spinofflive
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The asylum seekers had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents.  (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The asylum seekers had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

PoliticsJuly 16, 2019

What a horrified New Zealander can do about kids in cages

A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The asylum seekers had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents.  (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The asylum seekers had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Practical steps to take right now if you’re appalled at the news coming out of the United States.

This article was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated with current information.

From the far side of an ocean, we in Aotearoa are still watching, horrified, as human rights abuses unfold in real time on the United States-Mexico border. US president Donald Trump has ordered children to be taken from their asylum-seeking parents, held as hostages to get his ridiculous border wall built.


“New Zealand has always stood as a counterpoint to the politics of hate and division. We hold steady to our values and shout them from the rooftops when the rest of the world seems adrift. We speak to fairness and human rights, as we did on apartheid, as we stood against nuclear testing in the Pacific. Now is such a moment.”

– Golriz Ghahraman


This weekend vice president Mike Pence visited detained children and asked them – a bunch of little kids – if they were being well treated.

News flash: they’re not. Children have been made to sleep on concrete floors, share lice combs, and live without soap or toothpaste.

In Congress, representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Veronica Escobar, and Rashida Tlaib spoke of what they had witnessed in detention facilities, including blocked sinks so women had to drink from toilets.

Last year ProPublica shared a recording of children crying for their parents – children who are housed in what can only be described as cages inside an abandoned WalMart. On any given day 2000 children are in custody on the US-Mexico border, under a policy that punishes asylum seekers exercising their legal rights by stealing their children. A year later since the policy was first introduced, many of the children originally detained have still not been returned to their families, and children continue to be taken from their parents by border staff.

Whether you are poring over Twitter and the New York Times website, gaping at every new atrocity this corrupt and cruel administration embarks on, or consciously trying to avoid the excruciating sights and sounds of children abducted by the state – a state that is wholly unwilling to spend the money to look after them – it is hard not to feel helpless if you’re not a US citizen with an elected representative to phone daily.

But there’s actually a bunch of things you can do, even from here. We need not feel powerless. Here are some concrete actions you can take today to add your voice of outrage, and pledge what aid you can to these children who are being tortured by a despot who likes to think of himself as the ‘leader of the free world’.

Donate money to those who are helping directly

The most pressing need in Texas right now is legal help for the thousands of illegally imprisoned children and adults.

The leading civil rights organisation in the US, the ACLU, is taking legal action to protect asylum seekers. You can donate to them here.

RAICES is a Texas-based organisation that offers free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here.

CNBC has a more extensive list of organisations you can donate to who are working with people who have been arrested at border crossings.

Help your American friends and family to exert their influence

As we saw during the attacks on healthcare, one of the most effective things US citizens have done to thwart the Trump administration’s policies is lobby their elected representatives.

Encourage any US citizens you know, wherever they live, to call (phoning is most effective, apparently, in the US) their representatives daily. Here’s a step-by-step guide from the ACLU on who to call and what to focus on. You could share this link around your US friends and family, on social media, and by email to make it super easy for them. If you’re on Twitter, follow @Celeste_Pewter who shares calling scripts for US citizens who want to lobby their elected representatives.

Call on our government to protest

Winston Peters is in Washington DC right now. Call his office today, to urge him to act on behalf of these traumatised children.

Call his office on 04 817 8701, and leave a message with his staff, expressing your opinion. Keep it short and sweet, and make sure you say you are calling because he is Minister of Foreign Affairs. The message will be passed on. You can also email (though phoning is better): w.peters@ministers.govt.nz. He’s not active on Twitter, so don’t rely on that.

Protest to the US ambassador here in Aotearoa

To send a message directly to the US, join a protest. In early July people protested and slept on the street outside the US Embassy in Wellington in solidarity with the children with no beds in Texas. There will be more protests. You can join them.

You can also contact the US Ambassador, Scott Brown, directly on his Twitter and the Embassy Twitter.

Amnesty International New Zealand has a current petition available to sign online, which will be delivered to the Ambassador.

Add your voice to international human rights protests

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has told the US that the practice of separating families violates the children’s rights and international law and the UN Secretary-General has spoken out, too.

Put your hand up, as a citizen of the world, and lend your support to international organisations working to stop US human rights abuses. You can sign Amnesty International’s petition here.

Channel your outrage and energy closer to home

Australia is doing similarly illegal and cruel things in its treatment of asylum seekers. We can protest against this in all the same ways. On the other hand, they take in 20,000 refugees a year, far ahead of our 1500, even on a per capita basis.

Here’s another embarrassing fact: 86% of refugees are currently being hosted by developing nations. Pakistan alone has 1.5 million refugees. Thailand, not even a signatory to the UN Convention, has more than 700,000. The rich world is not even close to pulling its weight.

So how about today you do something to make Aotearoa a place where many more refugees are welcome:

  • Sign up with Red Cross to be a resettlement volunteer.
  • Donate good quality household gear to the Red Cross to help furnish a former refugee’s first home in Aotearoa.
  • Educate yourself on the facts of the refugee crisis. I’ve collected lots of information and links here.
  • Chat with a former refugee to help their conversational English come along. Be a friend in their new home. You can train as a tutor (60 hours training) here, or just contact your local volunteer hub, library, church, or community centre to see which community groups near you running conversational English gatherings you can just join in.
  • Write to MPs and Ministers to show your support for New Zealand taking more refugees. Sample templates and directions for contacting MPs are here.
  • Volunteer with RASNZ to support former refugees – maybe by mentoring a university student, befriending a young parent, or providing transport and practical help to someone getting used to a new country.

The news cycle is brutal these days. You’re not alone if you feel bombarded by the steady barrage of horrors we’re shown each day.

But we need not feel powerless. Turn off the news, follow some of these links, and join millions of other international citizens, each doing their bit.

Keep going!
alexb

PoliticsJuly 15, 2019

10 things you might have forgotten from John Banks’s back catalogue

alexb

With everything in politics moving so fast these days, it can be hard to remember characters from earlier seasons who get brought back for yet another run. So with John Banks considering another Auckland mayoralty run, what are some things you might have forgotten? 

Once upon a time, he was utterly ubiquitous. John Banks was on the cover of magazines, pounded out his message on the airwaves and seemingly got himself elected to whatever office he took a fancy to.

His latest foray into politics ended in scandal and disaster, and that is largely what has kept his name in the press since, too. But now John Banks is considering another tilt at the Auckland mayoralty, showing he’s not quite finished yet.

So, with so long between the start of his career and the present moment, what might have got lost in the mists of time? Here’s ten things you might have forgotten.

1. Almost really before he was ‘John Banks’ the character, as we know him now, he was an extremely long-serving MP in the Whangarei electorate. After four terms, he became minister of police, and later said that he deeply regretted not getting gun law changes through after the 1991 Aramoana massacre.

2. While running for mayor of the Super City, he uttered this immortal clanger on The Nation: “If we continue the bankrupt response of just paying young Polynesian, young Māori men in South Auckland, the dole to sit in front of TV, smoke marijuana, watch pornography and plan more drug offending and more burglaries, then we’re going to have them coming through our window regardless if we live in Epsom or anywhere else in the greater Auckland.” Yep, those actual words came out of the mouth of a politician, while on television.

3. He had some truly extraordinary memory lapses around donations made during his last mayoral campaign. Now, it has been back and forth before the courts, so we have to be careful about the wording of this, but suffice to say he had to resign from John Key’s ministry because of allegations of electoral fraud involving Kim Dotcom.

4. He was part of a bizarre and self-defeating takeover of the ACT party, when in 2011 he stood alongside Don Brash’s coup against Rodney Hide. As part of the plan, Banks then stood in Hide’s now vacant Epsom seat, which he won. Hilariously though, the ACT party vote collapsed, and avowed social conservative John Banks was left as the sole MP of the relatively liberal ACT party.

5. He once shared one of the most consequential cups of tea in New Zealand electoral history, with former PM John Key. It was meant to just be a nudge and wink to National voters in Epsom to cast their electorate vote for Banks, in a public place, with media meant to simply act as stenographers and relay that message to the voters. It backfired spectacularly, because a tape recording of their conversation was made, and Winston Peters made enough hay out of it to get his NZ First party back into parliament.

John Key and John Banks at the Urban Cafe. Photo: Hannah Peters/Getty Images

6. He shared mutual respect and friendship with perennial activist and shit-stirrer Penny Bright, despite the two being utterly implacable political foes. When Bright was on her deathbed last year, Banks was one of the people she asked to visit her. He did so, and described her as a sister, and a kindred spirit.

7. Banks has been part of a long and often not great tradition of politicians bouncing between elected office, and being talkback radio hosts. He inherited former PM Sir Robert Muldoon’s slot on Radio Pacific in the early 90s, and held onto it for about 15 years. While he was at the station, press releases insisted on calling him ‘Banksie’.

8. Some guy once threw a bucket of mud at him outside court. Incredibly, and despite the incident happening in 2014, it was apparently because of something he said as a talkback host back in 1997.

9. He grew up in dire poverty, and credits the experience for some of the views he holds today. Banks credits the “world class education” he got as the turning point of his life, and combined with a loving home environment (which he says he didn’t have) he says that is the best way out of poverty.

10. He had a son whom he refused to recognise as such, and the High Court had to rule that he was, in fact, the birth father. In an extraordinarily messy court case, it was also alleged by the mother that Banks had supplied and urged her to take abortion drugs, which she refused. Incidentally, and allowing for personal views to change, he was vehemently anti-abortion during his stint as a talkback host in the 90s.

But wait there's more!