“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”
— Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Before we get into it, a rhizome is a plant stem.

Not the kind that grows upward in a nice neat line toward the sun. No — this one grows sideways, underground, in every direction at once, connecting with everything, starting again if you cut it, producing new shoots wherever it pleases. Think ginger. Think bamboo. Think kikuyu grass - you never get rid it no matter how many times you try.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari — two French philosophers with a lot to say about capitalism and very little interest in being easy to read — used the rhizome in their 1980 masterwork A Thousand Plateaus as a metaphor for how knowledge, power and even people actually work. Not like a tree — not hierarchical, not with a single trunk and authorised branches growing from the top down. But like that underground root network: no fixed centre, no single entry point, no one place where “the truth” lives.

Here’s the thing: most of our institutions — schools, governments, corporations, universities — are trees. One trunk, with multiple branches. One set of authorised roots. One boss at the top who decides what counts as knowledge and who gets to have it. The teacher pours knowledge into the student like water into an empty cup. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called this the banking model of education — the idea that learners are empty vaults waiting to be filled by an expert. It’s not education. It’s compliance training, just as all systems which rely on captivity and indoctrination require - there are walls, boundaries, and limits.

The rhizome says: nah, well, NAH!!!

Enter te-pa

te-pa.org — Te Pā Tūwatawata is an ecosystem, free to enter (exit) and targets Māori data sovereignty and AI as the next frontier. It’s multilingual, beautifully designed (even if I do say) and pulls no punches. The core argument? That AI has become the latest machine for what Māori call raupatu — confiscation. Not of land this time, but of language, of faces, of waiata, of stories — all fed into machine learning models without consent, without benefit, without so much as a please.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Te Pā Tūwatawata isn’t just a course about a problem. It’s structured as the solution. The entire site — it’s six thinkers, free modules, teaching toolkit, sticker campaigns, its manifesto sections, its rhizome framework PDF — is built on explicitly rhizomatic logic. No single entry point. No prerequisites. No hierarchy.

You can start at Module 3. You can start at the sticker page. You can start by reading the kōwhaiwhai symbolism and end up three hours later down a rabbit hole about Māori data governance law. The community is the curriculum. The ecosystem is the course.

The Ecosystem — What We’re Actually Talking About

Te Pā Tūwatawata doesn’t stand alone. It’s one node in a larger network — part of The Kiwi Dialectic publishing ecosystem, which includes:

• A Substack publication for long-form political education.

• Twitter/X threads and meme campaigns using the hashtags #KiwiDialectic #TinoRangatiratanga #MāoriDataSovereignty

• Downloadable teaching PDFs under Creative Commons, free to print, copy, and share

• A rhizome theory framework — He Pakiaka Kei Raro (The Web) — drawing on Deleuze, Freire, Graeber, and Kropotkin.

• Print-ready street stickers with QR codes linking back to the course

• A campaign to establish Te Pā Tūwatawata as a registered charitable trust, with kaitiaki seats reserved for each language, community, all hosted on one site.

Every piece links to every other piece. Every sticker on a lamp post is an entry point. All indigenous languages, everywhere. Every tweet is a line of flight back to the source material. This is the rhizome in action — not as a metaphor, but as a strategy and a pedagogical architecture at the same time.

Why This Matters: The Tree vs The Rhizome

Let’s get concrete.

Deleuze and Guattari described arbolic thinking or tree thinking, as the default mode of Western knowledge systems. There’s a root (foundational truth), a trunk (authorised institution), and branches (approved versions of that truth). Binary. Hierarchical. You either have the qualification or you don’t. You’re either in the system or you’re not.

If you look around - The Beatles were all unemployed, and on the dole when they created the music of a century. Imagine how many people there are sitting outside the system. How much talent is wasted? And why?

Rhizomatic thinking cuts across all of that. In education terms, it means:

• Any point connects to any other point — you don’t have to start at the “beginning”.

• Knowledge is negotiated, not deposited — learners are co-creators, not passive recipients.

• There is no canonical path — learning can move in any direction, at any speed, responding to what’s actually happening in the world.

• Lines of flight are encouraged — when conventional thinking runs out of road, you find another route.

Canadian educator Dave Cormier, who brought rhizomatic learning into the digital age, described it simply: “the community is the curriculum”. You don’t need a textbook if you have a live, engaged community generating, questioning, and sharing knowledge in real time. That’s exactly what Te Pā Tūwatawata is trying to build.

Now Here’s the Plot Twist: Whakapapa Was Already There

Here’s something the European philosophers didn’t fully reckon with: Māori already had a rhizomatic knowledge system. It’s called whakapapa.

Whakapapa is usually translated as “genealogy” — but that undersells it. It’s not just a family tree. It’s a web connecting humans, non-humans, the spiritual world, ecological systems, and the cosmos. You can enter the network at any node. The past is mua — in front of you, visible, guiding you forward. You walk backwards into the future with your eyes fixed on what came before.

As a knowledge system, whakapapa has been described as a mind map, a folk taxonomy, and a cognitive gestalt — a way of organising complex arrays of information where everything is held in relationship to everything else. Researchers from the MAI Journal describe how whakapapa can function as a research methodology: not linear, not extractive, but relational — tracing the threads that connect people, places, ideas, and responsibilities across time.

This is why the framing on te-pa.org is so sharp. When it says “Whakapapa is not a family tree — it is a web,” it’s not borrowing Deleuze. It’s pointing out that Deleuze was, in some sense, catching up to indigenous ways of thinking that predate him by centuries. The rhizome wasn’t invented in Paris in 1980. It was already growing in Aotearoa - and we’re just learning that now.

Comparing the Rhizome Family: You’re in Good Company

Te Pā Tūwatawata sits within a much wider tradition of rhizomatic and connected pedagogies. Here’s how they relate:

Deleuze & Guattari, Dave Cormier

No centre, no hierarchy, community as curriculum.

Explicit structural framework of the whole site.

Critical Pedagogy

Paulo Freire Banking model vs problem-posing; learner as co-creator. Teacher’s Handbook built on Freirean generative word method.

Kaupapa Māori Graham Smith, Linda Tuhiwai Smith.

Māori-led, tikanga-grounded, transformative praxis. Foundation of governance, content framing, and assessment.

Whakapapa as Network

Te ao Māori epistemology. Relational web across time, space, human and non-human. Built into site structure — enter at any node.

Indigenous Pedagogies (global)Battiste, Blackstock, LearningBird

Relational, experiential, community-embedded, place-based. Mirrored in module activities, wānanga model, kaitiaki trust.

Connectivist MOOCs George Siemens, Stephen Downes

Learning as network formation; knowledge distributed across connectionsEchoed in multi-platform distribution strategy.

Mutual Aid / Horizontal Organising Kropotkin, Graeber

Non-hierarchical cooperation; collective self-organisation.

Te Pā Tūwatawata doesn’t cherry-pick. It weaves with whakapapa, like unaunahi the interlocking fish scales whose motif runs through the entire site’s design language.

Each tradition reinforces the others. Freire’s problem-posing meets Kaupapa Māori transformation meets Deleuzian rhizome meets Kropotkin’s mutual aid — and somehow it all holds together because the tikanga is doing the structural work underneath.

What Makes a “Line of Flight”?

One of the most useful ideas from Deleuze and Guattari’s toolkit — and one the Te Pā rhizome PDF develops directly — is the concept of lines of flight (lignes de fuite).

A line of flight is not escape. It’s not running away and hiding. It’s a movement that creates new terrain. When something escapes the control of the dominant system, it doesn’t just disappear — it deterritorialises, makes space, opens possibilities that didn’t exist before. And it’s creative and innovative - moving in all directions at once.

Look at the examples from Aotearoa’s own history:

• Kōhanga reo was a line of flight — te reo Māori had been nearly destroyed by the colonial school system, and rather than fighting that system from the inside, communities built their own. The language found a new root.

• Te Hiku Media building their own voice AI — using community-owned recordings, their own servers, their own consent protocols — rather than handing Māori speech data to Silicon Valley. That’s a line of flight in real time.

• Te Pā Tūwatawata itself is a line of flight. Rather than petitioning universities to teach data sovereignty, or waiting for the government to regulate AI extraction, someone just built the course and made it free. Why not?

This is the practical political value of rhizomatic thinking. You don’t capture the tree. You spread underneath it.

The Working-Class Case for Rhizomatic Learning

Let’s be straight about who the banking model of education serves. It’s not you. It’s not your whānau. It’s not the worker on the factory floor or the nurse on the night shift, nope, the single parent trying to understand why their kid’s school is underfunded, no, or the person who left school at 16 because school never made them feel like their knowledge was worth anything. The runaway. The creative thinker.

The banking model needs you passive. Needs you to believe that knowledge lives in their books, their institutions that charge fees you can’t afford, dispensed by experts who speak in languages designed to keep you out. The debt model expressed by Graeber and Freire.

It’s not a conspiracy — it’s how hierarchical systems reproduce themselves. Get bigger, fatter, more rapacious until eventually, they explode - and brain matter splatters with the blast of a shotgun. Like Gaza. Like the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis and numerous other crisis. It’s endemic - the cancer spreads and implodes.

Freire wrote that education is never neutral — it either reinforces the dominant order or it challenges it. Kaupapa Māori, indigenous pedagogies — they all land on the same side of that line. They say: you already have knowledge. Your experience is data. Your community is curriculum. Start where you are.

Te Pā Tūwatawata does this with elegance. As one might expect!

Module 1 doesn’t start with a lecture on the history of data governance. It starts with an activity: draw a whakapapa of your own data.

AI Use Disclosure:

Research assistance and initial drafting support for this article was provided using AI tools. All claims, sources, framing and editorial judgements were verified and finalised by the author.

Author Disclosure:

The author publishes The Kiwi Dialectic, a socialist political education platform based in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article discusses te-pa.org

(Te Pā Tūwatawata) a project within the same publishing ecosystem. This relationship is disclosed in the interest of transparency. No financial compensation was received for coverage of any platform, tool, or organisation mentioned herein.

Published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — The Kiwi Dialectic / kiwidialectic.com

It begins with deep research at www.te-pa.org with a mapper that links all indigenous movements around the world and records activity. I am thinking of adding the course rhizome from thinker.mapper to widen the scope of the mapping.

So, once indigenous culture is connected, and their individual languages we can spread the message about worker education in the period of AI, and data sovereignty.

Who owns the data?

Of course the easiest place to start is in Aotearoa.

So, some website links are translated - for example in AI Literacy for Families is presented in Maori, Samoan, English, Portuguese and Guarani - it’s meant to be shared as a repo so other languages can be added. I’m trying to get the website out there, so if you can help by linking it to your community - please do so and start the discussion.

Serve the poorest, as Freire encouraged - empower the worker, let the people decide on the outcomes. Let them decide what, when, where and how they learn and let them design the curriculum.

All of the courses are now html.

I started putting them here on Substack, but it was agony. Too slow, arduous and not suited to the task. So, everything is now in Github in html which makes it easier to link everything, into an ecosystem. Which is the goal. Then the ecosystem can grow independently of me. People can grow their own eco-system and map it to the rhizome mapper.

I also wrote a campaign website in Te Reo and English - designed to be downloaded and adapted by any iwi - look at the rhizome page and links. It comes with street campaigns, stickers, and funding like givealittle - not connected yet.

See how Te Pati Maori is connected. What are it’s policies? Connections. The beginnings of a rhizome which can ultimately be connected to the wider indigenous communities around the globe. It’s also designed to be a campaign website for Te Pati Maori and data sovereignty. Let me know what you think here.

Other plans include - a Te-Pa Collective Action Lab. I’ve mapped it out here:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1" />
  <title>Te Pā Collective Action Lab (CAL)</title>
  <style>
    body{font-family:Arial,sans-serif;max-width:960px;margin:0 auto;padding:32px;line-height:1.6;color:#222;background:#f7f4ed}
    h1,h2,h3{line-height:1.2}
    .card{background:#fff;border:1px solid #ddd;border-radius:12px;padding:20px;margin:16px 0}
    .grid{display:grid;grid-template-columns:repeat(auto-fit,minmax(240px,1fr));gap:16px}
    code{background:#eee;padding:2px 6px;border-radius:6px}
    ul{padding-left:20px}
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Te Pā Collective Action Lab (CAL)</h1>
  <p>A draft concept page for a free, open-source GitHub Pages project that treats art-based activist pedagogy as collective action infrastructure.</p>

  <div class="card">
    <h2>Purpose</h2>
    <p>CAL is a shared production house for Indigenous and working-class political education. It publishes reusable lesson plans, media kits, action prompts, and printable campaign materials built around Māori, Sāmoan, and Guaraní language and community contexts.</p>
  </div>

  <div class="card">
    <h2>Homepage sections</h2>
    <div class="grid">
      <div><h3>1. Intro</h3><p>Explain CAL as a public studio for collective action.</p></div>
      <div><h3>2. Pathways</h3><p>Māori, Sāmoan, Guaraní starter pathways.</p></div>
      <div><h3>3. Media forms</h3><p>Video, stickers, dialogue cards, performance, photography.</p></div>
      <div><h3>4. Action packs</h3><p>Workshop-ready packs for organisers, whānau, schools, unions.</p></div>
      <div><h3>5. Kōrero</h3><p>Community discussion and adaptation notes.</p></div>
      <div><h3>6. Repo links</h3><p>Files, licensing, contribution guide, printable assets.</p></div>
    </div>
  </div>

  <div class="card">
    <h2>Suggested repo structure</h2>
<pre><code>cal/
├── te-pa-collective-action-lab.html
├── assets/
├── modules/
│   ├── maori/
│   ├── samoan/
│   └── guarani/
├── lesson-plans/
│   ├── video/
│   ├── stickers/
│   ├── dialogues/
│   ├── performance/
│   └── photography/
├── print/
├── social/
├── docs/
│   ├── SOURCES.md
│   ├── CONTRIBUTING.md
│   └── LICENSE.md
└── data/
    └── modules.json</code></pre>
  </div>

  <div class="card">
    <h2>Nine starter lesson cards</h2>
    <ul>
      <li>Māori video: Who controls Māori data?</li>
      <li>Māori stickers: Digital rangatiratanga slogan sheet.</li>
      <li>Māori photography: Taonga, whenua, and infrastructure photo essay.</li>
      <li>Sāmoan dialogue: Talanoa on language, family, and platform power.</li>
      <li>Sāmoan performance: Short call-and-response script for community use.</li>
      <li>Sāmoan video: Community media statements in Gagana Sāmoa.</li>
      <li>Guaraní dialogue: Language survival in the digital commons.</li>
      <li>Guaraní stickers: Open-source language rights poster set.</li>
      <li>Guaraní photography: Everyday bilingual life and resistance.</li>
    </ul>
  </div>

  <div class="card">
    <h2>Build notes</h2>
    <ul>
      <li>Use GitHub Pages for free hosting.</li>
      <li>Keep content reusable under an open licence.</li>
      <li>Link CAL back into te-pa.org and the Kiwi Dialectic hub.</li>
      <li>Reuse your existing Kōrero/Giscus discussion pattern.</li>
    </ul>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

If you haven’t explored the image library or social media kits - please do so. And follow the ‘motif’ collection. It’s really quite fascinating.

Appreciate your support. Start sharing - it’s all there. And ultimately, we may be able to upset the apple-cart if we hook up with different communities. Like, unions, pride, indigenous, Gen Z - is it Gen Z?

Nga mihi,

Rob

The repo is in Github. It puts two figures up against each other, creates a drawing and a post on your own ‘dialogue’ page.

You can see the people I have added so far. Mostly socialists, and starting to add capitalists and fascists. What do you think?

It links to the six thinkers website.

They cut the food off the kids’ plates so a FTSE 100 caterer could ship the profit to London. That’s the whole fucking story. Everything else is decoration.

Let me tell you what happened, because the mainstream press keeps burying the lede under David Seymour’s smug little press-conference smirk.

In 2019 the previous government stood up a programme called Ka Ora, Ka Ako — Healthy School Lunches. By 2023 it was feeding around 242,000 kids in over 1,000 schools — a quarter of the country’s students — for roughly $323 million a year, using more than 150 local suppliers: iwi and hapū providers, community trusts, small caterers, marae kitchens, local sparkies and cooks paid local wages that got spent in local shops.

An independent Value-for-Investment evaluation out of Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland found the programme was doing exactly what it was designed to do — alleviating hunger, improving nutrition, supporting local jobs, reducing barriers to learning. ([University of Auckland](https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2025/10/24/free-school-lunch-evaluation-raises-concerns-about-funding.html), [BMC Public Health study](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12539167/))

Then the coalition rocked up and lit the whole fucking thing on fire.

The heist, in plain English

David Seymour — the same bloke who once suggested fining parents for truancy — decided $8.90 a lunch for a growing teenager was unaffordable extravagance. Not $2.9 billion in landlord tax breaks. Not the tobacco excise reversal. **Kids’ lunches.** ([The Daily Blog](https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2024/11/01/3-buck-chuck-vs-2000-jobs/))

In October 2024 he handed the contract for Years 7 and up to a consortium called the School Lunch Collective — fronted by British multinational Compass Group, with Libelle and Gilmours attached. Reported value: $85 million a year, two-year deal. Price per meal: dropped from up to $8.69 to $3. Internal-model schools (the ones cooking their own food) got cut from $8+ to $4 a meal — and that $4 has to cover the wages of the person making it. ([Office of the Auditor-General](https://oag.parliament.nz/media/2025/school-lunches), [1News](https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/10/27/school-lunches-overhaul-will-be-heavily-felt-by-community-caterer/))

Seventy-five local suppliers lost their contracts on 24 December 2024. Around 2,000 jobs on the line. Trust House alone laid off 47 people. Iwi/hapū providers watched years of work vaporise. ([The Daily Blog](https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2024/11/01/3-buck-chuck-vs-2000-jobs/))

Merry fucking Christmas.

Officials — the government’s own officials — wrote a memo dated 23 September 2024 begging the Ministry to **exclude Compass and Libelle from consideration** because of “serious concerns” over billing breaches, food-safety failings, and a track record of losing 60% of their existing school contracts between 2021 and 2024. Seymour signed the deal anyway. ([Reddit summary of the memo](https://www.reddit.com/r/nzpolitics/comments/1lu47vz/serious_concerns_officials_urged_school_lunch/), [Q+A interview](

Who the fuck is Compass Group?

This is the bit the government doesn’t want plastered on the six o’clock news.

Compass Group PLC is a FTSE 100 company listed on the London Stock Exchange. Global revenue in 2025: $46.1 billion US dollars. Underlying operating profit: over $3.3 billion. The world’s largest catering multinational. Clients include Microsoft, Shell, Harvard Business School and — now — a couple of hundred thousand hungry New Zealand schoolkids. ([Compass Group FY25 annual reporte](https://www.compass-group.com/en/investors/annual-report-2025.html), [Compass Group corporate site](https://www.compass-group.com/en/who-we-are.html))

In New Zealand, Compass pulled in about $296.5 million in revenue in its last reported year — a big chunk of it from public contracts (schools, hospitals, defence). In 2024 the local subsidiary paid a $53.3 million dividend to its UK parent and shipped another $6 million in royalties offshore. ([CICTAR / NZ Herald analysis](https://cictar.org/news/nzh/compass), [BusinessDesk analysis](https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/business-of-health/compass-how-a-global-catering-giant-gobbles-up-hospital-contracts))

Fifty-three million dollars. Straight out of the country. In the same year they were being handed the contract to feed our poorest kids for three bucks a plate.

Tell me again who the “welfare bludgers” are.

The dog’s breakfast in action

From day one of Term 1, 2025 it was a disaster. Not “teething issues” — a full-blown, documented, kids-in-hospital disaster.

- A Year 9 student in **Gisborne ended up in hospital with second-degree burns** after a Compass lunch reheated in packaging **not designed for commercial reheating** exploded on him. ([1News](https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/03/17/lunch-that-burnt-student-in-packaging-not-designed-for-commercial-reheating/))

- Kids ate melted plastic off their meals. Others found pieces of glass. Term 1 alone: 63 food safety complaints, incidents and queries — nearly double the same term the year before. ([Otago Daily Times](https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/glass-pieces-melted-plastic-school-lunch-investigations-continue-rnz))

- Ham found in meals labelled ”halal friendly.” Beef mince served in “vegan” meals. Allergy meals given to the wrong students — MPI complaint laid. ([The Spinoff](https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/28-02-2025/drums-beat-louder-for-new-school-lunches-to-be-scrapped))

- Mouldy mince served to primary-aged kids in December 2025. Lunches left unrefrigerated for three days.

- On 11 March 2025, Libelle Group — the outfit contracted by Compass to make 125,000 meals a day — went into liquidation. Incidentally, I applied for work there and the pay was minimum wage to run a province of tuck shops.

Deloitte in as liquidators. Seymour, straight-faced: *”the liquidation process will not materially impact the provision of meals.”* ([1News](https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/03/12/stanford-seymour-discuss-whole-range-of-school-lunch-issues-in-meeting/))

Meanwhile the Minister was on Q+A crowing about ”99.96% delivered on time.” Mate, if I serve you shit on a plate at 12:01 sharp is that a win? ([Q+A / Seymour interview](

What the teachers and principals actually said

Not the ACT talking points. The people in the fucking room with the kids.

The NZ Principals’ Federation wrote to Seymour in February 2025 demanding the entire system be scrapped and lunches returned to local providers, citing widespread food wastage, disruption to learning, and a “global company” failing to meet expectations. ([The Spinoff](https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/28-02-2025/drums-beat-louder-for-new-school-lunches-to-be-scrapped))

The PPTA (Post Primary Teachers’ Association) — who had publicly *applauded* the previous programme in 2024 — filed a **Waitangi Tribunal claim (Wai 3310)** in May 2025 that specifically calls out Ka Ora, Ka Ako. Their claim reports independent analysis finding the new lunches provide **roughly half the energy expected**, are **30–40% smaller than the previous meals**, and that **not one** of the 13 analysable meals met all nutrition standards for all age groups. They call it “a breach of the Crown’s duty to actively protect tauira Māori”.

Aorere College principal Leanne Webb described the meals as “awful” and “disgusting.” ([The Spinoff](https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/28-02-2025/drums-beat-louder-for-new-school-lunches-to-be-scrapped))

Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Aniwaniwa is voluntarily running **tens of thousands of dollars into deficit** to keep feeding their tamariki actual food, because $4 doesn’t cut it. Principal Te Irirangi Tawhara said the coalition dropped their funding **from $8.59 to $4 per meal.** They’re eating the loss themselves rather than serve their kids the crap. ([Māori TV report]

The Health Coalition Aotearoa noted there are no nutritionists employed by the school lunches programme any more. They got made redundant in the wider public service cuts. Of course they fucking did.

What it means for the kid at the desk

Twenty-one percent of NZ kids live in food-insecure households. Thirty-five percent for Māori. Forty percent for Pacific. Food-insecure kids are already 2–4 school years behind in international assessments compared to their food-secure peers, adjusting for socio-economic status. ([Value for Investment analysis, PHCC](https://www.phcc.org.nz/sites/default/files/2024-03/Value%20for%20Investment%20Ka%20Ora%20Ka%20Ako%2019-03-2024%20final.pdf))

For a lot of these kids the school lunch **was the meal**. Not a supplement. The meal.

Now they get half the calories, plastic in the packaging, mystery pasta and if their whānau is unlucky, food poisoning. The Child Poverty Action Group costed the reversal — restoring the previous programme would cost between $107–115 million a year, exactly the amount the coalition ripped out. ([CPAG budget submission](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60189fe639b6d67b861cf5c4/t/67df4952f49fd46ed8adb3df/1742686547100/CPAG+calls+on+Ministers+to+reverse+lunch+cuts+with+Budget+bid.pdf))

Budget 2025 committed zero dollars to the programme beyond 2026. It’s on a cliff edge, exactly as the Greens warned. ([Green Party](https://www.greens.org.nz/budget_2025_leaves_future_of_school_lunches_uncertain))

The root of the whole fucking thing

Here’s where I stop being polite.

This is not incompetence. This is not “teething issues.” This is not a Minister who “got sold a dog.” This is the textbook capitalist manoeuvre: socialise the costs, privatise the profits, ship the surplus offshore.

- The state takes on the cost of feeding children — a cost the market has always refused to price properly, because hungry kids don’t have purchasing power.

- The state builds up the demand, the infrastructure, the distribution — 240,000 guaranteed customers, five days a week, paid for in advance by the taxpayer.

- Then the state hands the contract to a foreign multinational who lobbies its way in past its own officials’ warnings.

- The multinational strips the local supply chain — 75 Kiwi businesses, 2,000 jobs, iwi/hapū providers, all gone by Christmas.

- The multinational cuts the input costs — cheaper food, worse nutrition, mass-produced slop reheated in the wrong packaging.

- The multinational skims the margin and ships the profit — $53 million in one year — to a FTSE 100 head office in London, whose biggest shareholders are American asset managers like Vanguard and BlackRock.

- The kids eat the difference. Literally.

That’s not a bug. That’s the model.

The empire needs feeding, and it doesn’t give a fuck if a nine-year-old in South Auckland has to eat mouldy mince to fund the next share buyback in the City of London. The kids’ hunger is the raw material. Compass is the extraction machine. The dividend is the export.

What to do about it?

Get loud. Get organised. Get local.

1. Back the PPTA Waitangi claim— it’s the sharpest legal challenge on the board right now.

2. Pressure your MP and your board of trustees to formally support returning to the local-supplier model, iwi/hapū included.

3. Support your local school’s internal kitchen — donate, volunteer, buy their raffle tickets. The schools running deficits to feed their kids properly are on the front line.

4. Name Compass Group every single time. Not “the provider.” Not “the caterer.” Compass Group PLC, London Stock Exchange, $53 million dividend offshore in 2024. Say it in every meeting. Say it on every timeline. Make the name radioactive.

5. Vote like your kids’ lunch depends on it. Because it does.

They took food out of children’s mouths to pay a dividend to a London parent company. That is the sentence. That is the fight.

Kia kaha. Feed the kids.

The AI Warrior

---

*Sources embedded throughout. Corrections and additions welcome in the comments — send me your school’s story.*

The mapper is up: thinkers-mapper. A rhizome of every course in The Kiwi Dialectic catalogue. Free to read. No login. No algorithm in the way.

Tap a node, the drawer opens, the lessons are there. Every link goes straight to the Substack post. Every course has a Chat thread button so the conversation keeps going after the lesson ends.

How it's wired

The mapper is not a static picture. It reads the live courses.json from the kiwidialecticcalendar repo every time it loads. That file is the single source of truth — the same file that builds the public calendar and the .ics feed you can subscribe to in Apple Calendar, Google, or Outlook.

The pipeline runs in one direction:

- A course goes into courses.json — title, slug, lessons, access type, real Substack URLs.

- The calendar repo rebuilds the .ics feed and the public calendar page.

- The thinkers-mapper pulls the same JSON on load and draws each course as a node with its lessons and chat thread.

- The Substack post itself is where the lesson actually lives. **Substack is the school gate. GitHub is the timetable on the wall.

Add one course, the whole network updates. That is the point of a rhizome — no centre, no hierarchy, just connections that grow.

What's on the map right now

- AI Warrior — The Kiwi Dialectic is live. Just translated this site into te reo - it looks amazing. Six modules, six thinkers, one praxis. Train the mind. Arm the class. Once the course is finished, a user has to comment etc and gets a badge.

- Gramsci for Aotearoa — hegemony, organic intellectuals, counter-power from below. Live.

- Kropotkin & Mutual Aid — solidarity as a material force, not a feeling. Live.

- Graeber: Debt, Bullshit Jobs & Direct Democracy — the violence of what passes for normal work. Live.

- He Ako mō ngā Umanga Mahi Ngātahi — how to start a cooperative in Aotearoa. Live.

- Pedagogy of the Algorithm — Freire mō Aotearoa — upcoming.

- Gilles Deleuze for Educators, Artists, and Organisers — upcoming.

- Tangi o te Tāheke — Bakunin mō Aotearoa** — upcoming.

- AI Literacy for Families — a six-week household course. This is live - with a course set to start soon. Share - alike, it’s translated into 5 languages I think. Add more if u can. Repo available.

- Te Pā Tūwatawata — AI, tikanga, and data sovereignty. This site is to set up as a charitable trust but need to find the right people to work with. Otherwise, I thought I would turn it into a Cooperative - based on deep research.

Filter by LIVE, UPCOMING, or ALL with the buttons at the top. Subscribe to the .ics calendar feed with one click and the lessons land in your calendar app.

For the AI Warriors

This is your map. Post a lesson — the post you wrote, the thread you ran, the Chat reply that became its own essay — and once it lands in courses.json, it lands on the mapper. Your work becomes a node. Your node connects to the thinker it descends from. The lineage is visible. The class can see the whole library at a glance.

Open it. Walk the rhizome. Pick a thinker. Start the course.

**→ robertmccallnz.github.io/thinkers-mappe*The Kiwi Dialecticr**

Kia kaha,

Robert

*The Kiwi Dialectic*

A waterfall does not ask permission.

The water was held. It held because the shape of the land demanded it. Then the land changed, or the water found a crack, or the pressure of what was dammed up finally exceeded what the dam could hold — and it fell. Not as a protest. Not as a strategy. As the only honest response to accumulated pressure.

Tangi o te Tāheke. The cry of the waterfall. The sound of things falling that were held too long.

This is how we are running Course 6 of the AI Warrior thinkers series — the course that closes everything. Not because Bakunin has the final word (he doesn't; no one does), but because he is the one who refuses to let the other five thinkers settle into safe conclusions.

Gramsci says: build counter-hegemonic institutions from within.

Bakunin says: the institutions will eat you.

Kropotkin says: mutual aid is the deep logic of evolution.

Bakunin says: at what scale does it federate, and who controls the structure that federates it?

Graeber says: debt is the original political relation.

Bakunin says: and the state is what issues the debt and calls in the enforcers.

Freire says: dialogue and critical consciousness will liberate the oppressed.

Bakunin says: and when you have your consciousness, what then?

Deleuze says: draw the rhizome of control and find the exits.

Bakunin says: walk it. Now.

We are here because the waterfall is overdue.

Who was Bakunin?

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was born 30 May 1814 on his family's estate in Tver province, Russia, into minor nobility, and died 1 July 1876 in Berne, Switzerland, broke and exhausted and still arguing (Wikipedia: Mikhail Bakunin).

In between: Berlin Hegelian circles, the Dresden barricades (alongside Richard Wagner, before Wagner became respectable), six years in tsarist cells with scurvy eating his teeth, exile in Siberia from which he escaped the long way — Japan, San Francisco, the United States, London. He was expelled from the First International by Marx in 1872, and Marx spent the following year writing private margin-notes answering Bakunin's arguments he could not answer in public. He is the person the left has spent 150 years alternately dismissing and returning to.

The mature theoretical statement is Statism and Anarchy (1873), his last completed major work. The most-read work in English is God and the State (1882, posthumous) — the argument that God and the State are structurally identical, both demanding submission, both sustained by institutions that legitimate inequality.

anarchist-collectivism. Not bomb-throwing, not chaos, not the nihilism the word "anarchism" has been deliberately confused with. Here is what it actually means:

The means of production held collectively by the workers who use them.

Local communes federate voluntarily into regional bodies — always from below, never by delegation of authority downwards from above.

The state is not reformed. It is dissolved.

In his own words:

"I mean that liberty of each which is not limited or restrained or curtailed by the liberty of another, but is strengthened and enlarged through it: the unlimited liberty of each through the liberty of all, liberty through solidarity, liberty in equality." (Marxists.org)

"Freedom can be created only by freedom — that is, by a universal revolt of the people and free organisation of the toiling masses from the bottom up." — Statism and Anarchy, 1873 (Anarchist Library)

why this course, why now

We are in Aotearoa in 2026. The Crown is in active retreat from Te Tiriti obligations. The AI Strategy is titled Investing with Confidence — confidence for investors, not for the communities whose data is being extracted. Social media platforms hold our organising histories, our community relationships, our political communications, on terms set by corporations answerable to no one we elected. The state mediates all of this and calls it normal.

Bakunin's question is: why do we keep accepting these terms? Not as a psychological question — as a structural one. What is the form of organisation that reproduces our submission, and what would we have to build to get free of it?

The algorithmic platform is the new state-form Bakunin was diagnosing before it existed. It claims authority from above. It manages populations from the centre. It is not accountable to those it manages. It extracts value from workers' social lives and calls it a service. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019), calls this "a new form of power... that has migrated outside of democratic reach." Bakunin would recognise it immediately. He would not be surprised.

This course does not offer a neat Aotearoa application. Bakunin does not translate cleanly. What it offers is harder: the practice of holding his question — where does power actually live, and what do we have to refuse to keep it living there? — against the specific conditions of this place, this time, these relationships.

On resonances and limits: a note before we begin

This course draws resonances between Bakunin's federalist, anti-authoritarian socialism and Māori political philosophy as expressed in He Whakaputanga, Te Tiriti, and the ongoing struggle for tino rangatiratanga. These are resonances, not equivalences.

Bakunin's federalism is a European revolutionary socialist theory, universal in its ambitions and rooted in the Enlightenment. Māori rangatiratanga is rooted in whakapapa, tikanga, and specific historical relationships between peoples and land. When Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou) writes about the myth of sovereignty — arguing that the Western concept of absolute authority held and transferred is itself incoherent, and that Māori political ontology is built on something different — he is not making Bakunin's argument. He is making a deeper one, from a different foundation.

Margaret Mutu (Ngāti Kahu, Professor of Māori Studies) is clear that tino rangatiratanga is not a variant of socialist theory — it is a specific, legally and historically grounded claim that Māori authority was not surrendered under Te Tiriti, and that the Crown has systematically misrepresented what was signed.

We will read Jackson and Mutu directly. We will not paraphrase them as support for Bakunin. We will sit with both traditions and notice where they think in parallel, and where they do not — and treat the differences as important rather than inconvenient.

This is not a Pākehā socialist project that invites Māori to participate on its terms. The pātaka must be built in partnership.

The tāheke motif

The waterfall tāheke is the course's central image. Use it as a Pākehā writer's metaphor — a feature of Aotearoa landscape that makes Bakunin's European-abstract concept of creative destruction visible and local.

Water held is energy waiting. The dam does not destroy the water; it arrests it, extracts from it, makes it serve a purpose not its own. When the dam breaks or the water finds the crack, it falls — and what was held becomes movement. The awa (river) below is fed. The sound of the waterfall is both lament and announcement. It is the cry of something becoming.

Bakunin's famous sentence, from "The Reaction in Germany" (1842, published under the pseudonym Jules Elysard):

"Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!" (Marxists.org)

This is not nihilism. It is a Hegelian-inflected argument that what must be overcome contains within it the seed of what supersedes it. The destruction he calls for is the destruction of institutions — the state, the church, inherited property — not of people. What the waterfall tears down, it feeds.

The six lessons

Lesson 1 — Ko wai a Bakunin? The man Marx feared. We read the life: the estate, the barricades, the tsarist cells, the Siberian exile, the oceans, the First International, the Hague expulsion, the Conspectus Marx wrote in private. We introduce the central tension: state power as a transitional instrument, or the state as the thing that must be dissolved? The disagreement is alive today. Bring it to your own organising.

Lesson 2 — Mana motuhake: federation from below. Bakunin's federalist principle — authority originates in the commune, is delegated upward conditionally, never downward — held alongside He Whakaputanga 1835 and Te Tiriti 1840. We read Moana Jackson on the myth of sovereignty and Margaret Mutu on tino rangatiratanga directly. We mark the resonances between federated self-governance as a political principle and tino rangatiratanga as a specific historical and legal claim. We do not collapse them.

Lesson 3 — Te Tāheke: the passion for destruction is a creative passion. The 1842 essay, the full sentence in its context, the distinction between Bakunin and the nihilism he is usually confused with. What does "destruction" mean in an organising context in 2026 Aotearoa — not violence but unmaking? What are the institutions that need to be unmade before something better can be built? We write 200 words on this in the chat thread, and we read them together.

Lesson 4 — Caracoles in the kāinga: a Zapatista reading. On 1 January 1994, the day NAFTA came into force, the EZLN declared: Ya Basta! — Enough. The Zapatista autonomous governance structure — the caracoles, the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the principle of mandar obedeciendo (to govern by obeying) — is the most sustained working example of Bakunin's federation-from-below in the modern world. We read the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (2005) and the 2023 reorganisation communiqués. We ask what these structures look like alongside the marae, the papakāinga, the rūnanga — and we are careful not to import one indigenous tradition into another.

Lesson 5 — The algorithmic Leviathan: anarchism in the age of AI. Bakunin's structural critique of the state — any institution that manages populations without being accountable to them reproduces domination — applied directly to the platform corporation. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (Yale UP, 1998) on legibility and the destruction of local knowledge. Zuboff's surveillance capitalism. Te Mana Raraunga's Charter and Karaitiana Taiuru's work on Māori data sovereignty as a living form of the federalist principle — data governance originating in communities, not in the Crown or the platform. The NZ AI Strategy 2025 read against all of the above.

Lesson 6 — Arm the class: closing the thinkers series. Six thinkers, one through-line: domination is reproduced, and can be undone. We synthesise: where do these six — Gramsci, Kropotkin, Graeber, Freire, Deleuze, Bakunin — contradict each other, need each other, and produce, together, a toolkit for organising in Aotearoa in 2026? The final action prompt is not theoretical: join, build, refuse, federate. Before the next Sunday.

The course context

This is the sixth and final course in the AI Warrior thinkers series. The series has covered:

Course 1 — Gramsci: hegemony and counter-hegemony

Course 2 — Kropotkin: mutual aid as evolutionary fact

Course 3 — Graeber: debt, bullshit jobs, direct democracy

Course 4 — Freire: the banking model of education, conscientização

Course 5 — Deleuze: control societies and the rhizome

Course 6 — Bakunin: federation from below, creative destruction, the refusal of the state-capital machine

Each course works as a standalone read. Each is better for having read the others.

the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and why it matters

This course is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. That is not legal boilerplate.

The ShareAlike clause is an anti-enclosure mechanism written into copyright law. You can take this material, translate it, adapt it, run it at your union branch, your kura, your marae, your library, your kitchen table. You cannot take it private. Derivatives must stay in the commons under the same license. The knowledge stays common.

This is, in small but real form, Bakunin's principle applied to the means of teaching: "the means of production held in common by the workers who use them" — applied to the means of education. If AI Warrior trains the organiser, AI Literacy for Families trains the household — and both refuse to call the chatbot a friend.

That's the refrain. Both courses are yours. They were always yours.

Lesson 1 drops Sunday 5 July 2026, 19:00 NZST. Subscribe to The Kiwi Dialectic and claim your Pou Tohu badge in the chat thread when you complete the course. Join the thread below and bring one answer to this question: In your organising or your community life right now, is power moving from below to above, or from above to below? One paragraph. We start from there.

Sources: Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873); Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1882, posthumous); Mikhail Bakunin, "The Reaction in Germany" (1842); Mikhail Bakunin, Selected Writings, Maximoff ed. (1953); EZLN, Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (2005); Moana Jackson, "The Myth of Sovereignty" (University of Auckland, 2022); Moana Jackson, "The United Nations on the Foreshore" (2006); Margaret Mutu, "Call it what you want, co-governance isn't going away" (E-Tangata); Te Mana Raraunga, Charter (2016); Karaitiana Taiuru, AI Ethics and Indigenous Data Sovereignty (ACE Aotearoa keynote, 2025); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale UP, 1998).

Welcome to the third course in The Kiwi Dialect’s free socialist education series. This course is about David Graeber — one of the most original and unsettling thinkers of the last thirty years. His work is not comfortable. It names things that most people feel but are not supposed to say. That is precisely why it matters.

Who was Graeber?

David Rolfe Graeber was born in New York in 1961, the son of a plasterer and a garment worker who had both been involved in left politics. He became an anthropologist, spending years doing fieldwork in Madagascar studying village politics and resistance to state power. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago and taught at Yale before being denied tenure in circumstances his supporters attributed to his political activism. He moved to Goldsmiths in London and then to the London School of Economics. He died in Venice in September 2020, aged 59.

In between he wrote some of the most widely read political theory of the early 21st century, helped organise the Occupy Wall Street movement, and spent decades in anarchist politics and direct action organising.

What anthropology does

To understand why Graeber thinks the way he does, you need to understand what anthropology does — particularly the kind of anthropology Graeber practised.

Anthropologists spend time living in communities very different from their own, learning their languages and participating in their daily life. What this does, over time, is make the familiar strange. When you have seen societies organised without money, without states, without permanent hierarchies, without wage labour — you come back to your own society and you stop being able to take it for granted.

The things that are supposed to be natural and inevitable — the fact that some people own and others work for them, that debt must always be repaid, that there must be a government with a monopoly on violence, that most people spend most of their lives doing things they would not do if they had a choice — start to look like particular historical arrangements rather than facts of life.

This is Graeber’s most fundamental contribution: the application of anthropological defamiliarisation to capitalism. He kept asking: is this how it has to be? And the evidence from human history kept answering: no.

Graeber and anarchism

Like Kropotkin, Graeber was an anarchist. But his anarchism was less about programmatic demands and more about what he called the anarchist imagination: a disposition toward building non-hierarchical structures, practising direct democracy, and prefiguring the world you want to live in through the way you organise.

He was deeply suspicious of vanguard politics and the idea that a small group of enlightened people should lead the masses to liberation. He argued that the most interesting and transformative political experiments of recent decades — the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Kurdish liberation movement in Rojava, the global justice movement, Occupy Wall Street — had all been organised around anarchist principles of horizontal decision-making and direct democracy, not Leninist ones of centralised direction.

The three big ideas

Graeber’s work circles around three related problems, each of which gets a lesson of its own:

Debt: Graeber showed that debt is not a neutral financial instrument but a historically constructed tool of domination. The moral weight we attach to debt repayment — the idea that a debt must always be repaid, that owing money is a form of moral failure — is not natural. It is an ideology that serves those who lend.

Bullshit jobs: Graeber observed that capitalism, which claims to be the most efficient system for allocating labour, has produced an economy in which a large and growing proportion of work is experienced by those who do it as pointless. This is not an accident. It serves particular interests.

Bureaucratic violence: Graeber argued that the bureaucratic structures of the modern state and corporation are not neutral administration. They are forms of violence — slow, grinding, humiliating — that fall disproportionately on the poor and marginalised.

Why Graeber matters for socialist politics in Aotearoa

New Zealand is a small, highly administered society with a large state apparatus, a significant financial sector, and an economy in which a growing proportion of jobs are in management, compliance, administration, and financial services rather than in producing things of tangible value.

Graeber’s questions cut through the ideological fog of this economy. He asks: what is actually valuable? Who actually creates it? Why are the people who create the most value — nurses, teachers, cleaners, care workers, tradespeople — paid the least, while those who create the least — financial traders, corporate consultants, compliance managers — are paid the most? And what would it mean to organise an economy around actual human need rather than around the extraction of value for those at the top?

Questions for you

Have you ever had a job that felt pointless — where you spent most of your time on tasks that seemed to have no real purpose? What did that feel like?

Can you think of a way in which your own society is organised that would look bizarre or unjust to someone from outside it? Something that only makes sense if you are already inside it?

Reply or comment. The course gets richer the more people bring their experience into it.

Next up: Lesson 2 – Debt: the first 5,000 years and why you should never feel morally obligated to a bank.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we met Graeber and the defamiliarising power of anthropology. This lesson we go into his most ambitious and historically sweeping argument: his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

The standard story of debt

We are told a particular story about the origins of money and debt. It goes like this: in the beginning, people bartered — they traded goods directly. But barter was inefficient, so they invented money as a medium of exchange. Credit and debt came later, as financial instruments built on top of money.

Graeber spent years in libraries and archives looking for evidence of this barter economy. He found none. Not a single anthropologist or historian has ever found a society that operated primarily through barter between strangers. The barter story is a myth — a just-so story invented by economists who needed a simple origin narrative for markets.

What actually happened

What the historical and anthropological evidence actually shows is this: debt came first. Long before coins or notes existed, communities operated through systems of mutual obligation, credit, and debt. The earliest written records we have — clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, around 3,500 BCE — are not trade records. They are debt records: lists of who owes what to whom.

Physical money — coins — came much later, and Graeber traces its invention to a specific historical moment: the age of warrior states that needed to pay armies. Rulers minted coins, paid soldiers, and then demanded taxes back in those same coins. This forced the population to enter the money economy in order to pay their taxes. Markets, in this account, were not a natural outgrowth of human exchange. They were created by states to service military expenditure.

Debt as a moral weapon

Graeber’s most politically powerful argument is about the moral weight of debt. In English and many other languages, the word for debt is closely related to the word for guilt or sin. In German, Schuld means both debt and guilt. The idea that a debtor is morally compromised — that owing money is a form of wrongdoing that must be made right — is extremely old and extremely powerful.

Graeber asks: why? When someone lends you money, they do so because they expect a profit. The interest they charge is their compensation for the risk. If they get their money back plus interest, they have been fully compensated. There is no moral wrong. The debt relationship is a financial transaction, not a moral one.

But the moral framing is enormously useful to creditors. It means debtors feel shame rather than anger. It means the politics of debt are framed around individual responsibility — you should not have borrowed what you could not repay — rather than around the structural conditions that force people to borrow: low wages, high housing costs, inadequate welfare, predatory lending.

Debt in Aotearoa

New Zealand has some of the highest household debt levels in the world, driven overwhelmingly by housing costs. Mortgage debt is the defining financial experience of a large proportion of the working and middle class. Student loan debt has loaded a generation of graduates with obligations that shape their career and life choices for decades. Consumer debt fills the gaps left by inadequate wages and welfare.

The moral framing of debt in New Zealand public life is intense. People who cannot make mortgage payments are talked about in terms of poor choices and financial irresponsibility. Students who struggle with loan repayments are told they should have thought harder before studying. Beneficiaries who fall into debt with WINZ — through overpayments, recoverable grants, or the punitive advance payment system — are chased for repayment even when they have no income.

Graeber’s intervention is to denaturalise all of this: to show that debt is not a law of physics but a social relationship, that its moral charge is historically constructed, and that the question of who owes what to whom is always a political question, not a financial one.

Sovereign and colonial debt

Graeber also has crucial things to say about sovereign debt — the debt of nations. He traces how international debt has been used as a tool of imperial control: indebted nations are forced to implement structural adjustment programmes, privatise public assets, cut welfare, and open their economies to foreign capital in order to service debts that were often incurred under conditions of duress or corruption.

For Aotearoa, this connects to the history of colonial land purchase, where Maori were often pressured into selling land to repay debts incurred through the colonial credit system — a direct mechanism of dispossession through financial obligation.

Questions for you

Have you ever felt guilt or shame about debt? Where do you think that feeling came from? Does it feel different now that you know the moral framing of debt is historically constructed rather than natural?

Who do you think is owed a debt in Aotearoa, and who owes it? Think beyond individual financial relationships to historical and structural ones.

Reply or comment. These are not abstract questions.

Next up: Lesson 3 – Bullshit jobs: why so much work under capitalism is meaningless by design.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we saw how debt is not a natural law but a political and moral construction. This lesson we turn to work itself — and Graeber’s argument that under capitalism, enormous amounts of human labour are not just exploited, but completely pointless.

The book is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), and it is one of the most widely shared and debated works of radical social criticism of the past decade.

What is a bullshit job?

Graeber’s definition is precise: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence — and yet feels obliged to pretend otherwise.

Note what this definition is not. It is not a description of bad jobs, hard jobs, or low-status jobs. Graeber is clear that many jobs that are socially essential — rubbish collectors, care workers, nurses, teachers — are underpaid and undervalued. His argument is about a different category entirely: jobs that produce nothing of social value, and whose practitioners know it.

Graeber identified several types of bullshit jobs:

Flunkies — people whose role exists to make someone else look or feel important

Goons — people employed aggressively on behalf of employers in ways that harm others (certain lobbyists, PR consultants, corporate lawyers)

Duct tapers — people whose job is to fix problems that should not exist

Box tickers — people whose role exists to allow organisations to claim they are doing something they are not really doing

Taskmasters — people whose role is to assign work to others who do not need it

Why does this happen?

This is Graeber’s most provocative claim: we tolerate and even produce bullshit jobs not because capitalism is efficient, but because capitalism requires that people work. Work has become a moral value in itself, entirely separate from whether it produces anything useful.

In this sense, Graeber turns the standard economic story on its head. Economics teaches us that markets are efficient allocators of resources. If a job exists, the logic goes, it must be producing value — otherwise why would someone pay for it?

Graeber’s answer: because powerful people benefit from others being kept busy and feeling dependent. Because full employment is politically necessary. Because we have built an entire moral framework — a theology of labour — that says idle hands are dangerous and a job, any job, is better than no job.

The spiritual damage of pointless work

Perhaps the most important part of Graeber’s argument is psychological. He collected testimonies from people in bullshit jobs and found a consistent pattern: people doing pointless work suffer. Not just boredom. Deep, corrosive misery — the particular torment of being paid to pretend that what you are doing matters when you know it does not.

Graeber calls this a form of spiritual violence. Work is one of the primary ways humans find meaning, purpose, and connection. When that work is hollow, something essential is damaged.

Meanwhile, the people whose work is genuinely meaningful — who teach children, care for the elderly, grow food, maintain infrastructure — are systematically underpaid. The less bullshit a job contains, Graeber argues, the less it tends to pay. The more bullshit, the more it pays.

Bullshit jobs in Aotearoa

New Zealand is not immune. Our public and private sectors have grown extensive layers of compliance, communications, strategy, and coordination roles — many of them recognised by the people doing them as not producing much that is real.

There is a particular irony in the expansion of managerial and administrative roles in the public sector during decades of austerity. Frontline teachers, nurses, and social workers were cut. Middle management layers grew. The people doing the actual work — teaching, healing, supporting — were stretched. The people monitoring, reporting, and administering multiplied.

This is not simply waste. Graeber argues it is structural. It reflects who has power, and who gets to define what counts as productive.

The political stakes

If Graeber is right, then the standard debate about work — how to create more jobs, how to grow the economy, how to reduce unemployment — misses the point entirely. The question should not be how to create more work. It should be: what kind of work, for what purpose, decided by whom?

This connects to movements for a Universal Basic Income, a four-day week, and for genuinely democratic workplaces. If work as such is not inherently good, then we are free to ask what would actually make lives worth living — and to organise politically to get there.

Questions for you

Honestly: have you ever done a bullshit job? What did it feel like?

Why do you think we treat employment as a moral value, even when the work produces nothing useful?

What work do you think is genuinely valuable and genuinely undervalued in Aotearoa right now?

Reply or comment. These are not abstract questions.

Next up: Lesson 4 – The Utopia of Rules: why bureaucracy didn’t end with the welfare state, and why the left needs to take it seriously.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

This lesson we come to the last and in some ways the most ambitious book Graeber wrote — The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow and published in 2021, just over a year after Graeber’s death.

It is a big book in every sense. It covers tens of thousands of years of human history. It draws on decades of new archaeological and anthropological evidence. And its argument is simple but radical: almost everything we think we know about the deep past — about where inequality came from, about whether hierarchy is natural, about the range of social arrangements humans are capable of — is wrong.

The stories we tell ourselves about the past

Graeber and Wengrow begin with a puzzle. Why do we believe that social inequality is inevitable? The most common answer, across both the political left and right, goes something like this: for most of human history, people lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came agriculture. Agriculture created surplus. Surplus created property. Property created hierarchy. And hierarchy — kings, classes, states, capitalism — followed naturally and inevitably.

This story appears in Rousseau. It appears in mainstream social science. It appears in popular books about human nature. It is so widely shared that it feels less like an argument than a fact.

Graeber and Wengrow argue it is a myth — and a politically dangerous one, because it makes hierarchy seem like the inevitable product of complexity, and therefore beyond challenge.

What the evidence actually shows

The archaeological evidence accumulated over the past few decades paints a completely different picture. What it shows is that early human societies were astonishingly diverse. Some were egalitarian. Some had hierarchy of a kind, but only seasonally — chiefs and ceremonies in winter, dispersed and relatively flat organisation in summer. Some built large cities with no evidence of palaces, kings, or concentrated wealth. Some had slavery. Some clearly did not.

The key point is this: early humans were not locked into a single social form determined by their technology or their mode of subsistence. They experimented. They chose. They debated. They built radically different kinds of society, sometimes across distances of a few hundred kilometres.

Graeber and Wengrow give particular attention to what they call the indigenous critique — the documented encounters between European colonists and indigenous North American thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These encounters produced serious, sustained critiques of European society by indigenous intellectuals. Figures like the Wendat leader Kandiaronk argued, with documented sophistication, that European society was characterised by a kind of poverty of freedom: people were materially dependent in ways that made them servile, unable to simply leave arrangements they found unjust.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that the European Enlightenment — including its concepts of freedom, equality, and democracy — was significantly shaped by these encounters. The ideas did not flow only westward.

The political stakes

The argument of The Dawn of Everything is not nostalgic. Graeber and Wengrow are not saying we should return to some prior state. They are saying something more important: the range of social possibilities available to humans is vastly wider than we currently imagine.

If hierarchy, states, and concentrated wealth are not inevitable consequences of agriculture and complexity, then they are choices — or rather, the results of specific historical processes that imposed them, often through violence. Which means they can be undone. Which means other arrangements are possible.

This is what the book calls the dawn of everything: not a single origin point from which all subsequent history necessarily followed, but an ongoing, unfinished human project of experimenting with how to live together.

What this means for Aotearoa

For readers in Aotearoa, this framework has particular resonance. Te ao Māori — the Māori world — contains within it a rich tradition of thinking about collective organisation, about the relationship between people and land, about the obligations that bind communities together. These are not museum pieces. They are living frameworks that have survived colonisation and are being actively renewed.

The Dawn of Everything offers an intellectual context for taking these traditions seriously not just as cultural heritage, but as genuine political knowledge. As evidence that the forms of organisation that colonialism sought to destroy were real and functional — and that their principles have not disappeared.

It also invites us to ask: what would Aotearoa look like if it drew more fully on the political wisdom of the people who have lived here longest?

Questions for you

Does it change how you think about the present if you believe that hierarchy and inequality are the results of specific historical choices rather than inevitable consequences of complexity?

What aspects of Māori political and social organisation do you think offer the most important resources for thinking about a different kind of future?

What does it mean to say that another world is possible, when you are living inside this one?

Reply or comment.

Next up: Lesson 6 – Synthesis: what Graeber’s whole body of work means for how we think and act in Aotearoa today.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

This is the final lesson of the course. We have covered five books across five weeks, moving from the nature of anthropology to debt, work, bureaucracy, and the deep past. Today I want to try to draw these threads together — and to ask what Graeber’s work, taken as a whole, means for people living and thinking in Aotearoa.

The thread that runs through everything

Graeber was not simply a critic. He was not just pointing at things that were broken. He was doing something more demanding: trying to show that the stories we tell about why things are the way they are — about human nature, about history, about what is possible — are not neutral. They are political. They serve particular interests. And they can be changed.

Each book in this course has turned over one of those stories:

Debt showed that the moral weight of financial obligation is not a natural law but a historically constructed tool that serves creditors against debtors.

Bullshit Jobs showed that the moral value we attach to work itself is not a natural law but an ideology — one that keeps people occupied, dependent, and unable to imagine alternatives.

The Utopia of Rules showed that bureaucracy is not primarily a product of the welfare state but of markets and private power — and that the left needs a different relationship with it.

The Dawn of Everything showed that human social arrangements are not determined by technology or ecology but are the results of conscious choices, experiments, and struggles — and that the range of possible arrangements is far wider than we are usually told.

Taken together, these books constitute a sustained argument for what Graeber called the radical imagination: the capacity to think seriously about social arrangements other than the ones we currently have.

Why this matters in Aotearoa

Aotearoa is a particular place, with a particular history. It is a settler-colonial society in which the foundational dispossession of Māori has never been adequately addressed. It is a society with one of the highest rates of household debt in the world. It is a society whose public services have been extensively restructured along market lines since the 1980s. It is a society with high rates of both overwork (among the privileged) and underemployment (among the precarious).

It is also a society with rich resources for imagining otherwise. The tikanga and mātauranga Māori — the values, knowledge systems, and customary practices of tangata whenua — encode ways of organising collective life that prioritise relationships, obligations, and the long term over individual accumulation and short-term profit. Tino rangatiratanga — Māori self-determination — is not just a political demand but an alternative social vision.

Graeber’s work does not speak directly to any of this. But it provides a set of intellectual tools that make it easier to take these alternatives seriously: to see them not as romantic nostalgia but as evidence of the genuine range of human social possibility.

What does it mean to act?

Graeber spent his life not just writing but doing. He was a central figure in the anti-globalisation movement, in Occupy Wall Street, and in movements for debt cancellation and worker cooperatives. For him, the point of radical thinking was always radical action.

But action does not mean everyone must be in the streets. It means something simpler: being willing to act as if another world were possible, even in the circumstances of this one. It means refusing the learned helplessness that the current order encourages. It means finding, or building, spaces where different rules apply — where care matters more than efficiency, where the long term matters more than the quarterly result, where collective wellbeing matters more than individual accumulation.

It means asking, in every situation: who does this arrangement serve? And what would it look like if it served someone else?

A final thought

Graeber died in September 2020, at the age of 59, of sudden illness in Venice. He left behind an extraordinary body of work, a generation of students and collaborators, and a set of questions that feel more urgent with each passing year.

The questions he kept asking — what are we doing, why are we doing it, who benefits, what else is possible — are not academic questions. They are the questions of anyone who has ever looked at the world and thought: this is not right, and there must be another way.

Thank you for taking this course. I hope it has been useful. I hope it has given you at least one idea that you didn’t have before, and at least one question you didn’t know you needed to ask.

Questions for you

Of the five books we covered, which spoke most directly to your own experience? Why?

What is one idea from this course that you plan to carry with you — into your work, your community, your thinking?

What would you do differently, in your own sphere of life, if you genuinely believed another world was possible?

Reply or comment. The conversation does not have to end here.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

He Ako mo ngā Umanga Mahi Ngātahi — a free 6-module course on how to start a cooperative in Aotearoa.

I built this on github pages so it’s easy to transfer, link to etc

Covers the legal structures, the Mondragón model, Māori collective economics, and the solidarity economy.

Read and download it free here:

https://robertmccallnz.github.io/cooperative-aotearoa/

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

Want to spread the word? Download free social media cards for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn:

https://robertmccallnz.github.io/cooperative-aotearoa/memes.html

The Night Wall Street’s Backyard Cracked

On 23 June 2026, three openly democratic socialist candidates won New York City Democratic congressional primaries, two of them unseating sitting members of Congress. Brad Lander defeated two-term incumbent Dan Goldman in NY-10 with approximately 65.8% of the vote. Darializa Avila Chevalier ousted incumbent Adriano Espaillat in NY-13 with roughly 49.4% to Espaillat’s 46% in a close but decisive race. Claire Valdez won the open NY-7 seat, defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso by around 10 percentage points with 92% of precincts in. All three were endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist elected mayor in November 2025 with 50.78% of the vote — the highest turnout NYC mayoral election since 1993.

This is not a one-off protest vote. It is the third major escalation of a socialist electoral project that has been building since 2016. It is happening in the belly of global finance capital. And it carries direct lessons for Aotearoa heading into the November 2026 general election.[7]

Who Are These Candidates?

Brad Lander — former New York City Comptroller, endorsed by Mamdani, ran explicitly on opposing US military aid to Israel, immigration rights, and working-class economic demands. Lander accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza; his opponent Goldman received support from pro-Israel organisations. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, which has been on pace to break its own spending records in 2026 primaries, poured money into supporting Espaillat. Lander’s demographic breakdown was striking: 61% of younger voters backed him against Goldman’s 39%; in college-educated areas he won 69-31; in higher-income areas, 70-30. Goldman performed better in lower-income areas (57-43), which flags a class complexity discussed below.

Darializa Avila Chevalier — doctoral student and Columbia University Gaza war encampment leader. She is described by the New York Times as an “activist and democratic socialist” who ousted a sitting Congressman in an upset. Her support skewed toward younger voters (+24.5 points advantage among under-40s) and college-educated precincts, while Espaillat retained the established Hispanic working-class vote in lower-income majority-Hispanic districts, again showing a generational and class fracture within the left coalition.

Claire Valdez — State Assembly member, DSA-endorsed, backed by Mamdani and AOC. She won the open Brooklyn-Queens seat, defeating the more moderate borough president. Pre-election polling from Emerson College had her leading Reynoso among younger voters 33%-15%. Men broke for Valdez; women were more split. In majority-Black communities, Reynoso outperformed significantly, again showing a non-uniform class and racial coalition.

The Ideological Shift — What It Is and How We Measure It

These three candidates ran on a shared platform anchored in the DSA’s 2025-2026 national programme: universal healthcare (Medicare for All), universal rent control and the right to counsel for tenants, a 32-hour work week with no pay cut, tax the rich including a wealth tax, a Green New Deal with public ownership over energy infrastructure, union power, abolition of mandatory minimums, free higher education, free public childcare, and — critically — an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to military and economic aid to Israel. The word “socialist” appeared on their campaign materials and public statements without apology.

This represents a clean break from the dominant Democratic Party mode of the last 30 years, which has been: accept the market as given, soften its edges, and above all never name the class enemy. These candidates named it.

How we measure an ideological shift

An ideological shift is not a feeling. It is measurable in at least four ways:

1. Who wins elections they were not supposed to win.

Lander beat a well-funded two-term incumbent by 32 points. That is not a polling error or a bad candidate — it is a structural shift in what a safe Democratic district will accept. Avila Chevalier beat a sitting Congressman in a majority-Hispanic district while being an activist doctoral student, not a party machine product.[8][3][14][21]

2. Organisational growth.

NYC-DSA had 5,910 members in October 2024, the month Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign. By December 2025, it had 13,145 members — more than doubled. National DSA grew from 50,713 to 92,912 in the same period. That is not a trend; it is a rupture. Historically, DSA hovered around 5,000 for decades before exploding to 50,000 between 2016 and 2020, then stagnating during Biden before surging again post-Mamdani.

3. Where the money and attacks are concentrated.

AIPAC and its United Democracy Project are on pace to break their own spending records in 2026, openly targeting DSA-backed candidates. The United Democracy Project routed $22 million through shell PACs in Illinois primaries and spent heavily in New York and Maryland. When capital spends like this to stop a political current, it has correctly identified a genuine threat — not a performative one. Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters” who spend “millions in dark money” to “turn us against one another”. He was not wrong about the spending.

4. What becomes “sayable” without career death.

In 2022, calling Israel’s actions genocide in a Democratic primary was career-ending. In 2026, Lander built his entire campaign on it and won 65.8%. In 2022, “democratic socialist” on a ballot was a liability in New York. In 2026, it is the winning brand in multiple working-class districts of the empire’s financial capital.

The generational and class fracture

These wins are not unambiguous. The demographic breakdowns reveal a fracture within the working class itself. In NY-10, Goldman outperformed Lander specifically in lower-income areas (57-43). In NY-13, Espaillat — the incumbent, a Latino representative with deep machine roots — retained lower-income majority-Hispanic communities even while losing overall to the younger, more educated socialist challenger. In NY-7, Reynoso significantly outperformed Valdez in majority-Black communities.

This is a genuine tension the socialist left must grapple with honestly. The DSA’s current coalition skews toward younger, college-educated, often white-collar renters rather than the lowest-income sections of the working class, who retain ties to the existing party machine — the machine that, however corrupted, has historically brokered local services, housing placements and political patronage for immigrant and Black communities. The NYC socialist project has begun to bridge this through tenant organising and Palestine solidarity in immigrant communities, but the fracture is real data, not a smear.

The lesson is not to abandon the project. The lesson is that **electoral wins are insufficient without deep organising in the communities that still back the machine**, and that the DSA’s success depends on proving, in practice, that socialist governance delivers more material improvement than the machine ever did.

***

The Mamdani Effect: One Year of Socialist City Government

The context for June 2026 is Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and victory. He ran explicitly on rent control, fare-free public transit, tax the rich, and opposition to US-backed war crimes. He was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the DSA. Three-quarters of New York’s youth voters (ages 18-29) voted for him — 75% vs 19% for Cuomo and 5% for Sliwa. Youth turnout hit 28% in a mayoral race, historically one of the lowest-turnout elections in the country.

His endorsement of the three June 2026 congressional candidates was a direct test of whether his political project could expand beyond the mayoralty into congressional representation. It passed — and with striking margins. As the New York Times summarised: “The results also indicated voters’ acceptance of far-left ideologies”.

The broader city-wide picture: democratic socialists now hold the mayoralty of the world’s financial capital, and are on course to hold multiple seats in the US House of Representatives from NYC districts. The Hill’s political analysts note that socialist mayors have now won or advanced in NYC, Washington DC, and Los Angeles in 2025-2026, with commentators divided on whether this signals a durable ideological shift or primarily a “desire for change” anger vote. The weight of evidence — especially DSA’s membership growth, the coherence of the policy platform, and the establishment’s coordinated spending response — points toward the former.

The Correlations with Aotearoa — Real and Structural

Where the parallel is direct and evidenced

Housing un-affordability as a class weapon.

In New Zealand, average annual housing costs increased 31% between 2020 and 2024, while average disposable income increased only 24% over the same period. Approximately one in four households that rented spent more than 40% of their income on housing costs in the June 2024 year. Around two-thirds of non-owner-occupier Māori and Pacific households spend 30% or more of their income on housing. The median house price nationally is $753,500 against a median household disposable income of $51,597 — a ratio of 14.6 times annual income to afford the median home outright. This is the same structural crisis — housing as an asset class stripped from workers and handed to capital — that Mamdani’s platform directly attacked. The parallel is not rhetorical. It is the same mechanism, operating across the Pacific.

The fracturing of the left vote under MMP.

The 2023 New Zealand general election saw Labour’s vote almost halve — from 50.0% in 2020 to 26.91% in 2023. The Greens rose to a record 11.6% and won two traditionally Labour electorates outright. Te Pāti Māori doubled its parliamentary seats to six, taking Māori electorates that Labour had held. The combined National-Labour two-party vote was just 65.9%, the lowest since 2002. This is a structural vote fracture: Labour is losing its working-class Māori and Pacific base to Te Pāti Māori, its urban progressive base to the Greens, and its rural and small-town working-class base to NZ First and National.

By April 2026, a 1News Verian poll showed Labour surging to 37% with the left bloc (Labour-Greens-Te Pāti Māori) holding 66 seats against 58 for the right. However, by May 2026, Roy Morgan showed National’s bloc back at 51.5% and the left bloc at 41.5%, with Labour plunging 7.5 points in one month to 26.5%. The Greens at 12.5% and Te Pāti Māori at 2.5% tell the story: the left vote is fragmented, volatile, and driven by economic anger rather than organised class solidarity.[34][35]

The non-voter base — Aotearoa’s sleeping giant.

In the 2023 New Zealand general election, approximately **1.19 million eligible New Zealanders did not vote** — including 829,396 enrolled voters who chose not to participate and a further 500,000+ eligible but not enrolled. In percentage terms, 22% of enrolled voters did not cast a vote. This is the largest untapped electoral bloc in the country, concentrated among the young, the poor, Māori, and Pacific communities — exactly the demographic that Mamdani activated in NYC. The DSA did not win on swing voters. It won by turning out people who had previously been written off by the machine.

Where the parallel does not directly hold

Structural differences in electoral systems. New Zealand uses MMP, which already produces proportional representation and allows smaller parties to win seats without needing to take over a major party from within. The DSA’s strategy is explicitly to operate inside the Democratic Party because the US first-past-the-post system makes independent socialist parties electorally unviable. In Aotearoa, the DSA model (entryism into Labour) is one option, but the MMP system means that a credible, organised socialist current could instead build a dedicated party and win seats directly — as the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have demonstrated.[38][39]

The left fragmentation problem. Aotearoa’s socialist and anarchist left is substantially more fragmented than NYC-DSA. The ISO calls for coalitions with Labour and the Greens; the WSWS (Socialist Equality Party) attacks the ISO for doing exactly that; and neither has the organisational weight, the embedded community roots, or the electoral experience that NYC-DSA has built over a decade. Socialist Aotearoa, ISO, and the Greens each claim portions of the left space without unified strategy or membership base remotely comparable to 13,000 NYC-DSA members alone.[23][40][41]

The Palestine question lands differently here. In NYC, opposition to the genocide in Gaza was a ballot-box winner in multi-racial working-class districts because of the demographics of those districts (large Arab-American, Muslim, Black, Latino communities) and the material reality of AIPAC’s dark money. In Aotearoa, anti-war and pro-Palestine sentiment exists and is growing — the ISO is explicitly trying to channel anti-war sentiment ahead of the 2026 election — but it has not yet achieved the ballot-box crystallisation that it reached in NYC. However, with New Zealand’s involvement in Five Eyes and the US war machine, and with a NZ election in November 2026, the conditions for this to become electorally significant are present.[

What Aotearoa Can Actually Use

Lessons from NYC with direct application

1. Name the class enemy and win more votes, not fewer.

The evidence from NYC is now three cycles deep: campaigns that say “socialist,” “tax the rich,” and “rent control” explicitly win in working-class urban areas. The NZ left’s reflex of softening demands for “electability” has no empirical basis — see Labour’s 26.91% in 2023 and 26.5% in May 2026 polls. Clarity works.[2][31][35][16][19]

2. Build the candidate from the movement.

Avila Chevalier came from the Gaza encampment at Columbia. Mamdani came from state assembly organising and the Working Families Party. DSA’s Jacobin-published strategy explicitly calls for “candidates who have come out of movements themselves, not just lifelong politicians who only turn to movements for endorsements every four years”. In Aotearoa, this means the candidates should come from rent strikes, the food poverty campaigns, te ao Māori organising, migrant worker advocacy, and Palestine solidarity — not from party list bureaucracies.[42][19]

3. The non-voter base is the electoral revolution.

Mamdani’s 50.78% came in part because youth turnout hit 28% in a usually low-turnout election, and 75% of those youth voters backed him. Aotearoa’s 1.19 million non-voters are predominantly the same demographic: young, working-class, Māori, Pacific, and renters. A serious socialist electoral project in Aotearoa must be organised around mobilising this base, not competing for swing voters already embedded in National or Labour.[5][28][37]

4. Use MMP’s proportionality as a weapon, not an excuse.

The 5% threshold is real, but the Greens, Te Pāti Māori, ACT, and NZ First all clear it regularly. Under MMP, a genuinely socialist current that builds 5-8% support through movement-embedded organising can hold seats and extract policy concessions from any government. The precedent — that socialists and trade unionists fought for MMP specifically to break the two-party stranglehold — is real history. That tool exists. The question is whether there is organisation disciplined enough to use it.[33][35][39]

5. The fracture in the left coalition is a warning, not just a success story.

NYC’s class and racial fractures within the socialist vote are a live warning for Aotearoa. The Greens’ growing support base is urban, educated, and predominantly Pākehā. Te Pāti Māori represents a different class fraction of the Māori working class. The ISO, Socialist Aotearoa, and the far-left speak to small activist layers. Without genuine unity of these currents around material class demands — rents, wages, food prices, public housing, healthcare — the left vote fracture in Aotearoa will continue to hand power to the right bloc, just as NYC’s fracture among Hispanic working-class communities in lower-income areas demonstrated the limits of even a winning coalition.

The Bottom Line

Three socialists just beat the Democratic Party machine in the financial capital of the United States, backed by a movement that doubled its membership in fourteen months and turned out young people at rates not seen in a generation. They did it on a platform that said “rent control,” “tax the rich,” “Medicare for All,” “end the genocide,” and “32-hour work week” — without apology. AIPAC spent record money to stop them and lost

Aotearoa has 1.19 million people who didn’t vote in 2023, housing costs rising three times faster than wages, a left bloc that fractures every election, and a November 2026 general election four months away. The conditions are not identical to NYC. But the core lesson transfers without modification: when working-class people are organised into movements that then run their own candidates on clear class demands, they win. When they are managed by careerists who ask them to be patient and moderate, they stay home.

The empire just showed us the crack in the wall. The question is what we do in Dunedin, in Ōtara, in Porirua, in Te Tai Tokerau.

*Sources: Democracy Now![19] | New York Times live results[29][8][13][4] | Patch NY[3] | Forward[1] | Politico[9][11][16] | BBC[12] | Washington Post[2] | Al Jazeera[42][10] | The Hill[27] | Jacobin[45] | DSA Platform 2025-2026[18] | DSA membership data, City & State NY[23] | CIRCLE/Tufts (youth vote)[28] | Wikipedia: 2025 NYC mayoral election[5] | Unherd[20] | Elections NZ: 2023 Official Results[33] | The Conversation (NZ Greens)[43][44] | Australian Institute of International Affairs[31] | The Conversation (NZ 2023)[32] | 1News Verian poll April 2026[34] | Roy Morgan NZ May 2026[35] | Stats NZ Housing 2025[30] | Scoop: NZ non-voters 2026[37] | ISO NZ[36] | WSWS NZ[40] | vote.nz 2026[7] | Jacobin: NZ MMP history[39] | DSA NYC working groups[46]*

Building an AI data centre in Aotearoa from a socialist standpoint means rejecting the extractive logic of Big Tech — where socialised costs fund privatised profits — and designing infrastructure that is publicly owned, democratically governed, rooted in Te Tiriti, powered by the whenua’s own renewable energy, and whose surpluses flow back to the workers who build and run it. This is not a utopian fantasy. The material conditions in Aotearoa are unusually favourable: ~85% renewable electricity, a cool climate that slashes cooling costs, a co-operative economic tradition that contributes 13% of GDP, strong data sovereignty law, and existing models of state ownership in the energy sector.cpusa+2

Why Private Ownership of AI Infrastructure Fails Workers

The core contradiction of the current AI boom is simple: the costs are socialised, the profits are privatised. When a hyper-scaler builds a data centre in Invercargill, it consumes local power and water, drives up costs for residents, offers no guarantee of local employment, and exports all profit offshore. New Zealand’s data centre market is projected to generate over USD 1.37 billion in revenue in 2025, yet communities hosting these facilities receive little in return beyond infrastructure strain.reddit+2

Under private ownership, workers have no say over how AI is deployed — whether to automate their jobs, surveil them, or extract value from their communities. The tech oligarchy’s monopoly control must be broken if AI infrastructure is to serve rather than exploit. The strategic objective is political: subjecting AI infrastructure to democratic, public control.cpusa

Foundations: The Socialist Structural Principles

Public and Worker Ownership

The data centre must be publicly or cooperatively owned — not a PPP (public-private partnership) that hands control to capital after the ribbon is cut. There are several viable ownership models suited to Aotearoa’s existing legal landscape:treasury

The most robust socialist model combines a worker cooperative operating structure with a public majority ownership stake — similar to how NZ’s state-owned energy SOEs (Meridian, Mercury, Genesis) have retained public dividends while employing a unionized workforce. The Crown’s residual 51% stake in Meridian alone is worth more than the total received from partial privatization, demonstrating the long-term fiscal logic of public ownership in infrastructure.devonfunds

Workers’ Councils and Democratic Governance

A workers’ council, composed of all employees across technical, maintenance, administrative, and support roles, must hold binding authority over key decisions: hiring and wages, working conditions, technology deployment, and reinvestment priorities. This is consistent with NZCTU principles for AI in the workplace, which mandate that workers must be involved in decision-making on the introduction, use, and regulation of AI technology — with high-risk AI only deployed where workers and their unions have agreed.union

Governance should be structured in layers:

• Shop floor councils — direct worker democracy at the technical level

• Enterprise board — elected by worker-members plus community representatives

• Public accountability layer — Parliamentary oversight via select committee and an open public register of all decisions, contracts, and compute allocations

This mirrors proposals from democratic AI theorists who advocate for citizens’ assemblies — representative cross-sections of everyday people with real authority to set binding goals and constraints on AI systems.oneproject

Te Tiriti and Māori Data Sovereignty

Any socialist framework in Aotearoa that ignores Te Tiriti o Waitangi is incomplete. Data sovereignty for Māori is not a compliance checkbox — it is a fundamental right grounded in tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) and the understanding that data about Māori is taonga (treasure).minterellison+1

Te Mana Raraunga (the Māori Data Sovereignty Network) has established clear principles: asserting Māori rights and interests in data, safeguarding Māori data, advocating for Māori involvement in the governance of data repositories, and supporting the development of Māori data infrastructure. A socialist data centre must:ecs.wgtn

• Co-design governance with iwi and hapū from the outset, not as consultation theatre

• Reserve compute capacity for Māori digital businesses and innovations

• Give hapū representation on the enterprise board with binding veto over decisions that affect Māori data

• Support te reo Māori AI development — training language models on te reo with iwi consent and benefit-sharing

This is not charity — it is rangatiratanga expressed materially, and it connects the socialist project to decolonization rather than reproducing Pākehā control under a red banner.

Energy: Built on the Whenua’s Renewable Power

Aotearoa generates approximately 85% of its electricity from renewable sources — hydro, wind, geothermal, and emerging solar. New Zealand data centres already operate at an average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of just 1.3, well below the global average of 1.54. The South Island’s cool climate provides natural cooling, further reducing energy waste.ey+3

A socialist data centre should be co-located with, or directly contracted to, a publicly owned renewable generator. The most compelling model comes from the Te Huka geothermal field, where co-location design eliminates the data centre’s cooling energy demand and the geothermal plant’s thermal waste simultaneously. This is circular socialist infrastructure: the land’s geothermal energy runs the computers; the computers’ waste heat returns to the community.facebook

The Swiss workers’ cooperative Infomaniak offers the clearest global proof-of-concept. Their Geneva D4 data centre runs entirely on renewable energy, houses 10,000 servers in 1,800 sqm, and at full capacity feeds 1.7MW into a district heating network capable of heating up to 6,000 homes. By eliminating air conditioning and recycling all heat, it avoids up to 3,600 tonnes of CO₂ per year. The facility is embedded in the basement of a housing cooperative — integrating digital infrastructure with community life. This is the model Aotearoa should replicate.datacenterdynamics+1

A socialist Aotearoa data centre built on similar lines could:

• Use Waikato or Taupō geothermal energy (already an established grid resource)

• Feed waste heat into community heating networks in the adjacent town

• Source hardware through publicly tendered, union-approved contracts

• Operate under a Power Purchase Agreement with a Crown energy SOE

Labour: Who Builds It, Who Runs It

Current private data centre investment in NZ offers no guarantee of local employment during construction — operators may choose imported labour if it is cheaper. A socialist data centre must contractually mandate:reddit

• All construction work performed under union collective agreements with local labour hire preferences

• Living wages as the minimum for all operational roles — cleaning, security, maintenance, and technical staff alike

• No casualization — all roles are permanent with full employment protections

• Training pipelines embedded in the enterprise: apprenticeships, digital skills programmes for working-class communities, and partnerships with polytechnics (including Otago Polytechnic)

• Profit-sharing through annual distributions to worker-members, proportional to hours worked, not capital invested

The NZCTU’s AI principles are explicit: workers must share fairly in any benefits that the use of AI creates, such as increased productivity. A worker coop data centre operationalizes this from the ground up.union

What the Centre Computes For

A socialist data centre is not neutral infrastructure — it should have a mission. Compute capacity should be allocated by democratic priority, not highest bidder. This means a tiered access model:

TierUsersAccess TermsPublic ReserveGovernment agencies, public hospitals, schoolsFree at point of useResearch TierUniversities, CRIs, public interest researchSubsidized, peer-reviewed allocationCooperative TierWorker coops, social enterprises, NGOs, Māori digital businessesBelow-market ratesCommercial TierPrivate companiesMarket rate, with a solidarity levyExcludedSurveillance capitalism, weapons AI, fossil fuel optimizationBanned by governance charter

The Ada Lovelace Institute frames public compute investments as an industrial policy lever for reshaping AI development — not just building more compute, but challenging concentrated power and promoting public value throughout the AI supply chain. This means AI models built on this infrastructure should, wherever possible, be released as open-source public goods.adalovelaceinstitute

Financing Without Capital

The standard critique of socialist infrastructure projects is: where does the money come from without private capital? Several mechanisms exist within Aotearoa’s current institutional architecture:

• Green bonds issued by the Crown — the same mechanism proposed for energy infrastructure, redirected to public digital infrastructurereuters

• NZ Superannuation Fund — the Cullen Fund already invests in infrastructure; a democratic socialist government could mandate a public compute allocation

• Development contributions from commercial users — private firms using the co-op tier contribute a capital development levy reinvested into capacity expansion

• International solidarity finance — cooperative finance networks (e.g., through the International Cooperative Alliance) can provide long-term, below-market debt

• Worker investment bonds — workers and communities can purchase low-yield bonds, creating public stake and social ownership from below

The Harvard Kennedy School’s cooperative AI research is blunt: “The federal government could support the creation of a cooperative research-focused cloud, owned and operated by nonprofits, government, and universities to ensure sufficient compute and storage power for research into innovative, safe uses of AI — and without a shareholder profit motive.” New Zealand should not wait for Washington. The political and material conditions to do it here, now, are real.ash.harvard

Data Sovereignty and Privacy

Private hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft subject NZ data to foreign jurisdictional risk — US CLOUD Act provisions mean American law enforcement can compel access to data held by US firms regardless of where it is physically stored. A state-owned cooperative data centre, governed under NZ law and the Privacy Act 2020, eliminates this risk by design.catalyst+1

Locally headquartered providers like Catalyst Cloud already demonstrate that fully NZ-owned, NZ-operated cloud services are viable. A socialist data centre goes further: it is not just locally owned but collectively governed, with data policy set democratically rather than by executive fiat or shareholder pressure.catalyst

Data cooperatives — organizations where individuals pool their data while retaining control, collectively benefiting from its use — represent a user and worker-owned alternative to current extractive practices. Building a data cooperative layer into the centre means workers and communities whose data trains AI models share in the value those models generate.policyreview

Challenges and Honest Contradictions

A socialist analysis demands honesty about contradictions:

• Scale gap: AI training workloads require enormous compute. A cooperative data centre starts smaller than hyperscalers — this is a feature (lower resource footprint) but also a constraint on the most intensive AI work.

• Skills shortage: NZ faces a digital skills gap. Worker ownership only works if workers have the skills to participate meaningfully in governance — requiring serious investment in technical education.

• Political resistance: NZ’s current government has moved toward private data centre attraction, not public ownership. Building socialist infrastructure requires a political majority willing to use the state as a tool of class power, not just a neutral regulator.reuters

• Hardware supply chains: GPUs and specialized AI chips are dominated by NVIDIA, a US firm. No cooperative data centre escapes this hardware dependency in the short term. The longer-term answer is supporting open hardware initiatives (RISC-V, etc.) and international cooperative procurement.

• Co-operative economy already exists but is underpowered: NZ’s top 30 co-operatives contribute revenues of more than NZD 42.3 billion per annum — the co-operative tradition is real, but it is concentrated in dairy (Fonterra) and agriculture, not tech. Building digital worker coops requires new organizational effort.massey+1

The Vision in Concrete Terms

A socialist AI data centre in Aotearoa is:

• Sited in a regional centre (Taupō, Hamilton, Dunedin, or Christchurch) near renewable generation, not just Auckland

• Powered by geothermal or hydro under a Crown PPA, with waste heat piped to community heating

• Owned as a worker cooperative with Crown majority stake and iwi representation on the board

• Governed by a workers’ council with democratic allocation of compute capacity

• Staffed under union collective agreements, with permanent contracts, living wages, and training pipelines

• Serving public agencies, researchers, cooperatives, and Māori digital enterprises first — commercial users last

• Transparent — open public registry of all compute allocations, energy use, and financial accounts

• Sovereign — NZ law governs all data, no foreign jurisdictional hooks

This is not a compromise with capitalism. It is the infrastructure of a different kind of digital economy — one where AI, for once, actually works for the workers who live beside it, build it, and are changed by it.

Banners: Unite for Trans Rights. Stop the Gender Bill.

Neave Ashton at the mic: “What better distraction than punching down on an already marginalised community?”

Same weekend. North Belfast burning. Masked men going door to door in Lower Shankill, chanting “foreigners out.” A two-month-old pulled from a fire. Fourteen police injured. Twenty thousand people then marching through Belfast and Derry under a different banner — Belfast Stands Against Racism.

Same week. Different hemisphere. Same energy.

Ben-Gvir in the Knesset saying Lebanon should be “Israel’s playground.” Brazil voting 461-19 to end the 6x1 work week. Spain’s former justice minister jailed for 24 years. Ireland’s far-right party collapsing from within.

The week told us something. Not a series of unrelated news items. A single, cracked structure showing more of itself.

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING

Rose Brewer’s Insurgent Sociology opens with a demand: ground the moment historically. Don’t just read the headlines. Read the duration.

First thesis: what we are living through is not a sequence of bad events. It is the polycrisis of racial capitalism — a system that has always required hierarchy, always required an enemy within, always required the management of populations through division.

The Belfast pogrom didn’t come from nowhere. A decade of austerity. A social media infrastructure built to amplify outrage. One man’s knife weaponised into a “coordinated programme of intimidation” against an entire immigrant community. Elon Musk amplified it from New York.

New Zealand First’s gender bill is the same architecture. A manufactured moral panic. Peters has found his campaign issue: define “woman” and “man” in all legislation, erase the legal existence of trans and non-binary people, call it clarity. A speaker in Dunedin named it: trans people used as scapegoat “from a government that has been a disaster.”

Ben-Gvir calling Lebanon a “playground.” Not a military objective. Not a threat assessment. A playground. You do not use that word accidentally. It is the language of a child who does not consider the other children real. It is the grammar of ethnic cleansing, spoken aloud in a parliament. 3,798 Lebanese killed since March. Ben-Gvir: “even if there are tears from a thousand Lebanese mothers, we need to keep going.” The silence of the international labour movement on this is a political failure with consequences.

The 6x1 work schedule in Brazil — six days on, one off, running since 1988 — disproportionately destroys Black and poor workers in retail, food service, healthcare. Not an accident of policy design. The design.

These are not separate pathologies. They are the same pathology, expressed in different national idioms. Racial capitalism does not produce one crisis. It produces the polycrisis — simultaneous, mutually reinforcing, designed to exhaust.

Why is everything happening at once. Because it was always happening. We just kept treating it as separate.

THE CORRELATION OF FORCES

Stuart Hall borrowed “conjuncture” from Gramsci. This specific moment. This alignment of forces. Who has power, who does not. Not permanent. Not inevitable. Open.

Map it. June 2026.

New Zealand. The coalition is fracturing. National announces compulsory KiwiSaver — every worker enrolled, contributions rising to 12% by 2032. ACT’s David Seymour calls it “a big gift for the financial services sector.” A property developer’s party and a libertarian party running out of room to coexist. The cracks are showing.

The new 1News poll: Labour down five points since April, at 32%. National at 29%. The left bloc — Labour, Greens, Te Pati Maori — projects to 64 seats. The current coalition holds 60. Peters at 11% and rising, already in campaign mode. Winston Peters does not poll at 11% and stay quiet.

Israel/Palestine/Lebanon. Netanyahu is moving to seize control of Likud’s candidate selection, removing primaries, installing loyalists. A leader who rigs his own party’s internal democracy is not operating from strength. He is building a fortress because the walls are failing.

Ben-Gvir calls Lebanon a playground while Trump signs a deal with Iran. The US Senate votes 50-48 to halt military operations against Iran — the first time both chambers have passed a war powers resolution against a sitting president. The American imperium is not monolithic. It contains contradictions.

Spain. Sanchez’s former right-hand man, Abalos, sentenced to 24 years for corruption. Social democracy’s rot is not hidden. It rots in court, on the record. Proximity to state power without structural accountability produces the same outcomes across partisan lines.

Ireland. The Irish Freedom Party loses its registered party status — destroyed by internal conflict, “a handful of disruptive members” per its own leader. The far right is not invincible. It is often its own worst enemy. Note this. The enemy has contradictions too.

Brazil. The Chamber of Deputies votes to phase out the 6x1 work schedule. 461-19. That margin does not happen without the street. The Vida Alem do Trabalho campaign, organising millions of workers through social media and union networks, created the political conditions for a parliamentary vote that would otherwise never have happened.

On the streets. Anti-G7 protesters in Geneva: windows smashed, a Tesla burning. The No Kings movement in the US. The DSA developing a platform that actually names class. None of this is the revolution. All of it is the correlation of forces shifting in contested terrain.

The right is overextended, internally contradictory, propped up by media infrastructure that can be challenged. But the left is fragmented, reactive, frequently unable to hold the class line while defending the communities most targeted by the culture war.

PRAXIS

Brewer’s third thesis is the hardest: what do we do with the analysis?

“Sociology for whom?” she asks. The answer is: for the people most exposed to the crisis. Not the academy. Not the left that wants to feel correct. For the workers on the 6x1 schedule. For the trans kid in Dunedin whose legal existence is up for parliamentary debate. For the family in north Belfast made homeless by a coordinated pogrom.

For NZ readers: the gender bill and the KiwiSaver fight are the same fight approached from opposite ends. The gender bill is divide-and-rule — get working-class people arguing about who counts as a woman while the financial services sector pops champagne on Queen Street. The KiwiSaver fight is the moment that mask slips: National and ACT cannot agree on retirement policy because they serve different fractions of capital. Make that visible. Hold both at once.

The Brazil vote shows what mass pressure actually does. 461-19 is not organic. It is the result of organised workers making the political cost of voting no too high. That is a method.

The Belfast counter-march — 20,000 people, trades councils, migrant centres, community organisations — is what working-class anti-fascism looks like when it organises rather than posts. Belfast Trades Council was on the organising committee. Not symbolic. Structural.

The AI rollout in schools: parents and teachers pushing back, demanding a pause. Ask the question Brewer demands: whose children are being experimented on? Not the children of the ruling class. Their schools still have adequate staffing, the technology supplements rather than replaces. The AI moratorium campaign is a class question dressed in tech language.

Ben-Gvir’s “playground” language must be named for what it is — ethnic cleansing rhetoric, spoken publicly, with impunity. The labour movement’s silence is not neutrality. It is a choice that will be remembered.

The November election in New Zealand is a floor, not a ceiling. 64 projected left-bloc seats is not a mandate for transformation. It is an opportunity for organised pressure to matter. Whether the movements that filled the Octagon on Saturday have any relationship to the electoral strategy is the question. Right now they remain strangers to each other.

THE ONLY QUESTION

The conjuncture is open.

Not won. Not lost.

The right is overextended. The coalition is cracking. The street is active. The senate voted 50-48 against the president’s war. Brazil’s workers cut their work week for the first time in 38 years.

And: Belfast burned. Lebanon is a playground. The gender bill moves through select committee. The financial services sector celebrates.

Both things are true simultaneously. That is what the polycrisis looks like from inside it.

Brewer doesn’t offer comfort. Neither does the week. Racial capitalism does not resolve itself. It intensifies until something breaks it, or it breaks everything else.

What you do with that is the only question that matters.

The Kiwi Dialectic publishes irregular dispatches from the material conditions of the present. Based in Aotearoa. No institutional affiliation.

There’s a concept David Graeber spent his life dissecting: the performance of power. Not power itself — the actual boots-on-the-neck stuff — but the elaborate theatre states and ruling classes put on to make domination feel natural, inevitable, even warm. Kings wore crowns. Pharaohs built pyramids. Christopher Luxon does a magazine shoot.

Here’s what the Women’s Weekly soft-focus lens doesn’t show you. As of 2024, Luxon’s net worth sat somewhere between NZ$21 million and NZ$30 million, making him the second-wealthiest MP in Parliament. He has owned as many as seven properties — Auckland rentals, a Waiheke Island holiday home, a family home in Remuera — while simultaneously claiming $52,000 in taxpayer-funded accommodation allowances to live in a Wellington apartment he owned outright, mortgage-free. The Spinoff called it “the highest plane of passive income — truly the boss level.” He told reporters: “I get it, I’m wealthy.”wikipedia+2

He gets it. And then he builds a cover story about it.

Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, showed that property — the accumulation of it, the enforcement of it — has always required a mythology. You don’t just need the land. You need people to believe you deserve the land. That your good fortune is a function of your good character. The Women’s Weekly exists, functionally, to manufacture that myth. It is a machine for converting class power into personality. The cover doesn’t say “landlord.” It says: Life, love & leadership.image.jpggoodreads

Meanwhile, in the real world this family photo is papering over: Budget 2026 nearly halved funding for food banks. The Family Violence support contracts — gone, $14 million cut by Oranga Tamariki alone. GP fees heading toward $100 a visit, forcing families to choose between seeing a doctor and paying the power bill. Patients dying in hospital waiting rooms under unsafe staffing conditions that this government’s hiring freeze helped create.psa+3

Austerity, as The Spinoff put it in June 2026, is for poor people, not politicians.thespinoff

Graeber had a term for this too — the inverse relationship at the heart of capitalist work: the more socially necessary your labour, the less you get paid for it. The nurses working understaffed wards at Dunedin Hospital. The food bank volunteers filling the gap left by Luxon’s Budget. The checkout workers at Countdown paying rent to a landlord who’s claiming a parliamentary accommodation subsidy. Inversely: the man on the cover, whose primary economic contribution to New Zealand has been owning houses in a market his own party keeps inflated.thespinoff+2

The magazine’s pull quote is “the heart of the Prime Minister’s world.” That heart beats for capital gains. It beats for property speculation. It beats for the kind of person who can sell a Wellington apartment for $890,000 profit while telling the country it needs to tighten its belt.reddit

Graeber was an anarchist. He didn’t believe in waiting for better kings. He believed the first step was seeing through the theatre — understanding that what gets presented as natural authority is usually just well-dressed theft, photographed nicely for a magazine rack.

So next time you see this cover in the waiting room of a GP surgery you can barely afford to visit: look at it clearly. That’s not a family. That’s a balance sheet in a blazer. And the magazine is the frame.

Key Takeaway: Every ruling class needs its mythology. Ours comes with a Women’s Weekly spread. Don’t buy it — literally or figuratively.

The Kiwi Dialectic | Edition 1 of 5 | June 24, 2026 | thekiwidialectic.substack.com

This is the first in a five-part series running the length of RIMPAC 2026. Each week we go deeper. This week: what RIMPAC is, what it costs us, and where our retirement savings are sitting right now.

WHAT’S RIMPAC AND WHY SHOULD YOU GIVE A DAMN?

Every two years, the US Pacific Fleet throws the world’s biggest naval party in Hawaii and invites its mates. This year — June 24 to July 31, 2026 — it’s called RIMPAC 2026. Rim of the Pacific. The world’s largest maritime war games.

Here are the numbers: 31 nations. 40 warships. 5 submarines. 140 aircraft. 25,000+ personnel. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group leading the American contingent. (Stars and Stripes)

And us. New Zealand is there. Three ships — HMNZS Te Mana (178 people), HMNZS Aotearoa (101 people), HMNZS Matataua (49 people) — plus 20 staff officers and 3 support personnel. 351 New Zealanders. Our 17th time at this rodeo. (NZDF)

The official line from NZDF is that it’s about “interoperability” and “a sharing of cultures.” Sweet as. The real line, from CounterPunch, is blunter: “The intent of RIMPAC, as with the entire U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific, is to prepare for war against China.” (CounterPunch)

That’s not a fringe reading. That’s what the exercise is. The US encircles China with bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia. RIMPAC trains everyone to fight together when the time comes. New Zealand is practising being a component of that machine.

Meanwhile NZ politicians “regularly condemn the militarisation of the Pacific.” Then they send the navy. (Scoop)

That’s hypocrisy. Or it’s ideology. Either way, workers pay for it.

WE PAID FOR THIS

Budget 2026. Finance Minister Nicola Willis. NZ$3.5 billion for defence and intelligence — $2.3 billion capital, $1.2 billion operating. The NZDF is explicitly exempt from the 2% budget cuts every other government agency has to swallow. (Defense News)

Total new defence spending since the Defence Capability Plan last year: NZ$5.8 billion. The goal: double defence spending to 2% of GDP over eight years. Nine billion dollars in new military spending over four years. (Newswire NZ)

To put it in plain English: we are spending nine billion dollars so our navy can train with the US to potentially fight China.

We just signed a NZ$2.6 billion deal — approved by the US State Department — to buy five Lockheed Martin MH-60R Seahawk helicopters armed with Mk 54 torpedoes. (Stars and Stripes)

Lockheed Martin. The same company that makes the F-35. The same company whose missile systems are used in Gaza. The same company whose satellite intelligence systems underpin US global military dominance. We just gave them NZ$2.6 billion.

Now look at what’s happening to everyone else. 8,700 public sector jobs axed. CPI inflation running at 4%. Unemployment rising to 5.5% by June 2026. Workers getting a temporary $50/week in-work tax credit — for one year. (BDO Budget 2026 analysis)

The choice is being made. Guns over people. Every single time.

This is not an accident of fiscal policy. It is a statement of priorities. The state knows what it values. And it’s not you.

YOUR RETIREMENT SAVINGS ARE IN THIS TOO

Here’s the part they really don’t want you to think about.

The NZ Superannuation Fund — the Crown’s retirement savings vehicle, currently worth about $94 billion (Keen Lens Substack) — is invested in companies directly implicated in war crimes, genocide, and the occupation of Palestinian land.

In May 2026, the Auckland High Court found that the NZ Superfund’s investment policies are “unreasonable and unlawful.” The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa brought the case. The court found the Guardians’ framework for making ethical investment decisions doesn’t comply with the NZ Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001. (High Court judgment 2026-NZHC-681)

Four companies were at the centre of the case. Here’s what the Fund holds:

Motorola Solutions — NZ$123.3 million. Supplies surveillance and communications tech to Israeli military forces at West Bank checkpoints and illegal settlements. Named in the UN Human Rights Council database as complicit in the occupation.

Booking Holdings (Booking.com) — NZ$48.6 million. Lists accommodation in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The ICJ ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s occupation is unlawful and states must not aid or assist it. Your retirement savings are listed on Booking.com next to stolen Palestinian land.

Airbnb — NZ$18.3 million. Same deal. Airbnb removed settlement listings in 2018 under public pressure. Then put them back in 2019 under pressure from the settler lobby. Your money went back in with them.

Expedia Group — NZ$467,000. Smaller. Same problem.

Now add one they didn’t bother to include in the court case:

Palantir Technologies — NZ$140 million. Not in the court case. Not on the exclusions list. Just sitting there. (Anti-War Aotearoa / Solidarity)

Palantir builds the AI targeting systems the Israeli military uses to select who to kill. Specifically, the “Lavender” programme — an AI system that generates kill lists. And the “Where’s Daddy?” programme — which tracks Palestinian men and hits them when they arrive home, to maximise civilian casualties counted as “collateral damage.” Palantir appears prominently in the UN’s Economy of Genocide report. Its founder and majority shareholder is New Zealand citizen Peter Thiel.

The Fund has NZ$140 million in Palantir. Meanwhile the Dutch pension fund ABP divested in April 2026. Cardano dumped 89% of its Palantir shares in Q1 2026. European banks and institutional investors are fleeing. (Business and Human Rights Centre)

New Zealand is staying put.

Let that sink in. Cardano ran. ABP ran. And the Guardians of the NZ Super Fund — the people managing your parents’ retirement — are holding firm on $140 million in the company running AI kill lists in Gaza.

THE EXCLUSIONS LIST IS WINDOW DRESSING

Here’s the thing that should make you furious. The Superfund has an exclusions list. It sounds responsible. It sounds like someone’s keeping an eye on things. RTX (Raytheon). Lockheed Martin. Northrop Grumman. General Dynamics. Elbit Systems. All formally excluded. (NZ Superfund Exclusions List August 2025)

But here’s what that list actually means in practice:

RTX was confirmed still held in the portfolio as recently as September 2024 — after exclusion. (Scoop) For context: RTX paid a $200 million fine for 750 violations of the US Arms Export Control Act. That’s not a technicality. That’s a company that ran arms exports illegally at industrial scale. And it was still in the portfolio.

The High Court found the framework that produced those exclusions is itself unlawful. Every decision made under that framework sits on rotten legal foundations.

Palantir — directly implicated in mass civilian killings — is not excluded at all. Didn’t even make the list.

And your KiwiSaver? The PSNA says KiwiSaver funds hold even more in these companies than the Superfund does. The money working-class New Zealanders squirrel away every paycheque — sometimes the only savings they have — is being funnelled into the same machine. Check yours at mindfulmoney.nz. Look for the OPT symbol. It means the UN has listed that company as operating in occupied Palestinian territory.

FIVE EYES AND THE DIGITAL KILL CHAIN

This isn’t just about ships and money. It’s about what New Zealand is plugged into systemically.

Five Eyes — the intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — is the most integrated surveillance network in human history. Every signal intercepted by the GCSB in Wellington feeds into the same system as the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The UK has been running near-daily spy flights over Gaza, feeding real-time intelligence on Palestinian movements to Israeli military forces. (Ground News) That intelligence flows through Five Eyes channels. Which New Zealand is a member of.

NZ’s own GCSB uses Palantir software for Five Eyes interoperability. (PSNA) The same Palantir whose AI systems run Lavender and Where’s Daddy. The state apparatus and the investment portfolio are pointing in the same direction. This is not a coincidence. It’s coherence.

In May 2026, NZ military representatives attended the Five Eyes Combined Digital Leadership Summit, committing to “Project Arcadia” — integrating AI into the Five Eyes war-fighting network. (Otago Daily Times) The NZDF said it “will play a full role in the project” but won’t say which AI tools will be used, for “national security reasons.”

Meantime, the US Congress is pushing Section 622 of the Intelligence Authorization Act — which would legally require the US to share all its intelligence with Israel, eclipsing even Five Eyes in scope. If it passes, it becomes impossible for any partner nation to apply pressure through intelligence withdrawal. (The Independent)

New Zealand would be embedded in an intelligence architecture that is legally bound to serve Israeli military operations. That’s not a slippery slope. That’s the plan on paper.

THE COURT SAID IT’S CRIMINAL. WE SAID CARRY ON.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024: war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. (Al-Ahram Online)

In December 2025, the ICC Appeals Chamber upheld those warrants. Rejected Israel’s appeal outright. The warrants stand.

The UN Commission of Inquiry found in September 2025 that Israel “committed and was continuing to commit genocidal acts with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian group in Gaza.” (UN UNISPAL)

The ICJ ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful. States must not render aid or assistance that maintains the occupation. That’s binding international law.

Amnesty International published conclusive evidence in June 2026 of the war crime of unlawful deportation and the crime against humanity of forcible transfer in the West Bank. (Amnesty International)

Israel is at RIMPAC 2026. New Zealand is at RIMPAC 2026. We are building “familiarity, trust, interoperability and collective strength” — the NZDF’s own words — with a state whose head of government has an active international arrest warrant for war crimes.

The Scoop piece puts it directly: NZ “has an obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocidal behaviour.” (Scoop) Instead we are drilling with the accused.

There is no fine print that makes this okay. There is no asterisk. We are there.

WHAT DO WE DO?

This is not a counsel of despair. Naming what’s happening is the first act of resistance. Here’s what you can do right now.

Check your money:

• Look up your KiwiSaver at mindfulmoney.nz — search for the OPT symbol (UN-listed occupation-linked companies). Find out where your savings are sitting.

Apply pressure on the Fund:

• Write to the Guardians of the NZ Super Fund and demand full implementation of the High Court ruling — and immediate divestment from Palantir. They are managing public money. They answer to the public.

Contact elected representatives:

• Defence Minister Chris Penk. Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters. PM Christopher Luxon. Tell them RIMPAC with Israel is a violation of our Genocide Convention obligations. You don’t need a law degree to say that. You just need to say it.

Support the organising:

• Anti-War Aotearoa: antiwaraotearoa.nz

• Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa: psna.nz

The bigger picture:

Workers did not vote to spend $9 billion preparing to fight China. Workers did not vote to park $140 million of retirement savings in the AI infrastructure of genocide. These decisions are made by ministers, fund managers, and military brass — people who don’t live with the consequences and won’t be conscripted when the shooting starts.

The labour movement in Aotearoa needs to take a position on this. Not in the abstract. Concretely. The question isn’t whether we’re anti-war in principle. It’s whether we’re willing to name what our government is doing and demand it stop.

Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1916 that militarism “fulfils a quite specific function in the history of capital.” It’s not an aberration. It’s not a policy mistake. It’s the system working as designed — extracting from workers at home to project power abroad, locking in the relationships between states and corporations that keep the whole thing running.

RIMPAC is not a training exercise. It’s a commitment. Every ship New Zealand sends is a promise to fight alongside the US in whatever war comes next. The money flowing from our Superfund into Palantir, Motorola Solutions, and occupation-linked platforms is not an accident of passive indexing — it’s a choice, one a High Court just found was made unlawfully.

We are financially and militarily embedded in systems of imperial violence. That’s not rhetoric. It’s the balance sheet.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Your taxes fund the warships. Your retirement savings fund the kill-list AI. Your intelligence agency feeds the same network running surveillance over Gaza. New Zealand is not a neutral bystander. We are a component. The first step is knowing that. The second step is organising to change it.

Research verified June 2026. All sources linked inline. Series continues weekly through July 31 — read the full run at thekiwidialectic.substack.com

THE KIWI DIALECTIC — RIMPAC 2026 SERIES PLAN

Five Editions: June 24 – July 31, 2026

SERIES OVERVIEW TABLE

EditionDateTitleCore Focus1June 24YOUR MONEY. THEIR WARS.RIMPAC overview + Superfund investments. The full frame: workers fund this at every level.2July 1THE CORPORATIONS.Military-industrial complex deep dive. Lockheed Martin, RTX/Raytheon, Palantir, Motorola Solutions. KiwiSaver angle. Who profits from permanent war?3July 8FIVE EYES: THE SURVEILLANCE EMPIRE WE NEVER VOTED FOR.Five Eyes history and architecture. GCSB. Project Arcadia. UK Gaza spy flights. Section 622. Surveillance of workers and surveillance of Palestinians — same logic.4July 15THE LAW SAID GENOCIDE. THE WEST SAID CARRY ON.ICC warrants, ICJ rulings, UN genocide finding, Amnesty West Bank report. NZ’s Genocide Convention obligations. Compare to 1985 nuclear-free moment. What would compliance actually require?5July 29WHAT DOES AN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT LOOK LIKE IN AOTEAROA?Synthesis + organising edition. NZ peace movement history. What socialist demands look like in 2026. Concrete asks. Rosa Luxemburg on militarism and capital.

EDITION-BY-EDITION CONTENT DIRECTION

EDITION 1 — June 24: YOUR MONEY. THEIR WARS.

The combined overview. Establish the frame.

• Open with RIMPAC as a fact on the ground: 351 New Zealanders, three ships, 17th time, $25,000+ personnel globally. The numbers are overwhelming by design — this is a show of force, not a training camp.

• Budget 2026 as the material base: $3.5b defence and intelligence, NZDF exempt from cuts, $9b over four years, $2.6b Seahawk deal with Lockheed Martin. Juxtapose directly with public sector job losses and flat wages.

• Superfund as the hidden financial arm: High Court ruling, the four companies named (Motorola Solutions, Booking Holdings, Airbnb, Expedia), plus Palantir as the most egregious omission from the exclusions list. $140m in AI targeting systems.

• Close with the systemic picture: Five Eyes, Project Arcadia, GCSB-Palantir link. NZ is not a bystander — we are a node in the machine. Invite readers into the series.

EDITION 2 — July 1: THE CORPORATIONS.

Follow the money. Who profits from permanent war?

• Lockheed Martin: The $2.6b Seahawk deal as the entry point. Widen out: F-35 programme, missile systems in Gaza, satellite intelligence infrastructure. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest arms dealer by revenue. NZ just became a customer. What does it mean to buy weapons from a company whose products are currently being used in an active genocide finding?

• RTX/Raytheon: On the exclusions list. Still held in September 2024. 750 violations of the US Arms Export Control Act, $200m fine. Patriot missile systems. The exclusions list as performance — the gap between what the Guardians say and what they do.

• Palantir: Full treatment. Lavender, Where’s Daddy, the Economy of Genocide UN report. Peter Thiel as NZ citizen and majority shareholder — the sovereignty question. European institutional divestment wave while NZ holds. What does it mean that the GCSB runs Palantir software?

• Gramsci angle: The concept of manufactured consent. “Defence” as a language that launders military spending for public consumption. The military-industrial complex is not a conspiracy — it’s a class project, with beneficiaries and victims, and the beneficiaries are not working-class New Zealanders.

EDITION 3 — July 8: FIVE EYES: THE SURVEILLANCE EMPIRE WE NEVER VOTED FOR.

The digital architecture of empire.

• What Five Eyes actually is: Start from scratch — the UKUSA Agreement 1946, post-WWII Anglo-American signals intelligence network, expanded to include Canada, Australia, NZ. The most comprehensive surveillance alliance in history. Snowden revelations as the definitive public exposure of its scope.

• How NZ fits: GCSB as the Five Eyes node in the South Pacific. What it intercepts, where it goes, who sees it. The absence of meaningful parliamentary oversight. The public didn’t vote for Five Eyes membership and can’t vote to leave it.

• Gaza as the live case: UK near-daily spy flights over Gaza, real-time intelligence to Israeli military. Five Eyes intelligence sharing channels. GCSB-Palantir link for interoperability. The digital kill chain: from GCSB signal collection to Palantir processing to IDF targeting decision. NZ is a link in that chain.

• Project Arcadia and Section 622: AI integration into Five Eyes war-fighting, NZ NZDF committed but won’t say which AI tools. Section 622 would legally mandate US-Israel intelligence fusion — eclipsing Five Eyes and making NZ exit from Gaza intelligence-sharing structurally impossible. Pedagogy box: what is signals intelligence, how does mass surveillance serve capital, the connection between surveilling workers at home and surveilling civilians abroad.

EDITION 4 — July 15: THE LAW SAID GENOCIDE. THE WEST SAID CARRY ON.

International law, its limits, and what NZ must do.

• The legal record, plainly stated: ICC arrest warrants (November 2024) upheld on appeal (December 2025) — war crimes, crimes against humanity, starvation as a method of warfare. ICJ July 2024 occupation ruling — unlawful, states must not aid or assist. UN Commission of Inquiry September 2025 genocide finding. Amnesty International June 2026 forcible transfer/ethnic cleansing evidence from West Bank. This is not contested among international legal bodies.

• Why the law isn’t stopping it: Trump administration sanctions on ICC prosecutors. US veto at the Security Council. The structural limits of international law — it was designed by states, and states with power can exempt themselves from it. Pedagogy: how does international law work, who enforces it, what are its class limits? The ICJ is not a police force.

• NZ’s Genocide Convention obligations: Article I requires states to prevent and punish genocide, not just refrain from committing it. Drilling with the accused state at RIMPAC, holding $140m in its AI targeting infrastructure, sharing intelligence through Five Eyes — each is a form of complicity the Convention was designed to prohibit.

• Compare: 1985 nuclear-free moment: When NZ actually defied the US. The ANZUS crisis. Lange’s government refused USS Buchanan entry. The US suspended NZ from ANZUS. NZ didn’t cave. The lesson: defiance of the imperial partner is possible. It has happened. It happened here. What would it require in 2026?

EDITION 5 — July 29: WHAT DOES AN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT LOOK LIKE IN AOTEAROA?

Synthesis, history, and concrete demands.

• History of NZ peace movement: Anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s–70s. The Springbok Tour resistance of 1981 — the largest civil disruption in NZ history, and a model of mass non-compliance. The nuclear-free campaign of the 1980s. What these movements had in common: mass participation, union involvement, willingness to name the imperial relationship directly.

• What’s organising now: Anti-War Aotearoa. The PSNA divestment campaign and its High Court victory. The limits of NGO campaigning without union muscle behind it. The trade union movement’s silence on RIMPAC, on Palantir, on Project Arcadia — and why breaking that silence is the key task.

• What socialists should be demanding — concrete, not abstract:

  • NZ out of Five Eyes Gaza intelligence sharing, at minimum; full withdrawal from Five Eyes as a longer-term demand

  • Superfund: immediate full divestment from Palantir and Motorola Solutions, implement the High Court ruling in full

  • No RIMPAC with Israel until ICC warrants are complied with

  • Full public disclosure of Project Arcadia — which AI tools, which contracts, which companies

  • Parliamentary vote required before any future RIMPAC deployment

• Rosa Luxemburg close: “Militarism fulfils a quite specific function in the history of capital, accompanying it on every step of its historical journey.” (The Junius Pamphlet, 1916.) This is not a deviation from normal capitalism. This is capitalism doing what it does. The anti-war movement is the labour movement, or it’s a pressure group. Which one do we want to be?

Full series at thekiwidialectic.substack.com | Research verified June 2026

Winston Peters is furious again.

This time it’s at an RNZ reporter who dared to ask whether NZ First might work with Te Pāti Māori after the next election.[facebook]
He snaps about “career politicians”, ducks the actual question, and wraps himself in that familiar cloak of wounded outsider.[en.wikipedia]
It’s a hell of a performance from a man who has spent nearly half a century on Parliament’s payroll, ministerial perks and all.[en.wikipedia]

Takeaway: This is not an anti‑establishment voice. It is the establishment lashing out at anyone who questions its pecking order.

2. Right‑Wing Populism 101: Punch Sideways, Not Up

NZ First sells itself as the home of the fed‑up: sick of “Wellington”, sick of “woke elites”, sick of being ignored.[youtube][nzfirst]
On paper, they talk about “social and economic justice” and “power to the people”.[nzfirst][youtube]
In practice, their anger rarely points at the people who own the banks, supermarkets, farms, or rental empires.
It points sideways – at Māori, at migrants, at anyone flying a rainbow flag or speaking too much te reo in the office.[thespinoff.co]

When Peters rages about “career politicians”, he’s doing three things at once:

• Pretending he isn’t one.[en.wikipedia]

• Turning justified anger at politics-as-usual into hatred of anyone to his left, especially Te Pāti Māori.[youtube][facebook]

• Keeping capital out of the firing line entirely.

Takeaway: NZ First’s populism is a safety valve for the system. It vents working‑class anger without ever threatening who owns what.

3. The Coalition Deal: Baubles for Him, Austerity for Us

If you want to know what a party stands for, don’t listen to the speeches.
Read the coalition agreements and the Cabinet circulars that tell ministers how to behave.[dpmc.govt]

In 2023, Peters took NZ First into a three‑way government with National and ACT.[en.wikipedia]
The deal gave his party cabinet posts, a chunk of a $1.2b “regional infrastructure” fund, and a raft of nationalist culture‑war toys.[nzfirst]
In return, he signed up to:

• Shrinking the public sector back to 2017 levels – code for cuts in services and jobs.[thespinoff.co]

• Restoring perks for landlords and advancing ACT’s deregulatory agenda.[clladvocates]

• Supporting a Treaty Principles Bill that aims to rewrite how Te Tiriti works in law, while reviewing and rolling back Treaty references across the statute book.[russellmcveagh]

Behind all the rhetoric about “equality before the law” and “no special treatment”, NZ First is locking in an austerity‑plus‑reaction package that hits workers, beneficiaries, Māori communities, and migrants hardest.[thespinoff.co]

Takeaway: Peters didn’t go into government to blow up the establishment. He went in to secure baubles and help drive a hard‑right programme.

4. Anti‑Māori Politics in a High‑Vis Vest

Peters’ hostility to Te Pāti Māori is not a personal quirk, it’s baked into the project.
He’s attacked them as “not pro‑Māori”, and his party has pushed for a referendum on the Māori seats and for rolling back co‑governance across public services.[facebook][youtube][russellmcveagh]

The coalition’s constitutional package is dressed up as “one law for all”, but the details are blunt:

• Remove co‑governance from public service delivery.[russellmcveagh]

• Repeal Ngāi Tahu’s dedicated regional council representation and force local referenda on Māori wards.[russellmcveagh]

• Police language, making English the primary name and mode for state entities, with narrow carve‑outs for Māori agencies.[russellmcveagh]

This is colonial politics in a high‑vis vest: wrap it in talk of “unity” and “fairness”, then use the state to claw back every fragile gain Māori have fought for.
Socialists should be absolutely clear – an attack on tino rangatiratanga is an attack on the whole working class, because it strengthens the bosses’ power to divide and rule.

Takeaway: NZ First’s anti‑“race‑based” agenda is just old‑school colonialism with better marketing.

5. What a Real Working‑Class Politics Would Say

When Peters barks at reporters and rails against “no consequences”, he’s tapping into something real: people know the game is rigged.[facebook]
But he refuses to name who it’s rigged for.
There’s no sustained attack on corporate profits, on landlords hiking rents, on banks posting record earnings while foodbanks explode.[thespinoff.co]
Just endless noise about the supposed excesses of “woke” bureaucrats, Māori radicals, and anyone who looks or sounds different.

A socialist response starts somewhere else entirely:

• The problem isn’t “career politicians” in the abstract, it’s a capitalist state that reliably serves wealth over need.

• The answer is not a grumpy uncle in a pinstripe suit, it’s organised worker power – unionised workplaces, tenants’ unions, iwi and hapū organising, community campaigns that don’t accept the colonial frame at all.

• Instead of a Treaty “review” designed by the right, we need deeper rangatiratanga and democratic control over resources – land, housing, energy, finance – in the hands of those who do the work and bear the costs.

That’s the conversation Peters cannot have, because it would mean confronting the class he has spent his whole life reassuring.
So he rants, he sneers, he picks new enemies. The job of the left is to refuse the bait and keep pointing at the owners, not the neighbours.

Takeaway: Don’t let Winston Peters define what “anti‑establishment” means. If it doesn’t challenge profit, property, and colonial power, it’s just another costume change for the same old ruling class.

Christopher Luxon flew to Singapore in May 2026. Signed a deal. Shook hands. Came home.

Then he got on Newstalk ZB and told Mike Hosking we have “serious work to do on our infrastructure compared to Singapore”.

He told us to look at Singapore.

He looks at Singapore.

He looks at Finland.

He holds Singapore up like a report card.

Like we’re the slow kid in class

and Singapore’s the one who got it right.

What Chris Knows About Singapore

Singapore is clean. Singapore is fast. Singapore does business. Singapore doesn’t mess around.

Chris knows this.

Chris likes this.

Chris wants us to be more like this.

What Chris Doesn’t Mention

The Singaporean state owns 90 percent of the country’s land.

Every time Luxon says “look at Singapore” — he’s pointing at one of the most interventionist land ownership models on the planet.

In 1949, Singapore’s government owned 31 percent of the land. Ordinary people owned the rest.

Then the state started buying it.

Not asking.

*Buying* — at prices the government set

What Americans call eminent domain. What the rest of us call: the government takes your land.

Decade by decade, the state accumulated.

By the 1980s it had the biggest land ownership in Singapore — over 76 percent.[8]

Today: 90 percent.

The “Homeownership” Trick

Here’s the part that gets funnier.

Singapore has a 90 percent homeownership rate. Everyone talks about it. Luxon types love it. *Look at their property-owning democracy.

But what Singaporeans own is a 99-year lease.

Not the land.

Not ever the land.

After 99 years, it reverts to the state.

Your kids might own the lease. Your grandkids might own the lease. Your great-grandkids get nothing — the state takes it back.

That’s not homeownership. That’s a very long rental agreement with good branding.

The Numbers, Plain

- 90% of Singapore’s land: state-owned[5][9]

- 80% of Singaporeans: live in housing built by the HDB — the government housing corporation[11][12]

- 77% of residents: still live in that public housing today[12]

- 99 years: length of the “ownership” lease before the land reverts to the Crown[6]

- 0: the number of times Luxon mentioned any of this

The NZ Initiative Agrees (Sort Of)

Even the NZ Initiative — the right-wing think tank that loves Luxon’s Singapore comparisons — wrote a piece asking whether turning New Zealand into Singapore means adopting its housing model.[13]

It’s the question they had to ask.

Because the model doesn’t work the other way around.

You can’t have Singapore’s outcomes without Singapore’s methods.

And Singapore’s method is: the state owns the land, the state builds the housing, and the state decides what you can do with it.

That’s not the free market.

That’s not property rights.

That’s closer to what Luxon would call socialism — if he found it in the wrong country.

What This Tells Us

When Chris Luxon says “be more like Singapore,” he means:

low corporate tax,

fast infrastructure,

a business-friendly environment.

He means the Singapore that appears in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index.

He does not mean the Singapore where the government owns 90 percent of the land.[6]

He does not mean the Singapore where the state built and still manages most of the housing stock.

He does not mean the Singapore where “owning your home” means holding a century-long lease from the government.

He wants the aesthetics of Singapore without the politics.

He wants the efficiency of state planning with none of the state.

And nobody — not one journalist, not one press conference question — has made him explain the contradiction.

Singapore Is a Real Priority for New Zealand

That’s what he said before the trip.

*Singapore is a real priority.*

Yeah. We can see that.

A country where the government owns the land, builds the houses, and controls the leases.

A real priority.

For a man who tells us property rights are sacred.

The Kiwi Dialectic is published from Dunedin, New Zealand. Working-class. Socialist.