Prime Minister Helen Clark has called the general election for November 8th hoping to win a fourth term. The problem for the Labour Party is that it is well behind in the various opinion polls which give the National Party between an 8% and 18% lead over the Labour Party. With such a lead in the opinion polls the Labour Party is most likely to be defeated.
New Zealand is clearly entering into
recession with its economy shrinking in the first quarter of this year.
"Statistics New Zealand" (SNZ) has provided the figures that confirm what most
of us have known for sometime that indeed we are at the beginning of a
recession.
Bourgeois historians portray New Zealand as
a place where class conflict has never really existed. Such statements bear no
relation to reality, as the history of New Zealand is a history of class
struggle with the building of the trade union movement in the late 19th
century, the fight against the arbitration system and for militant trade
unionism in the early 20th century culminating in the great strike
of 1913. Today that tradition is once more coming to the fore with a rising
level of working class militancy.
We are proud to announce a new website
linked to Marxist.com, Socialist Appeal New Zealand,
the website of the Marxist tendency in New Zealand. Its aim is to defend the
ideas of Marxism within the New Zealand labour movement and create a tendency
embedded in the mass organisations of the New Zealand working class.
The Australian Labor Party won a landslide
victory in the recent elections. At the centre of the election campaign was
Howard’s hated anti-trade union legislation. The workers of Australia voted
massively against this. But as the new Labor leader, Rudd, is no different from
Blair, what are the tasks facing genuine socialists in Australia?
Earlier this month there was a very militant 48-hour strike of the New Zealand dockworkers over pay and conditions. As usual, the bosses, while getting fat salaries themselves, claim the dockworkers are already well paid!
Join us!