Kia ora koutou, My name is Grant Brookes. I am a Mental Health Nurse here at Wellington Regional Hospital Ngā Puna Wai Ora, and I’m an NZNO delegate. At our last strike in July, we had NZNO President Anne Daniels speaking to us. She is in Ōtepoti Dunedin today, supporting the picket line down there, so I’ve been asked to speak. I’ve got notes that have been sent through containing some of what she wanted say. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐚𝐦 𝐈 𝐨𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲? I’m on strike today because I care about staffing and patient safety. I love my job as a Te Whatu Ora nurse, but understaffing prevents me doing the job I love. I started work at Wellington Hospital in 2002. I’ve seen many changes over the years – and recently, changes for the worse. The understaffing in 2025 is so critical that I am unable to do the most important part of my job – talking with people, hearing them in their distress and supporting them through it. I work in mental health. What does today’s understaffing look like in our area? Through my role as an NZNO delegate, I have access to Te Whatu Ora’s real-time data on understaffing in the Mental Health, Addictions and Intellectual Disabilities Service. Across MHAIDS last month, 12.7% of all hours worked were overtime. That means that on average, one staff member in 8 on any given shift is working overtime. And even with an average of one or two staff members on each shift working a 16 hour day, in August our Directorate experienced Critical Care or Significant Care deficits on day shifts fully one third of the time, according to Te Whatu Ora’s own figures. This care deficit means stressed and burnt out staff. But what does it mean for our tāngata whaiora, our patients? As our ED colleagues can confirm, it means that our tāngata whaiora can sit in the Emergency Department for days on end waiting to be admitted – surrounded by patients in states of distress, or behaving in a way that causes distress to others. It can mean our tāngata whaiora waiting months – or even years – for specialist mental health rehabilitation. Or it can simply mean that they get turned away from accessing mental health services altogether, because there aren’t the resources to provide care. The impact is greatest of all for our Māori and Pacific peoples. We see the evidence of the growing number of people turned away daily on our city’s streets. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐰𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭?
It was fabulous to have the support of other unions and both the outgoing NZCTU President Richard Wagstaff and President-elect Sandra Grey on our picket line.
More than 36,000 Te Whatu Ora nurses, midwives, health care assistants and kaimahi hauora voted for this further strike action after Te Whatu Ora failed to resolve ongoing concerns about understaffing like these. We voted – and I voted – strongly to go on strike on two days from 7am to 11pm on Tuesday 2 September and Thursday 4 September. NZNO members are clear that we want to keep fighting for the safety of our patients and to reduce preventable patient deaths. We have had enough of our patients waiting for care – or missing out entirely – because we’re too busy to get to them. We became healthcare workers because we want to help people and give them the care they need. Not risk their suffering due to a lack of staff. Patients are at risk because the Coalition Government is choosing cost cutting over patient need. We don’t get paid for striking but we do it for the sake of our patients. Te Whatu Ora needs to do more to retain our nursing workforce, employ graduate nurses and ensure patients get the care they need. There were 30,000 New Zealanders who moved to Australia in the past year. We all know some of our nursing colleagues who burnt out and moved there for better conditions and wages. We need more Māori and Pacific nurses so there are culturally appropriate ratios that ensure the right nurses are caring for the right patients at the right time. Despite Te Whatu Ora’s and the Government’s denials, Aotearoa desperately needs more nurses, midwives, health care assistants and kaimahi hauora. Better pay and conditions would make nursing more attractive and help keep the nurses we have. To fix understaffing and ensure patient safety we’re calling for the following: 1. We need mandatory, culturally-safe staff-to-patient ratios. 2. We need Te Whatu Ora to recommit to CCDM for safe staffing. 3. We need the full employment of new graduates. We’re here to fix the health system and we won’t stop. It’s going to require a long-term effort from NZNO members to win the safe staffing that we and our patients need, and today is just the start. So let’s finish with a chant. – When patient safety is under attack – stand up, fight back – When nurses rights are under attack – stand up, fight back – When health care assistants are under attack – stand up, fight back – Health workers, united, will never be defeated!
Confronted today with dismal Right Wing governments at home and overseas, it’s easy to feel powerless. But mass popular movements can beat back governments – especially when these are backed up by active support from workers and unions. In fact, we’ve beaten the government in Aotearoa many times before. Sometimes we scored quick victories. Other times, the success of a mass movement only became apparent years later.
The history of successful mass struggles is usually covered up or, if it’s too big to hide, the history gets rewritten to make it seem like the success was due to some beneficent politician or state institution. With the amazing Hīkoi Mō Te Tiriti and Palestine solidarity protests still resonating across the motu, here are a few past examples to show what we can achieve.
#Landback
The colonisation of Aotearoa caused the alienation of 95 percent of Māori land. Treaty settlements have resulted in the return of land, although the amount of land returned and compensation paid is a pittance. Historian Vincent O’Malley calculated in 2018 that, “Treaty settlements typically return 1 to 2 percent of what was lost”. What is less widely known is that the return of land through the Waitangi Tribunal started because of mass mobilisations and industrial action by trade unionists.
The Waitangi Tribunal was established in 1975, as a result of pressure from a rising protest movement which culminated in the 1975 Land March. For its first ten years, it couldn’t examine breaches of Te Tiriti which occurred before that date, rendering the Tribunal largely useless.
On 5 January 1977 Māori from the hapū Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, supported by communists and other activists, began an occupation at Takaparawhau Bastion Point. This last remaining block of Māori land in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland had been confiscated by the government in stages from the late 1850s until World War Two. In 1976, the National government under prime minister Robert Muldoon announced plans to sell it off for an up-market housing development. Māori demanded its return.
For 506 days, the occupiers resisted eviction. The Auckland Trades Council, the city’s union leadership, declared a “green ban” on the site, so that no union member would be allowed to build Muldoon’s mansions. On 25 May 1978, Muldoon ordered the New Zealand Army, backed by Air Force helicopters, to invade Takaparawhau and attack the people. The operation was later described as “the largest peacetime force of police and army in recent history” by Māori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples. But the green ban remained, and the mansions didn’t get built.
The land sat vacant until a law change in 1985 enabled the Waitangi Tribunal to investigate historical breaches of Te Tiriti. In 1987 the Tribunal recommended the return of Takaparawhau to Ngāti Whātua. The government, even after deploying military force, accepted that it was beaten. A decade on from the occupation, mass struggle backed by industrial action forced the return of the first block of Māori land under the Treaty settlements process.
Aotearoa’s nuclear free foreign policy has become part of this country’s national mythology. This mythology contains elements of truth, overlaid with ruling class ideology. Clips of Labour Prime Minister David Lange at the 1985 Oxford Union debate regularly resurface in the media. His famous quip that he could “smell the uranium on the breath” of a heckler made him look like an anti-nuclear champion. It reinforces the commonly-held view that he was the one who led Aotearoa out of the ANZUS nuclear alliance with the United States. In reality, Lange fought against the people who made Aotearoa nuclear-free.
The first nuclear warship to be welcomed to our waters was the USS Halibut, invited by Labour Prime Minister Walter Nash in 1960. Three more followed in 1964. When visits resumed after a hiatus in 1976, they were met with mass protests. As the USS Truxtun sailed into Wellington harbour on 27 August that year, waterfront workers launched a strike which lasted for the six day duration of its visit. No cargo moved. No inter-island ferries sailed. The Truxtun was unable to berth and had to anchor off shore.
Other Wellington workers also took strike action in protest, including the cleaners at the US embassy. The USS Long Beach got the same reception when it visited Auckland two months later.
Demonstrations grew in size with each visit. On Hiroshima Day 1983, as the USS Texas lay berthed in Auckland, 50,000 people took to the streets in protest. The mass movement shifted public opinion. In 1979, polls showed 61 percent of people willing to allow visits by nuclear armed warships. By 1984, 57 percent were opposed.
Propelled by the mass movement, delegates to the 1983 Labour Party Conference voted for a policy that: “The next Labour Government… will continue to oppose visits to New Zealand by nuclear powered and/or armed vessels and aircraft.” As Lange later admitted in his book, Nuclear Free – The New Zealand Way, he fought against it. “I argued against withdrawal from the alliance at party conferences and delegates hissed in ritual disapproval.” Elected as Prime Minister the following year, he defied his own party and told US secretary of state George Schulz, “nuclear-powered vessels which were proved safe and were not carrying nuclear weapons would be allowed to visit”. According to US ambassador H. Monroe Browne, Lange asked him to wait six months for the public to “cool off” and then restart the ship visits.
It was only the strength of the anti-nuclear mass movement, when the news broke of a planned warship visit in 1985, which forced Lange’s hand, defeated US imperialism and ended Aotearoa’s participation in the ANZUS nuclear military alliance.
It’s not widely remembered these days, but it used to be compulsory for young people in Aotearoa to join the military. All males had to register on their 19th birthday with the Department of Labour, and if your name was drawn in a ballot, off to the army you went. The campaign of civil disobedience to end conscription is one of the most spectacularly successful people-powered movements in this country’s history – scoring complete victory in little over a year.
The campaign began in Pōneke on 22 February 1972, at a small meeting of students in the Victoria University Students Association building. They settled on a name, Organisation to Halt Military Service or OHMS, being a pun on the unit of electrical resistance (ohms) and the stamp on official government postal envelopes at the time, On Her Majesty’s Service.
National chair of OHMS, Robert Reid, recently recalled that “it was no use being an individual martyr for the cause and it was necessary to build a nationwide movement of 19 year olds refusing to register for military service, even if this lead to huge fines, which if unpaid would lead to prison sentences”.
The main strategy was one of non-compliance. Many young men, on reaching the age of 19, broke the law by refusing to register for military service. For this, OHMS co-founder Geoff Woolford, a first year teacher at Taita College, was sent to prison.
As the campaign continued, other young men who had already been forced into training deserted military camps to join the new group of resistors. As OHMS grew, it forged links with Māori activist groups like Ngā Tamatoa. A 19-year old Tame Iti was one who refused to register.
OHMS found imaginative ways to resist. They found that filling in false compulsory military training registration forms, giving names like Micky Mouse or Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, completely disrupted the system. The campaign also included hoax bomb threats, setting off fire alarms and smoke bombs to disrupt the conscription ballot at the Labour Department head office.
The law requiring compulsory military service was repealed in 1973. Although OHMS claimed the victory, veterans of the anti-conscription campaign are quick to acknowledge that the power to win came from the mass protests against New Zealand’s involvement in the US war of aggression in Vietnam. These peaked with huge nationwide demonstrations on 30 April 1971, backed by the trade unions, which drew 35,000 people onto the streets.
David Seymour’s ambition to privatise our public health system isn’t the first time that a Right Wing government has tried it. When National was elected in 1990, it set about transferring ownership of our hospitals to companies called Crown Health Enterprises. In 1992, the Government started charging all public hospital patients and moved to break the power of unions in the health sector. Labour Party leader Michael Moore said, “the introduction of user part-charges marked the second stage of the Government plan to privatise health.” Maurice Williamson, the associate Minister of Health, publicly refused to rule out privatising public hospitals after the 1993 election.
The government’s plans were met with a mass revolt. The Coalition for Public Health brought together a vast array of opponents including the country’s biggest trade unions, the Public Service Association and Engineers Union, medical workers organisations, nurses’ unions, and many community and religious organisations that spanned from the National Council of Women to the Anglican Church.
Protests took place outside hospitals from Whangarei to Timaru in 1992 to mark the last day of free hospital care. Wellington Hospital nurses defied orders from their managers to issue invoices to patients, and all the unions on site resolved to “support any staff disciplined for refusing to invoice patients or collect money.” The Service Workers’ Union, one of the largest in the country, urged their members to boycott the hospital charges, and offered legal support to boycotters if they needed it. Hospital staff from laboratory workers to cleaners and nurses went on strike. Doctors took strike action for the first time.
By April 1993, the number of New Zealanders with unpaid hospital bills had swollen to more than 20,000. Prime minister Jim Bolger sacked the Health Minister, and his replacement announced that charges for hospital stays would be scrapped – although outpatients would still have to pay for hospital appointments. The boycott continued.
By 1997 there was a non-payment level of at least 25 percent and 50,000 boycotters were being pursued by debt collectors. The last plank of the privatisation plan had to be abandoned. Once again, a people-powered mass movement had beaten the government.
EDUCATED HEALTH professionals are aware of the statistics – 735 healthcare workers killed in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the World Health Organisation, with a further 919 injured in Israeli attacks and 129 healthcare workers detained.
There are now over 120,000 fatalities and injuries – a majority of whom are women and children – in what the ICJ says are plausible acts of genocide. The WHO has also documented over a million cases of communicable diseases in Gaza since October.
Why are New Zealand’s medical colleges silent?
Of the 18 professional bodies belonging to the Council of Medical Colleges, 17 have made no public statement on the Gaza genocide, despite appeals from their own members. Specialist associations have been similarly silent. The contrast with the Russian invasion of Ukraine could not be starker.
Individual doctors who speak up face disciplinary proceedings. For the first seven months of war, the NZ Women in Medicine Facebook group banned all mention of Gaza – going as far as removing posts simply marking Ramadan.
Other health professional bodies have spoken out – Nurses, Midwives, Social Workers, Dieticians and other Allied Health groups. Māori health professional bodies have been vocal.
But all medical professionals have both moral and ethical obligations to advocate for the right to health in every instance where it does not exist, and for every human being it does not exist for.
The ongoing silence of our medical colleges is a stain on our profession. To restore our moral standing, we must speak up for our colleagues, for women and for the right to health for all in Gaza.
Besan’s story
THIRD YEAR medical student Besan Helassa posted about her hopes and fears on X last October. “I have dreams I have not yet fulfilled,” wrote the Palestinian trainee doctor. “I have a life that I have not fully lived. I have a family that I love and fear for.
“If we are all exterminated by this barbaric occupation, our crime is simply that one day we defended our land that was stolen from us and demanded our basic rights as human beings. We will not forgive the whole world.”
Besan died in an Israeli missile strike on her home on 14 October 2023. She was 19 years old.
Sign the open letter to medical bodies
A month ago, Aotearoa Healthcare Workers for Palestine wrote to the medical colleges and professional associations, calling on them to break the silence.
AHW4P was formed in November 2023, around an open letter to the New Zealand Government. Signed by over 1,500 people, it demanded an immediate ceasefire and for all parties to uphold international humanitarian law.
AHW4P has a 14-member interim committee – made up of Doctors, Nurses, Health Care Assistants and Allied Health professionals from Tāmaki Makaurau down to Ōtautahi.
Our Chairperson is Dr Ruba Harfeil, a Palestinian GP in the Waikato.
Our mission statement acknowledges that the colonial violence in Aotearoa and Palestine is connected. We are holding our inaugural AGM in July. Apply to join at facebook.com/groups/ahw4p or email ahw4p2023@gmail.com.
On 11 October, the fifth day of the war on Gaza, emergency services at Al Shifa Hospital received a call from a nearby neighbourhood. The assault by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) had caused mass casualties in the vicinity of the Karni Crossing.
Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances had to wait to receive clearance from Israel. The green light came, and paramedic Hatem Awad raced to respond. Before he could arrive at the scene, his ambulance was targeted and hit by an air strike. Hatem was the fourth paramedic killed by the IOF that day. After nearly six months of war, 410 Israeli attacks on healthcare have resulted in 685 fatalities and 902 injuries and damaged 99 facilities and 104 ambulances, the World Health Organisation reported on 19 March. But these aren’t just numbers. They are people, like Hatem.
Hatem Awad stands beside his ambulance
Coupled with the blockade of medical supplies, fuel for hospital generators, food and water, Israel has engineered the total collapse of a healthcare system serving more than two million people.
Aotearoa Healthcare Workers for Palestine (AHW4P) was formed a month after the outbreak of the war on Gaza, in response to this pending catastrophe and war crime. We came together around an open letter calling on the New Zealand Government to demand an immediate ceasefire and for all parties to uphold international humanitarian law.
The letter quickly garnered more than 1,500 signatures from healthcare workers and was presented at Parliament on 21 November. We established a 14-member interim committee – made up of doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants and allied health professionals from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the north down to Ōtautahi Christchurch in the south – headed by Dr Ruba Harfeil, a Palestinian doctor now practising as a GP in rural Waikato. We agreed a mission statement acknowledging that the colonial violence in Aotearoa and Palestine is connected. We created a closed Facebook group for organising and a public Instagram account.
Over the succeeding weeks and months, we have organised and participated in many solidarity actions within the health sector and in the wider Palestine solidarity movement.
International links to similar groups overseas led us from the outset to participate in Friday vigils by healthcare workers worldwide, inspired by a vigil in London in November which captured global media attention.
A Friday vigil at Ngā Puna Waiora Wellington Regional Hospital
We also participate as a contingent in the many rallies and marches which have been taking place across Aotearoa, highlighting the impact of Israel’s war on the health of the Palestinian population, and issue media releases.
An AHW4P contingent march in Tāmaki Makaurau
On International Working Women’s Day, we organised a powerful vigil outside the Israeli Embassy.
We have been less successful in our lobbying of medical professional bodies which, with the exception of Te Ohu Rata o Aotearoa Māori Medical Practitioners, have rejected our calls and remained silent in the face of genocide. Despite this, we persist. This month we surveyed the candidates standing for election to the Medical Council of New Zealand. We are in talks with the New Zealand Women in Medicine conference organising committee and are in the process of writing to all of the medical colleges and specialist associations.
Our work continues to achieve a just and peaceful future for Gaza healthcare workers like Hatem Awad and for all Palestinian people. We invite any healthcare worker in Aotearoa who supports our mission to join us.
• Reposted from iso.org.nz. Thanks to the International Socialist Organisation for accepting publication of this article.
Ngā mihi ki a Noah mō te karakia tīmataka, ki a Unions Wellington hoki mō tēnei hui.
Ko wai ahau?
Ko Kapukataumahaka te mauka. Ko Ōwheo te awa. Ko Cornwall te waka. Ko Tangata Tiriti te iwi. Ko Grant Brookes tōku ikoa.
My name is Grant Brookes. I am a descendant of Scottish settlers who arrived in Ōtepoti Dunedin in 1849, aboard the ship Cornwall. I speak to you today as the Chair of the Greater Wellington Regional Council of my union, Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa NZNO, and as a nurse. I am able to talk for 10 to 15 minutes on where our union’s Regional Council and the wider nursing profession stand on peace and war today.
But I must first to acknowledge the mana whenua of this Region, Te Upoko o te Ika a Māui. The colonisation of this region in the 1840s occurred not only through an invalid deed of purchase by the New Zealand Company and other measures which had no basis in Māori or English law. On 27 February 1846, just across the harbour in Te Awa Kairangi, colonial troops burned down a pa, church and urupa and seized lands of Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Rangatahi through military force, sparking a war of conquest which soon extended to Ngāti Toa lands around Pāuatahanui in Porirua.
Although the war was short, true peace requires justice and the wait for justice has been long. It took 163 years for a measure of justice to be delivered, when the Crown finally acknowledged these and other breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in our region. In an extraordinary act of peace on the part of Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika, the settlement for these and breaches included a Statement of Forgiveness by mana whenua, which begins with the karakia:
Korōria ki te Atua i runga rawa. He maungārongo ki runga i te whenua. He whakaaro pai ki ngā tāngata katoa.
Glory to God on high. Good tidings upon the land. Good thoughts to all mankind.
The indispensable need for peace, as a precondition for health, has been brought home to me as a Mental Health Nurse over the course of my career. I have seen more than enough of the effects of war on people. I have cared for refugee survivors from wars in the Middle East, Africa and the former Yugoslavia – people who cannot forget what they have seen, what they have lost, or what they have done. Experiences in caring for the survivors of war is part of nursing everywhere.
My union was born just before the outbreak of World War I. It experienced a baptism of fire. We still remember, through annual hardship grants for nurses, the 10 members of NZNO who lost their lives when the transport ship Marquette was torpedoed on 23 October 1915.
In finding common cause with nurses around the world, NZNO joined the International Council of Nurses (ICN) more than a century ago. Representing the global voice of the profession, ICN issued a Position Statement in 2012 on “Armed conflict: nursing’s perspective”, which begins:
“[ICN] strongly opposes armed conflict and believes negotiation, mediation, and other peaceful conflict resolution and diplomatic solutions should be sought to avoid it. ICN’s particular concern focuses on the potential impact armed conflict has for affected civilians, refugees and internally displaced persons and combatants including direct and indirect impact on health and development and violation of basic human rights… Deliberate attacks on health care facilities and personnel and on patients and medical vehicles is a violation of international law.”
The NZNO Greater Wellington Regional Council wholeheartedly supports this ICN Position Statement, and the related stands taken by our union. In 2016, NZNO joined with the New Zealand Medical Association to call for a ceasefire in Syria, following a wave of attacks by government forces on health personnel and civilians. Two years ago, NZNO condemned the illegal invasion of Ukraine and the military attacks on its people and joined the ICN #NursesForPeace campaign. And in 2018 we condemned the targeted killing of a 21 year old Palestinian nurse, Razan al-Najar, shot dead by Israeli snipers while providing first aid to peaceful protesters in Gaza.
This brings us to today. In addition to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the world is now witnessing Israel’s horrific war on the Palestinian people, which according to the International Court of Justice includes plausible acts of genocide. And rising military tensions in the Pacific are a bringing a possible war between the United States and China ever closer.
Backed by the NZNO Board, our union has been speaking out against attacks on Palestinian civilians and health workers since the horrific bombing of al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza last October. Our statement on 17 November made it clear that in this conflict our union stands with the health workers, civilians and people aspiring for freedom from colonisation. More than words, NZNO has also emailed its 60,000 members, inviting them to take part in peaceful protests calling for an immediate ceasefire.
I am proud that the first NZNO member group to take a stand for peace and justice in Gaza was from our Region. At the start of November, a joint meeting of NZNO delegates from Te Whatu Ora Capital Coast Hutt Valley voted to formally endorse a letter to caretaker Prime Minister Chris Hipkins from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi, on the urgent action required to end attacks on civilians in Gaza.
Also in November our Kaiwhakahaere, Kerri Nuku, wrote a blog which I would like to read out in full:
At a recent conference speakers talked about the waves of pandemics not isolated to viruses, communicable or non-communicable diseases. They also talked about the pandemics of economic disadvantage, declining social and labour markets; pandemics of hate and war for control and resources. All of these are underlined by power and greed, with the highly calculated weaponisation of racism, xenophobia and bigotry to divide people and concentrate more power and wealth in the hands of the few.
We see this on full display in Palestine where one of the largest military powers in the world, backed by the US, is committing alleged ethnic cleansing and displacing millions of indigenous people living in what the UN has described as the world’s largest open-air prison. And why is Israel doing this? If the ‘war’ is really about
why is Israel doing this? If the ‘war’ is really about driving out Hamas, then why displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians? This is and always was about claiming more land and resources.
As the genocide in Palestine continues to escalate, my thoughts are with the thousands who have been slaughtered, and the hundreds of thousands displaced in the last month. It would be difficult for many of us to appreciate the indescribably harrowing and traumatic experience of those people, and especially of the Palestinian health workers dealing with mass death and injury under siege.
It’s sickening to see the violent invasion of al-Shifa Hospital where more than 3000 doctors, nurses and civilians have been sheltering. Seeing these images, it’s clear to me that there’s no symmetry of power, and it reminds me of the events of our own history in Aotearoa.
I think of the violent displacement of our people by the British so that settlers could have more land and resources. I think of Parihaka, where 1600 British soldiers arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters trying to protect their own whenua from unlawful occupation. I think of the purposeful erosion of our legal, political, cultural and economic institutions over the past 250 years, and the violence that our resistance is met with
I might add, this includes the displacement and violence inflicted on mana whenua here in Te Upoko o te Ika a Māui. Kerri Nuku continues:
I see the similarities between our fight for tino rangatiratanga and mana Motuhake, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
There’s a growing call globally for a ceasefire and an enduring solution that recognises the Palestinian state. There are also calls for Israel to be held accountable for war crimes. Among those countries calling for justice, it should be noted, is South Africa who intimately understands the injustice from their own history of apartheid.
Palestinians often say: “justice is the seed, peace is the flower”. We know that those in power will play on our fears and make us believe that justice is impossible and peace unreachable. But as unionists and health workers, we know that those in power rarely have the people’s best interests at heart. So, we must critically analyse their motives and interests, and listen to the dreams of the Palestinian people. When we do, it is clear to see that with global solidarity, justice is possible, and so too is peace.
And as we continue to work for peace and justice in Palestine, the NZNO Greater Wellington Regional Council is also concerned about the increasing militarisation of the Pacific. This includes threats to peace for the people of Taiwan, and for our sisters and brothers in the independent Taiwan Nurses Association and the Taiwan Nurses Union. It also includes the threat of nuclear proliferation through the AUKUS military alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. On this issue, we are again guided by positions adopted by the International Council of Nurses and by our union.
In another Position Statement, titled “Towards elimination of weapons of war and conflict”, ICN “calls on national nurses associations to support international efforts towards the elimination of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and land mines and the indiscriminate use of firearms.” They further call on member organisations, including NZNO, to lobby national governments to stop the distribution of such weapons and to join groups working to eliminate them.
Under the terms of the AUKUS military alliance, Australia plans to spend up to $368 billion to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from the United States. Unlike some other countries, the United States operates its naval reactors using nuclear-weapons-usable highly enriched uranium fuel.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, scholar Sébastien Philippe criticised AUKUS and said, “we can now expect the proliferation of very sensitive military nuclear technology in the coming years, with literally tons of new nuclear materials under loose or no international safeguards.”
Today the New Zealand Government is taking steps towards joining Pillar 2 of the AUKUS partnership. Pillar 2 excludes nuclear technology, but includes other offensive capabilities such as accelerated development of hypersonic missiles. Supporting AUKUS goes against international efforts towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. Our Regional Council strongly supports the decision by the NZNO Board at its December meeting to “stand against NZ joining or otherwise participating in the AUKUS Military Alliance.”
I will end this kōrero as I began, by acknowledging the mana whenua of our region. Almost two years ago to the day, the leaders of Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika and Ngā Iwi o Taranaki – with the tautoko of the Kiingitanga – laid down Te Kahu o Te Raukura, a cloak of aroha and peace over the Parliament grounds and surrounding ancestral sites.
Te Raukura contains the three feathers representing honour, peace, and goodwill – the same symbol used at Parihaka. The NZNO Greater Regional Council respects these values and in accordance with our union’s leadership and the democratic will of our members, we will work with honour and goodwill for peace.
Grant Brookes | Nurse & Trade Unionist 