welcome to Israel, the “only democracy” in the Middle East and the “defender of Western civilisation!”

Just leave your camera at home or we’ll smash your face in.

Mark Naglazas is a West Australian journalist specialising in Perth culture and the arts. Republished from his FB page with permission.

After Israeli settlers beat and severely wounded Palestinian farmers and a Washington Post journalist yesterday, settler violence continues on the olive harvest in the occupied West Bank.

Al Jazeera’s @mohammadfff_ reports. https://t.co/bVj4Xl04m1

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 17, 2026

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) head of news has threatened journalist and unionist Michael Slezak with disciplinary action over an October 5 opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review, written in his capacity as a union official.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said in a statement that it joined its Australian affiliate, Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), in defending the right of union representatives to engage in public advocacy and called on ABC management to rule out disciplinary action.

The ABC’s recently appointed head of news Simon Robinson threatened ABC journalist and federal president of media at MEAA, Michael Slezak, with disciplinary action after an article he wrote was published by the AFR.

• READ MORE: Other Bondi terror attack and media reports

In the piece, Slezak suggested that the corporate regulator, the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), used the Bondi terror attack to support the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s (ASIC) push to restrict public and media access to directors’ personal information.

Slezak wrote the piece within his capacity as a union leader.

Last week, Slezak was called to meet with Robinson and Lee Glendinning, head of national and digital news, who advised the piece potentially infringed ABC’s external work policy which required staff to formally request external opportunities.

However, MEAA said Slezak had an existing arrangement with the ABC before Robinson’s appointment which authorised him to publicly engage in union-related advocacy. The pair did not rule out disciplinary action, including dismissal, during the meeting.

Open letter to ABC
MEAA called for ABC management drop potential disciplinary measures in an open letter to Robinson and managing director Hugh Marks.

The letter, sent on October 12, received 165 signatures from union members.

MEAA members on the ABC house committee said “the ABC cannot publicly champion press freedom while privately targeting a national union representative for doing the same thing”.

This follows a period of prolonged industrial action from the ABC’s unionised workforce.

Disputes over secure work and fair pay earlier this year caused ABC staff to strike for the first time in 20 years, calling on management to ensure fair pay, secure work, and improved conditions that protect quality public-interest journalism.

The MEAA said: “MEAA members at the ABC have overwhelmingly backed a motion defending the rights of elected union representatives to speak out and represent members.

“Members are calling on ABC management to respect legal union rights, commit not to undermine those protections, and meet with staff to discuss their concerns. Union representatives must be free to advocate for the members they were elected to represent.”

The IFJ said: “Threatening Slezak with disciplinary action for engaging in union related advocacy is an attack on journalists right to association and freedom of expression.

“The IFJ stands with the MEAA and calls on ABC management to drop potential disciplinary measures and to meet with union members to discuss their concerns.”

The state of fascist Zionism continues its systematic extermination and social media is full of its supporters.

Thank you to this list from my friend Mike Huett on how to spot and combat hasbara trolls.

(Hasbara is the communications arm of Mossad, the Zionist state’s secret service and it has long tentacles employing trained journalists who work in the mainstream as well as social media influencers. Some — self included — turned down working on or off that toxic pay roll but others lap up and spit out the propaganda.)

• READ MORE: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to shift narratives in its favour
• Other hasbara reports

Typical hasbara “tell” signs:

1. Excessive and inappropriate use of the “laughing” emoji.
2. Calling people “retards”, or other derogatory terms based on assumed cognitive/intellectual ability.
3. Frequent attempts to avoid answering direct questions by way of irrelevant “whataboutery”, or other forms of deflection.
4. Frequent attempts to reframe Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, or violent attacks against other countries, as a religious war; Islam versus Judaism/Christianity.
5. Appeals to a mythological past with biblical claims to the land of Palestine; coupled with erasure of Palestine as an historically recognised place, and a similar denial of the existence of Palestinian people (instead labelling them as Arabs, or the “descendants” of Muslim invaders).
6. Accusing commentators who support Palestinians of being antisemitic, and even of being Nazis.
7. Mirroring the observations of critical commentators; e.g. if you point out their racism or support for genocide they will immediately accuse you of being racist or genocidal towards Israelis. “Mirroring” is a tactic used frequently.
8. If they do not like how you respond, do not be surprised if they comment, then block you — as if having the “last word”, is an achievement. Also, they frequently delete their offensive comments to make it appear you are ranting incoherently for no reason.

In my experience they will also unblock you and try to spring from your platform again and again.

Humanitarians defamed
One hasbara operative in New Zealand has defamed humanitarians I know (John Minto and MP Damien O’Connor). I proved he was doing this by contacting them directly and quoting his malicious quotes to them.

Of course, they were appalled. These are people who are supported by humanitarian Jews.

Presented with the facts, that man, who is influential in the entertainment/media industry did not retract.

He doubled down, equating anti-Zionism and anti-genocide with anti-semitism.

He is wrong. There was always a counter movement to Zionism. The Bund. Not all Jews believe that Jews should have a Jewish state. Zionism is a policy of supremacism, one group of people receiving more rights than another is never right.

In Israel, those who don’t submit to this policy are demonised, expelled, killed.

The right of return for Palestinians is a human right. Peace comes when you open the door rather than building apartheid behind a wall and invading other countries — Lebanon, Syria etc etc. The state of Zionism is expanding, it does not have borders.

Ignored background
Here is the background on what the social media influencers who are pro-genocide choose to ignore.

Controlling the narrative is the strategy of these predators. They fail to acknowledge the 1948 Nakba. Yes, the Nakba — the real start — long before October 7, 2023.

The Nakba is when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes under a British imperial policy to replace Palestinians with Jews. Yes Palestine was used by Britain as a holocaust refugee dumping ground for refugees Europe did not want.

The social media influencers who influence genocide ignore the thousands of Palestinians who were killed in massacres since 1948 (about 16,000). Women, men, children.

Murdered.

Yes, they ignore the tens of thousands killed in the decades since the establishment of a Zionist state in 1948.

The social media influencers for genocide who operate for the Mossad (hasbara) ignore the massacre in Qibya in 1953, when 69 Palestinians were murdered.

They ignore the massacre in Khan Yunis in 1956 when more than 275 Palestinias were murdered.

Colonialism on steroids
They ignore the massacre in Rafah in 1956 when more than 111 people were murdered. Women. Men. Children. Little children.

They ignore the way the Zionist state — a state of colonialism on steroids — enabled the genocide of Palestinians in the the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982.

More than 3000 Palestinians sheltering, seeking refuge in Lebanon were slaughtered.

The mercenary Israeli army shone the lights on that genocide. Literally.

Many Zionists hold two passports, their get-out card is the US. US emigration to the Zionist state is massive. But this is ignored. The genociders are aided by the US. They are predators. They are invaders. They are lethal.

I went to Is-hell as a starry-eyed kibbutznik and I witnessed the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese were killed. I remember an Israeli commenting that if so many people had not been against that invasion “we would probably have invaded Turkey by now”.

The social media influencers who work for Mossad ignore the fact that 2000 Palestinians were killed during the first Intifada 1987–1993.

They ignore about 3300 Palestinians killed during the Second Intifada (2000–2005).

Subsequent invasions
They ignore the subsequent invasions and murders during operations by the Zionist offensive mercenary army in Gaza during 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 which claimed several thousand more Palestinian lives.

They ignore this genocide. They laugh at it. They mock it. They support it. They refuse to call it by its name but it is a genocide.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry and international documentation as of late 2026, direct reported deaths of Palestinians have surpassed 75,000 to 81,000. When will it ever end?

Actually it’s all worse than this. The real death toll estimates including the number of missing “under-the-rubble” put this genocide at around 186,000–335,500. These are stats from health organisations.

Think about it, bodies decaying under the rubble, including children. And Trump and Netanyahu want to turn it into a playboy’s playground.

What can we do?

Don’t buy products that pay for genocide. Go to this site and look at the list of products to avoid buying in Aotearoa: https://bdsaotearoa.nz

This is the terror
So when you see the laughing emojis or people claiming that that the Zionist state is doing this in the name of God, or some holy ordinance, or against terror, remember that this is the terror, that these people, paid to communicate that this is OK are terrorists.

They are invaders of land and social space who support the murder of children, of women, of people with disabilities.

I will never forget the footage of the poor youth who could not walk or run and who was burned to death in his tent. Writhing, writhing.

I will never forget the sound of a little girl screaming for help and I will never forget that not only did the mercenary army of the state of Zionism riddle her — that little crying girl — with bullets, they destroyed the aid workers that came to rescue her. Turned people to rubble.

I will not forget the mothers and fathers and widows and widowers who were handed bags of human flesh when they went to collect their loved ones.

Right now the only good people in that country are those who stand against genocide and they are telling the truth about it, rather than denying it.

And many of us are being “ghosted” because meta is run by genocide supporters.

Many people won’t even see this. So share it.

What you can do
And what can you do — my keyboard warriors? You can wage a keyboard warrior war against the communications arm of Mossad:

When you see the laughing emojis or statements denying genocide:
Go to the often-fake profile and click on the three dots then scroll to block them, confirm block.

Don’t give them space. They want to spring from other people’s platforms and they are funded to promote the lies that support genocide.

Don’t engage.

Educate others by copying and sharing the facts and figures about when the oppression, exile and extermination started.

Don’t give space to genociders. Block the genociders.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

The Free Palestine Party has condemned the New Zealand government for its “shameful” failure to walk out of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the UN last month — as more than 70 protesting countries did — claiming it made New Zealand complicit in genocide.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” a party  statement said citing a famous quote often used to describe the rise of fascism in Germany.

“It could be used in today’s world to describe what is happening with the Holocaust in Gaza and the Palestinian occupied Territories, and the attacks on Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, to name but a few,” the party said.

• READ MORE: Netanyahu’s UN belligerence wins cheers at home as world walks out
• Palestinians, US journalist attacked in West Bank pogrom: What we know
• Vote progressive parties – if you seek justice for Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“Except New Zealand doesn’t have good men in government — it has greedy, gutless, small-minded men,” the statement added.

The party said the New Zealand government’s “lack of a spine or any sort of independent foreign policy” meant that the country was “actively assisting this evil arising in the world”.

The NZ government maintained its alliances through the Five Eyes, ANZUS, and many other security arrangements with the US, which “makes us complicit in the Holocaust in Palestine and illegal attacks on Iran”.

New Zealand’s armed forces had participated in military exercises with the “genocidal forces of Israel”, in combined military exercises during the ongoing genocide (RIMPAC June-August 2024), said the Free Palestine Party.

40 NZ troops in Middle East
Currently 40 New Zealand Defence Force personnel were deployed in the Middle East, with 20 of these personnel stationed in Bahrain working for the combined maritime forces of the US Navy Central Command.

The New Zealand government “doubled down on its lack of an independent foreign policy in its gutless reaction to Trump’s speech at the UN, where [he] threatened to annihilate the entire civilisation of Iran in a veiled threat to use the US’s vast nuclear arsenal”, the party statement said.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ response to this threat by a country that had the capacity to carry out the biggest genocide in world history was “that is unhelpful”.

An independent foreign policy and getting out of all military alliances and security arrangements with the US and Western powers is a key platform point of the Free Palestine Party for New Zealand’s general election on November 7.

“Having these military and security arrangements makes New Zealand a mere vassal of the US and Western Europe,” the party said.

“To break with New Zealand’s imperial and colonial past, it must forge a new independent foreign policy, one that will allow us to take a moral stance and cut off all ties to the apartheid state of Israel and to sanction all economic activity with it.”

NZ military ties with US
The party cited the ties between the New Zealand military and government and the US that “New Zealanders may be unaware of”:

Joint Commercial Operations: Auckland hosts a global tracking and monitoring hub for this network, which integrates commercial satellite data for military and intelligence commands.

Operation Olympic Defender, designed to strengthen space dominance, has an embedded military officer at the US space command in Colorado Springs.

Artemis Accords, space cooperation with the US.

Project Arcadia, US Battlefield shared command AI system.

Project Convergence, rapid data sharing and automated targeting.

Combined Joint All-Dominance Command and Control, overarching US mega network targeting and tactical integration.

Wideband Global SATCOM network, Pentagon military satellite communications, New Zealand to help fund with the $24 million Partnership for Indo-Pacific industrial resilience, military supply chain defence cooperation.

The Kingmakers debate on TVNZ last night was won by the two Queens, Chlöe Swarbrick (Greens) and Qiulae Wong (Opportunity), but I think Te Pāti Māori’s co-leader Rawiri Waititi landed a killer blow to Winston Peters (New Zealand First) that he won’t recover from.

By throwing into Winston’s face his infamous 1975 quote about Māori losing their land, culture and language and becoming “kahki” Europeans, Rawiri reminded the entire country that Winston has been around so long that he has become a political hypocrite.

That is devastating because very few would remember that quote and resets Winston more recent Treaty of Waitangi bashing with the radicalism of his youth.

• READ MORE: Other NZ 2026 general election reports

That moment alone allowed Rawiri to land a knock out punch while Winston spent the rest of the debate reeling.

It was New Zealand vs Old Zealand.

The TVNZ polling clearly shows Māori voters understanding the Te Pāti Māori candidate strategy and the rush to the Greens continues to back up that vote splitting strategy.

Māori strategic voters will decide the 2026 Election.

Martyn Bradbury is publisher and editor of The Daily Blog. This article was first published by TDB and is republished with permission.

I have watched the most disturbing film in my lifetime — a warning to the world of a horrendous dystopian future when human life and death is being decided by remote AI-assisted control warfare weapons. The problem is that this dystopian future is already with us now and has been unfolding for three years — with genocide in the Israeli besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Unlike the Venice film festival premiere last month when the audience gave an unprecedented 25-minute standing ovation for The Guardian-produced NAZA: A Window into Systems of Mass Killing, the New Zealand preview audience at Auckland’s Rialto Cinemas sat in shocked silence for minutes at the end, unsure how to respond to this harrowing documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. NAZA won the Venice Special Jury Prize.

So stunned was the Auckland audience that there was not a single clap.

This is a chilling visual testimony (surely likely evidence for future war crimes trials of Benjamin Netanyahu and others?) of what Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein wrote about in his landmark 2023 global book The Palestine Laboratory. At least 75,000 Palestinians have now been slaughtered (the real total is bound to be far, far higher) in the more than 1000 days since the genocide began — mostly women and children (some 25,000 of the latter).

And a Republican congressman, David Valadao, has just been reported as gloating about the US “benefits” of the war on Gaza in that weapons “are tested there; we are able to learn from that”. “We”? Sickening!

Ironically, the standing ovation in Venice eclipsed by a couple of minutes another Gaza film last year, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, a dramatised feature film about the cold-blooded murder of a five-year-old girl by an Israeli tank crew, who also ambushed and assassinated the two ambulance responders sent to rescue her.

The Hind Rajab film was heart-rending and tragic, whereas NAZA is so deeply disturbing because of the sheer callousness and remoteness of the killing carried out by 24 intelligence agents and soldiers at the push of a button through their AI applications known by Orwellian labels such as “Lavender”and “Where’s Daddy?” Yet to their credit, perhaps, they must have at least had tugs at their conscience to agree to being interviewed for this film (anonymous and with disguised voices) in secret to expose the industrial level killing.

Acceptable kill ratios
One of the interviewees tells of approval to kill 500 civilians as acceptable to target one Hamas resistance fighter. Others spoke of 200 killings at a time for one target as “acceptable” – or even “expected”. The gloves of revenge were cruelly off.

The official Naza documentary trailer.                  Video: Madman Films

The location is eerie, even ghostly, as the narratives explore remote killings during the interviews on (presumably) Tel Aviv rooftops. In the background, are the lights from Israeli apartments as people go about their mundane lives — a far cry from the terror experienced by Gazan families as they are targeted, often during the night, by quadcopters, missiles or bombs — or “Whoops”, mini drones designed especially for attacking inside homes.

“It’s so insanely fun. . . ” “It’s like a video game . . . ” “You understand that your goal is to destroy . . . ” are some of the reflections of the death dealers under the cover of darkness. The “whistleblowers”, if we can call them that, spoke to co-director Abraham under the expectation of complete anonymity for fear of retribution from the system they were once — or possibly still are — embedded in.

The film title NAZA is an acronym standing for the Hebrew term Nezek Agavi, which means “collateral damage”.

This documentary has provoked an immediate and savage response by the extreme rightwing Netanyahu regime. Responses began with Culture Minister Miki Zohar calling the film “despicable” and saying he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators on the grounds of treason against the state”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, was the next to attack the filmmakers. He declared he would introduce two legislative bills targeting those who “defame” the Israeli military. According to him, the first bill would enable revoking the citizenship of “anyone who defames soldiers”. The second would boost “twentyfold” the amount in damages in lawsuits for defamation.

The military itself has also threatened action. Chief-of-staff Eyal Zamir ordered punitive legal steps against the filmmakers with the help of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet.

Punishing the filmmakers
The documentary is not an outlier in the allegations it makes, and it is revealing that the Israeli establishment should seek to punish the filmmakers rather than examine the abhorrent rules of engagement that have blighted this war on Gaza (in response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 – a “breakout” from their 23-year prison enclave).

Just this week, the German news magazine Der Siegel has published accounts from 10 Israeli soldiers describing how troops killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza and branded them as “terrorists”. The soldiers recounted war crimes in their testimonies, including slaughtering unarmed Palestinians and destroying entire neighbourhoods to prevent families returning. One infantry reservist described how he was encouraged to kill unarmed civilians, saying: “The Arabs must be punished.” Collective punishment is a war crime.

The Israeli authorities are so desperate to minimise the political damage from this documentary that a hurriedly produced “counter” film as part of the $1 billion hasbara propaganda programme has been released — but this is littered with lies and disinformation and is unlikely to have the desired impact.

For an accurate exposé of the Gaza breakout itself that triggered the genocide following more than seven decades of occupation and repression since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their own land during the 1948 Nakba (“the Catastrophe”), it is hard to match the Al Jazeera investigation October 7.

• NAZA: A Window into Systems of Mass Killing, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (Madman Entertainment). The film has been released in 55 countries, including New Zealand, but is banned from screening in Israel. It will be streamed for free on The Guardian’s website in late November.

People running foodbanks in South Auckland say poverty is deepening among the Pacific community, and the high demand they are seeing is the just tip of the iceberg.

Persistent high rents and basic living costs, plus nagging debt, continue to leave Pasifika families facing tough decisions on whether to pay bills or feed their children.

As New Zealand gets ready to head to the polls on November 7, and the cost of living looms as the biggest issue for voters, the government has been touting its stewardship of the economy and signs of recovery.

• READ MORE: Other New Zealand election reports

But it is a different picture at the frontline of foodbanks such as Vinnies Tāmaki Makaurau – based in Onehunga – which is part of the national organisation of the Society of St Vincent de Paul.

Households from the Pasifika and Māori communities make up the majority of families who come to their foodbank or to access budgeting support, counselling, youth development or help with employment pathways.

“We used to see people come once every three months. Now we’re seeing people try and register with us and apply every week, every fortnight, and we just wish we weren’t the capability to do that,” Henry Elliot, a triage coordinator and financial mentor with Vinnies, said.

He said while housing insecurity, chronic illness, disability, mental health difficulties, domestic violence and other factors contributed to food insecurity, Vinnies did not have enough resources to meet the high demand.

The Onehunga base had 31,000 engagements last year — that is, people reaching out and getting responded to, either by phone, face to face meetings, online engagement, workshops, sessions, or programme participation.

Post-pandemic deprivation
According to Elliot, Vinnies has seen the level of need among Pasifika deepen since the covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid brought the need up, and then when covid kind of disappeared, and we were supposed to go back to normal lives, for lots of people their jobs were never there again; they had no work.

“Some of them still have no work, or they’re on part time, or their hours are cut. So while covid disappeared and the funding disappeared, the need for food did not.”

Meanwhile, the government this term introduced a host of sanctions on beneficiaries, which he said had left a number of people in the Pacific community needing help from Vinnies.

“Two three years into those those new rules, we’re seeing the effects. People are coming in unsure why their benefit was cut or why their benefit was slashed altogether, and then finding out that it’s because they missed a meeting, a conference, a phone call, and those sanctions that are imposed on them happen very quickly.”

A new survey by the New Zealand Food Network found that one in every three households is struggling to provide affordable, nutritious meals, with the burden falling heaviest on single parents, Pacific communities, disabled people and renters.

‘The gap is widening’
Vinnies Tāmaki Makaurau general manager Delphina Soti said it was increasingly clear that many Pasifika families were struggling to afford basics.

“Like we understand that the cost of living has gone up, inflation’s gone up, like all sorts of different things have gone up, but what people are getting paid is not going up,” Soti noted.

“So it’s 9 percent that rent’s gone up, and then cost of living — 5 percent. Then you look at income, Work and Income, our most vulnerable, 2.2 percent; and then you look at how much the incomes have gone up, it’s like 4 percent.”

She said that only about 16 percent of Pasifika in New Zealand owned homes, compared with 42.1 percent of all New Zealanders, while around two-thirds of Pasifika were renting homes.

“So if the rent is shooting through the clouds, their income is coming down, and Work and Income is coming down, what kind of planning is this as a government?

‘The poor are becoming poorer, and the gap is widening.”

This is echoed by Mangere Budgeting Services Trust CEO Lara Dolan, who said in each of the past two financial years, her organsation supported around 4000 families with food support and budgeting advice.

She said Pasifika made up 60 percent of those people.

‘Struggling big time’
“The demand for our services, financial mentoring services, has increased by 61 percent in the last two years, and the demand for food has increased by more than 100 percent, which tells me that people are struggling big time.”

Dolan said people coming to them for help were often working people drowning in debt and the high cost of living.

“Everything is getting more expensive but salaries of people are not keeping up with inflation.

“We see a lot of people who are ‘working poor’, like teachers, builders, and health care workers coming in.”

Because Vinnies does not offer food deliveries, people need to come to them to get the food packages. But getting all the way to Onehunga is too hard for some families.

Elliot said another barrier is the shame some Pacific people feel about reaching out for help.

“It’s that sense of shame or whakamā. So we try and provide that safe space where it’s as simple as going to a New World or a Pak’nSave, they don’t have to feel like they’re coming to a charity.

‘Weight off their shoulders’
“We notice that when we give them the food, a small weight’s lifted off their shoulders every time.

“Every time the person puts food in their car or in their trolley or whatever, that small weight is okay — ‘of all the problems I have in my life right now, at least I know I’ve got a meal tonight, and so do my kids.'”

Soti said Vinnies was probably only seeing about 50 percent of the families who were in need of help.

“We’ve had people here who’ve struggled to come here. We watch cars do ueys [u-turns]. They keep on turning around and going back until somebody goes. Henry goes out and waves them down — ‘come’. and they come trembling.

“They don’t want to ask, but they are connected to a whole lot of other people who are doing it tough as well. We reckon about 50 percent. We only see the tip of the iceberg.”

Community ‘come to party’
Vinnies gets some funding from the Ministry of Social Development, and then other funding from private sources and church donations.

Soti said Vinnies was grateful government support for its foodbanks, but it was nowhere near the level they needed.

However, the Pacific community has come to the party as much as it can.

“Amidst all of this, there’s so much hope. We ask our young people, ‘hey, you can be part of this food system, you can really make an impact’,” she explained.

“So they turn around and collect cans, and they don’t just collect cans. They collect to the value of $30,000 worth of cans,

Elliot said the sense of community is strong within Pacific people, which gives them resilience.

“I will say this: they’ve known struggle and poverty their entire lives, especially if they’re from New Zealand. So they know how to make it work if need be,” he said.

Families in wider context
“And while they may be shy to come to us because we are a Pacific community, they do know that the community will rally around people that need support in the long run, whether that be through their church or their village communities that operate here in New Zealand, or their families in a wider context.”

Soti said that in Aotearoa there was enough to go around — and that no one should go hungry.

“I think there is enough. You got people who’ve got billions, and then you’ve got people with absolutely nothing, and so it’s just thinking, coming back to human beings.

“Poverty seeps in when we forget that we belong to each other on a really human level. If we remember that, maybe it’s time to pull some of those resources towards those who don’t have enough of the blanket.”

Vote for the three progressive parties — Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori — in next month’s general election if you want to see a principled Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy stance based on international law and justice.

Here is how Aotearoa New Zealand’s political parties stand on the Palestinian solidarity movement’s four key demands this election:

This year’s election provides the movement a crucial opportunity to educate and encourage the public to elect representatives who will take a stand for justice and be accountable to us, the people.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Party reports

Rating footnotes:
However, Opportunity wants any goods and services produced inside the Zionist state to be “unaffected” by sanctions.

Te Pāti Māori, the Greens and Labour have committed to comprehensive sanctions, using a framework based on the Russia Sanctions Act.

The language of this Bill would offer the solidarity movement the possibility to organise together for wider-ranging sanctions (eg. targeting complicit states and international financial backers of the genocide and occupation).

While Te Pāti Māori has had the clearest and strongest position on Palestine and related issues throughout the past 3 years, their campaign is calling for electorate votes only.

Te Pāti Māori is encouraging voters to cast their party vote for the Greens or Labour.

The Opportunity Party’s commitment to sanctions targets goods produced in illegal settlements and travel bans on individuals. Opportunity would consider divesting public money if it fit UN criteria of supporting the illegal occupation.

This scorecard is endorsed by Justice for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and Dayenu.

Western civilisation has never had a clean record. Its history is soaked in conquest, enslavement, and slaughter. Yet it always took solace in one redeeming quality: it carried within itself the seeds of its own correction.

Its unwavering support for Israel has betrayed the values and squandered the achievements cultivated over centuries of philosophical inquiry and moral struggle. But more importantly, it has dismantled the very mechanism of self-correction that once enabled it to confront and overcome its own wrongs.

The West’s defenders often argue that, yes, it lived under some of history’s most brutal monarchies, but it gave the world constitutional democracy. It enslaved Africans on an industrial scale, they concede, yet abolished slavery and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• READ MORE: The escalation in Yemen is a turning point
• Other Gaza reports

It colonised continents, but came to recognise the right of peoples to self-determination. It waged two world wars, yet drafted the UN Charter and outlawed aggression. It perpetrated the Holocaust, yet helped establish the Genocide Convention. It committed unspeakable crimes, yet helped build the architecture of accountability, from Nuremberg and the Geneva Conventions to the International Criminal Court. It dropped atomic bombs on Japanese cities and gassed soldiers in the trenches of Ypres, yet helped forge the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the ban on chemical weapons.

This capacity for self-correction gave the West a normative power that served it for decades. It allowed Western capitals to speak the language of rules and rights, and to be heard even by those who remembered suffering at Western hands.

Its unconditional support for Israel has squandered that capital. Worse, it has turned the West against the very mechanisms that once allowed it to redress its mistakes. This did not begin in Gaza. It has been under way for half a century.

Democracy was the first casualty. When Vietnam War opponent Senator Charles Percy lost his seat in 1984, the head of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby publicly boasted that politicians everywhere had taken note.

Free speech policed for foreign power
Four decades later, a single pro-Israel super PAC spent more than $20 million to unseat two members of Congress in one election cycle. Governments across the West have adopted definitions of antisemitism that blur into criticism of Israel. Students are arrested for protesting, foreign scholars face deportation for their op-eds, and in Britain hundreds have been detained for holding placards. Free speech is being policed on behalf of a foreign regime.

The legacy of abolition has been betrayed. The West that ended slavery and ultimately turned against apartheid South Africa has made peace with racial domination.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the world isolated Pretoria, Israel was among its most important military partners. Today the very instrument that helped bring down South African apartheid, the boycott, is penalised in dozens of American states and condemned by Germany’s Parliament when aimed at Israel. This comes even as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own B’Tselem conclude that Israel practices apartheid.

The promise of decolonisation has been inverted. The West that eventually conceded independence across Asia and Africa has, since 1967, armed and shielded an occupation it formally considered illegal. It shrugged off the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling against the separation wall and watched settlements expand in defiance of Security Council Resolution 2334. When the Court declared the entire occupation unlawful in 2024, Western capitals answered with more weapons.

The UN Charter has been hollowed out. The principle that territory cannot be acquired by war, enshrined in Resolution 242 and drafted by Britain, was abandoned when Washington recognised Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. The United States has vetoed roughly 50 Security Council resolutions to shield Israel since 1972, about half of all the vetoes it has ever cast.

It has paralysed the Council as occupation hardened, ethnic cleansing continued and tens of thousands were killed. It has walked out of UNESCO and the Human Rights Council over their treatment of Israel and defunded UNRWA, the lifeline of Palestinian refugees.

The Genocide Convention has been emptied. In 1982, the General Assembly declared the Sabra and Shatila massacre an act of genocide. The massacre was carried out in camps ringed by Israeli troops, and the major Western powers abstained. Four decades later, the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, and a UN commission of inquiry has since concluded that Israel committed genocide. Western weapons kept flowing. Germany, of all nations, found itself defending its arms exports before the Court.

International justice gutted
International criminal justice has been gutted at every level. When Belgian courts pursued Ariel Sharon over Sabra and Shatila, Belgium rewrote its universal jurisdiction law under Israeli and American pressure. When a London court issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, Britain changed its law so it could not happen again.

In 2020, Washington sanctioned the ICC prosecutor for investigating Americans and Israelis. In 2025, after her successor sought Netanyahu’s arrest, it sanctioned him, the Court’s judges and even a UN special rapporteur. European governments that once championed the Court found reasons not to enforce its warrant.

And the non-proliferation regime is collapsing. Since 1969, Washington has tacitly accepted Israel’s undeclared arsenal behind a doctrine of “deliberate ambiguity”. Israel remains outside the NPT and the Biological Weapons Convention and has never ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Western states have repeatedly obstructed a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, the very bargain that secured the NPT’s indefinite extension in 1995. Meanwhile, they demand total transparency from Iran, an NPT member under IAEA inspection.

In 1981, even Washington voted to condemn Israel’s strike on Iraq’s safeguarded Osirak reactor. In 2025, when safeguarded Iranian facilities were bombed, Germany’s Chancellor praised Israel for doing the “dirty work” for all of us. The lesson to every capital is that joining the treaty buys no protection, and staying out of it costs nothing.

Netanyahu likes to portray Israel as the defender of Western civilisation against Iran. The truth is the opposite. Iran never made the West abandon its own principles. Israel did. No adversary has damaged Western civilisation as profoundly as the ally that persuaded it to dismantle its own conscience.

Rez Nasri is an international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, and he writes about Iran in Persian, English and French.

The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded this year’s prize to Navi Pillay for her lifelong commitment to human rights, justice and accountability.

Following a long and distinguished career as a human rights-focused jurist, South African-born Pillay was appointed chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 2021.

Quite predictably, within hours of the announcement of her award, President Trump said he should have won eight “Noble” (sic) prizes, that the decision was an indelible stain on Norway, and he would impose fresh sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) established to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

• READ MORE: Nobel Peace Prize honours Navi Pillay for lifelong commitment to human rights, justice and accountability
• A triumph for global justice – why Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize is beyond reproach

Happy to do his master’s bidding, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US would punish the choice of Pillay by “dismantling the ICC brick by brick, … we will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate”.

In lockstep with his US patron, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared the choice of Pillay “a gross weaponisation of the Nobel Peace Prize…  If there was an award for lies, hatred and blood libel, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender, she’d be a front runner”.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has said nothing. Despite repeated claims to respect international law, a fearful silence is the best Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong can offer, a tactic suggesting a

cowardly sheltering behind the diatribes from Trump and Netanyahu.

A champion of human rights
In complete contrast to the Netanyahu criminality invective, Judge Pillay has promoted universal human rights, advocated respect for humanitarian law and, through her kindness and generosity, has represented the ideals of a common humanity.

Citations explaining Navi Pillay’s record explain why she is regarded as a champion of peace with justice and why so much is at stake in this controversy over her Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Committee explained their choice: “For her efforts to promote peace and international law.” … “History has shown that a world operating without the rule of law is unjust, unwise, and inhumane.”

A year earlier, Navi Pillay received the Sydney Peace Prize whose citation included reference to “a lifetime of advocating for the fundamental human rights of women”, due recognition of Judge Pillay’s campaigns to abolish female genital mutilation and forced child marriages.

Where is the gratitude?
Navi’s lifetime work has included a period as a judge on the ICC, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and chair of the UN Commission inquiring into war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Ever since her appointment as the first coloured, female judge to be appointed to the South African High Court, Navi Pillay has spoken and acted courageously.

Such a virtue has prompted ire from Israel and silence from Australia.

In her report to the UN, Judge Pillay concluded, “The State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Reference to Australian human rights abuses
Judge Pillay has also condemned Australia’s mandatory detention policy, repeatedly criticised offshore processing arrangements and the Northern Territory’s “imperialist, discriminatory attitude towards Indigenous communities”.

To tolerate criticism and still manage to act generously usually requires a touch of courage. In which case Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong still have a chance to congratulate Navi Pillay, if only because they regard themselves as champions of international humanitarian law.

Penny Wong’s silence is particularly notable, given her support for Venezuelan 2025 Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who handed her prize to Donald Trump.

An Australian government statement of support for the UN, for the Nobel Committee and for Navi Pillay’s humanity-saving achievements would still be invaluable.

But support for the Nobel choice of Navi Pillay cannot be expressed by silence.

Details are emerging of violence which left at least eight people dead at Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea’s Enga Province, in an incident for which local people have pointed blame at PNG’s Kumul 23 elite tactical police unit.

The police have denied that Kumul 23 are behind the killings, which reportedly occurred on September 23, but the incident has raised serious concerns about ongoing efforts to target illegal miners at the Porgera gold mine, which has been a magnet for lawlessness and violence for decades.

A local official claims Kumul 23 forces came to Porgera’s Kulapi villages, setting fire to houses and reportedly firing into a crowd of people.

• READ MORE: ABC Pacific on the September massacre in PNG’s troubled Porgera
• Other Porgera reports

Porgera District Administrator Jerry Maku said that eight people were known to have been killed, with one critically injured.

PNG Police deny this allegation and say Kumul 23 forces were not behind the killings, but were in the area to respond to fighting by groups invoved in a tribal conflict.

PNG Police deny this allegation and say Kumul 23 forces were not behind the killings, but were in the area to respond to fighting by groups invoved in a tribal conflict.

The Commissioner of Police, David Manning, said the police operation followed the recent murder of nine people and destruction of houses by opposing clansmen.

Manning released a statement today, announcing that “24 male criminals have been arrested and two armed men killed during a police operation targeting a violent criminal group in Porgera, Enga Province”.

“Specialist tactical police deployed discreetly into the area, conducted surveillance and, once the gunmen had been located, initiated the operation that resulted in 24 arrests and the deaths of two armed men.

“This operation should serve as a clear warning to those engaged in tribal conflict or holding illegal weapons: the law will reach you, and you will be held accountable,” the commissioner said.

RNZ Pacific has seen footage — taken at the end of that day — of bodies adorned with blankets and flowers, surrounded by grieving locals. In the footage, a voice says in Tok Pisin that “all our houses have been burned down” and that “many of our tribesmen are missing”.

Maku said that six people spotted near the Porgera gold mine, suspected of being illegal miners, were shot and killed by police officers, while two landowners were killed in their homes.

It is the latest incident in a long string of violence linked to efforts to relocate people who have been living on or near the Special Mining Lease (SML) area.

The owners of the mine, mining company Barrick Niugini Limited and the PNG state, have been trying to crack down on ongoing illegal mining at the mine site, but the ensuing displacement of local villagers has added to the problems.

“Frightening things are happening, and we are failing, the government is failing its own people,” Maku said.

“They have no place to go, that’s why they are just hanging around with illegal miners… but you know, they start shooting.”

Teenager killed, police refusing to allow burial
Richard Yope, a 16-year-old student, is reported to be among those killed in the incident. According to his family, he was simply passing by the area.

A letter written by Pulumani Tribe spokesperson Andreas Wabiria, addressed to authorities and supplied to RNZ Pacific, said the officers were wearing military fatigue uniforms and black masks covering their faces.

“They ordered villagers to assemble, razed Kulapi Villages 1, 2, 3 and 4, burnt houses belonging to Pulumani Tribe landowners, and discharged firearms indiscriminately into the crowd.

“Many other persons remain missing and are presumed dead,” Wabiria said.

Afterwards, officers cordoned off areas of the district and formed a roadblock on the Highlands Highway towards Mount Hagen, whose hospital had been willing to autopsy bodies.

Wabiria said it stopped most relatives of the deceased from taking the bodies for post-mortem examination – but they managed to get Richard out.

Thirty family members accompanied Richard’s mother Rachel to Mount Hagen General Hospital, a four-hour drive from Porgera, where they still remain.

Wabiria told RNZ Pacific they were told over the phone by Maku on Saturday that officers were refusing to let them return with Richard’s body for the sake of a traditional burial at the village.

“I couldn’t really help them much, because Kumul 23 is going to get on me if I try to,” Maku told RNZ Pacific.

Wabiria said that many in the group feared for their lives if they re-approached the entrance to their homes.

“This is two deaths in two years suffered by the same family, at the hands of the same mine, under the watch of the same government… they are becoming a spectator on their own land.”

“The morgue fees is also exorbitant, every day it costs her dearly to keep the body in the morgue,” he said.

“All 30 of them, they are hungry. They have no whatever means of surviving.”

Mine disturbances
Enga Province has been plagued by violence for years — both election-related conflict and tribal fighting.

Lawlessness in and around Porgera, particularly in relation to illegal mining, has also been a problem that Engan authorities have struggled to contain over many years.

“The company doesn’t want illegal miners to stay close to the mine, every day they go in and disturb the mine operation,” Maku said.

“They suspect that the landowners are harbouring the illegal miners.”

Earlier this year, Enga’s governor Sir Peter Ipatas told RNZ Pacific that people in his province had taken lawlessness to another level using modern guns, with no respect for authority.

The national government has responded to the problem by resourcing police on the ground. In recent months, Kumul 23 intensified its ground patrols across Enga as part of operations targeting illegal firearms and violent offenders, and as part of an intelligence-led policing strategy.

The unit was established last year, in the wake of new anti-terrorism laws in PNG — its forces were given unprecedented “shoot to kill” powers.

PNG’s former Deputy Prime Minister Don Polye, an influential Engan political leader, said he had concerns from the outset about the use of the “terrorism” tag in a PNG context.

The latest events have deeply concerned Polye who told RNZ Pacific that a grieving father had approached him about the death of his teenage son.

“The father who lives in Port Moresby, he came to me crying. I said what happened. He said ‘my son has been killed and murdered’… he said ‘it was the police that shot my son’.

“Kumul 23 just went in and burned down houses and started shooting at this line of houses and this compound, that the intelligence told them that they were illegal miners.”

“They started shooting at them, and some of them were running. And one student who I know personally, he went into the wrong direction, and the Kumul 23 shot him and he died.”

Police have denied the claim.

Failure in resettlement efforts
Polye said in the absense of a proper relocation plan, a volatile mix of different communities has increased in Porgera while associated law and order problems have grown out of control.

“There is the soup of locals, immigrants, illegal miners, warlords, warriors, mercenaries — all squatting on the SML land,” Polye explained.

“For addressing the 30 years of outstanding SML relocation issues, funding will have to have been provided.”

“When no such relocation is taking place and (with) the gold price being at the highest peak in history, the SML area is breeding the chaos witnessed in Porgera at present.”

Wabiria said the Pulumani tribe were seeking just restitution from the government, noting a 700 million kina (NZ$280 million) budget set aside for the relocation of his people that thus far has been untouched.

The deal — which has yet to be settled between landowners and Prime Minister James Marape — included more than K200 million (NZ$80 million) in ‘equity-related’ funding that is currently being held in a government trust.

Marape could start by rebuilding the houses that the violence has destroyed, Wabiria suggested.

“They should just have the courtesy and the respect, the human dignity, to at least bury the dead and facilitate the land.”

He added that as things stand, once the 30 locals return from Mount Hagen, none of them will have a home to go to.

Millions of people asking the same question: How is this still happening?

For three years, we have watched the destruction of Gaza. Homes, hospitals, schools and churches. Entire families erased. Children killed, maimed, orphaned and left to starve. Premature babies intentionally left to die in their incubators.

The videos. The images. The screams.

• READ MORE: Aotearoa marches, vigils kick-off ‘global day of action’ for Palestine with mass protests in dozens of countries
• Other Palestine reports

What we have witnessed is worse than any horror film I’ve ever seen — and these are real people. Our people.

And our history did not begin on October 7th.

For 78 years, Palestinians have been fighting for their freedom, dignity and the right to live in our own land.

What is happening to Palestine is the tip of the spear of so much that is wrong with our world: hypocrisy, double standards, selective accountability, and political agendas placed above human lives.

And it has spread to Sudan, Yemen, Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Iran.

Dystopian world
We live in a dystopian world. A world where the Epstein class get away with pedophilia and human trafficking and worse, while those speaking up against the murder of children are deemed problematic and extremists.

A world where wealth buys access, power buys protection, and accountability depends on who you are.

And that is why we are so frustrated.

We have presented the evidence. We have marched. We have petitioned. We have appealed to our governments and international institutions.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

A UN commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide, and later reported the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children.

Journalists have documented it. Doctors have testified. Palestinians have shown the world their own suffering, day after day.

And still, it goes on.

Biggest atrocity of our time
What more do our leaders need? How many more reports? How many more testimonies? How many more children?

Governments lecture us about human rights, international law and so-called “Western values” — then turn a blind eye to the biggest atrocity of our time.

Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York last month despite an ICC arrest warrant.

And in the West Bank, Palestinians have faced killings, displacement and the destruction of their communities.

We are exhausted by the distance between what our leaders say and what they are prepared to do.

We are done with statements of concern without consequences. Of accountability that reaches the powerless but stops at the powerful.

Palestinian lives cannot remain the price of somebody else’s profit.

Independent access denied
Now, one year into a so-called “ceasefire”, Israel continues to deny international journalists independent access to Gaza, while Palestinian journalists continue to risk their lives to show us what is happening.

Palestinian voices suppressed online. Artists face consequences for speaking out. Prominent figures pressured into silence.

Yet our stories continue to reach people.

They have killed our journalists, but they have not buried the truth.

And despite every effort to silence us, look around you. Across the world, people are listening, organising and marching beside us.

They cannot make the world unsee what it has seen.

Demonstrators gathered at Parliament Lawn in Wellington, New Zealand, on Saturday for the Hikoi for Palestine / Global March for Palestine, marching to Te Ngakau Civic Square. https://t.co/5iOylRtBqv

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 11, 2026

There is no going back. But awareness alone will not free Palestine.

We hold them accountable
Now we hold them accountable. Our politicians. Our representatives. Our leaders.

They talk about “fixing the basics”, but where is their action against the deliberate killing of children?

Start with the basics of humanity. From this October until the next, we escalate our peaceful pressure.

We demand sanctions. We boycott Israeli products. We demand the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador and the cutting of political and economic ties with Israel. We demand visa restrictions on those responsible for atrocities.

We are done asking for accountability. We demand it as our right. We demand commitments, deadlines and action.

Hardest year in life
On a personal note, this year has been without a doubt the hardest year of my life. This year we lost Roger Fowler to cancer, one of our most just leaders and advocates for humanity in here in Aotearoa.

During the last moments I had with him, he was still pushing for us to continue the fight for people in Palestine.

My father, who was born in the Nakba on May 15, 1948, is currently continuing his 2 year battle with cancer, leaving me with the ever-growing pressure to uproot my life here and move to Australia to be with him and my mother, both of whom can only be described as angels on earth and I count my blessings everyday that I was lucky enough to have them as my parents.

This year we also lost my grandmother Elena at the age of 96. One of the last things she told me was how much she wished she could go back to her home in Palestine. The place where she played with her friends, where she grew up, where she got married.

We should not have had to wait 78 years. We cannot let another generation inherit this same abandonment.

This year I also witnessed and experienced a cancer of a different kind, a cancer within our movement both locally and internationally. Where bullying, personal agendas and censorship were allowed to thrive while our shared values of transparency equality and fair treatment were cast aside.

How can we push and demand accountability externally when we cannot practise that internally? I understand it’s because we are all frustrated, but there’s no room for that here.

Collective power
Let us turn our collective frustration into collective power. Stand up against bullying against personal agendas and saviour mentalities. We’re all in this together, and silence is the ultimate killer.

I do not want to live in a world where a child’s life is negotiable. And I know I am not alone.

We are the closest we’ve ever been to a better world. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Let us take our world back — and make it a world where every child can live in freedom and safety.

Free Palestine.

Youssef Sammour is a Palestinian Christian and a construction project manager who has been on board three Gaza Freedom Flotilla humanitarian aid missions for the besieged Palestinian enclave. This article is adapted from a speech he made at the Global March for Palestine last Saturday and is republished with permission.

THE LARGEST GLOBAL MOVEMENT IN THE WORLD…
Today marks the 37th national pro-Palestinian protest in London, joining more than 250 demonstrations across 60 countries worldwide.

UNPRECEDENTED.
Over the past three years, at least 51,000 pro-Palestinian protests have been documented across the world.

— Earth Hippy (@hippyygoat) October 10, 2026

The Fiji Times has reaffirmed its commitment to serving as the voice of the nation and championing freedom of expression, access to truth and the rights of every Fijian.

In his Fiji Day message on Saturday, Fiji Times Pte Limited chairman Kirit Prabhudas Patel said the newspaper was humbled to have journeyed alongside the people of Fiji for more than a century and a half.

“At The Fiji Times, we remain deeply humbled to have journeyed alongside the people of Fiji throughout the years,” Patel said.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji Times reports

“For more than a century and a half, we have remained committed to serving as the voice of the nation, championing freedom of expression, access to truth, and the right of every Fijian to be heard.”

Patel, who is also chairman and chief executive officer of the Motibhai Group of Companies, said the newspaper’s longstanding “Your Voice Since 1869” message represented more than a slogan.

“‘The Fiji Times — Your Voice Since 1869’ is more than a slogan; it is a promise that has endured through generations,” he said.

“Through periods of change, challenge, and celebration, we have stood with the people of Fiji, sharing their stories, reflecting their aspirations, and supporting the principles of truth, fairness, and accountability that are essential to a vibrant democracy.”

Enduring spirit
Patel said The Fiji Times would continue that commitment under the enduring spirit of “For Fiji, Ever Fiji”.

“We reaffirm our pledge to continue serving the people of Fiji with integrity and purpose,” he said.

Reflecting on Fiji’s 56th anniversary of independence, Patel said every citizen had a responsibility to contribute towards the country’s success.

“Progress is achieved not by the efforts of a few, but through the collective commitment of all.”

He called on Fijians to honour the country’s past while working together towards a peaceful, prosperous and inclusive future.

“Let us honour their legacy by upholding the values they cherished and by working together to ensure an even brighter future for generations to come.”

Anish Chand is a senior Fiji Times journalist. Republished with permission.

COMMENTARY: By Nick Bollinger

I have to confess to a degree of imposter syndrome.

I was the wrong age and in the wrong place to be any part of this visionary organisation.

When the small group first gathered in the 1970s to plan what would be the foundations of the Ponsonby People’s Union (PPU), I would have been 12 or 13 and just starting secondary school at Onslow College in Johnsonville, near Wellington.

• READ MORE: From Resistance to the Ponsonby People’s Union, a courageous tale of struggle for justice — David Robie
• Honouring the people’s fight against hardship, repression and racism — Tony Fala
• Other Ponsonby People’s Union reports

But even then, it would have been hard not to notice that there were things going on, out in the world beyond our school walls, that were challenging the way society was being run; that sought fairness and justice and peace.

For the past five or six years New Zealand had been involved in a war, waged by America against the Vietnamese, and it didn’t take much to see that this was completely wrong. There were marches through town on Friday nights, organised by people just a few years older than me; some who our government were trying to force into military training, perhaps even to fight in this unjust war.

And these were some of the first activities that me and my Onslow friends would join in on, that could be seen as part of the challenge to the powers that governed our society.

There were other things happening too that I wanted to be part of. Some were deadly serious, like the movement against nuclear weapons or apartheid in South Africa. And there were others that just looked like more fun than the mainstream version of life in New Zealand that was being offered – rock concerts and festivals, communes, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Hope, ideas, action
It was a time of hope, ideas, and action.

It felt, however loosely, like a movement.

It looked to me like an attempt to change the world.

And in many ways I think it did.

Sometimes that things that changed would change back again, as the forces of the establishment regrouped. Some things may have had destructive side-effects that no one really questioned enough at the time.

But there were also lives that were meaningfully improved, perhaps even saved, because of the ideals and the efforts of people who, in different ways, made up this movement.

It would take me a good few decades to get around to it, but a few years ago I set out to write a history of all of this, which I loosely termed the counterculture (because that is how other historians around the world had defined it — and versions of this movement did take place all over the world.)

Just too young
As I had been just too young to really be more than an observer, I wanted to fill in some gaps in my experience. I wanted to know more about the people who had driven the movement in this country, where their ideas had come from, how they had developed them and put them into action and, ultimately, what had happened as a result.

I began interviewing people who had been involved – whether it had been in the protest activities, or the early bookshops, or the music festivals.

And I would always ask these people who they thought I should talk to; who else had been involved and might have valuable stories to share?

A name that would come up with amazing frequency was that of Roger Fowler.

Now as I’ve said in the introduction to this book, Roger would no doubt have been embarrassed to find his name in the first sentence because – as I discovered when I met him – his ethos was always one of co-operation, the power of people working together to achieve a common goal rather that the celebration of the individual.

As I worked on my project I began to see that sometimes a shared energy and sense of purpose can help unite a group of likeminded people who might not otherwise have found a focus for their own energies.

And I’m sure that for many people that is what Roger provided, and that was one of his great gifts.

Roger was involved in many, many causes and projects, both before and after the PPU, but it’s the PPU that we’re celebrating here today and it is a great example of something he achieved and how it was achieved.

Jumping Sundays
When I completed my book about the counterculture in Aotearoa, I named it after something else Roger was involved with, something perhaps more frivolous but which seemed to me to be a symbol of those times: I called it Jumping Sundays, which was the name by which people referred to the Sunday afternoon people’s festivals that took place in Albert Park, and where Roger would often perform with his band, the Frank E. Evans Memorial Lunchtime Entertainment Band.

In Jumping Sundays, I attempted, perhaps over-ambitiously, to look at all the aspects of this movement and show some of the connections and even contradictions between its different facets. So there’s a chapter on the Vietnam War but also one on communes; a chapter about alternative media – the underground newspapers and the Resistance Bookshop (something else Roger was involved with) – but there are also chapters on drugs and sex and rock’n’roll.

To fit it all in, I had to compress an awful lot of information. I believe that in the index to Jumping Sundays there are four entries for the People’s Union, but really it adds up to just a couple of pages in which I couldn’t do much more than outline how this organisation came about, who was involved and a few of the things that they did.

So I’m very glad that this new book has been put together from the memories and stories and writings and photographs of the people who were actually there. It’s like zooming in on those few paragraphs I wrote and expanding it to show us all the detail and colour that I could only hint at.

I’m hoping other people today will talk about some of the specific things the Ponsonby People’s Union achieved – whether it was providing cheap food for hungry families or staging occupations of substandard housing when landlords needed an extra nudge; the bus visits to prisons, or the way they worked with other groups like the Polynesian Panthers to fight racism on this city’s streets.

But the final thing I’d like to say is that, looking back on the counterculture era, in all its different dimensions, which ranged from the revolutionary to the ridiculous, the PPU for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most practical, principled, and inspiring example of countercultural ideals put into action.

This book is a reminder of what is possible. I believe that back then they used to call it “survival pending revolution”.

And we’ve never needed that more than now.

Nick Bollinger is a Wellington-based writer, historian, broadcaster and critic. He was a music columnist for The Listener for more than 20 years, has written for Mojo and been the voice of Radio New Zealand’s music review programme The Sampler.

Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.

Thousands of people took to the streets across Aotearoa New Zealand on Saturday, standing in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Global Day of Action. Yet where was the media coverage?

From Auckland to Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and communities across the country, people turned out to demand justice, freedom and an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

These are not insignificant gatherings. These are people exercising their democratic right to protest, raising their voices against injustice and demanding accountability.

• READ MORE: Aotearoa marches, vigils kick-off ‘global day of action’ for Palestine with mass protests in dozens of countries
• Tens of thousands join pro-Palestinian march in New Zealand — coverage in 2025
• Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza rises to 74,370, says Health Ministry
• Other Palestine reports

When thousands take to the streets for Palestine, that is news. When their voices are barely heard, that raises serious questions about media priorities.

Whose voices are being amplified, and whose are being pushed to the margins?

New Zealanders deserve journalism that reflects what is happening in their communities — not selective silence when the issue is Palestine.

The media cannot claim to represent the public while overlooking thousands of people demanding justice.

Palestine is not going away. Our voices are not going away. And neither is our demand for justice.

Do your job. Cover the protests. Let the public see what is happening.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Mass pro-Palestine protests across at least 60 countries in more than 250 locations worldwide were launched as part of a Global Day of Action beginning in Aotearoa New Zealand today.

Thousands of people took part in solidarity rallies and marches in the three largest cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — and vigils and actions happened at least 23 other places around the country.

An estimated 15,000 people, including representives of more than 50 organisations and movements backing the global action took part in the march up Queen Street from downtown Te Komititanga Square next to the Waitemata transport hub to Albert Park.

• READ MORE: Death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza rises to 74,370, says Health Ministry
• Other Palestine reports

Giant banners proclaiming “Genocide is a crime — Free Palestine” and “Global March for Palestine – NZ Sanction Israel now” were carried by lead marchers, and posters displaying slogans such as “The genocide feeds on the silence”, “Freedom for Palestine”, and “Bombing and shooting kids is not self-defence — Free Palestine” were carried throughout the crowd.

One cardboard poster said “The intifada is global now” and another “The Epstein class are killers”, referring to allegations in the United States against members of the elite, including President Donald Trump.

A counter-protest was staged by supporters of Israel and the Shah’s regime in Iran — waving Israeli, Lion and Sun flags of the ousted monarchy, Stars and Stripes and Union Jack flags — but this was dwarfed by the pro-Palestine rally.

Police kept the peace and 1News reported just one minor incident.

Detained and tortured
Before the march began, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and a coalition of groups, two protesters who had been on Gaza freedom flotillas in humanitarian aid efforts to break the siege and had been detained and tortured by Israeli security forces talked of their experiences.

Hāhona Ormsby (Ngāti Maniapoto), son-in-law of the late Kia Ora Gaza activist Roger Fowler, condemned a recent “Indigenous” delegation from New Zealand hosted by Israel and said this was undermining Tangata Whenua solidarity with Palestinians.

“We know what settler colonialism is,” he said.

Youssef Sammour, a Palestinian Christian who has joined three peace flotillas to Gaza, spoke about the question being asked by millions of people around the world: “How is this still happening?”

“For three years, we have watched the destruction of Gaza. Homes, hospitals, schools and churches. Entire families erased. Children killed, maimed, orphaned and left to starve.

“Premature babies intentionally left to die in their incubators. The videos. The images. The screams.

“For 78 years, Palestinians have been fighting for their freedom, dignity and the right to live in our own land.”

In Albert Park, representatives of opposition parties pledged their support for a change in government policy in active support for Palestine if elected on November 7.

The Labour Party foreign affairs spokesperson Vanushi Walters told the crowd that New Zealand could not stand by in the face of genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and ongoing violations of international law.

The party has made it clear that a Labour-led government would recognise the State of Palestine, including diplomatically with presentation of credentials, impose economic sanctions on Israel via new laws similar to the Russian Sanctions Act, support South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and ensure our Super Fund and ACC divest from companies identified by the UN as operating in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Today was the third anniversary of protests against the Israeli genocide.

Major global protests
Meanwhile, the Middle East Eye reports that capital cities across the globe will see major protests and actions in support of Palestine today, according to the Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP).

The statement says that more than 200 organisations will be mobilising for a mass “synchronised Global Day of Action”, involving civil society groups, trade unions, student federations and human rights networks across 60 countries.

The global event is organised by GAFP alongside the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and Global Coalition Against Occupation of Palestine (SANED).

The Global March for Palestine action in Christchurch Ōtautahi today. Video: PSNA

“As governments actively fund, arm, and protect Israel from any legal accountability, grassroots movements are refusing to allow this genocide to become normalised as the status quo,” GAFP wrote.

It added that the event “marks a decisive shift, moving beyond symbolic protest toward direct civil intervention to shut down public complicity and demand systemic accountability for Israel’s war crimes and genocide”.

Anas Altikriti, secretary-general of the Global Alliance for Palestine, said that the third anniversary marking Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza was a “stark, devastating reminder of the unbearable terror and suffering that the Palestinian people had been forced to endure every single day for three years”.

“As world powers remain silent and complicit, civil society is rising,” he added, saying that the global demonstration is a a direct response to “this ongoing horror”.

‘Global conscience’
Altikriti described the event as a “declaration that the global conscience will not stand idly by as a genocide is normalised”.

“We are taking to the streets to demand total accountability, an immediate end to the siege, and a free Palestine.”

Participating organisations in more than 250 locations worldwide are expected to shut down civic squares, encircle government buildings and blockade corporate entities directly tied to military supply chains.

“The objective is clear: render normal commerce and political diplomacy impossible while Israel’s genocide continues uninterrupted.”

As well as mass protests in major capitals worldwide, in cities like Athens and Modena, the coalition indicated that “actions will extend across multiple days with cultural sit-ins, public teach-ins, and large-scale visual projections highlighting Israel’s war crimes directly onto government and corporate buildings”.

“Three years into Israel’s genocide, the global movement for Palestine has grown in power, unity, and resolve,” the statement added.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay is a monumental victory for international law, universal human rights, and the global rules-based order.

At 85 years old, the eminent South African jurist represents the absolute pinnacle of legal integrity – a career forged in the crucible of the anti-apartheid struggle and elevated to the highest chambers of international justice.

From defending anti-apartheid freedom fighters under a brutal regime to serving as the first black female judge on South Africa’s High Court, Pillay’s foundational years were defined by a refusal to bow to institutionalised oppression.

• READ MORE: US sanctions International Criminal Court in major escalation
• Who is Navi Pillay, winner of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize?
• Other international law reports

Her subsequent contributions to global jurisprudence are historic. As president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), she pioneered the landmark ruling that recognised rape as an element of genocide, forever altering international criminal law.

Her tenure as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and her service at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) have consistently reflected a single, unwavering principle: that international law must apply equally to all nations, regardless of their size, wealth, or geopolitical alignment.

Predictably, this well-deserved recognition has drawn sharp, vitriolic condemnation from the Israeli government and its allied lobby networks.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s categorisation of the award as a “grotesque weaponisation” and allegations of political bias are desperate attempts to deflect from Pillay’s objective application of international humanitarian law.

Disgruntled reactions
These disgruntled reactions focus heavily on her leadership of the UN Commission of Inquiry into violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Gaza. Yet, the work of that commission was not driven by prejudice, but by a rigorous adherence to the Geneva Conventions and established legal frameworks — the very standards the world relies on to prevent atrocities.

The claims of bias leveled by these detractors fall flat against the sheer breadth of Pillay’s lifelong body of work. She has spent decades holding perpetrators accountable across the globe, from Rwanda to Myanmar.

To suggest her record is a product of personal prejudice is to reject the very concept of objective international justice.

The backlash from Netanyahu and those currently under the scrutiny of international legal bodies reveals more about their own discomfort with accountability than it does about the character of the laureate.

At a moment in history when international legal institutions face immense geopolitical pressure, the Nobel Committee has sent an unmistakable message.

By honoring Navi Pillay, the world community reaffirms that accountability is non-negotiable and that universal human rights must be defended without fear or favour.

The desperate noise from spoilers cannot diminish the brilliance of her career or the profound justice of this prize. The world stands with Navi Pillay — a true titan of international law.

Iqbal Jassat is an executive member of the South Africa-based Media Review Network. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle and it is republished with permission.

27 February 1933 was a momentous turning point in German history; a lightning rod for what was to follow.

It enabled Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party to quickly transition Germany from a formal democracy (Weimar Republic) to a fascist dictatorship (inspired by Benito Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy).

On that day, an unemployed Dutch construction worker named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag (German Parliament) building, causing considerable damage.

• READ MORE: Trump says US will not strike Iran before midterm elections
• Other Donald Trump reports

The Nazis first falsely blamed the communists for the fire and then claimed emergency powers to crush all opposition, not just those it blamed.

The event was contrived by the newly formed Nazi government to turn public opinion against its opponents and consequently to successfully achieve these fascist objectives.

This began with the emergency law decree for the Protection of the People and State which restricted free speech and freedom of the press, and allowed the imprisonment of enemies without trial.

Scene setting for US-style ‘Reichstag Fire’
Fintan O’Toole is an advising editor at the New York Review of Books (NYRB). An award-winning journalist and recognised public intellectual, he is a former editor The Irish Times where he still continues as a longstanding columnist.

On 25 July 2025 he began an article (paywalled) in the NYRB on the direction of the United States under President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement with the above-mentioned “Reichstag Fire”: A show of force stepping stone towards a ‘Reichstag Fire’.

O’Toole analysed Trump’s endeavours to militarise American politics and politicise the American military describing them as unfinished business. This meant:

“…defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations [and] … dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the President but to the Constitution.”

This analysis continued on to the much reported brutally derogatory narrative and actions (including armed force) against immigrants (which got much worse since the article was published) and Trump’s dishonest delusional endeavour to portray himself as having known “military life”.

This delusional military self-image contrasts with Adolf Hitler’s actual record of being a decorated (Iron Cross) German soldier in the First World War.

It also contrasts with other past dictators; in particular, Benito Mussolini (Italy), Francisco Franco (Spain) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile).

O’Toole refers to Trump’s speech to his supporters at the 6 January 2021 insurrection;

“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Language and form to achieve absolute military obedience
At the time of the article’s publication in the NYRB, Donald Trump’s militarism was primarily about language and form, including supporting references to the Confederate insurrectionists of the American Civil War in the 1860s.

Pointingly, Fintan O’Toole notes that Trump:

“… is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience.”

This is the opposite of the military non-partisanship that is necessary in order to defend the US Constitution.

Fintan O’Toole has convincingly outlined an analysis that under Donald Trump’s presidency this emerging authoritarianism in the United States is evolving towards fascism.

In this process, Trump is seeking his own “Reichstag Fire”. This includes seeking in various ways to use his position to rig the mid-term elections in early November for the Congress (House of Representatives) and one-third of the Senate.

Currently he controls both but is likely to lose the former and possibly the latter. Losing control of both is a realistic outcome given popular feeling and mobilisation.

Desperation to seize mid-term US elections
Thirteen months after the above NYRB article was published, the UK newspaper The Independent discussed this endeavour further (August 18): Trump desperate to seize elections.

Journalist Alex Woodward outlined the Trump administration’s numerous roadblocks with courts in his attempts to seize control of these federal elections by establishing a national voter registration list that would be used to decide who is eligible to cast a ballot.

Trump has also not dismissed the idea of declaring a national security emergency to unilaterally enforce his takeover of federal elections. In his reported words:

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK. I’ll leave it at that.”

Woodward reports that Trump could also threaten to use federal troops or law enforcement “…to seize voting equipment or ballots, which would disrupt ballot collection and vote-tallying and insert a hunt for alleged fraud to satisfy his conspiracy theories.”

In another measure to rig the mid-term elections, the Trump administration has abruptly removed the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency tasked with supporting election officials.

The practical effect is to leave the key bipartisan agency effectively paralysed weeks before election day.

Election officials are behind-the-scenes public servants. However, they are increasingly on the frontlines of conspiracy theory-fuelled threats.

Woodward reports an annual poll of elections revealing that at least 38 percent of election officials have experienced threats, harassment and abuse because of their job, with more than 60 percent of those threats delivered in person. More than half feared for their safety.

Now is the right time to compare US politics to Nazi Germany
In response to the question “when is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era”, The Guardian said “now” on October 3: US politics today compares with Nazi politics in Germany.

Washington DC based British Guardian journalist David Smith writes about a book on the declining white Christian influence in the United States managing to fuel an alliance with Trump and working to reshape its “democracy”.

The book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn against Democracy, is by Robert P Jones arising out of a consideration of studied US demographic numbers, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s use of the language of racial purity. This led him to his inescapable conclusion that “This is our 1933”.

Jones began with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches.

He cites a Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, who was eventually imprisoned for opposing Hitler. Niemöller is famously remembered for the powerful poem “First They Came”.

For the first four years of Hitler’s reign Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Revival of white Christian nationalism strengthens drive to US fascism
David Smith argues convincingly that US democracy is experiencing a severe “backslide” that is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, including Donald Trump’s language on the campaign trail. Further:

“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes.”

Smith then refers to Trump’s repeated use of the concept of genetic inheritance. Addressing a mostly white crowd in Minnesota in 2020, Trump declared:

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

In his diagnosis, Jones links Trump’s language to the influence and activism of white Christian nationalism:

… white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country’s autocratic slide.

Jones notes that whereas in 2008 white Christian Americans constituted 54 percent of the US population, by 2026 it had dropped to 41 percent. The decline among white evangelicals is even steeper. In 2000, they represented 25 percent of all Americans; today it is 13 percent.

Jones then observes:

“Trump loves to talk about the art of the deal and, in many ways, there’s been a massive quid pro quo deal struck between a declining white evangelical population and Trump. His big appeal to them was less about policy and more anti-immigrant: I’m going to restore an America that looks like you, and I’m going to restore power to the Christian churches.

“He was literally saying on the campaign trail: this is a quid pro quo deal. Give me your votes and you won’t even have to vote again. I’ll fix it so you don’t have to vote again.”

And now for Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung is an interesting German word meaning synchronisation or coordination.

In the context of German history it was used to describe the process of Nazification in the mid-1930s; that is, establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society.

On 1 June, I posted on Gleichschaltung in Political Bytes: Gleichschaltung and the far right momentum:

“The NZ First party is a toned-down version of the MAGA movement with deputy leader Shane Jones the loudest proponent of its rhetoric.”

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, my narrative in this post includes the following observation:

“New Zealand is a long way away from Nazi Germany in 1933. We are also long way away from having a Gleichschaltung. But, when certain stars align, the unexpected can occur very quickly.

“Donald Trump has succeeded by both synchronisation and coordination over the past nearly 18 months in turning immigrants in the United States into the Jews of Nazi Germany in 1933-35.

“A tipping point leading to our own Gleichschaltung should not be dismissed out-of-hand even if the recipe’s ingredients might be different.”

‘First they came . . .’
It is appropriate to come back to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem (English translation of the original German version):

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest

In terms of Donald Trump’s “1933 trajectory” towards the mid-term elections, should he succeed then he will be well-placed to control the institutions necessary to ensure authoritarianism’s success.

This may well include declaring a national emergency based on a false manufactured pretext as was the case with the Reichstag fire in 1933.

However, his vote rigging attempts, along with the growing unpopularity of his presidency, appear to be arousing much public contempt; sufficient for him to lose control of both the Congress and Senate.

As a narcissist who is devoid of empathy, Trump sees strategic and tactical decision making through a limiting narrow lens.

Anything is possible over how responds to such a plausible mid-terms defeat; attempted dictatorial actions stronger than declaring a state of emergency should be anticipated.

In these circumstances concerted political opposition within the Congress and Senate are important, including impeachment moves and investigations into illegalities and corruption.

However, what will be most decisive is popular mobilisation against this drive towards a fascist state in the world’s strongest military power, whether or not Trump’s electoral vote rigging succeeds.

Organising the popular will is the critical task. “Power to people” as the old but permanently relevant slogan goes.

The final word
Meanwhile let’s leave the final word to Robert P Jones. In the epilogue to his above-discussed book he writes:

“Just as God asked Niemöller where he was between 1933 and 1937, God will ask us where we were between 2025 and 2028. Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing.”

Not just powerful words; very timely and directly relevant words as well. Time will tell whether Trump and his MAGA movement will achieve this endorsement; but it is not inevitable.

History does not have to repeat itself nor even rhyme a lot. Germany 1933 does not have to be United States 2025-28.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

ANALYSIS: By Shailendra Singh

In his address at last month’s Pacific Media Summit, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka highlighted his government’s repeal of Fiji’s Media Industry Development Act 2010, saying that it was in the interest of democracy.

While the Rabuka government has been rightly recognised for scrapping that Act in 2023, another piece of legislation with potential significant implications for journalism remains in force — the Online Safety Act 2018.

Like the Media Act, the Online Safety Act was enacted under the FijiFirst government and gives the state a role in regulating expression.

• READ MORE: Special fijivillage Straight Talk public forum on online safety
• Other Fiji online safety reports

The Online Safety Act was tabled in Parliament in 2018 in response to escalating social media abuse, but was controversial from the outset, especially the breadth of its provisions.

The backlash was such that the entire opposition voted against it, arguing that it undermined democracy. Rights groups were similarly alarmed, describing the Act as a “Trojan horse” for censorship.

However, because much of the attention focused on the draconian Media Act, and relatively few people were being charged under the Online Safety Act, the latter escaped sustained scrutiny.

That changed in 2025, as the unabated abuse of digital platforms and a spate of charges laid under Section 24 of the Act, which criminalises the posting of electronic communication that causes harm, brought it back into the spotlight.

Expecting stronger legislation
Currently, the Act is under review and Information Minister Lynda Tabuya, under whose ministry the Act falls, has told Parliament to expect stronger legislation by the end of this year.

To some extent, Tabuya’s call for tougher laws is understandable. The misuse of social media platforms is a global problem, but the threat is considered greater in fragile democracies with multiethnic societies, such as Fiji.

The Online Safety Commission received 1609 complaints in 2025 alone, with more than 50 percent involving cyberbullying, harassment and defamation.

More broadly, policymakers have warned that online misconduct poses a serious national security threat.

In March 2026, Tabuya flagged the increased prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, stating, “A single lie can divide a nation”.  Likewise, Fiji’s National Security Strategy 2025-2029 warned the malicious use of emerging technologies for misinformation and disinformation posed a threat and could “undermine the credibility of national leaders and erode public trust in governance structures”.

Even before the proliferation of social networking platforms, there were concerns in Fiji about the mainstream media’s alleged role in fomenting societal conflict, with some analysis even suggesting that the media acted as a catalyst in the 2000 and 2006 coups.

The increase in digital penetration has added a new dimension to these security challenges.

Young people particularly, the most avid consumers of online networks, risk exposure to disparaging and damaging online discourses, including racism and hate speech.

While these trends are serious and require a firm response, they do not negate legitimate concerns about the flaws in the Online Safety Act.

Implications for media and press freedom
While the aim of the Act is not specifically to regulate media — Section 4 stipulates the law applies to the “whole of Fiji” — media are, nonetheless, caught in its crossfire.

The Act contains no protections for the practice of journalism. Professional journalists using social media platforms in the public interest are lumped with ordinary citizens who may be using them with malicious intent.

This renders journalists and media organisations particularly vulnerable to the Act due to the broad provisions of “electronic communication” that causes “harm” (defined in the Act as “serious emotional distress”), as most of their work is published online and can require critiquing the actions of private individuals and public officials.

The Act also does not differentiate between public and private individuals. In general, public figures such as politicians enjoy a lower level of privacy compared to private citizens. The scrutiny can extend to their private lives should they overlap with, or endanger the fulfillment of, their public duties.

Under the Online Safety Act, media could be held culpable if their reporting causes individuals “serious emotional distress”, which could be a consequence of, for example, news coverage of actual or alleged wrongdoing.

Then there is Section 2’s treatment of electronic communication as “any information, whether truthful or untruthful…”. This suggests journalists publishing legitimate and verified information in the course of their professional duties could face the same criminal liability as bad actors posting untruthful content with malicious intent.

Section 6 raises concerns about the independence of the Online Safety Commission, including the ministerial-appointed Commissioner, which introduces the risk of a political appointment.

Indeed, the appointment of Anne Dunn as the first Commissioner by the then Communications Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was controversial for this very reason. Dunn contested Fiji’s 2018 election under Sayed-Khaiyum’s FijiFirst Party.

The potential conflict of interest could render the Commission vulnerable to political pressure, and have consequences for the Commissioner’s role as an independent and unbiased authority.

The Act does outline seven factors the courts may use to determine whether an offence has occurred, including: the extremity of the content; the age and characteristics of the victim; whether the posting was anonymous; the repetitiveness and extent of circulation; and its truth or falsity, along with the context in which it appeared.

However, it does not provide specific defences based on public interest, truth, reasonable error, or the absence of malice.

An opportunity for reform
The fact that no journalist or media organisation has been charged under the Act in the eight years since its inception is of little consolation. No journalist or media organisation was charged under the now-repealed Media Act, but we are all aware of that legislation’s deleterious effect on the media sector as a deterrent to robust journalism and a catalyst for self-censorship.

Some criticisms of the Online Safety Act — including its open-ended provisions, the Minister’s role in appointing the Commissioner, and the potentially chilling effect on freedom of expression — are uncannily similar to those expressed about the Media Act.

Against this backdrop, Rabuka’s remarks at the Pacific Media Summit are pertinent. The Prime Minister emphasised that the media are “not a threat to democracy” but a “part of” it.

The reviewers of the Online Safety Act would do well to heed his words, as well as those of Rabuka’s deputy, Manoa Kamikamica, at the same event. Kamikamica stated that while this government was committed to media freedom, there was no guarantee future governments would share the same mindset.

In other words, the weaponisation of the Online Safety Act might not be a present danger, but it cannot be ruled out as a future one.

Associate Professor Shailendra Singh is head of journalism at The University of the South Pacific. This article is derived from his submission to the review of the Online Safety Act 2018 and was first published by Pacific Security. It is republished with the author’s permission. Dr Singh’s views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer.

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

Benjamin Netanyahu’s whirlwind visit to the United States late last month to address the United Nations General Assembly was further evidence that the Israeli prime minister is now a universal pariah.

He is being abandoned even by his closest allies.

It was perhaps not surprising that 77 nations, including a handful of European states, walked out of the chamber in protest that a wanted war crimes suspect — a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) — was being given a platform to speak on the world’s largest stage.

• READ MORE: Map of Middle East redrawn after October 7
• Other Gaza, West Bank reports

Far more notable was what happened — or rather, didn’t — away from the podium. Netanyahu spent just eight hours in the US before heading back to Israel. It is hard to believe that that was his choice.

He was denied his usual moment in the sun with US President Donald Trump at the White House, and could not even secure a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

There was no invitation to address the US Congress, and with it familiar scenes of legislators rapturously celebrating his anti-Palestinian incitement.

Israel’s former Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Reuters: “I don’t recall a time when the prime minister came to the United States and didn’t meet with the president.”

Stark contrast to Xi
The shunning of Netanyahu stood in stark contrast to the reception of Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader was personally greeted at the airport by Trump with a red carpet and military flyover.

Netanyahu’s UN visit was exploited by both sides — by Israeli officials and Western leaders — to advance their separate, and conflicting, agendas.

Netanyahu is less than a month away from a hotly contested general election in which, for the first time, his failures to prevent Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 are under intense scrutiny.

According to a growing number of recent reports, he was warned by Egyptian and Gulf leaders of a major event — an “earthquake” — coming from Gaza in the days and weeks preceding Hamas’ breakout, but failed to act.

Netanyahu had scheduled his UN speech for Israeli prime time, to attract the largest domestic audience possible. He took the opportunity to call out other world leaders as “moral cowards” and “hypocrites”.

As Israeli analyst Jonathan Ofir notes, Netanyahu also used the UN platform to smuggle in a biblical phrase in Hebrew that was designed, for listeners back home, to serve as a dog-whistle: a call for Israel to carry out genocide to the bitter end.

Netanyahu’s goal was to demonstrate to voters that he is still a force to be reckoned with on the international stage, and that he alone can make Israel safe from a world supposedly mired in “antisemitic”, anti-Israel sentiment.

Nudging Netanyahu out of office
Western leaders, by contrast, wish to demonstrate the precise opposite, hoping to nudge Netanyahu out of office by suggesting to Israelis that their leader is a spent force, that he has gone too far.

Time to be rid of him.

This may prove no simple matter. Netanyahu is the great political survivor, serving a record near-two decades as his country’s prime minister — longer even than Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. He has used that time to whip up much of Israeli society into an ever greater, ultra-nationalist, genocidal fervour.

The current antipathy in Western capitals to Netanyahu is most certainly not based on any kind of ethical assessment of Israel’s recent actions: a three-year genocidal rampage through Gaza; the violent expansion of Jewish settlements and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank; the bombing and ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon; and the Israeli leader’s starring role alongside the US in launching a catastrophic war on Iran whose fallout has destabilised the global economy.

Washington — backed by its European client states — has been an ardent partner to these crimes, supplying the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic leverage to help Israel carry them out.

But Netanyahu now looks to be a political liability, even for Trump.

The US President, nosediving in the polls, needs a scapegoat — and the Israeli prime minister appears the only one suited for the role.

The antagonism is, in part, personal.

Netanyahu seduced Trump on Iran
A number of recent reports indicate that Netanyahu pulled out all the stops to seduce Trump, against the advice of his generals, into launching an unprovoked and illegal war on Iran.

The promise of a decisive victory persuaded Trump he could secure his place in the history books as the president who “remade the Middle East”. Once Iran was out of the picture, the US would enjoy unchallenged control over the region’s oil.

And all of this would supposedly take place weeks after Trump had cemented his command over Venezuela’s oil, following an illegal operation at the start of the year to kidnap President Nicholas Maduro.

With Iran’s defeat, and Venezuela subjugated, economic rival China would find itself utterly dependent on the US for access to the main lubricant of the global economy. Trump could avoid a direct military confrontation with Beijing, bringing it to heel simply by threatening to turn off the oil spigot.

But, of course none of this came to pass.

Washington is now in an unwinnable war with Iran that has clarified to Tehran the extent of its power over the Strait of Hormuz — and of the parallel power of Ansar Allah, its allies in Yemen, over the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Together, they can inflict unmitigated damage to the world economy.

Soaring petrol prices on US forecourts are likely to be a critical factor in the collapse of the Republican vote in November’s mid-term elections and the likely loss of both Houses to the Democrats, turning Trump into a lame-duck president.

Supremely vulnerable
Meanwhile, the war has educated Washington’s client states in the Gulf that they are supremely vulnerable to any retaliation from Tehran and from Yemen — a fact they are reminded of every time Trump orders another reckless round of strikes on Iran.

For all its military might, Washington has shown it is unable to defend its Gulf allies.

But Netanyahu is not facing a reckoning just because of his role in engineering a disastrous war on Iran.

Despite the best efforts of Western political and media classes over the past three years, the reality of Israel’s destruction of Gaza — and the murder and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children — has become ever harder to hide or rationalise.

Even among those parts of the public little interested in world affairs, the truth is gradually sinking in, aided by battles in mainstream cultural spaces that have swung conclusively against Israel.

NAZA standing ovation
NAZA, a new documentary on Gaza made by Israeli film-makers, won a record, 25-minute standing ovation at last month’s Venice Film Festival. In it, anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers document in detail how they engineered genocide in the tiny enclave. It is scheduled to be available to stream for free in November.

Ireland’s team, forced to play Israel in the Uefa Nations League at the weekend, did not hide their feelings. They wore black armbands in a show of solidarity with Israel’s victims in Gaza and refused to shake hands with their opponents. Irish captain Dara O’Shea pledged to donate his match earnings to humanitarian causes in Gaza.

Superstar musician Ed Sheeran has found himself unexpectedly painted as the bad guy for failing to stand by his support act, the rapper Macklemore, over the latter’s comments opposing genocide in Gaza.

Predictably, when faced with pro-Israel stadium owners threatening to pull the plug on the tour, Sheeran caved and dropped Macklemore. But Sheeran is reeling from a widespread backlash that clearly took him by surprise.

And leading British politicians, such as former prime minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretaries David Cameron and David Lammy, are for the first time facing serious critical scrutiny in the mainstream over their conduct towards Gaza.

Last month, a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, revealed that British officials had imposed a deeply flawed methodology, apparently so they could ignore mounting evidence of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

As a result, they were able to duck out of their legal obligations to take action against Israel, including by ending arms sales.

Rising tide of revulsion
Western capitals are finally realising this rising tide of revulsion at the Gaza genocide cannot be staunched.

In the US, where bonds to Israel are invariably described by politicians as “unbreakable”, 62 percent of respondents told Pew in July they had a negative opinion of Netanyahu’s government.

Meanwhile, a poll last month found 60 percent of American Jews want the Israeli prime minister voted out at the forthcoming election.

As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper observed: “Trump is well aware of the consistent, dizzying decline in support for Israel among Americans.”

Which is why he and other Western politicians are desperate to reframe the conversation. Singling out Netanyahu over Israeli atrocities in Gaza does not get them off the hook because they so obviously partnered with him every step of the way.

Instead Western leaders want to switch focus to the West Bank, where their role is more easily obscured and Netahyahu’s law-breaking is unmistakable.

Since October 2023, he, along with his self-confessed fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have given both violent Jewish settler militias and the Israeli military greater freedom to terrorise Palestinian families off their land in preparation for the West Bank’s annexation.

Illegal West Bank settlements role
In the West’s new, self-serving narrative, Netanyahu isn’t a pariah because he is sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in starving the people of Gaza.

Nor because the International Court of Justice is currently investigating his government over “plausible” allegations that it is committing a genocide in the enclave.

Nor because his government has overseen the killing of at least 21,000 children there — and most likely, far more.

Nor because he continues to violate a sham “ceasefire”, one in which Israel has killed more than 1400 Palestinians penned up in the ruins of their enclave since the fighting supposedly ended. A further 4900 of Gaza’s residents have been maimed over the same period.

No, Netanyahu is not a pariah in the eyes of Western leaders because of any of these savage crimes — crimes they have been fully complicit in.

His offence — the one they are now determined to focus attention on — is Netanyahu’s role since October 2023 in intensifying the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank to expel Palestinians from their lands.

But this narrative works only if Western politicians and media studiously ignore the context: that for more than half a century, all Israeli governments sponsored settlement expansion, with the aim of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population.

Exploited the opportunity
Netanyahu is not an outlier in doing this. He simply exploited the opportunity to accelerate West Bank expulsions on the back of world sympathy after Hamas’s single-day attack in October 2023.

The most likely explanation for why Britain and 11 other Western states, including France and Canada, declared their intention last month to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements is that they had received signs from the Trump administration for the first time that there would be no serious repercussions for doing so.

Britain’s new government under Andy Burnham also dared to describe what Israel has done to West Bank Palestinians as “ethnic cleansing”. Notably, and paradoxically, the UK has avoided using the term to describe Israel’s even more brazen ethnic cleansing in Gaza — a campaign of expulsions that have all too clearly been aided by Western bombs and logistics.

Officials under Mike Huckabee, the fervently partisan US ambassador to Israel, reportedly drafted a stinging rebuke in preparation for the British announcement of sanctions. It accused London of replicating the “playbook of the antisemitic boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] movement”.

That expected line of attack, favoured by Israel lobby groups, was presumably the reason why Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, went to such exaggerated lengths to publicly distance his new policy from BDS.

But in fact, no attack materialised from the Trump administration. Instead, Marco Rubio, Miliband’s US counterpart, stated innocuously: “I don’t have any comment on it [the sanctions policy] right now.”

The next day Trump appeared to buy time with a uncharacteristically non-committal response: “I want to find out why all of a sudden has that [the announcement of UK sanctions] happened.”

Trump and Rubio have said nothing more of substance on the matter.

Failure to listen to warnings
Then there is the recent flood of media reports suggesting that Netanyahu personally failed to listen to multiple warnings from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates that an unprecedented attack was coming from Gaza in the days before Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu has called on Abu Dhabi to deny the leaks. But it has so far failed to help out by doing so.

The two countries, among Washington’s closest client states in the region, have always appeared anxious to avoid openly defying a notoriously vengeful Trump.

In his address to the UN, Burnham noted the dilemma facing Western governments: “We live in an age of low trust in politics. If we were to continue to talk about the two-state solution, but fail to back those words with deeds, that trust will fall even lower — and our enemies will seek to exploit the alienation that follows from that.”

Burnham seems oblivious to the reality: that part of the reason trust is so low is because a succession of British governments have not only colluded in the genocide in Gaza but arrested critics of the genocide as supporters of terrorism.

Miliband demonstrated precisely the kind of hypocrisy Burnham had warned is alienating the public when he told the Labour Party conference last week — to great applause — that “millions of people in this country”, opponents of the genocide, “were right”.

The previous day dozens of protesters had been arrested outside the conference venue for silently holding signs stating: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Burnham and Miliband wish to have their cake and eat it. Neither has indicated that there is any intention to scrap the previous government’s decision to use terrorism laws against anyone who holds such a sign — or is “right”, as Miliband now admits.

Cynical theatre of distraction
What Western leaders are engaged in here is the cynical theatre of distraction.

The declarations of “You were right” and “We feel your pain”, the promises of sanctions and urgent calls for two states, amount to nothing more than virtue-signalling. They are designed to divert public indignation over Israel’s atrocities away from the complicity of Western capitals and direct it exclusively at Netanyahu.

The new spin suggests the gun-wielding, religious zealots in the West Bank settlements who have been growing ever more violent and politically powerful for over half a century — under successive Israeli governments — are solely Netanyahu’s creation.

The new spin argues that the growing confidence of these pogromists, who have long worked hand in glove with the Israeli military, is entirely unrelated to the West’s unconditional support for Israel over many decades.

In absolving themselves, however, Western leaders are necessarily crafting a new lie to deceive their publics: one that suggests the “settler terrorists” are some kind of personal Netanyahu militia that stands or falls with his premiership.

The implication of this new narrative is that, were Netanyahu to be prised from power, a more empathetic leadership would emerge, one that could be cultivated by Western powers to make peace with the Palestinians.

This is all patent nonsense.

Supremacist political spectrum
Like the Israeli public, leaders from across Israel’s narrow Zionist, ethnic supremacist political spectrum shared the genocidal logic that propelled forward the past three-year erasure of Gaza.

None dissented. All engaged in genocidal incitement.

There is no hope of their making peace with the Palestinians under illegal occupation when Israeli leaders cannot even allow their own Palestinian “citizens” — a much-oppressed minority comprising a fifth of Israel’s population – a meaningful voice in next month’s general election.

The central elections committee, a political body whose members are drawn from Israel’s main parties, voted to ban from standing all four factions representing the Palestinian minority.

Whoever wins next month’s election, whether Netanyahu again or one of his rivals, will keep the country heading on the same ethnic supremacist track Israel has been on for decades. Trump, Burnham, Macron and other western leaders understand this.

They want Netanyahu out of the way not so there is real change but simply so they can revert to what constituted business as usual before the Gaza genocide: a slower, more incremental pace to the eradication of the Palestinian people.

Rebranding the Gaza genocide
They want to be able to rebrand the Gaza genocide as one man’s historic folly, a tragic catastrophe that cannot be reversed but can be mitigated if he is gone.

They want us looking resolutely forwards, to real-estate deals and a distant two-state solution, not backwards: to their active role in levelling the homes of more than two million people – with mostly US munitions that unleashed eight times the explosive force of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Trump administration has already okayed the shipment of vast numbers of these mega bombs to replenish Israeli stocks, even before the result of the Israeli election is known.

Notably, the same Trump administration that allowed Netanyahu, a war crimes suspect, to travel to the UN in New York blocked the putative leader of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, from doing so.

In announcing his new sanctions policy targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, Miliband was keen to stress that it would in no way affect intelligence sharing with Israel — the kind of intelligence coordination that saw British planes carrying out surveillance operations over Gaza throughout the genocide.

And while Miliband promised a “double lock against arms exports” to Israel as part of the UK’s sanctions package, in practice not a single existing arms export licence has been revoked or suspended since.

The current fight is not against a genocidal Israeli state or for some illusionary Palestinian state — let alone for justice for the endlessly abused Palestinian people.

Engineering a reset
It is about engineering a reset in which the West gets Israel’s old guard back in charge.

Western leaders have been embarrassed by the froth-mouthed rantings of Netanyahu’s government. This week Smotrich called for Israel to unleash its genocidal Gaza policies on the West Bank — presumably using the very bombs Trump is about to ship them.

He told the Israeli media: “We should do there what we did in Gaza.”

Western leaders fear what that would do to their sinking credibility. And they have allies in Israel, among its opposition, whose vision — at least for the moment — is not Smotrich’s of a Gaza-style eradication of the West Bank.

Rather they envision continuing the current trajectory of gradually turning the West Bank’s small, surviving Palestinian ghettos, trapped in a sea of illegal Jewish settlements, into mini-concentration camps — replicas of Gaza before it was destroyed.

Those are the competing visions among Israelis for the West Bank: the absolute confinement of Palestinians in a series of cages versus their extermination.

That is what is really at stake — nothing more — in the West’s struggle to unseat Netanyahu and uphold its fabled two-state solution.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by Middle East Eye and republished from the author’s Substack with permission.

Labour will recognise Palestine, put in place economic sanctions on Israel, and join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

These are among highlights of Labour’s foreign policy stance and the action the party says it will take if elected as the government next month.

Labour’s foreign policy spokesperson Vanushi Walters made that clear in her recent speech alongside the Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, as part of Diplosphere’s foreign policy election series at Parliament.

• READ MORE: Labour sums up its foreign policy approach as ‘independent, principled and unafraid’
• The full Labour foreign policy speech
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Explaining what was meant by “restoring our independent foreign policy”, she said independence was pivotal to New Zealand’s foreign policy approach.

Independence was about agency.

New Zealand’s silence this term on breaches of the United Nations Charter “has been noticed” globally.

“This government’s silence as one after the other States recognised Palestine has been noticed.”

Silence over Palestine
She said the National-led coalition government’s “silence in failing to stand up [with] a sanctions regime, following the ICJ [International Court of Justice] decision on the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, continues to be loud”.

“New Zealand’s abstentions this term, on the floor of the UN whether it be about the reappointment of the High Commissioner of Human Rights or a vote abstaining on indigenous participation at the UN, have been met with confusion by our colleagues in the international space.

“We do not grow our agency if we stand for nothing because that too is a choice that has consequences.

“We lose our reputation as an honest broker and a consistent champion of international law. Make no mistake, the choice to shrink from the moral challenges we face will diminish our agency not expand it.”

Walters said a Labour government would “make full use” of the foreign policy tool box.

“There is a time for quiet diplomacy and there is a time when quiet diplomacy must bend to moral clarity — that is undeniably the case when the scale of human rights abuses is so stark that it amounts to genocide, to ethnic cleansing.

“Labour will recognise the State of Palestine. Labour will place economic sanctions on Israel and ensure the NZ Super Fund and ACC divest from holdings on the UN list of companies operating in the occupied territories.

Labour to join South Africa at ICJ
“Labour will intervene in support of South Africa’s case at the [ICJ] in respect of a breach of the Genocide Convention.”

Walters said that in this time of tension, “we must also remember there are seeds being planted”.

“International Courts continue to perform with diligence the duty of their statutes, people protest with astonishing courage in defence of their rights, humanitarians place everything on the line in the pursuit of development and peace for all, like-minded countries have begun acting on their desire to revisit creative diplomacy in defining new alliances,” she said.

She acknowledged Foreign Minister Winston Peters for his service during this term and under prior governments.

“We disagree on critical aspects regarding the role New Zealand must play in a fraught world, but not on all aspects of foreign policy, and I want to acknowledge in particular the breadth of his travel and the relationships he has maintained in the Pacific as hallmarks of his time in the role.”

Tracing the illegal land, sea and air siege of the Gaza enclave by Israel:

2006: Hamas elected in the last Palestinian legislative election
Israel withheld Palestinian tax revenues and imposed further restrictions on Gaza. Major international donors suspended direct funding to the Palestinian Authority.

That summer Israel launched a major attack on Gaza. On June 28, Israel destroyed all six transformers at Gaza’s only power station.

• READ MORE: Fear and a far-right lurch: How October 7 reshaped Israel
• How Israel’s genocide in Gaza pulled Britons into the Palestine movement
• Three years of Israel’s mass dispossession of West Bank Palestinians
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

2007: Gaza ghetto was sealed
Israel imposed an unlawful land, sea and air blockade on Gaza. For the next 16 years, more than 2 million people were trapped in a strip of land about 40 km long with illegal occupation forces controlling their borders, airspace and territorial waters. Most people could not leave without Israel’s permission. Israel restricted imports, virtually eliminated exports for years, restricted fishing waters and prevented people from accessing farmland along the perimeter.

The United Nations described Gaza’s population as “locked in”. UN bodies repeatedly described Israel’s blockade as collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment.

Children born when Israel imposed the blockade were 16 years old by October 2023.

And inside the ghetto came Israel’s attacks:

2008–09: Operation Cast Lead
Israel killed 1383 Palestinians in three weeks — more than the resistance attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

2012: Operation Pillar of Defense
Israel killed 174 Palestinians in eight days.

2014: Israel attacked Gaza for 51 days
Israel killed 2251 Palestinians, including 551 children — more than October 7, 2023.

Then Palestinians tried peaceful resistance.

2018–19: The Great March of Return
For almost two years, Palestinians marched against Israel’s blockade and for their right of return. Israel put snipers on the ghetto walls and shot them.

Illegal occupation forces killed more than 200 people and shot and crippled thousands more during the demonstrations. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli snipers intentionally shot children, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities who were recognisable as such.

In 2020, Israeli newspaper Haaretz interviewed the snipers. One Israeli sniper described shooting 42 knees in a single day.

It was the end of peaceful resistance in illegally occupied Gaza.

2021: Israel bombed Gaza again
Israel killed 261 Palestinians, including 67 children.

2022: Israel killed another 49 Palestinians, including 17 children.

May 2023: Israel killed another 33 Palestinians.

By October 2023, an entire generation had been born and raised inside Gaza Ghetto under an unlawful Israeli blockade, through repeated Israeli attacks, electricity shortages, polluted water, economic strangulation and an Israeli permit system controlling whether people could leave.

Then came 7 October 2023 — Al-Aqsa Flood.
Al Qassam Brigades and other armed groups broke through the ghetto walls and attacked Israeli military bases and communities.

7 October 2023 was not Year Zero
It came after sixteen years of unlawful blockade.

It came after Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza and killed thousands of people.

It came after the people marched against their imprisonment and Israeli snipers shot them from high on the wall.

It came after decades of illegal occupation.

And what followed is genocide by Israel.

Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians according to the recorded death toll alone. The real number is substantially higher.

As early as July 2024, when the recorded direct death toll stood at 37,396, public-health researchers writing in The Lancet estimated that, once indirect deaths were included, a death toll of 186,000 or more attributable to Israel’s attack on Gaza was plausible.

Israel has displaced almost the entire population of Gaza, many repeatedly. Israel has destroyed homes, neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, universities, water systems, sanitation systems and much of the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention, with genocidal intent. Its conclusion was unequivocal: Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful. The Court has also confirmed that the law of occupation applies in Gaza and treats Israel as the occupying power there.

For 20 years Israel told the world that history begins and ends when Israel suffers.

It does not.

Al-Aqsa Flood belongs to history. It was never Year Zero.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

EDITORIAL: By Michael West, founder of Michael West Media

On Friday, Mario Christodoulou, executive producer of ABC Media Watch, quoted two posts we had made on X regarding last Wednesday’s FlyDubai “terror hijacking” incident and asked two questions:

Do you believe this incident was an Israeli Government “false flag” event? If so, on what basis? If not, how do you explain your posts above?

Perpetuating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like this, especially from an established journalist such as yourself, can help spread misinformation. Your post likely contributed to this. What is your response?

(Full email and X posts below.)

• WATCH MORE: Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post – Netanyahu’s fight for political survival: PR stunts and press control

Our response

Hi Mario,

Excellent questions. You are barking up the wrong tree, however. My take on both flydubai and RAF Fairford is clearly — and the word was used in one of the tweets — “probably” false flags, or at the least “beat-ups” concocted for political advantage.

This view is borne out by evidence of multiple false flag attacks in Australia, as belatedly admitted by police, and around the world.

The bigger story, the real public interest in media coverage of these incidents, is how they are leveraged by our politicians and a compliant mainstream media. The minute they occur, whether actual false flags or just suspicious incidents, they are branded as “terror plots”, “Islamist attacks … jihadis” etc.

This media branding of these events, *before* the circumstances are known and the evidence is established, has given licence to political actions such as the ramping up of hate speech laws in Australia and justification for passing the private data of Australian citizens to foreign parties as per the arrangements with Cellebrite and Palantir.

As a pilot for 20 years I have questions:

– where are the cabin crew here?
– where are the oxygen masks that automatically drop during a rapid emergency descent?
– how did the Capt manage to open the door while being stabbed?
– Omani pilots were not allowed to fly to Israel, why was he allowed?
– how did the offending pilot get a weapon onboard?
– why has this happened so close to elections?
– how are passengers walking around while apparently in a nosedive?
– who else was injured? Nose dives cause significant g force incidents
– why is there two perfectly positioned people recording the incident and not helping?
– why did a plumber take control and not the 2 pilots onboard who would certainly know when an aircraft was in a nosedive?
– why was the plumber speaking in English to Bibi after the flight
– why was he still in his blood soaked clothes 8 hours after the incident

False Flags have been a very effective mechanism to influence public opinion

Hitler burnt down the Reichstag just before his parliament elections and he won the election…changing the course of history.

A full and independent investigation should be carried out here.

Hopefully independent journalist will be allowed to view this too.

— The Long Investor (@TheLongInvest) October 1, 2026

flydubai X post retweeted by MW

Let’s say flydubai is not a false flag in a technical sense; that is, a ploy cooked up by the Netanyahu regime in Israel just a few weeks before the election. Let’s just say it was actually a fight between the pilots and a happy ending. The fact that the initial coverage branded the event as a terrorist hijacking demonstrates that the incident was used for political gain.

The Fairford incident was also branded as a terrorist plot in its initial coverage, egged on by Trump and Rubio and the usual people on social media. Why did they not wait until it became evident that it was 5 lads pilfering diesel before reporting it as terror?

Here in “evidence-land” we try to ignore the noise and report the truth. And the truth is that the mainstream media has blood on its hands, a lot of blood. Its failure to address the exaggerated claims of the October 7 Hamas attacks — 40 babies beheaded, mass gang rapes, babies in ovens, babies on clotheslines — has given licence to genocide, to the worst human atrocities of this century.

Lies have dragged us into war against Iran which is hurting every citizen via higher petrol and food prices.

The effect on humanity has been drastic, and much of that can be foisted home to a failure by a craven media to report responsibly. The media is culpable and the rise of new media such as MWM is due to plunging public confidence in the institutions of power such as the ABC and traditional corporate media.

We haven’t grown from scratch to millions in audience a month by making stuff up.

To be fair, the ABC has done better than corporate media but it is still culpable. Where is the Four Corners on the hasbara movement, the litany of false flag attacks in Australia such as the Dural caravan hoax and the other 12 or so “terror” acts which turned out to be no-hopers with no political ideology apparently paid for by foreign interests?

This is the real story, the culpability of media in genocide, not some guy on X raising credible doubts about the official narrative because the evidence for terror claims does not stack up and the historical evidence of false flags is so compelling it should not be ignored.

As we approach the three-year anniversary of October 7, it would be apposite for traditional media to contemplate its own epic failures, its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. You could start by analysing the lies which have already been debunked.

Here are some questions: how many Israelis were slaughtered by IDF Apache gunships on October 7? Why did Netanyahu ignore warnings of the Hamas attacks from Egyptian and Qatari leaders? What is the evidence for mass rapes and babies beheaded? How and why were the Nova Festival arrangements changed prior to the attacks? Why has there been no official inquiry by Israeli authorities?

And what role did the mainstream media play to give licence to genocide?

Cui bono?

Media Watch email
Thanks for your time on the phone just now. Here’s what I sent via your website portal. 

We’re writing an item examining the FlyDubai incident, which has been widely reported this week, where passengers managed to seize control of a 737 en route to Tel Aviv from Dubai. As part of that story, we are examining the conspiracy theories that have cropped up online, and we noticed you have been posting about this being a “false flag” operation.

There was this repost in particular: 

But also this:

We may mention this in the segment. To my knowledge, there is no evidence this was an Israeli “false flag”, and theories like this are unsubstantiated.

Questions below:

• Do you believe this incident was an Israeli Government “false flag” event? If so, on what basis? If not, how do you explain your posts above?
• Perpetuating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like this, especially from an established journalist such as yourself, can help spread misinformation. Your post likely contributed to this. What is your response?

Deadline is 5pm today.  Let me know if you are having trouble reaching this.

 ‘Cheap 20 second opinions’
When the show aired last night, host Linton Besser didn’t hold back on the accusations of peddling conspiracy theories and “cheap 20 second opinions”.

We concede that in the absence of ABC’s $1.23 billion budget — even a dedicated team of researchers and others working for an entire week to produce 15 minutes of television for just 42 weeks of the year — that we may be cheap, at least in budget terms, by necessity.

Yet with our humble budget and the goodwill of the community we have managed to break a lot more stories than the ABC in relation to the crime of the century. Where is the ABC’s coverage of Australian charities funnelling money to the IDF and illegal West Bank settlements?

Nowhere, despite it being raised in Parliament.

Where is the coverage of Australians serving with the IDF, a story we broke with FOIs? Where is the coverage of the money trail of public grants to the Israel lobby?

We even beat this billion-dollar corporation on the story of Australian UN commissioner, Chris Sidoti, releasing an independent report for the UN on the systematic slaughter of Palestinian children by the IDF. We were literally first media in the world.

The ABC trundled along timidly a day late with its billion-dollar budget and, typically, buried the story anyway. This — an investigation about a rogue state engaged in genocide which Australia furnishes with weapons parts, to be found by the highest body in the world, to be deliberately murdering children.

Shamelessly buried.

And here they are with the gall, to sermonise about an independent journalist saying on social media that flydubai was “probably” a false flag or at least had been leveraged for political advantage. This, after three years of spinelessly tip-toeing around every single story which mentions the word Israel.

As Media Watch host, my former SMH colleague, and a first-rate journalist, Linton Besser did note in his piece, Benjamin Netanyahu was very quick out of the blocks when the story broke to get on the phone to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to kick off his media campaign.

With zero evidence Israel’s PM pointed the bone at Iran. Was Iran directly behind the plot, asked career misinformation-spreader Sean Hannity? “Too early to say,” said Netanyahu. Job done, as with the RAF Fairford “terror plot”, Iran named. The rest of the corporate media followed.

This is the way it works and ABC is a part of it. “Israel says”. Frothing forth with every false claim uttered by a war lobby whose lies are established and far too prolific to list here. They are daily.

Is flydubai a false flag?
Is the flydubai incident a false flag? It’s too early to tell but the narrative has changed a lot, the evidence suggests the official story is not credible, even CNN had a pilot demonstrate why it did not stack up. Many questions remain.

“This is Hollywood on steroids … ordinary civilians became superheroes,” Netanyahu told Fox News. “If you’re next hijacked, make sure an Israeli is sitting next to you.”

Is not the story — the story for Media Watch — why are so many sceptical about Israel’s claims? The answer is clear: they lie and twist facts relentlessly. The suspicion is warranted. The propaganda is documented. Why does ABC not cover that, bigger, story?

Our personal favourite was the still glass of water after the 14,300 ft nosedive (no, not the heroic plumber who watched aviation rescue shows or the pilot, Hamam al Hamami, whose name has been translated by scallywags as Bathroom King of Bathrooms).

Why does the ABC continue to trot out the Israel lobby’s propaganda when it has been proven time and time again to be false? The mainstream media has literally, deliberately missed the story of the century.

They avoid the G-word like the plague.

And this cowardice, this complicity by our institutions of power, has degraded all humanity. Our leaders and our institutions, in not standing up to genocide, in perpetuating lies, even rewarding them, have let us all down.

At least we said “probably” a false flag. They can’t even bring themselves — with all their sanctimonious tut-tutting about journalistic integrity to say “probably a genocide”, let alone admit they’ve been captured to the point of even sacking at least one journalist for raising the question.

Just look at the pictures. Gaza razed by US bombs, a population starved and tortured, homeless, 70,000 to 700,000 dead, concentration camps, the largest population of child amputees in history.

You allowed this to happen.

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker. This article was first published by Michael West Media on 6 October 2026 and is republished with permission.

Palestine Forum of New Zealand stands with Palestinians in Aotearoa and around the world, remembering generations of dispossession and struggle, honouring those who have been lost, and reaffirming the Palestinian people’s enduring demand for freedom, dignity and justice.

We remember. We resist. We remain.

Palestinian history did not begin yesterday, and it will not end today.

• READ MORE: October 7: How three years of Israel’s genocidal war have changed Gaza

For generations, Palestinians have remained connected to their homeland, their families, their culture and their identity despite displacement, occupation and profound loss.

Our story is not defined by a single day.

It is a story of steadfastness, memory, resilience and an unwavering determination to see Palestine free.

From the river to the sea, and across the diaspora, we will continue to speak, organise and stand for justice.

Survived for generations
Palestinians have survived generations of displacement, dispossession and attempts to erase their history and identity. Yet we remain.

Remembering is not about looking backwards. It is about understanding why Palestinians continue to demand freedom and justice and why the world must not look away.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand calls on Aotearoa New Zealand to stand consistently for human rights, international law, Palestinian self-determination and accountability, and to recognise that Palestinian lives, land, history and dignity cannot be treated as secondary or expendable.

We will not be silent. We will continue to speak, organise and advocate. We will continue to stand alongside Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and throughout the diaspora.

For us, remembrance is also resistance. Every Palestinian story preserved, every family connection maintained, every child taught their history, and every voice raised for justice is an affirmation that Palestine and its people cannot be erased.

The Palestinian struggle is a struggle for the right to live freely, safely and with dignity in the land to which generations of Palestinians remain connected.

We remember.

We resist.

We remain.

And we will continue to work for a future in which Palestinians are free.

Palestine will be free.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand will be the first to kick off a Global Day of Action next Saturday marking 1100 days of Israeli genocide with a rally and march in the heart of the country’s largest city.

Many other protests will be carried out across the country in a wave of solidarity for the people of Palestine suffering from genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank under illegal Israeli occupation.

The Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP) has issued an urgent call for support worldwide for upholding international law.

• READ MORE: Challenging apartheid, defending human rights and amplifying global solidarity for Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“In Aotearoa New Zealand, our kaupapa/purpose is to build a landmark demonstration here as part of this worldwide global mobilisation for Palestine, with demonstrations in every major city,” the local organisers for a grand coalition of activist groups, churches and solidarity movements.

“Why does it matter? This mobilisation marks three years — 1100 days — of Israel’s systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Media contact Rana Hamida for the Global March for Palestine Coalition (Tāmaki Makaurau) said: “International law is not optional. On October 10, we the people of the world and here in Aotearoa, demand an end to the violence, complicity and the enabling of a system that fuels crimes against humanity.

“New Zealand has the responsibility to stand on the right side of history, and we will hold our elected government accountable.”

Ceasefire ‘fiction’
The coalition’s statement said that despite diplomatic language and the “fiction of a ceasefire, the bombing of Gaza has not stopped”.

More than 74,200 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, including more than 18,000 children, and about 70 percent of buildings in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.

In the West Bank, land seizures and forced displacement continue.

The protest coalition said the New Zealand government had refused to “act meaningfully against this genocide. This is complicity.” The following “lack of action” was cited:

• Silence on illegal land seizures — Even when 22 countries, including Australia, Britain and Canada, condemned the latest West Bank land seizure, New Zealand stayed silent;
• Refusal to recognise Palestine — The coalition had the chance to recognise Palestine alongside Australia, the UK and Canada, but refused, calling it a matter of “when, not if” — then did nothing;
• Blocking sanctions — Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill was denied even a first reading;
• Failure to support the ICJ case — The government does not support South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which centres on Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza;
• Refusal to ban IDF holiday visas — The government will not alter the Working Holiday Scheme with Israel;
• Ignoring Rocket Lab and Black Sky concerns — The Palestine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa raised concerns with then Defence Minister Judith Collins in November 2024; she refused to investigate. On 12 August 2026, court proceedings were filed in the High Court of Wellington challenging the government’s approval of BlackSky satellites launched from the Rocket Lab site at Māhia, for spying for Israel over Gaza;
• Ongoing military cooperation — The NZDF sent its largest contingent in a decade to RIMPAC 2026, alongside Israel and the US; and
• Denying evidence of illegal abduction and torture. The government has dismissed evidence that Israel illegally abducted and tortured New Zealand citizens and tangata whenua during the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian mission, including videos posted by Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir himself showing him taunting and abusing detained flotilla participants.

23+ protests nationwide
More than 23 demonstrations will take place across the motu/nation on October 10, from Whangārei in the north to Waihōpai Invercargill in the south — making this one of the largest coordinated days of action for Palestine ever seen in this country,” said the protest coalition statement.

“In Tāmaki Makaurau alone, more than 50 organisations have endorsed the Auckland rally and march, which will assemble at 2pm at Te Komititanga/Britomart Square before marching to Albert Park,” the statement said.

Groups taking part include 350 Aotearoa, Alternative Jewish Voices, Amnesty International Aotearoa, Auckland Peace Action, Banners for Palestine, Bayan Aotearoa New Zealand, Council of Islamic Organisations of New Zealand, Dayenu: New Zealand Jews against Occupation, Global Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa, ISO – University of Auckland, Justice for Palestine, Kaiāwhina, Kia Ora Gaza, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, Palestinian Forum of New Zealand, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, Pax Christi Aotearoa, Polynesian Panther Party Aotearoa, Stop Wars Aotearoa, Students’ Justice for Palestine, Toitū te Tiriti, and Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Aotearoa.

The march will feature speakers spanning human rights and social justice organisations, political parties, Palestinian families and performances from local artists.

The protesters are demanding:

• Sanction Israel immediately and isolate the apartheid regime. Introduce comprehensive sanctions now, particularly targeting companies supporting illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This includes imposing an immediate arms embargo, supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, and backing Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill;
• Uphold international law and end impunity. This includes supporting South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice;
• Recognise the State of Palestine;
• End complicity in military supply chains. Halt the export of surveillance technology and other dual-use goods that aid Israel’s military operations, including the launch of BlackSky satellites from Rocket Lab’s Māhia site;
• Expel the Israeli Ambassador and stop the diplomatic cover;
• Revoke the IDF holiday visas programme;
• Permit Palestinian families to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand, as was done for Ukrainian families; and Exit RIMPAC and Five Eyes for a robust, independent foreign policy.

Words matter in politics. They matter even more when a country is debating the document that will determine how it is governed.

That is why remarks by Justice Minister and Acting Attorney-General Siromi Turaga about Fiji’s constitutional review deserve some thought.

Speaking about the journey that has brought the government to this point, Turaga repeatedly invoked God.

• READ MORE: Sweeping changes to Fiji’s governance recommended by Constitution Commission
• Other Fiji constitution reports

“We got here through the miracle of God,” he said.

He spoke of people fasting and of prayer groups, including people who had travelled from Nadi and were praying at his office.

Then came perhaps the most striking part of his remarks when he recalled that the government had initially failed to secure the parliamentary numbers required for constitutional change and had then gone to the Supreme Court.

“We thought we didn’t have the numbers, but God worked in a different way,” he said.

‘We got the numbers’
He then referred to what happened to FijiFirst: “They were deregistered . . . we got the numbers.”

Nothing unusual about a Christian politician expressing his faith. Fiji is a deeply religious country, and Christians are entitled to pray. So are Hindus and Muslims.

While those holding public office do not surrender their religious beliefs when they walk through the doors of Parliament or a government office, there is a difference between seeking God’s guidance and appearing to attribute a political outcome to divine intervention.

FijiFirst was deregistered on July 1, 2024, by the Registrar of Political Parties after failing to make required amendments to its party constitution within the prescribed period. That was an administrative and legal process.

Yet Turaga’s description places that development within a striking sequence:

• The government did not have the numbers;
• People prayed;
• “God worked in a different way”;
• FijiFirst was deregistered; and
• The government got the numbers.

Again, language matters when it comes from someone exercising considerable political and legal authority, and especially now, as Fiji considers fundamental changes to its supreme law.

A Christian should be able to support or oppose the proposed Constitution. So should a Hindu. So should a Muslim. So should someone who follows another faith or professes no religion at all.

Faith and political validation
And this is where Turaga’s words raise a difficult question: when does personal faith become political validation?

If a political leader suggests that God intervened to produce the parliamentary circumstances necessary to advance constitutional change, what message does that send to those who disagree with the changes?

And whose God was Turaga talking about? Whose faith?

When a cabinet minister speaks of God intervening in a political process, Christians may understand those words through their own faith. Yet Fiji’s Constitution does not belong to Christians alone. It belongs to the Hindu family in Labasa, the Muslim family in Ba, the Christian family in Lau and the citizen who believes in no God at all.

The legitimacy of a Constitution governing a democratic, multifaith nation must come from something shared by all its citizens — their consent to the system that governs them.

Again, words matter, especially at a time like this. Therefore, those entrusted with political power should choose their words carefully.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of The Fiji Times, Fiji Daily Post, Islands Business, Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.