Celebrating Suffrage
This dispatch fresh from the awesome crafty crew in Otautahi (Christchurch):
Do join us to celebrate Women’s Suffrage Day with an evening of craft at Manuka Cottage!
7pm onwards
Friday 19 September
Manuka Cottage (45 Dickens Street, Addington)Please B.Y.O stitching!
The evening will also feature a guest speaker sharing a woman’s perspective on Addington life.
A light supper will be provided.
All welcome!
Why not bring a friend or two!Please forward this message to others who may be interested.
I so wish I could go! And maybe someone there will be inspired to expand this page on the wiki.
Any other crafty suffrage events on?
Counting down til Suffrage Day
Anyone who’s been within air shot of me recently would have heard me going on about Suffragettes. I’ve been doing a ton of research into the Suffrage Movement in the context of creative resistance. And I’ve been reminding myself how militant the movement was. And it makes me wonder what fabulous ideas we’re missing out on hearing due to the fear based panic our world seems to be operating on. If the suffragettes were doing their campaign today, the majority of them would be locked up indefinitely as terrorists because they dared to question the state and how the state defines participation in democracy.
You wouldn’t think that exercising your opinion is a crime these days. But try telling that to the 400-odd people, including journalists, that got locked up during the Republican Convention. It is unbelievable that in the supposed land of the free, the government would spend US$50 Million on policing to prevent people from getting out and voicing their opinion. Most of the people arrested were on pre-emptive charges. So they hadn’t even committed a crime, the police just thought they might. And many people were arrested just for attending a concert. Brilliant. In the real world, we call that fascism.
So in the spirit of free speech and celebrating true heroes, let’s all take some time to remember all the freedom fighters in our history that dedicated their lives to ridding the world of injustice. And those who put their bodies on the line to demand equal rights and liberation for all on this lovely planet that we share.
Cat has taken a lead with the awesome pattern of American Suffragette Lucretia Mott at the top of this post. You can download the pattern here. Thanks Cat, legendary!
And if you’re in London, go see this.
International Day of Solidarity
Solidarity in the Kulin Nations
FED SQUARE, 2pm
Melbourne
Global Day of Action Saturday 30th August 2008
We demand the unconditional freedom of the people who are facing charges as a result of the state terror raids on 15 October 2007.
Attempts by the Police to lay charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act (TSA) failed but people are still facing politically motivated charges under the Arms Act. These charges are the result of a racist operation.
Police used the Terrorism Suppression Act and over $8 million to harass and punish political activists who they saw as supporting Tino Rangatiratanga.
The Police have arrested a few people but we’re all targeted. The arrests of 15 October are aimed at intimidating and frightening all of our communities and cannot be tolerated.
We therefore call on everyone to stand up against this attack on our communities. We support the global day of action on 30 August 2008 and are mobilising to demand the unconditional freedom of the people facing charges as a result of the state terror raids.
Brought to you by LASNET & In solidarity with Oaxaca Political prisoners
For more info on the Global Day of Action, check the Indymedia Feature.
You can also support the arrestees by buying a hand printed copy of the poster form the Garage Collective, pictured at the beginning of this post. Details here.
Vote Global Vote Green
One of the things that bugs me about not having very much time is that I don’t get to write very much about environmental issues. So I made a video instead!
We’re trying our best to contact each one of the 450,000 New Zealanders living in Australia (and other parts of the world) to let them know about the upcoming election. You can help by sending this video to any expats you know. Make sure you remind them to sort out their enrolment ASAP www.elections.org.nz
A big thanks to Cam for editing this video up for me, and a big chur to frey for the lovely soundtrack!
Flax Roots
The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand are launching their Australian campaign for the upcoming general election in Melbourne on Tuesday. You should totally come. There’s gonna be dub, yummy food and crafty door prizes. Need I say more?
Nice poster eh? It was made by our cool friends at the Groundswell Collective.
A Fishy Tail
Frog blog has this cool creative competition up to win a copy of “The Last Fish Tale – the fate of the Atlantic and our disappearing fisheries” by Mark Kurlansky.
I thought, ‘yeah I can draw a fish!’ but it turns out I’m quite crap at drawing. I am pretty good at designing cross stitch patterns though so I decided to do one of them instead. So my pattern looks like this:
And I decided that I’d use this pattern to raise funds. So I’m voiding myself from the competition but hopefully you’ll enter instead! (and lend it to me if you win 
)
I have the epattern up for sale in my Etsy store. It comes with all the colour codes to make this Rooster Fish come to life, and full instructions on how to cross stitch. But I’ll also give a free copy of this pattern and one other from my store to anyone who joins the Green Party and sends me a verification of this (which I will double check so don’t try fakin it).
Authorised by Michael Pringle, 2A Zanda Terrance, Wellington.
Hug A Tagger
On the 28th of January 2008 Bruce William Emery was remanded in custody after appearing in a south Auckland court charged with the murder of a teenage boy. The 50 year old business men allegedly stabbed 15-year-old Pihema Clifford because he caught him about to tag his fence.
You’d expect an outpouring of indignant outrage that someone could take the life of a young man over something so minor as small scale property damage. Maybe a public reaction similar to the virtual lynching of Junior Bailey Kurariki? No instead this man received generous helpings of media and public sympathy.
Sympathy for taking a life?
A few months down the track, The Wellingotn Police have jumped on the ‘tagging is the root of all evil’ bandwagon. They have decided to add a layer to the standard clean up duty punishment handed out to taggers. Now when a young kid gets caught scrawling his name on something he will be doing clean up in a bright pink jacket with TAGGER written on it.
Yes, the comparisons have already been made to Nazi Germany and the pink triangles homosexual people were forced to wear. And when the Police representative says “It was no reflection on anyone’s sexuality, it’s a loud colour,” I say ‘bullshit.”
Of course they chose pink because it brings along the homophobic peer pressure shame associations that all boys growing up know extremely well. If the Police claim that they didn’t think that was the first issue that would be raised, then they really are thicker than we already thought.
One of the biggest issues that young men deal with in New Zealand is bullying and the pressure to conform to a very white, sporty, straight, blokey, drinking culture. Sadly, too many of our young men don’t find ways of dealing with this pressure and this is one of the major contributors to our shameful teenage suicide rate.
The whole issue of tagging is symptomatic of a wider issue faced by all young people in New Zealand and that is a complete refusal by older generations to attempt to see the world from their perspective.
Wanna know why kids tag? ‘Cause they’re bored.
Wanna stop them from doing it? Give them something better to do.
It’s not fucking rocket science.
Everywhere on the planet where councils, communities, governments or whatever support street-based graffiti art programs see reductions in ‘illegal’ graffiti. EVERYWHERE. And they don’t cost very much. Certainly not as much as the price of housing a convicted murderer for a year…
And the benefits can be enormous. If you get some experienced graffiti artists with a bunch of kids, a pile of spraycans and a sanctioned space, the kids not only learn some decent skills and some basic behaviour codes. But they get to experience making a positive contribution to their community, learn new skills and all the other positive flow on effects of working in a group on a collective task.
Of course, we know it can also lead on to bigger and brighter things. People are now selling property at premium prices because it has Banksy art on it. Obviously the extreme example, but there’s a huge amount of people making a decent income from street art both commercially and as gallery artists.
I have so had enough of this issue. I think it’s time we start speaking out against this ‘community opinion’ that thinks tagging is such a hideous crime it is comparable with rape. Tagging is only a minor misdemenor and the biggest crime, in my opinion, is a lack of artistic skill.
I have spraypaint on the wall out the front of my house and sure it bothers me. But not as much as the fact that only 15% of women feel confident enough in the Police force to report a rape.
As a way of speaking out on this issue, I decided to cross stitch it.
And if you want to make one like this here’s the pattern for the text. Be as creative as you can.
Love and rage
xox
Green Jeans
No not those tragic coloured jeans we got to experience in the early 90s. I had a purple pair! Lord please don’t let these come back into fashion..
No I mean putting jeans to a green use. Another Limited Rebellion has a story about how an organisation called Access Cotton is collecting those old jeans that simply can’t be fixed any more and turning them into insulation for homes in needy communities.
In 2006 they collected over 14 thousand pairs of jeans which is enough to insulate about 28 homes. They have been working with Habitat for Humanity and have been focussing on the rebuilding project in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina.
This is such a fantastic idea. Not only is it a brilliant use of a waste product. Especially since fabric is one of the least recycled materials in our society and also one of the most energy intensive to produce. But also because insulation is such a sound investment.
While I’m on the topic of insulation. A huge well done to the Greens and Labour in NZ for the announcement of the new state housing retrofitting scheme.
A whopping $53.4 million will be spent over the next 5 years renovating the public housing stock to make the houses drier, warmer and more energy efficient. As well as insulating 21,000 homes they will also spend money on draft-proofing windows and doors, wraps for hot water cylinders, efficient shower heads, lagging of pipes and, if appropriate, new energy efficient home heating.
This is absolutely brilliant news for public housing tenants. Not only will it improve their health and well being but it will also make a hugely positive effect on their utility bills. The Greens have estimated that the country will recover this investment four-fold over the next twenty years in energy and health savings.
Chur.
Make Tea Not War
Check out this cool action from the Revolutionary Craft Womyn of Addington in solidarity of the ANZAC Ploughshares who gained access and casued serious damage to the Waihopai Spy Base in New Zealand. Waihopai is a key component of the global US spy system known as Echelon.
Here’s the report from Aotearoa Indymedia:
We all had a wonderful time, drinking cups of tea, holding banners, and giving biscuits and short lectures on NZ-US warlinks to friendly tourists. Green MP Nandor Tanczos joined us for a cuppa briefly, who was randomly cycling past.
We got far more mainstream media attention than expected, guess the quirkiness of our action and topical nature of issue got them interested. This reflects how effective the ploughshares action was in bringing this issue up for public debate. Hopefully our attempt to bring US military base at Harewood into mix had some effect too.We signed three cards for Sam, Adrian and Peter to express our heartfelt appreciation for their inspirational non-violent direct action,
Much love,
from one of the revolutionary craft womyn of Addington
And they managed to get some mainstream press coverage
An obsessive cross-stitcher, an expert crocheter and a quilting guru talked politics over cups of tea yesterday morning.
I reckon ten bonus points for getting nana-core into the article!
And of course my absolute maddest respect to Sam, Adi and Peter for their awesome courage in this action. Not only have they brought attention to the blatant hypocrisy of the New Zealand Government for not being a part of the invasion of Iraq, yet actively being a part of the intelligence gathering to fight this senseless war. They also succeeded in directly acting to stop the functionality of the facility. It was only a day and only a million dollars in damage which is a drop in the military industrial complex ocean. But the symbolism of their action was priceless.
Kia kaha crew, rage and solidarity.
xox
Green it.
So I hope you’ve all seen the new look Greens website. I think it looks really good and it will be fantastic for election year for people coming to the site for the first time. It’s really easy to find what you’re looking for. Well done to the team that sorted that out!
We’ve also been chugging away with some Facebook stuff and we now have a page up for people to become supporters of the Greens. It’s a great way to be kept up to date with major campaign news. Although it’s best to also sign up through the main site so you can get info about events specific to your area.
Because of course in Aotearoa this year there will be an election! Not sure when yet, some time in November probably. So make sure you’re enrolled to vote. Especially those of us living in other lands. If you are a kiwi overseas you can vote in the election provided you have been home in the last 3 years (and meet all the other normal criteria). Check your details and update your enrolment here!
Finally check the new vid the team have made. It’s worth sending on!