UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese is again at the heart of a witch hunt over a speech she made at the Al Jazeera Forum last week that was “doctored” by the pro-Israel and anti-United Nations NGO UN Watch to claim falsely that she described Israel as the “common enemy”. Albanese responded — as shown by the original speech recording — that she was referring to “the system that has enabled the genocide in Palestine” as the “common enemy”. Albanese did not make the fabricated statement in the address, but rather criticised Western inaction during the Gaza genocide. This is a flashback to when Asia Pacific Report contributor Eugene Doyle met Albanese in New Zealand in 2023.
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
It was with a sense of disgust rather than despair that I read in The Jerusalem Post today [February 2024]: “‘Antisemitic’ UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese banned from Israel.” We’re being gas-lighted again and this is a chance to push back against the narrative that to support victims of Israel is to somehow be antisemitic.
Back in November 2023 as the Israeli exterminations of Palestinians were ramping up, I had the privilege to hear and speak to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
She visited Wellington as part of a long-scheduled visit to Australia and New Zealand and spoke to government ministers, relief organisations, journalists and packed halls of citizens who shared a sense of horror at what was playing out in Gaza.
Her speeches were filled with knowledge and forensic clarity, only matched by her decency and sense of humanity — which extended to great courtesy shown to a lone and agitated Israeli supporter at a meeting I attended.
In issuing the banning order, two Israeli ministers stated: “The era of Jews being silent is over. If the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the antisemitic words of the special envoy.”
This is of course a vulgar lie told by ministers actively pursuing genocide. These two indeed aren’t silent: the scream, roar and boom of their shells, missiles and snipers’ bullets have shouted to the world how far the Zionist state has descended into the bowels of depravity.
The Jewish diaspora are anything but silent too — I have been immensely impressed by the courage and persistence of Jewish people worldwide who have shunned the fiction that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic. I hear them loud and clear chanting with righteous indignation, “Not in our name!”
[embedded content] Francesca Albanese rejects false accusations Video: Al Jazeera
Albanese’s riposte What really steamed the ministers and momentarily deflected their attention from the slaughter of innocents was Albanese’s riposte to a casual lie by French President Emmanuel Macron: “October 7 was the largest antisemitic massacre of our century.”
Albanese responded, quite rightly, surely self-evidently: “The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.” She also stated her respect for the victims of the attack.
When courageous people are attacked by malign and powerful actors, it takes moral clarity and steely determination to walk into a sea of troubles and oppose the true villains. We all need to do that now — and not remain silent.
In the past couple of months Israel has, with the complicity of the white-dominated Western countries, tried to destroy UNRWA, the primary UN organisation providing relief to the Palestinian people, as they endure this genocidal siege.
The Israelis have also hoicked and spat out their contempt for the International Court of Justice. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir commented, “Hague Smague — The ICJ has only proven what everyone already knew, that it is only seeking to prosecute the Jewish nation”.
Traducing the ICJ in this way is another attempt to gaslight us all. If we can do one decent thing it would be to get our governments to raise their voices in defence of the brutalised and besieged United Nations.
Stuck in settler colonial regime Albanese told audiences on both sides of the Tasman: “When I speak of human rights, I speak of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, who are stuck in a settler colonial regime; this is what we have to solve together.”
She went on to say, “ I will always stand with the victim.”
There is good reason to try to silence Francesca Albanese. She is an authority in the detail of the dehumanisation inflicted on the Palestinians. She has seen the daily lack of proportionality, the discourse of genocide, the military and administrative controls, the deprivation of sanitary services, food and medicine, the surveillance technology, the casual killings, the financial chocking of a people, the way the Israelis are eating up Palestine inch by inch as the West looks the other way.
In short, more than most people she understands the structural system of oppression that is denying the Palestinians the right to exist as a people — culturally, economically, politically. She is a humanist and the exact opposite of an antisemite.
Albanese is one of legions of good people besieged by Israel and its allies. The racist white elites in Europe and the USA are more than happy to adopt a definition that conflates anti-semitism with criticism of Israel, using the recently-minted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as a tool to silence (that word again) defenders of Palestinian rights.
When the right-wing of UK Labour set to work to oust Jeremy Corbyn, they succeeded, deploying an antisemitic slur. By the time the purge had finished, thousands of Labour progressives had been eliminated from the party membership, including large numbers of Jewish progressives.
The Labour Files, a must-see Al Jazeera documentary, based on a data dump of internal Labour files, uncovered the astonishing statistic that if you were a Jewish member of the UK Labour party you were seven times more likely to be expelled for antisemitism than a non-Jew.
Dustbin of dirty tricks It’s high time we kick this ghastly trope, this despicable manoeuvre equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism into the dustbin of dirty tricks. Jewish people have suffered persecution for their faith over the centuries. It does their memory a huge disservice — not least because now it is quite clear that genocide is the highest stage of Zionism.
For the record: I have Jewish friends who I invite to read and critique my articles before publication. They are not self-hating Jews, they are not antisemitic, and nor am I. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Jewish people worldwide who are appalled at what is being done in the name of Judaism.
Francesca Albanese said something else memorable that evening: “History is also made of watershed moments, when things change. Let’s make this one of them.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Scoop on 14 February 2024.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 17, 2026.
A worker was sacked over his side hustle. Here are 5 tips for employees with second gigs Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kerry Brown, Professor of Employment and Industry, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University A recent case before the Fair Work Commission has revealed the limits of being able to work a second job when you are employed full time. An employee was sacked for holding
Confusion over West Papua bombing, displacement claims RNZ Pacific The Indonesian government has dismissed a claim that its military has been bombing villages in West Papua. The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) claims a makeshift refugee camp in Puncak regency was bombed, and that many villagers have been displaced. ULMWP president Benny Wenda said the Air Force had “relentlessly attacked
Part star, part supporting actor, Robert Duvall lit up 1970s American cinema – and kept going Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben McCann, Associate Professor of French Studies, Adelaide University Robert Duvall, who has died at the age of 95, will be remembered for a glittering career that saw him appear in two of American cinema’s most iconic films. But let’s not forget the other hundred or so
55,000 extra social housing homes are being built. But a new study shows that boom still falls short Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hal Pawson, Emeritus Professor of Housing, UNSW Sydney Thanks to an unprecedented lift in public funding in the 2020s, an extra 55,000 new, good quality homes around Australia will be available to people on the lowest incomes by 2030. That’s almost triple the increase of 20,000 homes
Are the costumes for Wuthering Heights accurate? No. Are they magnificent? Absolutely yes Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Brayshaw, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney Even before the film’s release, the costumes for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights caused controversy. Wuthering Heights was first published in 1847 and the story switches back and forth in time between 1801 and the 1770s.
600 Australians, 50 Kiwis fighting for Israeli military during Gaza genocide Asia Pacific Report The issue of Australians — and New Zealanders as well — serving in the Israeli military has sparked growing debate as the genocidal war crimes in Gaza mount. Most of those involved are believed to be dual Israeli-Australian citizens, and under current Australian law, it is not automatically illegal to join a
Coles accused of ‘utterly misleading’ discounts as major court case kicks off Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne Coles has appeared before the Federal Court in Melbourne, as hearings for a high-stakes case launched against the supermarket by Australia’s consumer watchdog officially begin. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)
Bryce Edwards: What the Epstein scandal means for NZ politics ANALYSIS: By Bryce Edwards Politicians are under fire overseas. But New Zealand should take note too. The US Justice Department’s release of more than three million Epstein files (including 180,000 images and 2000 videos) has blown the doors off the most protected social network of the late 20th century. What these documents reveal is not
A recent case before the Fair Work Commission has revealed the limits of being able to work a second job when you are employed full time.
An employee was sacked for holding a second job, which he says he had fully disclosed to his employer. The worker took his case to the Fair Work Commission, claiming he was unfairly dismissed by his employer.
Dismissal is the termination for a breach of conditions of employment. An employee may go to the Fair Work Commission and make a claim of “unfair dismissal”. The commission then considers the legal aspects of the situation and makes a decision or ruling on the merits of the case.
The Fair Work Commission ruled the dismissal was not unfair, citing two key points:
the employee was running a side business in an area similar to their main job
running their own business caused the employee to spend his normal work time on his second job.
When is it OK to run a side hustle?
Some employers do not allow employees to hold a second job or run a side business, and include this requirement in the letter of offer for a new job.
Others specify an employee must ask permission to hold a second job. The employer can then decide if the other job may affect the worker’s safety and wellbeing. This includes being too tired to do your main job, or if it creates competition with their business.
Second jobs can take various forms ranging from formal to informal jobs.
A side job is a formal type of employment and usually has regulated times for work and required tasks. These can be jobs such as working in restaurants and bars or teaching classes in the evening after normal daytime working hours.
A side hustle is an informal activity from which you earn money and is undertaken alongside your full-time job.
Side hustles are entrepreneurial and flexible and can be as simple as turning a hobby or interest into a paid gig, such as selling refurbished furniture, playing in a band, dog walking or teaching yoga in your spare time.
Practical tips to avoid crossing the line
1) Read your letter of offer when you started your job. If it contains a statement prohibiting you from taking on a side hustle, you cannot undertake a second job.
If your letter of offer states you need to ask permission to take on a side hustle, let your employer know.
2) Make sure your side hustle doesn’t operate in competition to your main job.
3) As an employee, your loyalty to your employer matters. Taking on a side hustle may take your attention and support away from the main business that is paying you.
4) Your side job can’t spill over into your main job. There is a reasonable expectation you will totally focus on your full-time job during your agreed working hours.
5) It is not just your employer’s time that can’t be used: you should not use any of your employer’s resources to carry out your side hustle, either.
How many hours do people work in their second job?
While it’s hard to separate out data just on side hustles, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports almost 1 million people hold more than one job. That’s out of a workforce of 10 million full-time workers.
The bureau says employees with multiple jobs worked about eight hours each week in their second job, and they worked slightly fewer hours than single job holders, putting in around 30.5 hours a week in their main job.
These figures may be the tip of the iceberg, because multiple job holders include people with second jobs, as well as side hustle workers.
Motivations for the side hustle or side job
An increase in the number of people holding multiple jobs over the past five years has mirrored the increase in cost of living, especially driven by higher housing prices.
The rise of the side hustle has also been attributed to the greater use of digital platforms, such as ride share, food delivery and holiday homes, and the consequent highly flexible work options created by the gig economy.
While financial issues loom large in why people have second jobs, other reasons include:
So if your passion project, great idea or hobby can be converted to a paid side hustle – and you can do it in your own time around your main job without creating competition with your employer – there should be a clear path for you to try something different.
The Indonesian government has dismissed a claim that its military has been bombing villages in West Papua.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) claims a makeshift refugee camp in Puncak regency was bombed, and that many villagers have been displaced.
ULMWP president Benny Wenda said the Air Force had “relentlessly attacked the region” since the end of January.
“According to Human Rights Defenders on the ground, the Indonesian military used drones to drop bombs on the refugee camp in Kembru District, forcing civilians from nine villages to flee into the forest,” Wenda said in a statement.
ULMWP president Benny Wenda . . . “These are mostly women (some of them pregnant), children, and elders — defenceless people who have already been displaced.” Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony
“These are mostly women (some of them pregnant), children, and elders — defenceless people who have already been displaced from their homes by previous military operations.”
However, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s Embassy in New Zealand said that there were no increased attacks done by Indonesian Air Force or other branch of the military, “apart from regular patrol to provide security and to guarantee safety for all of Indonesians”.
The embassy spokesperson said about 500 residents in the area had been “evacuated” from their villages due to threats from an “armed criminal group”, a label given to Papuan independence fighters.
Counter claims There is more confusion around at least one separate, violent incident in the past several days.
ULMWP claimed Indonesia’s military forces killed a Papuan man, Pit Nayagau, during a raid in the Sugapa District of Intan Jaya Regency.
But the embassy spokesperson again pointed blame at the “armed criminal group” while indicating that more information was required for clarification regarding this incident.
Meanwhile, two pilots were killed after gunfire at a commercial plane when it landed at an airport in South Papua province last week.
“Unfortunately, those threats resulted in the loss of life of two Indonesian pilots in which their plane has been shot down by the armed criminal group.
“Elkius Kobak and Kopitua Heluka from the armed criminal group have claimed the responsibility of the shooting,” the embassy said.
Meanwhile, Wenda said internet blackouts had hampered the flow of information about the attacks.
“Indonesia is using their full range of occupation strategies during this offensive: forced displacement, indiscriminate targeting of villagers, and information blackouts,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Robert Duvall, who has died at the age of 95, will be remembered for a glittering career that saw him appear in two of American cinema’s most iconic films. But let’s not forget the other hundred or so more across a career spanning six decades.
Duvall was as comfortable in disposable fare like Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000) as he was in thoughtful dramas such as True Confessions (1983).
In 1990 alone, he played Tom Cruise’s mentor in the NASCAR epic Days of Thunder followed by The Commander in Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Acting is listening
Born in 1931 in San Diego, Duvall was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and enlist in the US Navy. But his love of acting led him to theatre and television in New York. There, he learned his trade – he once remarked the most important aspect of acting was talking and listening.
He made his film debut in 1962, playing Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Duvall dyed his hair blonde and avoided sunlight for six weeks to capture the character’s gaunt, fragile look. From then on, he was rarely off the screen, appearing in classic genre films Bullitt (1968), True Grit (1969) and M*A*S*H (1970).
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Film historian David Thomson wrote Duvall was “neither beautiful nor forceful enough to carry a big film”. Yet he was nominated for an Academy Award seven times, winning once in 1984. His most recent nomination was in 2015 for The Judge, where he played Robert Downey Jr’s crankily dominating father accused of murder.
He was often drawn to authoritative historical figures, portraying iconic outlaw Jesse James in The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid (1972), as well as Adolf Eichmann, Dwight Eisenhower and the confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Working with Coppola
Like so many of his contemporaries, Duvall idolised Marlon Brando.
It was fitting, then, that Duvall’s breakthrough role came in 1972, and his role as Tom Hagen, consigliere to Brando’s mob boss, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and its sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974).
His performance as clean-cut Hagen is majestic – all quiet menace and uneasy conviviality.
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Coppola cast Duvall again in Apocalypse Now (1979), as Kilgore, the surfing-loving, Stetson-wearing, Wagner-listening colonel who, despite the bloodshed of the Vietnam War, is helplessly addicted to its carnage.
It’s a deeply unsettling cameo (Duvall was on-screen for only ten minutes of the three-hour running time), but his calm and complete control in the middle of The Ride of the Valkyries scene is one of contemporary cinema’s most indelible moments. His speech steals the show.
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Seeking stardom
The followup was Tender Mercies (1983), in which he played Mac Sledge, a washed-up country music singer struggling with alcoholism. Sledge’s attempts to rebuild his life and find redemption after hitting rock bottom is a world away from the bombast of Kilgore.
Duvall beautifully captures Sledge’s laconic, introspective nature and promptly won the Best Actor Oscar.
Robert Duvall with Shirley MacLaine at the 1984 Oscars. Duvall won best actor for his role in Tender Mercies.AP Photo/Reed Saxon
Yet true stardom would prove elusive.
Unlike his counterparts Al Pacino, Robert de Niro and Jack Nicholson, or Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman (with whom he shared an apartment in the 1950s), Duvall remained “an actor’s actor” – talented, versatile, happy to play a supporting role, pivoting between paycheck film and passion project.
If the hallmark of a great actor is how effortlessly they deliver their lines and how plausible they are, then Duvall’s relaxed professionalism ensured he remained Hollywood’s most sought-after supporting actor.
Robert Duvall, left, as Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.AP/United Artists
Look again at this scene in Network (1976). As TV executive Frank Hackett, Duvall plays anger, vulnerability and humour all at once as he faces off against William Holden. Look at how his hands move and how he dabs his brow as he raises his voice.
Highly accomplished actors always make bold choices in terms of body language, posture and vocal delivery – Duvall’s work here is exemplary.
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Throughout the 1990s, Duvall continued to deliver outstanding performances across various genres. He admitted his favourite role was as Stalin in the 1992 HBO movie, in part because of the challenge of portraying monstrous, morally compromised characters and finding a glimmer of vulnerability.
A late bloomer
He then wrote, directed and starred in the wonderful The Apostle (1997). As Sonny Dewey, the charismatic and passionate Pentecostal preacher from Texas who goes on the run and starts a new life in a small Louisiana town, Duvall received another Oscar nomination in this startling tale about the quest for forgiveness.
One critic called it a “sublime exploration of what it is to be a human being, struggling somewhere between good and evil, sin and redemption”. The Apostle was a labour of love for Duvall (he invested US$4 million of his own money to ensure it got made). It’s one of his best films.
Duvall at the 2007 Emmy awards, with his trophies for the miniseries Broken Trail.AP Photo/Chris Carlson
He continued to appear in quirky work that surprised his loyal fanbase. He was quietly marvellous in Assassination Tango (2002), playing John J, a hitman who travels to Argentina for a job. When the hit is postponed, John J explores the world of tango clubs (the dance became an obsession for Duvall, and he spent much of his later life in Buenos Aires).
The film’s leisurely pace recalls earlier Duvall films, in which he worked with such slow-burning directors as Philip Kaufman, Sam Peckinpah and Sidney Lumet.
When asked to explain how he was able to tap into the darkness within his characters, Duvall described his approach as “all about percentages – perhaps 80% negative personal qualities and 20% positive on one day, and the next day, you reverse it.”
For an actor incapable of a false moment, this equation sums up Duvall’s entire career – authentic, unpredictable and ego-free.
Even before the film’s release, the costumes for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights caused controversy.
Wuthering Heights was first published in 1847 and the story switches back and forth in time between 1801 and the 1770s. But Cathy’s wedding dress references an entirely different era, inspired by a 1951 Charles Jameshaute couture gown. Cathy also appears to be wrapped in cellophane – a material first invented in 1908 – on her wedding night.
These costumes were designed by Jacqueline Durran, who previously won Oscars and BAFTAs for costume design for Anna Karenina (2012) and Little Women (2019), and a third BAFTA for Vera Drake (2005).
Some costume experts have panned Durran’s costumes as anachronistic and visually incoherent. But Vogue described them as “wild and wonderful”. So who’s right?
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Designing for film
Costume design is a collaboration; the designer works closely with the director and other production creatives to make a world and bring a story to life.
Costumes must make narrative sense within the world a director is building and communicate the character’s personality and story in each scene.
Often, costumes can seem so natural to a character and their world that you don’t even notice them, like Kathleen Detoro’s designs on Breaking Bad (2008–13).
Costumes can also be scene-stealers because displays of fashion and dress are part of the plot, like Durran’s costumes for Barbie (2023), or Patricia Field’s costumes for Sex and the City (1998–2004).
In Wuthering Heights, Cathy (Margot Robbie) has 50 different costumes, many featuring vintage Chanel jewellery. Other times, she is in ultra shiny, synthetic, plasticised contemporary fabric – such as a black gown that resembles an oil slick.
Cathy’s wedding dress would be more at home in the 20th century than the 18th.Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) has fewer changes, more in keeping with Georgian dress, with his costuming riffing on the cinematic trope of the bad-boy Byronic hero.
With every character, the costumes have a life of their own.
This is not unusual for cinematic adaptations of classic literature, which have featured glamorous, luxurious costumes to attract audiences since the beginning of film history, like Georges Méliès’s Cinderella (1899) and Cecil B. DeMille’s Male or Female (1919).
Designing Wuthering Heights
Fennell’s world of Wuthering Heights is built on a collection of images and cinematic references that span time and space to show the love story is universal.
Fennell also wanted to “make something really disturbing and sexy and nightmarish” rather than faithfully recreating the book.
To do this, she accumulated a huge number of visual references and collaborated with Durran to see how and where these could fit into the film.
The film draws on 500 years of art and fashion influences.Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Instead of historically accurate costuming, Durran and Fennell created a world of stylised costumes inspired by 500 years of historical dress, contemporary fashions, images from fairy tales and popular culture, and old Hollywood technicolor films from the 1930s to the 1960s, particularly Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).
This is part of a broader costuming trend rejecting complete historical accuracy when re-imagining historical eras on screen, such as the alternative Regency world of Bridgerton (2020–) and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025).
‘A collection of memoranda’
After Cathy dies in the book Heathcliff says, “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her”.
Motifs of hair, skin, bone and teeth are found throughout the film and speak to the physical, visceral nature of Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion. This echoes historical trends for mourning jewellery that featured hair, bones and teeth of deceased loved ones, and foreshadows the film’s ending.
Cathy’s jewellery is her armour. After she marries Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), her jewellery signals her newfound wealth and security. The majority of Cathy’s costumes are black, white and red, echoing the interiors of her old and new homes, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
Cathy demands Nelly (Hong Chau) tighten her bridal corset, echoing the scars on Heathcliff’s back from a beating he sustained as a child when defending her. But this tightening also signals she is trapped in a loveless cage.
Heathcliff’s costuming riffs off the cinematic trope of the bad-boy Byronic hero.Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Edgar, the nouveau-riche textile merchant, wears suits with a period silhouette but made in contemporary, shiny fabrics; his spoilt, unhinged sister Isabella (Alison Oliver) wears tacky, frilly beribboned gowns and accessories; Heathcliff transforms from rough brute in farming clothes to rakish, Regency-style dandy with a gold tooth.
Not all of the costuming choices work. Cathy’s dirndl-style gowns are more Oktoberfest than “moorcore”. Unlike Cathy’s other costumes which aren’t historically accurate, but are still based on a bygone time, I found the dirndl gowns too similar to a style of traditional dress still worn in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, taking us away from the historical fantasy world of Wuthering Heights.
Let it sweep you away
While some will criticise the bold costuming choices, the beauty and skill of Durran’s work on Wuthering Heights are undeniable.
We should embrace Durran’s costumes and their blend of romantic, historical silhouettes and imagery with glossy, gauzy fabrics and sexy, contemporary, high fashion looks.
The costumes aren’t quite historically accurate – but they’re sumptuous.Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Don’t look for historical accuracy in Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. That will lead to disappointment. Instead, let the sensual, opulent costumes, the brash, bold scenography and the chemistry between Robbie and Elordi sweep you away to a sumptuous, imaginary world.
Thanks to an unprecedented lift in public funding in the 2020s, an extra 55,000 new, good quality homes around Australia will be available to people on the lowest incomes by 2030. That’s almost triple the increase of 20,000 homes in the previous decade.
Residents in these modern “social” homes will generally pay only 25% of their income in rent. Social housing refers to government-subsidised homes, with below market rents.
You’d think federal and state politicians would be shouting about an extra 55,000 social homes by 2030 from those new rooftops.
But, surprisingly, there are no official projections on how many more total dwellings we’ll have in coming years, thanks to recently boosted investment.
For the first time, our new research fills this gap. It shows that even with the recent investment boom, we’re still not building enough to cut the backlog of need – leaving hundreds of thousands of Australians without an adequate, affordable home.
What’s being built vs demolished
Up until now, we’ve known how many social homes Australia has at the end of each year. Remarkably, though, there is still no national data series tracking social housing in greater detail: showing the balance between annual construction, acquisitions and losses.
Filling this gap, our new research reveals around 70,000 new “social” homes are due to built across Australia during the 2020s – a number not seen since the 1980s.
However, many new social housing projects involve replacing ageing public housing. So, along the way, 15,000 older homes will also be lost, mainly when large public housing estates in Sydney and Melbourne are demolished.
After allowing for these demolitions and sales, we found Australia’s total stock of social housing will increase by a total of 55,000 by 2030. That’s up 13% compared to what we had in 2020.
Who’s building the most?
A substantial share of this new housing comes from the Albanese government’s headline initiative, the Housing Australia Future Fund.
The fund is set to deliver 20,000 new social homes by 2029 (as well as 20,000 more “affordable” units targeted at low-income renters).
Strikingly, though, we found even more social housing will be delivered by state and territory government-funded programs across the decade. They’re projected to contribute about two-thirds (64%) of all social housing construction from 2020 to 2030.
Overall, the standouts have been Tasmania and Victoria. Between 2020 and 2025, they each built enough to increase the overall share of social housing within their states.
Victoria led the way in 2020, announcing its Big Housing Build program to initially construct 12,000 dwellings. More than three-quarters of them are social housing, while the rest are affordable rentals.
Since then, most states have followed suit, although generally on a smaller scale.
In the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales, new construction barely exceeded stock losses in the first half of the decade. In NSW, substantially ramped-up spending is only now flowing through.
In South Australia, more public housing units were sold or demolished than new social homes added.
Historically, state governments have generally invested in new social housing through the proceeds of land and property sales, or as a matching contribution alongside Commonwealth funds.
So it’s quite a big deal that, since 2020, most states have stepped up to do a lot more.
Why Australia is not keeping up
While we’re building far more than we did from 2000 to 2020, it’s still not enough.
Australia’s 13% increase in social housing this decade matches projected national household growth to 2030. In other words, what we’re building as a nation now is only enough to stop the share of social housing in Australia shrinking further.
Currently the sector accounts for only about 4% of all occupied dwellings in Australia, down from 6% in the mid-1990s.
In contrast, the average across similar wealthy OECD nations is 7%.
The projected net increase of 55,000 dwellings by the end of the decade is striking. Yet it pales alongside the estimate that 437,000 households had an “unmet need” for social housing on census night in 2021. That unmet need means they were either homeless at the time, or very low-income renters in rental stress.
The revival of public investment in social housing this decade is a notable policy reversal. But greater action is needed.
Our report finds we need clearer, more consistent rules for social housing providers and residents. These rules have remained neglected for decades.
More importantly, none of the current programs – state, territory or federal – come with committed funding beyond 2030. Australian governments need to extend recent investment into the next decade and beyond at similar, or expanded, levels.
The post-1990s history of social housing in Australia has seen gradual decline, punctuated by occasional bursts of activity, like the Rudd-era response to the global financial crisis of 2008.
For the future, we need assurance that stated government commitments are being met. That means starting to officially, transparently track social housing construction in more detail at a national level.
Thanks to Peter Mares for his input into this story.
The issue of Australians — and New Zealanders as well — serving in the Israeli military has sparked growing debate as the genocidal war crimes in Gaza mount.
Most of those involved are believed to be dual Israeli-Australian citizens, and under current Australian law, it is not automatically illegal to join a recognised foreign army, reports OnePath.
However, critics say the lack of transparency, including unclear numbers, roles, and oversight, is troubling, especially while international courts are examining serious allegations linked to the conflict.
Proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel is on trial for genocide in a case brought by South Africa, and International Criminal Court (ICC) warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu and other officials have intensified questions about Australia’s responsibility to monitor its citizens abroad.
According to an Al Jazeera report, more than 50,000 Western nationals — most of them holding US or European Union passports — have joined the Israeli military in its genocidal war that has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians.
The largest number is from the United States — 12,350 dual nationality US-Israel citizens and 1207 multiple nationalities — followed by 6127 French dual national citizens and 337 multiple nationalities, according to data obtained by the Israeli NGO Hatzlacha through Israel’s Freedom of Information Law.
Australia is well down the list with 502 dual nationality soldiers and 119 multiple nationality citizens. New Zealand is 56th with 39 and 11.
Accountability major concern A major concern being raised is accountability: if any Australians serving in Gaza were involved in alleged war crimes, would they actually be investigated?
Legal experts say Australia has “universal jurisdiction” laws, meaning citizens can theoretically be prosecuted for serious crimes committed overseas, but so far, there has been little public evidence of active investigations.
Critics argue this creates a perception of double standards.
The debate ultimately centres on whether Australia is willing to apply the same scrutiny to its own nationals in foreign conflicts, ensuring that military service abroad does not place individuals beyond the reach of the law.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne
Coles has appeared before the Federal Court in Melbourne, as hearings for a high-stakes case launched against the supermarket by Australia’s consumer watchdog officially begin.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is alleging Coles misled consumers with “illusory” discounts between February 2022 and May 2023.
The watchdog alleges that in this period, Coles temporarily increased the prices of “at least 245 different products”, then placed them on “Down Down” promotions which were:
higher than, or the same as, the price at which each product had ordinarily been offered for sale.
In opening arguments on Monday, head counsel for the ACCC, Garry Rich SC, described the supermarket’s conduct as “utterly misleading”.
While Coles’ legal team only addressed the court for a short time on Monday, barrister John Sheahan KC said Coles customers were aware of price movements before making purchases.
Coles has signalled it will argue the price increases in question represented a genuine response to surging costs.
So, what exactly is at stake for one of Australia’s largest supermarket giants?
Behind the allegations
The ACCC alleges Coles offered misleading discounts on a wide range of products over the relevant period – ranging from Colgate toothpaste to Sanitarium Weet-Bix cereal.
In its court filing, the ACCC provides the example of a 16 pack of Strepsils Throat Lozenges Honey & Lemon. According to the ACCC, this product had been for sale on a “Down Down” promotion at a price of A$5.50 for at least 649 days.
The ACCC says on 12 October 2022, Coles increased the price to $7 for 28 days, then reduced it back to $6 on a “Down Down” promotion, 9% higher than the previous price of $5.50.
What does ‘Down Down’ mean?
In making this accusation, the ACCC is emphasising the overall impression created in the mind of the reasonable consumer was that the price drop related to a price set more than a short period before.
It argues consumers should be able to take the “Down Down” campaign at face value, without scrutinising the fine print price change or researching prices over the recent history.
Notably, the ACCC is arguing that the conduct by Coles was “planned”. In other words, that the allegedly misleading representations were deliberate.
Under Australian Consumer Law, conduct can be misleading without being intentional. However, if the ACCC can show that the conduct was indeed planned then an inference that the conduct was also misleading is easier to establish. Additionally, intentional misleading representations are likely to attract a larger penalty.
What might Coles argue?
By contrast, Coles’ case is likely to rest on two things. First, its right to raise prices, especially in response to what Coles has said were “significant cost increases”, including:
a surge in global commodity prices, and in the cost of packaging, freight, utilities and international shipping.
And second, that the “Down Down” price on the ticket was, strictly speaking, accurate – there was a price reduction from the shelf, just not a reduction compared to the historical, pre-increase price.
So it is a legal battle with potentially significant consequences for all parties.
A separate action by the ACCC against Woolworths, also alleging “illusory” discounts, will be heard later this year.
Clearly the outcome of the case against Woolworths will be influenced by what happens in the Coles litigation.
What’s at stake?
If Coles is found to have made the alleged misleading representations, any penalties will be determined by the court in a separate hearing. However, the amounts are potentially significant.
The maximum penalty could be $50 million per contravention, or more.
By comparison, in 2024, Qantas was ordered to pay $100 million for misleading consumers by accepting bookings for flights that had already been cancelled.
Separately, the Federal Court last year ordered Optus to pay $100 million after the telco admitted it had engaged in unconscionable conduct involving aggressive debt collection and mis-selling to vulnerable customers.
The big issues at play
A supermarket such as Coles is entitled to raise prices.
But the question raised by this case is whether it is misleading under consumer law to advertise a discount on a product that has only briefly risen in price, using a well recognised promotion strategy, without disclosing that not so long before, it was even cheaper.
In other words, can consumers rely on the headline of a “Down Down” discount to tell them they are getting a deal? Or should they be scrutinising the fluctuations in retail pricing more carefully and shopping around?
Politicians are under fire overseas. But New Zealand should take note too.
The US Justice Department’s release of more than three million Epstein files (including 180,000 images and 2000 videos) has blown the doors off the most protected social network of the late 20th century.
What these documents reveal is not just a catalogue of one man’s depravity. It is, as Helen Rumbelow wrote in The Times, like “taking the back off the world clock”, exposing how power actually works at the top of the Western world.
And the implications reach all the way to New Zealand.
New Zealand media has done useful work tracking the Kiwi names that appear in the files.
Paula Penfold at Stuff searched more than a thousand New Zealand references. Joel MacManus at The Spinoff, Ben Tomsett and Ethan Manera at The New Zealand Herald, and Steve Braunias at Newsroom have reported on the local angles — Peter Thiel’s investment relationship with Epstein, the New Zealand Defence Force couple who managed Epstein’s properties, Auckland academic Brian Boyd, physicist Lawrence Krauss and his pursuit of Epstein money for an Otago University role.
These stories matter. But the fixation on which Kiwis appear in the files misses the real story. The Epstein scandal is not fundamentally about which individuals had dinner with a monster. It is about what kind of political systems allow monsters to operate at the centre of global power for decades without consequence.
On that score, New Zealand should be paying very close attention, because our systems are weaker than those now failing spectacularly in countries around us.
The Mandelson masterclass The most instructive case study is not American but British. The fall of Peter Mandelson (the architect of New Labour, the self-described “Prince of Darkness”) is a textbook case of how politics and money have gone rotten in liberal democracies.
The Epstein files revealed that Mandelson, while serving as “Deputy PM” to Gordon Brown, and in the position of Business Secretary, forwarded highly sensitive government tax plans to Jeffrey Epstein.
He told Epstein he was “trying hard to amend” a planned tax on bankers’ bonuses and suggested that JPMorgan’s CEO should “mildly threaten” the Chancellor to water down the policy. He gave Epstein advance notice of a €500 billion EU bailout before public announcement.
On Christmas Day, he wrote to a convicted paedophile: “I do not want to live by salary alone”.
So, a sitting Cabinet minister was leaking government intelligence to a convicted sex offender, lobbying against his own government’s financial regulation on behalf of that offender’s banking contacts, and angling for post-politics employment — all at the same time.
Within weeks of leaving office, his lobbying firm Global Counsel was chasing work with the Russian state investment fund and the state-owned China International Capital Corporation.
The Starmer government is bleeding credibility. Police opened a criminal investigation, Mandelson’s properties were searched, and yesterday Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney resigned, saying the appointment decision “has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself”.
The Economist magazine has called it “Britain’s worst political scandal of this century”. UK Labour now trails Reform UK in the polls.
As former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in The Guardian last Friday, in a remarkable act of public contrition: “I greatly regret this appointment . . . He seems to have used market-sensitive inside information to betray the principles in which he said he believed”.
Brown’s piece was not merely an apology. It was a manifesto for integrity reform. Brown called for an independent anti-corruption commission with statutory powers, a fully accountable vetting system for major political appointments, mandatory parliamentary hearings for senior ambassadors and ministers, a five-year cooling-off period for former ministers entering lobbying, and the creation of corruption as a new statutory offence.
Brown argued for nothing less than a “century-defining rebalancing of power and accountability”, and he warned that without fundamental change, the revelations would be “acid in our democracy, corroding trust still further”.
Heather Stewart, writing in The Guardian, drew out the structural lesson: Mandelson’s personal disgrace is “deep and unique, and may yet bring down a prime minister — but by laying bare the dark allure of the filthy rich, it also underlines the need for tougher constraints on money in politics”.
Stewart documented how Epstein’s efforts to influence government policy — working to water down Alistair Darling’s bonus tax at a time when the banks had crashed the economy — “underline the powerful forces with which politicians are faced”.
She noted that Transparency International warned last summer: “We stand at the beginning of a new and dangerous era, where big money dominates in a way that has corroded US politics across the Atlantic”. The campaign group Spotlight on Corruption warned the current system is “full of major loopholes and gaps”.
The real takeaway is this: when it comes to money and politics, whether post-parliamentary employment, lobbying, or party funding, it is unwise to take honesty and decency as a given. As Stewart concluded: “It is not too late to pull up the drawbridge . . . by introducing stringent new rules to protect British democracy from the malign influence of powerful companies, and dodgy billionaires”.
The global rot at the top What is striking is the convergence. Left, right, and libertarian commentators from across the ideological spectrum are reaching the same conclusion: the Epstein network was not an aberration. It was a symptom of what happens when wealth, power, and access operate without transparency or accountability.
As Josie Pagani observed in The Post, “there appears to be a high degree of crossover between the sort of people who attend World Economic Forum jamborees at Davos, and the sort of people who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein”. The Economist noted the files read “like a ‘Who’s Who’ which has gathered only a thin layer of dust”.
These are not fringe figures being exposed. These are the people who run things.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist at Princeton, described the files as “a sobering x-ray of some of America’s elites — immature, full of impunity, corrupt, venal, venial, and venereal all at once”. He warned that “an elite so needy, greedy, and now so vulnerable can hardly be trusted to exercise good judgment”.
Owen Jones put it bluntly: Mandelson is “the logical culmination of the career politician, attracted to government office not because of any commitment to a set of values or public service, but simply for power, position, and profit”. Jones asked the question that should haunt every democracy: “What is being done now by ministers and politicians to secure preferment and nice jobs later?”
The Economist observed on the Epstein-Mandelson scandal that “a weakened elite is also more vulnerable to populism” and that “public opinion is less tolerant of hypocrisy than of sex scandals or corruption”. A record 43 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup now say they have “very little faith” in big business.
The political lesson people take from the documents is broader: elites protect elites. And once voters accept that as a general pattern, they start to look at their own politics differently. They see the local versions: the donor dinners, the quietly arranged appointments, the lobbyists writing submissions, the ministers lining up post-parliament careers. They start to interpret routine insider politics as corruption-by-another-name.
So what does this mean for New Zealand? It’s easy to shrug this off as a foreign horror story. That shrug is the vulnerability. New Zealand has no lobbying regulations. None. No register, no code of conduct, no cooling-off period for ministers who walk out of the Beehive and into lobbying firms or corporate boardrooms.
We rank 42nd out of 48 OECD countries on lobbying transparency. NZ is ahead of only Slovakia, Luxembourg, and Turkey. Yet Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has said lobbying reform “is not a priority”.
As The NZ Herald editorial argued on the Epstein scandal, “what this all reveals . . . is how utterly certain those in power are that they will be protected”. That certainty, and that sense of impunity, is not confined to Manhattan townhouses and Caribbean islands. It operates wherever wealth and politics intersect without adequate transparency.
Our own political history provides uncomfortable parallels. Minister Stuart Nash was sacked in 2023 for emailing confidential Cabinet information to wealthy donors, a mini-parallel to Mandelson’s alleged leaking of market-sensitive information to Epstein.
But in Nash’s case, he lost his ministerial role without ever facing a police investigation. The structural failure is the same: the revolving door, the undisclosed lobbying, the donation loopholes, the absence of any meaningful cooling-off period.
If the Mandelson affair teaches one lesson, it is this: weak integrity systems do not just allow bad behaviour, they incentivise it. New Zealand has all of these mechanisms for embedding soft corruption, in weaker form than the UK. We rely on a “she’ll be right” attitude in place of the institutional safeguards that comparable democracies take for granted.
The example of Peter Thiel sharpens this further. Thiel is a New Zealand citizen. He is also a billionaire power broker in Silicon Valley and a funder of rightwing politics who appears prominently in the Epstein files.
That is a reminder: New Zealand has granted citizenship, and effectively social legitimacy, to a man who sits inside the very global plutocratic networks now being publicly scrutinised for moral collapse and elite impunity. Thiel is symbolic because he represents something New Zealand has not seriously confronted: the country’s relationship with the global super-rich, and the way money can smooth entry into our political community.
Meanwhile, public trust in New Zealand’s institutions has collapsed. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer showed New Zealand’s trust index falling below the global average for the first time: 47 percent compared to 56 percent globally. Political parties are the least trusted institution, at just 32 percent according to the OECD’s 2024 survey. And the anti-politics mood is deepening.
The recent McSkimming police corruption scandal, where a Deputy Commissioner’s misconduct was systematically covered up, has already forced a national debate about the “C-word”. The ground was prepared before the Epstein files even arrived.
An election-year wake-up call So what happens when this mood hits an election year? November 7 is nine months away, and the Epstein scandal feeds directly into a public mood that was already getting toxic. The danger here is not that the public demands accountability. The danger is that the public concludes accountability is impossible, because the system is so captured by insiders and vested interests that reform cannot come from within.
Scandals like this feed anti-politics. People conclude that “they’re all the same,” that it’s a rigged game, that power protects itself. But the same disgust can create reform pressure. When trust collapses, political promises about integrity stop being an optional add-on.
They become central. Voters start demanding answers: who is lobbying whom? Who is funding whom? Why do politicians leave office and immediately cash in? Why are conflicts of interest treated as personal errors rather than structural failures?
No party in New Zealand “owns” the anti-corruption space. That’s also both a vulnerability and an opening. The party or leader who takes integrity reform seriously in 2026 — who makes the lobbying register, the donation caps, the Integrity Commission a genuine campaign commitment rather than a footnote — will be tapping into something powerful and real.
The party that ignores it will be betting that public anger stays diffuse. That would be a bad bet.
The global mood of elite scepticism will shape this election whether our politicians like it or not. Voters are more suspicious than ever of cosy relationships between politicians and the wealthy. They are less willing to accept opacity, conflicts of interest, and the revolving door as the price of doing business.
Chris Trotter, writing today in The Interest, argues there are “heaps of lessons New Zealanders can learn from what is unfolding in the United Kingdom”. He is right. New Zealand has an opportunity to get ahead of the global backlash. We can build the transparency infrastructure — the lobbying register, the Integrity Commission, the cooling-off rules — that most comparable democracies already have.
Or we can keep pretending that we are too small and too decent for this kind of corruption, and wait for the next scandal to prove us wrong.
Starmer’s warning to his own cabinet, that “the public don’t really see individuals in this scandal, they see politicians”, applies here too. New Zealanders are watching the Mandelson affair, they’re reading the files, and they’re drawing the obvious conclusion: that the people who run the world are not to be trusted, and the systems meant to hold them accountable are broken.
A country can’t keep shrugging at unregulated influence while telling voters to trust the system. If New Zealand’s political class wants to avoid the kind of legitimacy collapse now unfolding overseas, the time to act is now. Not after the next (inevitable) scandal.
An immediate test And here is the immediate test. Transparency International is releasing its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. For the last couple of decades, New Zealand’s showing in the index has been in decline. Our score has slipped from the mid-90s to 83, and our ranking has dropped to fourth globally, now seven points behind Denmark.
Will this decline continue? If it does, it will be one more data point confirming what voters already sense: that the gap between New Zealand’s self-image as a clean, transparent democracy and the reality of our thin integrity architecture is growing wider.
The Epstein files have taken the back off the world clock. New Zealanders can see the mechanism now. The question is what do we do about it?
Dr Bryce Edwards is a political commentator and analyst. He is director of the Democracy Project, focused on scrutinising and challenging the role of vested interests in the political process. Republished with the author’s permission.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 16, 2026.
Herzog protest – when politicans fail, police go rogue, justice fails to protect Israel’s President Herzog has departed Australia, leaving less “social cohesion”, while politicians, justices and NSW police have many questions to answer. Wendy Bacon reports for Michael West Media. ANALYSIS: By Wendy Bacon Many who witnessed the horrific police violence in Sydney’s CBS on the evening of February 9 say they had never seen anything like
Why your brain has to work harder in an open-plan office than private offices: study Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Libby (Elizabeth) Sander, MBA Director & Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Bond Business School, Bond University Since the pandemic, offices around the world have quietly shrunk. Many organisations don’t need as much floor space or as many desks, given many staff now do a mix of hybrid
The West Bank: Israel’s atrocities in clear sight, but out of mind While the world has focused on the atrocities in Gaza, Israel continues its support of illegal settlements, hostility and apartheid in the West Bank. Asia-Pacific specialist journalist Ben Bohane reports from Bethlehem for Michael West Media. SPECIAL REPORT: By Ben Bohane We are no more than 5 minutes out of Bethlehem on a crisp December
Maher Nazzal: The Epstein Files – the real scandal is the silence COMMENTARY: By Maher Nazzal The Epstein Files were never just about one man. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t operate in a vacuum. His crimes were grotesque, systematic, and, crucially, protected for decades. That alone should unsettle anyone who believes power is held accountable. What’s disturbing isn’t only what he did, but what didn’t happen afterwards. How does
Keith Rankin Essay – The New Alchemy: Democracy, and the Church of Money Keith Rankin, 13 February 2026 On 14 January, Al Jazeera produced an episode of ‘Inside Story’, their daily current affairs feature programme: Why is the US Fed chair criminal probe causing global alarm? The context is the conflict between the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, versus the man who appointed him to that role, President
Israel’s President Herzog has departed Australia, leaving less “social cohesion”, while politicians, justices and NSW police have many questions to answer. Wendy Bacon reports for Michael West Media.
ANALYSIS:By Wendy Bacon
Many who witnessed the horrific police violence in Sydney’s CBS on the evening of February 9 say they had never seen anything like it before.
After a week of broadcasts of police “kettling”, viciously assaulting and pepper spraying peaceful protesters, the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) announced an independent investigation into the police conduct.
It will examine the policing operation as well as individual cases of unlawful policing.
One of the matters LECC should investigate is which politicians and senior police were involved in organising a massive increase in available police powers shortly before Herzog’s arrival, and what instructions were given to police on the ground about those powers.
The legislation that was used is a little-known act called the Major Events Act 2009, under which the NSW Minister for Tourism, Stephen Kamper, approved a new regulation which transformed Herzog’s visit into a “major event”.
Major Events Act The objects of the Act are to bring “benefits” to spectators and enhance NSW’s reputation for holding events. The Act grants special powers to plan and regulate major events, including shutting off access to areas, searching people, and using “reasonable force” to compel citizens to comply with directions.
It relieves the state of most liability for damage caused in the exercise of these powers.
The powers have the potential to severely impact the exercise of citizens’ political rights, which is probably why the Act includes a section that a political protest must not be declared a major event. The Act is designed to cover events of a “sporting, cultural or other nature”.
These police powers triggered the lack of restraint witnessed last Monday. This does not mean that police actions were lawful, but that these were the powers under which they thought they were acting.
As one constable who was part of two lines blocking protesters from entering Town Hall Square said when questioned, “I heard something about a major event.”
Court challenge failed The new regulation was announced on Saturday, February 7, just 48 hours before Herzog arrived.
The Palestinian Action Group (PAG), represented by Hanna Legal, had 24 hours to challenge the regulation.
PAG’s case was that the regulation was “unreasonable”, “disproportionate” and was created for an improper purpose of suppressing protests. Within an hour of NSW Supreme Court Justice Robertson Wright dismissing the challenge, NSW Police were already using the Major Event powers.
Before dismissing the Palestinian Action Group challenge on Monday, Justice Wright said that he found both sides’ arguments persuasive and that it was difficult to decide. But there was no hint of uncertainty in his judgment, which adopted almost all of the NSW government’s case.
The judge, who is near retirement, was described on his appointment as “a soldier, a historian and a gentleman”. His reasons were not published until two days later.
By that time, protesters had been violently flung to the ground while praying, and hundreds had been trapped and assaulted in Town Hall Square. People were blinded or choked with pepper spray. Others had been hospitalised with broken limbs or bleeding wounds.
Journalist and filmmaker James Ricketson, 76, had been injured in an assault by six officers and held in a cell for five hours without water before being released without charge. Videos of NSW police punching people had gone viral around the world.
Premier Chris Minns, Minister for Police Yasmin Catley and Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon defended the police actions as “reasonable” in the circumstances.
Not a political event? Few would disagree that Herzog’s visit to Australia was the key political event of last week. Yet key to the judgment was Wright’s determination that the Herzog visit wasn’t.
Before he arrived, Herzog defined the purpose of his visit as rebuilding Australia’s relationship with Israel. He brought a top-level delegation from Jewish national institutions with him. This was in evidence before the judge.
Also in evidence was the fact that Chris Sidoti, who had sat on a UN Commission of Inquiry that found Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and that Herzog had incited it, had called for his arrest in Australia.
But Justice Wright found that politics was not a “defining” or “dominant” purpose for the visit and that it was a “cultural event”.
Herzog’s tour did have cultural aspects, such as a trip to Bondi to meet victims of the December massacre and visits to a synagogue and school. But Herzog and Zionist leaders also consistently stressed that an important purpose was to encourage the Australian government to stand with Israel.
The act has never been used for a foreign dignitary visit before or at such short notice.
Until last week, no one would have imagined that this law would be used to enable police violence to be unleashed on peaceful citizens protesting against a controversial visit by a foreign head of state.
But a bright idea by the NSW Police changed this.
Police concerns As public opposition to Herzog’s visit grew and likewise support for a peaceful march from Town Hall to Parliament House during Herzog’s visit, senior police became concerned that the new anti-protest law passed on December 23 might not be sufficient to stop a big march in Sydney.
The ban over most of the CBD and the Eastern Suburbs was extended on February 2. On the same day, according to evidence tendered in last week’s court case, NSW police advised the government that the Major Events Act, with its extensive powers, could help avoid any risks to Herzog during the visit, advising “Police will be empowered to address any behaviour which poses a security threat or risk to the Presidential Visit.”
It is worth noting that nothing was ever planned at the protest related to a security threat or risk to Herzog. That was also in evidence.
The Cabinet office then prepared a minute setting out arguments, including ones for and against protests, for the Minister for Tourism Kamper to consider before making his decision. He was then told to sign but not date his recommendation, which was agreed to by the NSW Executive Council and gazetted on Friday, February 6.
In arguing that the regulation had been declared for the improper purpose of suppressing protests, PAG’s barrister Felicity Graham relied on the timing of events and material in the Cabinet minute. She also relied on Premier Chris Minns’ media conference on Saturday, February 7, in which he announced the “Major Event”.
Minns talked about 3500 police, fines of more than $5500 for disobeying directions and needing to prevent “the clash of mourners and protesters”. The latter seemed to be an idea of Minns’ own making because there was never any plan for protesters to be near mourners.
Suppressing protests to keep us safe Justice Wright agreed that it would be improper for the purpose of the regulation to be the suppression of protests. But he found that protests could be suppressed if it was consistent with the goal of facilitating “safety and crowd control” and that there was no intention on the part of the Minister or any other relevant person to “adversely affect any protest or right to protest except to the extent reasonably appropriate to facilitate the conduct of the visit”.
He agreed that there was no evidence that the protest would interfere with the President, but found that it did not matter.
When PAG’s barrister Felicity Graham argued that the powers in the Regulation could lead to unjust treatment of citizens, even those who were not protesters, the judge appeared mildly exasperated.
He assumed that officers act “reasonably”.
That turned out to be wildly optimistic. If the purpose was to keep us all safe, it had the opposite effect.
PAG is considering an appeal. The event is over, but there are many potential cases against the police, and the Act restricts liability and compensation. It might also be possible to raise implications of the Major Events Act on “freedom of expression”, which was not attempted in the short one-day hearing.
A protest was held near Parliament on Friday evening with a speech delivered from her hospital bed by a woman who suffered broken vertebrae: “We will not be silent. He [MInns] needs to take full responsibility for this and the laws that were passed. The police who did it need to take responsibility.”
If the Major Events Act can validly be used in protests, it needs reform. Imagine if the UN decided to hold a major climate conference backed by fossil fuel interests in Sydney? The whole city could be shut down to protesters.
Accountability for this disaster must start at the very top and run through to the police on the ground.
Wendy Bacon is an Australian investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS movement and the Greens. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Libby (Elizabeth) Sander, MBA Director & Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Bond Business School, Bond University
Since the pandemic, offices around the world have quietly shrunk. Many organisations don’t need as much floor space or as many desks, given many staff now do a mix of hybrid work from home and the office.
But on days when more staff are required to be in, office spaces can feel noticeably busier and noisier. Despite so much focus on getting workers back into offices, there has been far less focus on the impacts of returning to open-plan workspaces.
Now, more research confirms what many suspected: our brains have to work harder in open-plan spaces than in private offices.
What the latest study tested
In a recently published study, researchers at a Spanish university fitted 26 people, aged in their mid-20s to mid-60s, with wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets. EEG testing can measure how hard the brain is working by tracking electrical activity through sensors on the scalp.
Participants completed simulated office tasks, such as monitoring notifications, reading and responding to emails, and memorising and recalling lists of words.
Each participant was monitored while completing the tasks in two different settings: an open-plan workspace with colleagues nearby, and a small enclosed work “pod” with clear glazed panels on one side.
The researchers focused on the frontal regions of the brain, responsible for attention, concentration, and filtering out distractions. They measured different types of brain waves.
Brainwaves are grouped into five different wavelength categories.Shutterstock
As neuroscientist Susan Hillier explains in more detail, different brain waves reveal distinct mental states:
“gamma” is linked with states or tasks that require more focused concentration
“beta” is linked with higher anxiety and more active states, with attention often directed externally
“alpha” is linked with being very relaxed, and passive attention (such as listening quietly but not engaging)
“theta” is linked with deep relaxation and inward focus
and “delta” is linked with deep sleep.
The Spanish study found that the same tasks done inside the enclosed pod vs the open-plan workspace produced completely opposite patterns.
It takes effort to filter out distractions
In the work pod, the study found beta waves – associated with active mental processing – dropped significantly over the experiment, as did alpha waves linked to passive attention and overall activity in the frontal brain regions.
This meant people’s brains needed progressively less effort to sustain the same work.
The open-plan office testing showed the reverse.
Gamma waves, linked to complex mental processing, climbed steadily. Theta waves, which track both working memory and mental fatigue, increased. Two key measures also rose significantly: arousal (how alert and activated the brain is) and engagement (how much mental effort is being applied).
In other words, in the open-plan office participants’ brains had to work harder to maintain performance.
Even when we try to ignore distractions, our brain has to expend mental effort to filter them out.
In contrast, the pod eliminated most background noise and visual disruptions, allowing participant’s brains to work more efficiently.
Researchers also found much wider variability in the open office. Some people’s brain activity increased dramatically, while others showed modest changes. This suggests individual differences in how distracting we find open-plan spaces.
With only 26 participants, this was a relatively small study. But its findings echo a significant body of research from the past decade.
What past research has shown
In our 2021 study, my colleagues and I found a significant causal relationship between open-plan office noise and physiological stress. Studying 43 participants in controlled conditions – using heart rate, skin conductivity and AI facial emotion recognition – we found negative mood in open plan offices increased by 25% and physiological stress by 34%.
Another study showed background conversations and noisy environments can degrade cognitive task performance and increase distraction for workers.
And a 2013 analysis of more than 42,000 office workers in the United States, Finland, Canada and Australia found those in open-plan offices were less satisfied with their work environment than those in private offices. This was largely due to increased, uncontrollable noise and lack of privacy.
Just as we now recognise poorly designed chairs cause physical strain, years of research has shown how workspace design can result in cognitive strain.
What to do about it
The ability to focus and concentrate without interruption and distraction is a fundamental requirement for modern knowledge work.
Yet the value of uninterrupted work continues to be undervalued in workplace design.
Creating zones where workers can match their workplace environment to the task is essential.
Responding to having more staff doing hybrid work post-pandemic, LinkedIn redesigned its flagship San Francisco office. LinkedIn halved the number of workstations in open plan areas, instead experimenting with 75 types of work settings, including work areas for quiet focus.
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For organisations looking to look after their workers’ brains, there are practical measures to consider. These include setting up different work zones, acoustic treatments and sound-masking technologies, and thoughtfully placed partitions to reduce visual and auditory distractions.
While adding those extra features in may cost more upfront than an open plan office, they can be worth it. Research has shown the significant hidden toll of poor office design on productivity, health and employee retention.
Providing workers with more choice in how much they’re exposed to noise and other interruptions is not a luxury. To get more done, with less strain on our brains, better design at work should be seen as a necessity.
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t operate in a vacuum. His crimes were grotesque, systematic, and, crucially, protected for decades. That alone should unsettle anyone who believes power is held accountable.
What’s disturbing isn’t only what he did, but what didn’t happen afterwards.
How does a trafficker move across borders, fly politicians and royalty, launder wealth, avoid serious prosecution for years, and then conveniently die in a high-security facility with cameras malfunctioning and guards “asleep”?
That’s not a coincidence. That’s institutional failure at best, complicity at worst.
The real scandal is the silence.
Names were known. Networks were hinted at. Evidence existed. Yet accountability stopped at Epstein himself, the perfect firewall.
How power protects itself Once he was gone, so was the urgency. Files sealed. Investigations stalled. Media interest redirected.
This is how power protects itself.
Whether you call it the Deep State, the ruling class, elite immunity, or simply entrenched systems of power, the pattern is familiar:
The powerful are insulated, the truth is managed, and justice is selective.
Epstein wasn’t an anomaly. He was a symptom.
And until transparency replaces secrecy, and accountability reaches upward instead of downward, the question will remain:
Who was Epstein really working for?
And who benefited most from him never speaking?
Maher Khalil Nazzal is a Muslim Palestinian refugee living in Auckland and co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
While the world has focused on the atrocities in Gaza, Israel continues its support of illegal settlements, hostility and apartheid in the West Bank. Asia-Pacific specialist journalist Ben Bohane reports from Bethlehem for Michael West Media.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Ben Bohane
We are no more than 5 minutes out of Bethlehem on a crisp December morning when my Palestinian driver — let’s call him Ahmed — stops and points to a curl of smoke rising in the valley below, near Beit Jala.
“That’s a local restaurant the Israeli’s are burning since last night. They demand permits even when it is on family land. Israel then gives demolition orders, and no one can stop them.”
It’s the day before Christmas. I’m in the West Bank and Israel for a month to see the situation for myself, to try and understand how this comparatively small area continues to hijack history and our news agenda.
Photojournalist and producer Ben Bohane . . . “Israel has killed more journalists in the past three years than any other government in history.” Image: BB/MWM
The international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) states 249 media personnel have been killed so far by Israel in Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel and Iran since the Gaza war began.
Israel has killed more journalists in the past three years than any other government in history,
assassinating more than all media personnel killed in all the wars of the 20th century combined.
Israel has also now banned many reputable international NGOs from operating there. In late January, the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) finally acknowledged the death toll tally compiled by Palestinian health authorities as accurate, saying it believed 71,000 people had been killed so far — the death toll is now more than 72,000.
I’ve come to the other front, the West Bank, as Israeli settlers and the IDF establish new illegal settlements and make life difficult for Palestinians just trying to eke out a living.
While I’m there, Israel announces 19 new settlements, bringing to 69 the number of new settlements approved in the past few years.
They are slowly circling and strangling Palestinian towns by taking the high ground on hilltops, establishing their own roads to link up with other settlements, and destroying ancient olive groves which locals have long relied on for a meagre income.
Some of these trees are many hundreds of years old, and their desecration seems somehow symbolic of Israel’s attempts to change history and geography.
“We are trapped here”, says Ahmed. “Ever since October 7, Israel has closed off our access to Jerusalem and the rest of Israel. A lot of businesses are struggling to survive after 5 years of shutdowns — first it was covid, and then the Gaza war. No tourists for years.”
Unless they are employed in one of a handful of jobs, such as in hospitals or working for a Christian organisation, Palestinians in the West Bank can’t leave. Denied both Palestinian statehood and Israeli citizenship,
West Bank Palestinians are caught in a limbo where they can’t travel into wider Israel or beyond.
“Israel controls all our movements, all our water, and controls our petrol supply”, says Ahmed. “The only thing they don’t control is the air we breathe, and if they could control that, they would.”
Bulldozer warfare We visit a home recently bulldozed by settlers and fields uprooted because they were considered too close to the expanding nearby Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit. As locals lose access to their olive orchards, the only trees safe are those within towns or around their homes.
I see a young boy with a wheelbarrow full of seedlings and uprooted olive saplings moving towards a nearby field. Ahmed translates:
“The boy says that part of their resistance is to immediately replant the olive trees when settlers chop them down. The olives aren’t just an income for us, they are part of our identity on this land.”
We have to be quick when visiting the contested edges of these towns and fields, as settlers are always watching from nearby hilltops and the IDF can be on the scene in less than 5 minutes. On two occasions, my driver yells to get us back in the car for a hurried exit when he spots settlers driving down to intercept us.
Returning to Bethlehem, the annual Christmas parade is underway. Hundreds of Palestinian, Arab and Armenian Christians in uniforms march along roads leading to Manger Square in the heart of Bethlehem.
Palestinian Authority police guard the route and churches, including the Orthodox Basilica of the Nativity, first begun by Emperor Constantine’s Christian mother Saint Helena in the 4th century. Under this Byzantine church is a grotto where Jesus was supposedly born.
This is the first time in two years that Christmas celebrations, including a huge Christmas tree, have taken place. With few foreign tourists, shops in Bethlehem are happy to see many Muslim families from across the West Bank visiting with children to see Santa and the holy sites. It’s a peaceful time with Christian and Muslim families celebrating together.
I met Father Issa Thaljieh, a Palestinian (Greek Orthodox) priest overseeing the Basilica.
“Issa” is the Muslim name for Jesus. He says the number of Christians continues to dwindle, from 10 percent of the Palestinian population during the British mandate period 100 years ago, to around 1 percent today. Most live overseas now, with Israel incentivising their departure.
Apartheid One thing I hadn’t known until I came here is that Israelis are forbidden from entering any West Bank towns. At the entrance to many towns I visited, including Jericho and Bethlehem, are large road signs in red warning Israeli citizens not to enter.
Although usually framed as a security measure to prevent kidnapping, it has the additional impact of preventing ordinary Israelis and Palestinians from mixing together and stops Israelis from really understanding what is going on across the West Bank. It underlined the sense of apartheid, along with the long winding separation wall that snakes between Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the rest of the West Bank.
Always interested in art and graffiti as forms of resistance, I cruise a length of the wall, near two refugee camps inside Bethlehem and come across artist Banksy’s “Walled Off” hotel, which had only reopened the week before after 5 years of closure.
Upstairs is a gallery supporting local artists, downstairs a museum about the wall and “occupation”, along with a chintzy piano bar styled like a frontier saloon.
The hotel faces a section of the wall emblazoned with graffiti and promises “the worst views in the world”. The wall began construction substantially in 2002, runs for 810 kms and is Israel’s biggest infrastructure project. Banksy’s museum quotes the man put in charge of the build, Danny Tirza:
“The main thing the government told me in giving me the job was,
to include as many Israelis inside the fence and leave as many Palestinians outside as possible.
Down the road, a number of local stores have popped up selling cheap Banksy merch, and apparently, Banksy is fine with all the rip-offs.
Other days are spent visiting Jericho and Hebron with its shrine containing the tomb of Abraham, patriarch of all the monotheistic faiths.
It is a town often at flashpoint between Palestinians and hardcore Israeli settlers who have moved right into pockets of the town, protected by IDF soldiers. A day trip to Ramallah is aborted when my driver says that Israeli forces had entered that morning to destroy dozens of shops and shot two people.
“It’s too dangerous today to visit, and besides, it would take us 5 hours to get through the checkpoints instead of one hour as normal,” he says.
Every day across the West Bank, Palestinians must navigate security challenges, declining business and hungry families. Given the impunity with which Israel operates in Gaza, Palestinians across the West Bank are still standing their ground, but without much hope that the international community will stop Israel’s encroachment.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government wants to extinguish any hope of a two-state solution, but Palestinians will not cede their homes — or their olive trees — easily.
Ben Bohane is Vanuatu-based photojournalist and producer who has reported for global media for more than three decades on religion and war across the world, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region. His website. Republished with permission,
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
On 14 January, Al Jazeera produced an episode of ‘Inside Story’, their daily current affairs feature programme: Why is the US Fed chair criminal probe causing global alarm?The context is the conflict between the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, versus the man who appointed him to that role, President Donald Trump. In the sense of this conflict, Powell is the archetypal technocrat (the spokesperson for his craft guild), and Trump is playing the role of the democrat (the spokesperson for the American people).
(We note that, in New Zealand, something similar but different is happening; effectively a conflict – for a tiny slice of the historical narrative – between former Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr and the current Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis. It may be said that power is held by those who control the money, and by those who control the narrative.)
The format of Inside Story is that of three remotely-located expert or otherwise-interested interviewees, interviewed by a news-anchor studio interviewer. (Former Newshub newsreader Tom McRae serves as one such interviewer.)
For this episode, the interviewer was Adrian Finighan. The interviewees were: an American political commentator, Eric Ham; a London-based commentator representing the finance industry, Justin Urquhart-Stewart; and a celebrity Irish monetary economist, David McWilliams. (McWilliams was speaking in New Zealand last October; claims have been made that he is the “Attenborough” of economics.)
It is to McWilliams that I particularly wish to focus my comments; so, below, I have transcribed his contributions to the panel discussion. (I will confine my comments re McWilliams to his contributions to the Al Jazeera programme, and not to his writings or other presentations.) But first I have transcribed opening words from Finighan, Ham, and Urquhart-Stewart. There are also comments from Jerome Powell, reporter Fintan Monaghan, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. (To maintain focus the transcriptions have been slightly condensed; the original interview is available, see above.)
Finighan, Ham, and Urquhart-Stewart
Finighan: “A criminal investigation into the Chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell … could have implications well beyond the US … a swift and sharp response from central banks around the world, a joint statement expressing solidarity with Powell.”
Powell: “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President … [through] political pressure or intimidation.”
The general tone here is that Powell – the chairman of a committee – is the good guy, and Trump the bad guy. In this sense the discussion falls into the trope that if there’s a bad guy [ie Trump], then the bad guy’s adversary must be a good guy. Note how Powell presents himself as the ‘man of the people’, even though in reality he is anything but.
Of course, it goes without saying that a narrowly focussed criminal law investigation is not an appropriate forum for discussing democracy and monetary policy. And there is no doubt that President Trump is intimidating, and has a tendency for ad hominem flights of fancy. We should note, for clarification, that the criminal charges referred to relate to the expansion of a building, and not to misconduct in the setting of interest rates.
Reporter, Fintan Monaghan: “The two [President and Chairman] have been at odds over the setting of interest rates for most of the past year. Trump wants cuts. That might give the economy a short-term boost by bringing down the cost of borrowing money, but Powell has resisted because it could cause inflation. … Heads of major central banks around the world, including the ECB’s Christine Lagarde, have voiced support for Powell and the independence of the Fed. Central Banks have traditionally operated separately from the central government. That keeps long-term decisions about the health of the economy separate from short-term political [aka democratic] interests.”
Friedrich Merz: “I hope there will remain a broad consensus that central banks must remain independent because independent central banks are a guarantee that a currency can remain stable in the long term.”
We may note these themes are emphasised by those who we might call ‘monetary policy hawks’; and most central bankers are monetary policy hawks in that they emphasise the notion of raising interest rates as the sine qua non [without which not] of anti-inflation purgative emulsions.
To claim that Reserve Banks have traditionally operated separately from the central government, indicates that some commentators have a very short sense of history. Most central banks operated as a long-arm of government for most of their histories (and most are less than 100 years old; the RBNZ has existed since 1934). The American Fed is usually regarded as having been independent since 1951, though it’s always been a political organisation with politically appointed leaders. Most Reserve Banks have a single shareholder; the Government. During Abenomics, Japan’s central bank was fundamentally a part of Shinzo Abe’s macroeconomic program. As was New Zealand’s Reserve Bank in, say, the late 1930s, when it played a crucial role in implementing the economic policies which launched New Zealand into the position of a global exemplar for a modern egalitarian economy.
We note also that central bankers generally favour the cynical word ‘political’ over the much happier word ‘democratic’. And we note that Friedrich Merz may be confused. He appears to be referring to a national or imperial ‘currency’ such as the Euro, whereas monetary policy at its highest calling seeks to protect the internal value of money; not its external value. (The internal value relates to inflation and deflation; external value relates to currencies’ exchange rates.)
Eric Ham [author and political commentator]: “… that very independence which has actually fuelled United States’s monetary growth.”
Justin Urquhart-Stewart [chairman of an investment platform]: “There is one vital word that central bankers have to give out and that is confidence … this is the first time that I’ve seen central bankers getting together almost as a ‘trade-union’ … [in response to] political interference.’
Ham, like most political commentators, is all-at-sea when trying to comment on monetary matters. I presume that he meant to say ‘economic growth’ rather than ‘monetary growth’. Certainly the wizards of money – ie the Lords of Finance [in the 1930s, the Bankers Who Broke the World] – believe, or claim to believe, that central bank independence fuels long-run economic growth.
Yet, I have a sneaky suspicion that Ham meant what he said. In the mercantilist worldview, a worldview upheld by President Trump, ‘monetary growth’ and ‘economic growth’ are tantamount to the same thing. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is also a businessman who believes that making hard-won money represents the economic purpose of human life.
In the golden age of mercantilism, from around 1500 to 1800, money was understood to have been legitimately made by mining, exporting, or stealing. (Queen Elizabeth the First was the monarch best known for having resorted to the latter; she boosted the Royal navy for that purpose.) In this view, only mining represents a legitimate addition to the global money supply. Kings and Queens however sometimes resorted to a fourth method, ‘debasement’; modern monetary bankers are still fighting that battle of yore, with ‘public debt’ representing their principal concept of debased money.
On the ‘other side of the coin’ from monetary philosophers – or is it the ‘other side of the ledger’ – there were accountant bankers. One of their clever tricks was double-entry bookkeeping. Another closely related trick was fractional banking. These (along with a clearing-mechanism developed from medieval Italian banking) became the central technologies of modern banking practice. (Many of the earliest bankers were goldsmiths, who on-lent other people’s gold and silver deposits – albeit by issuing receipts, the forerunners of paper money – without telling the depositors. When in trouble, these fractional moneylenders required a fast horse, and contacts who could smuggle them out of the country! The final piece of the modern-banking puzzle was limited-liability status, facilitating an appropriate amount of risk-taking. These are the initially-disreputable technologies that lubricate capitalism and give it its dynamism. Bankers were not alchemists trying to make money independent of the economies it serves.)
Re Urquhart-Stewart, he emphasised the role of confidence – ie belief – in monetary policy. A word widely used by monetary economists is ‘expectations’. Thus, the role that twentyfirst century monetary authorities have assumed is to manage public expectations, even if they have to resort to some kind of poker trick to do so. An important part of this is to maintain a druid-like sense of authority; to tell a good collegial story – not necessarily an accurate story – in order to give themselves an arcane aura of credibility. Democratically-elected politicians – among others – are required to believe their story.
This may be the first time that Urquhart-Stewart has been aware of central bankers getting together as a union or college or guild; but their recent “joint statement” is by no means their first rodeo. Central bankers of the world – like staunch cowboys – regularly get together at a place called Jackson Hole in Wyoming, USA. (And the lords of finance of the late 1920s – the preeminent central bankers of the United Kingdom, United States, France and Germany – were all in regular contact with each other.) On this note, New Zealand’s own Reserve Bank governor, Anna Breman, was one of Urquhart-Stewart’s unionists; and, for her efforts, she had her fingernails clipped by Nicola Willis. (In the recent state of New Zealand’s political cycle, Willis and Luxon have been more in Trump’s camp than in Powell’s, expressing frustration with an unnecessarily slow process of lowering interest rates. This runs counter to their position in the summer of 2023/24; then the new government’s first act in Parliament was to raise the monetary policy bias in favour of generally higher interest rates.)
In the earlier days of central banking, central bankers were more likely to have been well-connected bankers. Nowadays they are more likely to have been economists, specialising in monetary economics and finance. The division between these two cultures goes back at least as far as to the disputations in the 1840s and 1850s between the economists’ Currency School, and the bankers’ Banking School. While the Banking School may have had the better of the argument, as demonstrated by the ongoing development of monetary practice, the Currency School won the culture war.
Before I go on to reveal economist David McWilliams’ substantial contribution to the Al Jazeera programme, we should note that the setting of interest rates through monetary policy is a fundamentally interventionist overriding of the market determination of a price; it represents an exception to the sanctity of the price-mechanism which is fundamental to economics. Neoliberal anti-interventionists tend to show strong support for interest rate intervention; just not intervention by kings or queens or presidents or ministers of finance; they favour intervention by someone they have confidence in. It is part of a wider belief on the part of economic liberals that it is good for our health that money (unlike sugar) should always be scarce; and that the technocratic authorities, if they must err, should err on the side of money being too scarce.
David McWilliams’ ‘Testimony’
I transcribe McWilliams several contributions to the Inside Story programme:
Contribution One: “I’m speaking to you as a former central bank economist … authoritarian leaders from Nero to Lenin, from Hitler to Henry VIII have always tried to interfere with who prints the money, who gets the money and at what price. … This issue is about who gets to set the growth rate of the American economy. Is it the Federal Reserve or is it the President? … Typically, it is the Federal Reserve that gets to set the growth rate, consistent with a low rate of inflation, is going to be X, and were going to drive our monetary policy and our rate of interest according to that. Politicians are always wanting to put their foot down on the accelerator, more growth, more election success, more people feeling good in the very short term. Central bankers push their foot down on the brakes … because we are worried about the rate of inflation. … The central bankers get [their extraordinary power] because they are concerned about the long-term rate of inflation. Politicians are not concerned about the rate of inflation, and as a consequence they want things to accelerate quicker. … The rate of inflation, which affects poor people more than rich people, will go up. The long-term rate of interest, which affects your mortgage rate, will go up. I think, for the world in general, the idea that the people who actually manage and preserve the integrity of the US dollar are no longer concerned about the integrity of the dollar and much more concerned about short-term politics; that will scare people, not just in the High Street, but also in financial markets.”
Re “printing money”, it’s an intentionally pejorative label for money creation through banking based on double-entry book-keeping. Before ‘printing’, there was ‘minting’, which has been the necessary historical privilege of all kings; not just Nero and Henry VIII. McWilliams conflates printing with minting. When money was principally coins, it was the ‘head’ of the king on the coin that gave the public confidence in that coin; the minted coins represented the liability of the kings to the public. It’s not the place here to comment on the monetary policies of Lenin and Hitler. But, re Henry VIII, I recommend the book Gresham’s Law, by John Guy. Thomas Gresham served as banker to four of the Tudor monarchs, in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Securing additional public debt for Henry VIII – ie, additional to the minted coinage – could be a difficult and hair-raising experience; actually tantamount to smuggling.
McWilliams posits that the technocratic monetary Tzar, Powell, has – and should have – the power to “set the growth rate of the American economy”. This assertion is problematic in that it is neither accurate nor democratic. Attributing the GDP of the United States to one man does a huge disservice to the other 330 million Americans, and grants Powell more concentrated power than Nero ever had. McWilliams doesn’t mention the word ‘productivity’ once, which is unusual for a media economist; it is more common to hear that long-term growth is determined by productivity than by central banks.
McWilliams goes on to say that elected politicians want economic growth rates higher than what monetary economists think they should want, effectively claiming that democracy is inherently inflationary, that inflation is the greatest of all economic sins, and that “politicians are not concerned about inflation”.
The whole discussion reveals overemphasis on a false conflict or dissonance between ‘long-term’ and ‘short-term’. In reality the long-term is no more than a sequence of short terms. We, all of us, all the time, live in the short-term.
His incorrect argument that inflation adversely affects poor people more than rich people is patently false, made most obvious by the facts that higher interest rates clearly favour the receivers of interest, and that past inflation has played a major role in establishing the wealth of today’s rich. We should note that active ‘inflation-fighting’ does not necessarily mean that prices become lower than they would otherwise be; central bank inflation-fighting is a costly process that contributes to the cost-of-living. If we are constantly inflation-fighting in the short-term, and the long-term is a succession of short-terms, then the cost of inflation-fighting becomes a ubiquitous presence in our lives.
Basically, his argument is that if we [ie people like himself] don’t put interest rates up [in the short-term] then interest rates will go up [in the long term]. We need to raise interest rates in order to lower interest rates, he claims. This illogical argument is essentially that inflation necessarily connects low interest today with high interest tomorrow (and vice versa); that interest rates act like an unlubricated seesaw in which one end is labelled ‘short-term’ and the other end is labelled ‘long-term’.
In his last two sentences above, McWilliams claims that a political appointee to replace Powell – compared to a career appointee – would undermine the “integrity of the US dollar”. There is a sense that the US dollar should be the master of the world economy, not its servant. By the way, all appointments by politicians are political; democracy is political.
Contribution Two: “Central backers are charged with – dully obsessed with – the rate of inflation. The rate of inflation is in effect the value of your take-home pay. … The second thing is of course ‘distribution effects’, who pays most. What you find is that, when the rate of inflation goes up, poor people pay more than rich people. Because a higher percentage of a poor person’s income is going to be going on basics … everybody is affected badly, but the poor are affected worse. And then the final point is that for anyone who has a mortgage … inflation means that interest rates will go up. Donald Trump is so keen to reduce interest rates because he is an endemic debtor. There’s always a split in the world between those people who are creditors, who lend money, and debtors, those people who borrow money. As a general rule those people who borrow money want the cost of borrowing to be as low as possible. And if you’ve spent your lifetime defaulting, borrowing, defaulting again, then your DNA will be biassed towards lower not higher interest rates. But who rewards the saver if the rate of interest is artificially low?”
Central bankers, but not McWilliams, make a virtue of themselves being dull technocrats.
The rate of inflation is not the value of your-take home pay. Inflation is an increase in prices, not a level of prices. Inflation, meaning a decrease in what a dollar will buy, strictly affects all prices, including wages; and including luxuries as well as necessities. What McWilliams is arguing is that inflation, though itself not about relative prices, nevertheless has a biased impact on relative prices. Relative prices are in fact caused by market forces; changes in the demand for and supply of different commodities and factors of production. Certainly, changes in interest rates represent a change in relative prices, because the rate of interest (comparable to the wage rate) is the price of a factor of production. If inflation is the only thing that’s going on, a four percent increase in prices will be matched simultaneously by a four percent increase in wages, so the value of your take-home pay is unchanged. All inflation does is reduce what a person’s money-in-the-bank will buy, and make it easier for a person to repay debts. It’s true that markets will respond to inflation by raising the money cost of future debt. Do markets really need help from the monetary druids who claim that interest rates should be raised in an interventionist manner, not only in response to inflation but also ahead of what they claim is expected inflation.
The line from people like McWilliams is that debt is akin to a form of sin, whereas squirrelling money away at four percent annual interest is a virtue. This is religious metaphysics, not science. How many people who have made a lot of money did so simply from squirreling away their wages? Not many. Rich people, except those who simply inherited from daddy, incurred debt to become rich. Rich nations incurred debt – private and public debt – to become rich. Debt has played and continues to play an absolutely fundamental role in economic and civilisational development.
Even in nature the squirrels are not rewarded. They earn no interest on their nuts, and they are subject to a ‘use it or lose it regime’. Nuts which are saved for too long become inedible, or simply go missing. Yes, savers should be rewarded when capital is scarce and people with unspent income need to be induced to take investment risks. In the twentyfirst century, however, the world has been awash with private stashes of idle money; central bankers should not be using public policy to serve the interests of the owners of these stashes.
Contribution Three: “Is the institution stronger than the personalities? I think what we are talking about is a power grab, and we know there’s nobody more powerful in society than the person who controls the money. Money is the glue that gels society together. It is an awesome weapon on the part of governments, which is why I suspect central banks have been independent for so long. We’ve largely seen a revolution of the central banks in the 1970s; by the 1990s with the exception of the UK most were independent. … This is about power and the exercising of power; and I would say that money is a far more powerful tool than ideology, than even warfare, than certainly all sorts of other weapons in the hands of presidents. So, what we are seeing here is a man who doesn’t really understand – or isn’t bound by – the rules of the game, so he’s tearing up the rules as we go along. This is a particularly acute tearing-up. Why? Because he’s actually affecting financial markets, corporate interests, Wall Street’s interests, so there may well be a massive pushback. But to answer your question, if there is a patsy at the helm of the Fed it will undermine the credibility of the United States dollar at a time when the dollar is under credible threat. The United States is no longer the overwhelmingly dominant economy in the world; it is technically number one, but it is being gradually dragged back downwards by China and in the long term by other countries as they grow. So, I think President Trump doesn’t understand the exorbitant privilege that the United States has as [having] the reserve currency of the world. There is nothing more powerful than that you can print money for free as the reserve currency, and people have to give you real stuff to buy that currency that you print for free. How amazing a deal is this? And for the Americans to self-sabotage from the White House seems to be the politics of idiocy.”
Here McWilliams reveals the power agenda of the monetary church. Money should be controlled by the church, themselves; not by the people through their elected or unelected representatives. Henry VIII struggled with the Rome-based Catholic Church in the 1530s. Henry won. What we see today, in McWilliams’ words, is the new church in another power struggle; a struggle – possibly a struggle to the death – that the new faith is probably winning. Who should we trust; the king or the church? The “rules of the game”, by the way, were set by the monetary economists – the currency school – of the nineteenth century. Those rules went quiet in the 1930s, but they started to reassert themselves in the 1970s; in the mid-1980s in New Zealand.
McWilliams does understand the power of double-entry bookkeeping as applied to banks – the power to “print money for free”. And he is correct that Trumponomics – Trumpian mercantilism – is an unwitting policy to self-sabotage the United States’ economy. But to transfer power to a college of druids is not the answer, either. Rather, lay people should all be better educated about money; but not so-educated by these monetary Jesuits. Henry VIII was taught statecraft by Cardinal Wolsey. He overthrew Wolsey – his mentor and his tormentor – but was unable to seek, let alone find, a better counsellor; Henry lost his way. Today we have democracy; a civilisation-project that is still immature, a project whose survival cannot be guaranteed. For all Trump’s faults, he is nevertheless more sensitive to ‘the people’ than are the technocrats who, while really serving the church of sacred money, claim to “serve the public”.
Contribution Four: “I would like your viewers to just remind themselves that the key word here is ‘trust’; what keeps money sacred, almost has an alchemic value, is trust. I trust it, you trust it, we trust each other. Now if you chip away at that trust, which is ephemeral, entirely in our heads, you begin to chip away at the very foundations of the system that we all have in, that system remains stable. So once you put the trust in the currency in the hands of somebody who is untrustworthy you begin to open all sorts of dilemmas about what’s the value of money, who prints it, will it buy what it says it buys, and can I save it. These are massive, massive issues.”
I can say here that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’, that delegating our credulity to a college of wizards and metaphysicians is not our best way forward. What David McWilliams (and the people he speaks for) says here, while more Hogwarts than hogwash, perhaps belongs in the Age of Aquarius; like Christian Hawkesby’s ‘North Star’ (refer Reserve Bank cuts OCR 25 basis points, RNZ Morning Report, 29 May 2025). That, of course does not redeem President Trump.
In an important sense, McWilliams is correct. Money is free; freer than a piece of paper. But it’s always an accounting liability; a liability incurred by whoever’s signature or head is on it. Neither kings nor bankers have an incentive to overcook the money supply. It’s their heads that are on the line. The secrets are to always have enough money in circulation; and that it is better to err on the side of too much than too little. Value can seemingly be created from nothing; that’s always been so. But money, and any other form of promise, is not itself ‘value’; rather money is a set of claims on value. The alchemy perception is that a piece of paper with a signature – or a metallic disc with a king’s head etched on it, or a deposit entry in a bank account – may have intrinsic value, may in itself be wealth. But no, such things are only promises. If promises are to be kept, then sabotage – including self-sabotage – should be avoided.
(As an aside, it has often been believed that a destructive weapon of war was to flood a country’s economy with credible counterfeit money. The Germans allegedly tried it in the United Kingdom in World War Two, but to no avail. The Japanese also tried it in the Philippines; I have actually seen a case of counterfeit money recovered from a Japanese crashed aircraft in Mindanao, Philippines. Fascinating!)
Conclusion
The monetarists’ essential argument is that if the policy objective is to have future lower interest rates you have to have higher interest rates now. That is, the preventative for high interest rates is high interest rates! (By ‘monetarists’, I refer to the monetary bankers and the growing numbers of ‘finance-experts’ of the new Currency School, distinct from the now-scarce practical banker-accountants of the old Banking School.)
Mysticism about money is rife, and ripe, especially within the guardian church. The Church of Money is a part of the New Technocracy that is surreptitiously overwhelming the institutions of democracy.
Re John Maynard Keynes, on the short-term versus the long-term. Keynes said: “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again”; meaning that actual life is always lived in the short-term, and that the distinction between the short-term and the long-term is essentially vacuous.
The monetarists’ view is normative; that in the event of an economic stagnation or decline, those who had already built ‘nest eggs’ (portfolios of financial claims) should have priority access to diminished goods and services; priority over the workers and capitalists who would be producing those goods and services. That is, priority access to a diminished ‘economic pie’ should be given to rich old gentlemen and gentlewomen, with the greatest priority to be given to those with the biggest portfolios regardless of how those nest eggs were obtained. This is not a policy to benefit the poor.
Further, the implementation of neoliberal monetary policies – today’s Currency School or Currency Church, which favours intervention on the side of less money and dear money – substantially increases the likelihood of national and global economic decline, in the short-term and in the long-term. Just as a car with insufficient lubricating oil will not go well. Such a car may complete a short run, albeit inefficiently; but it will not complete a long run.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 15, 2026.
Funny, tender, goofy – Catherine O’Hara lit up the screen every time she showed up Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben McCann, Associate Professor of French Studies, Adelaide University Catherine O’Hara, the beloved actor and comedian who has died aged 71, occupied that rare position in contemporary screen culture: a comic actor, a cult figure and a mainstream star. Her work spanned more than 50 years, from
Australia’s Pacific worker scheme is far from perfect – but we can make it better Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Mares, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme (PALM) is a crucial source of workers across regional Australia. About 32,000 people from nine Pacific nations and Timor-Leste work in Australia under PALM. Over seven months
Indonesian protesters slam Prabowo over ‘peacekeeping’ troops for Gaza Asia Pacific Report Protesters have condemned Indonesia’s plan to take part in the International Stabilisaton Force for Gaza as Israel continues to violate the ceasefire on an almost daily basis. Carrying placards declaring “Break the siege”, “Gaza is not for sale”, “So, when will the Palestinians get to decide their own future” and crosses over
High Court defeat piles pressure on ’embarrassed’ Fiji PM Rabuka’s leadership, says academic By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor A court ruling in favour of Fiji’s dismissed anti-corruption chief has “embarrassed” Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, a New Zealand-based Fiji politics academic says. University of Canterbury distinguished professor Steven Ratuva told RNZ Pacific Waves that while the Fiji High Court decision on Barbara Malimali offered “clarity” on the separation
Dog parks are an unexploited arena for a television dramedy – so now we have ABC’s Dog Park Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phoebe Hart, Associate Professor, Film Screen & Animation, Queensland University of Technology Raise a paw if your dog ever helped you to meet a new two-legged friend? The premise of ABC’s Dog Park capitalises on the fact pet ownership in Australia is increasing, with canines being the
NZ protesters condemn ‘IDF kill chain’ link to Gaza genocide Report by Dr David Robie – Café Pacific. – Asia Pacific Report New Zealand protesters have again spotlighted the country’s stake in US space militarisation today and speakers branded Rocket Lab as an alleged key link in the “IDF kill chain” as part of the Gaza genocide. “Rocket Lab is a celebrated New Zealand success
Francesca Albanese: Why a revolutionary shift on global justice is underway Report by Dr David Robie – Café Pacific. – UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has dismissed recent accusations of anti-Semitism against her as “shameful and defamatory” in an interview on France 24. She has also warned that “the plan to fully destroy Gaza continues” and denounced Israeli measures in the
Stuart Rees: Cowardice over Gaza dressed up as state authority on Sydney’s streets Report by Dr David Robie – Café Pacific. – COMMENTARY: By Stuart Rees The violence surrounding protests against the visit of Israel’s president was not an accident of crowd control. It reflects a deeper political failure – where authority suppresses dissent rather than confronting uncomfortable truths about Gaza, protest rights and democratic responsibility. In official
Protesters have condemned Indonesia’s plan to take part in the International Stabilisaton Force for Gaza as Israel continues to violate the ceasefire on an almost daily basis.
Carrying placards declaring “Break the siege”, “Gaza is not for sale”, “So, when will the Palestinians get to decide their own future” and crosses over the Israeli flag, protesters marched through streets in Jakarta dressed in keffiyeh and Palestinian flags.
President Prabowo Subianto is due to join a meeting of what US President Donald Trump calls the “Board of Peace” in Washington on Thursday, reports Al Jazeera.
Indonesia’s involvement is controversial with Prabowo facing mounting criticism for the deployment plans.
Many critics are saying the plan could “sideline” the Palestinians and are accusing Subianto of “serving Israel’s goals”.
He has sought to reassure Muslim leaders that Indonesia would withdraw if Palestinian interests in self-determination are not advanced.
[embedded content] Indonesia peecekeeping force plan Video: Al Jazeera
Fiji is also facing controversy over reported plans that it may also be deploying troops for the ISF.
However, Fiji’s Defence Minister Pio Tikoduadua has clarified that Fiji has not yet made any commitment to participate, saying six days ago that the country has only received an invitation, reports Pacnews.
In a statement posted on social media, Tikoduadua stressed that no response had been given at this stage.
“Let me be clear: Fiji has only received an invitation to be part of the Gaza international stabilisation force. We have not yet responded,” he said.
Writing for Asia Pacific Report, former Fiji military officer Jim Sanday who commanded Fijian peacekeeping battalions in Lebanon and Sinai, was highly critical of the proposal, saying its United Nations reputation risked being damaged while being “excluded from decision-making”.
In 2025, Sanday led the National Security and Defence Review (NSDR) and co-authored the National Security Strategy that was approved by Cabinet in June 2025.
New Zealand protesters have again spotlighted the country’s stake in US space militarisation today and speakers branded Rocket Lab as an alleged key link in the “IDF kill chain” as part of the Gaza genocide.
“Rocket Lab is a celebrated New Zealand success story, with a stated mission to open access to space and improve life on Earth,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) advocate Brendan Corbett.
“Yet many of its key contracts are with the US military and their suppliers.
“It is driven by share price increases and creating value for shareholders.”
Corbett said the global space militarisation market size was valued at US$61 billion (about NZ$100 billion) in 2025 and was projected to grow from US$66 billion this year to US$116 billion by 2034.
North America dominated space militarisation last year with a market share of more than 40 percent.
“Break the Rocket Lab kill chain,” says the protester banner on Queens Wharf in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau today. Image: Asia Pacific Report
‘World war threat’ “The overwhelming majority of our human family are totally appalled at this march to militarisation of space and the threat of world war,” Corbett told the crowd in Te Komititanga Square as they marked the 123rd week of protest over the Gaza genocide.
“But not the war mongering investor class. They make more money.
“Guess what people? Increasing geopolitical rivalry and security threats propels market growth.”
A so-called “ceasefire” came into effect in Gaza on October 10, but since then Israeli violations almost daily have killed 591 Palestinians and wounded 1578 – and children dying at a rate of about two a day — with the besieged enclave facing a severe humanitarian crisis.
Overall, the death toll in the Gaza Strip has topped 72,049 with 171,691 wounded – mostly women and children — since the start of the war, according to Palestinian health authorities.
PSNA activist Brendan Corbett . . . “Military tech companies no longer pretend they are ethical and humane.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
The government has raised the total number of launches allowed for Rocket Lab at its Mahia launch pad tenfold to 1000, as the cap set at 100 in 2017 is close to being breached.
However, a physics professor at Auckland University, Dr Richard Easther, told RNZ News this week that he did not trust the New Zealand Space Agency to make good decisions while the agency said it had assessed all space activities against clear legislative criteria.
Geopolitical tension Corbett stressed the increasing geopolitical tension, rivalries and escalating security threats across the globe.
This situation was expected to encourage countries to strengthen space-based defence capabilities.
Military forces of various nations required satellites and space systems to maintain secure communications, surveillance, and navigation under hostile conditions.
A “Rocket Lab = death for money” banner at today’s protest in Te Komititanga Square. Image: Asia Pacific Report
“This is the Rocket Lab, Black Sky, Palantir, IDF kill chain,” said Corbett, referring to the Israeli Defence Forces, although critics prefer to characterise IDF as the IOF – “Israeli Offence Forces” in view of Tel Aviv having attacked five countries in the region last year.
“This demand drives procurement of hardened, redundant, and cyber-secure space infrastructure — ”these are the factors contributing to space militarisation market growth”.
Corbett quoted Palantir chief executive officer Alex Karp telling investors in a call last month: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the best in the world, and when it’s necessary to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”
“Military tech companies no longer pretend they are ethical and humane,” Corbett said.
Space technologies He explained how space militarisation included deployment and use of space technologies for military applications such as reconnaissance, communications, navigation and so on.
It involved satellites, ground systems and related technologies for defence.
“This is the market niche that fuels Rocket Lab’s business plan,” he said.
Some countries used space and counter-space capabilities and integrated them into regular military exercises.
With space militarisation, countries integrated space assets such as satellites, ground stations, and launch systems into defence operations.
“These factors are driving the overall market growth,” Corbett said. “These are the activities that are driving us to war.”
“Sanctions now” placard pictured outside a McDonalds store – the US-based corporation sponsors Israel’s IDF military. Image: Asia Pacific Report
RIMPAC 2026 exercises He cited some of the major companies involved, including Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Technologies — both investors in Rocket Lab — Northrop Gumman Corporation, Airbus Defence and Space, and others.
Other speakers included Kia Ora Gaza activist Patrick O’Dea – who reminded the crowd of nuclear-free protest success in blocking visits by US warships in the 1980s – PSNA’s Neil Scott, and Maire Leadbeater of West Papua Action Tāmaki.
O’Dea challenged the crowd top campaign against New Zealand taking part in the RIMPAC 2026 military exercises in Hawai’i during June to August and “collaborating with the IDF”.
Protesters marched with banners declaring “Break the Rocket Lab kill chain” and “Rocket Lab – death for money” to Queens Wharf where a visiting Norwegian cruise ship Viking Orion (1000 passengers) was moored.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has dismissed recent accusations of anti-Semitism against her as “shameful and defamatory” in an interview on France 24. She has also warned that “the plan to fully destroy Gaza continues” and denounced Israeli measures in the West Bank, where “soldiers and settlers are spreading terror”. This is a flashback to her influential mid-2025 speech to the Hague Group in Bogotá declaring a global “revolutionary shift is underway”.
ADDRESS:By Francesca Albanese
I express my appreciation to the governments of Colombia and South Africa for convening this group, and to all members of the Hague Group, its founding members for their principled stance, and the others who are joining. May you keep going and so the strength and effectiveness of your concrete actions.
Thank you also to the Secretariat for its tireless work, and last but not least, the Palestinian experts — individuals and organisations who travelled to Bogotá from occupied Palestine, historical Palestine/Israel and other places of the diaspora/exile, to accompany this process, after providing HG with outstanding, evidence-based briefings.
And of course all of you who are here today.
It is important to be here today, in a moment that may prove historical indeed. There is hope that these two days will move all present to work together to take concrete measures to end the genocide in Gaza and, hopefully, end the erasure of what remains of Palestine — because this is the testing ground for a system where freedom, rights, and justice are made real for all.
This hope, that people like me hold tight, is a discipline. A discipline we all should have.
The occupied Palestinian territory today is a hellscape. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the last UN function — humanitarian aid — in order to deliberately starve, displace time and again, or kill a population they have marked for elimination.
In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing advances through unlawful siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, widespread torture.
Across all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world. The very few Israeli people who stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid — while the majority openly cheers and calls for more — remind us that Israeli liberation, too, is inseparable from Palestinian freedom.
The atrocities of the past 21 months are not a sudden aberration; they are the culmination of decades of policies to displace and replace the Palestinian people.
Against this backdrop, it is inconceivable that political forums, from Brussels to NY, are still debating recognition of the State of Palestine — not because it’s unimportant, but because for 35 years states have stalled, refused recognition, pretending to “invest in the PA” while abandoning the Palestinian people to Israel’s relentless, rapacious territorial ambitions and unspeakable crimes.
[embedded content] Francesca Albanese condemns “witch hunt” over doctored video about Israel Video: Al Jazeera
Meanwhile, political discourse has reduced Palestine to a humanitarian crisis to manage in perpetuity rather than a political issue demanding principled and firm resolution: end permanent occupation, apartheid and today genocide. And it is not the law that has failed or faltered — it is political will that has abdicated.
But today, we are also witnessing a rupture. Palestine’s immense suffering has cracked open the possibility of transformation. Even if this is not fully reflected into political agendas (yet), a revolutionary shift is underway — one that, if sustained, will be remembered as a moment when history changed course.
And this is why I came to this meeting with a sense of being at a historical turning point — discursively and politically.
First, the narrative is shifting: away from Israel’s endlessly invoked “right to self-defence” and toward the long-denied Palestinian right to self-determination — systematically invisibilised, suppressed and delegitimised for decades.
The weaponisation of antisemitism applied to Palestinian words, and narratives, and the dehumanising use of the terrorism framework for Palestinian action (from armed resistance to the work of NGOs pursuing justice in international arena), has led to a global political paralysis that has been intentional.
It must be redressed. The time is now.
Second, and consequentially, we are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the Global Majority it pains me that I have yet to see this include European countries. As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolise to many: a sodality of states preaching international law yet guided more by colonial mindset than principle, acting as vassals to the US empire, even as it drags us from war to war, misery to misery and when it comes to Palestine — from silence to complicity.
But the presence of European countries at this meeting shows that a different path is possible. To them I say: the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition, but a new moral center in world politics. Please, stand with them.
Millions are watching — hoping — for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity, and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us.
Principled states must rise to this moment. It does not need to have a political allegiance, colour, political party flags or ideologies: it needs to be upheld by basic human values. Those which Israel has been mercilessly crushing for 21 months now.
Meanwhile I applaud the calling of this emergency conference in Bogotá to address the unrelenting devastation in Gaza. So it is on this, that focus must be directed.
The measures adopted in January by the Hague Group were symbolically powerful. It was the signal of the discursive and political shift needed. But they are the absolute bare minimum. I implore you to expand your commitment. And to turn that commitment into concrete actions, legislatively, judicially in each of your jurisdictions.
And to consider first and foremost, what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught. For Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, this question is existential. But it really is applicable to the humanity of all of us.
In this context my responsibility here is to recommend to you, uncompromisingly and dispassionately, the cure for the root cause. We are long past dealing with symptoms, the comfort zone of too many these days. And my words will show that what the Hague Group has committed to do and is considering expanding upon, is a small commitment towards what’s just and due based on your obligations under international law.
Obligations, not sympathy, not charity.
Each state immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel. Their military, strategic, political, diplomatic, economic, relations — both imports and exports — and to make sure that their private sector, insurers, banks, pension funds, universities and other goods, and services providers in the supply chains do the same. Treating the occupation as business as usual translates into supporting or providing aid or assistance to the unlawful presence of Israel in the OPT.
These ties must be terminated as a matter of urgency. I will have the opportunity to elaborate on the technicalities and implications in our further sessions but lets be clear, I mean cutting ties with Israel as a whole. Cutting ties only with the “components” of it in the OPT is not an option.
This is in line with the duty of all states stemming from the July 2024 Advisory Opinion which confirmed the illegality of Israel’s prolonged occupation, which it declared tantamount to racial segregation and apartheid . The General Assembly adopted that opinion.
These findings are more than sufficient for action. Further, it is the state of Israel who is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, so it is the state that must be responsible for its wrongdoings.
As I argued in my last report to the Human Rights Council (HRC), the Israeli economy is structured to sustain the occupation, and has now turned genocidal. It is impossible to disentangle Israel’s state policies and economy from its longstanding policies and economy of occupation. It has been inseparable for decades.
The longer states and others stay engaged, the more this illegality at its heart is legitimised. This is the complicity. Now that economy has turned genocidal. There is no good Israel, bad Israel.
I ask you to consider this moment as if we were sitting here in the 1990s, discussing the case of apartheid South Africa. Would you have proposed selective sanctions on SA for its conduct in individual Bantustans? Or would you have recognised the state’s criminal system as a whole?
And here, what Israel is doing is worse. This comparison — is a legal and factual assessment supported by international legal proceedings many in this room are part of.
This is what concrete measures mean. Negotiating with Israel on how to manage what remains of Gaza and West Bank, in Brussels or elsewhere, is an utter dishonor international law.
And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter — not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, made these remarks at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia, on 16 July 2025.
