The Freedom Shop Aotearoa

 On the 1st of May 2025, the Freedom Shop in Wellington turned 30! We began in upper Cuba Street in the NORML shop and since then have been in various places around the city: the Cake Shop, Oblong, sharing space at Rebel Press, and then for several years at the Opportunity for Animals - now we're in the front of Book Haven (next door to Opportunity for Animals). Come and check us out.   

There are a lot of new books in the shop at the moment, just arrived from PM Press and AK Press. There are old favourites including some Frantz Fanon, Silvia Federici along with ever popular The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free, Pangayaw and Decolonising Resistance: Anarchism in the Philippines as well as Anarcha-Feminists in the Philippines, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution and a couple of new books for us, Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual and Physical Resistance – a history of UK anti-fascist organising. There's also, as always, Tina Ngata's Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions on the shelf, plus Murdoch Stephens new book Visas Now! Aotearoa's Response to Global Refugee Emergencies. A lot of reading as we head into the colder weather.  

Like many, I get a daily chuckle out of the news story that keeps on giving – the school lunches disaster. This was supposed to be an easy win for the free-market coalition: an opportunity to showcase how much better National and Act are at financial management, how wasteful Labour was and generally how everyone wins when you let competition and the free market rule. Except they picked the wrong target group. School kids. Had this been about meals delivered to rest homes, we would have never heard about the problems. The residents would have complained to the staff, some staff may have complained to management and management may have written a strongly worded letter to the food company. But the rest of us would never know and the government could have claimed the money savings as a success. But kids are different, in particular teenagers, who are very good at two things: complaining about how tough they have it and posting things on social media, especially pictures of food. Amplified ...

The presence of Chinese warships in the Tasman Sea has been a great boost to cheerleaders for the new arms race. Globally and locally, there have been calls for increased military spending from the whole range of the commentariat spectrum, from academics to Donald Trump. The British Labour government just slashed its overseas aid budget in order to have money to buy more guns.    Locally we are being told to increase our defence spending to two percent of GDP. We are told we’ve ‘underinvested’ in defence, and that a response is needed to the worsening ‘security situation’.   Defence minister Judith Collins recently said we have to “make up for the 35 years of feeling that we’re living in this wonderful world where nothing bad could happen”.   Contrary to the minister’s suggestion that we’ve been sitting on our hands, in the last 35 years we have splurged on new military gear including, but not limited to, two ANZAC frigates, a new amphibious and mi...