Unity is a blog that promotes itself as "The official blog of Socialist Worker (Aotearoa / New Zealand)." Generally sites with "official' labels can so often come across as rigidly editorial. This is not the case with Unity. As well as being a window into the New Zealand political experience, Unity aggregates the sort of fresh thinking and new initiatives that have marked New Zealand far left politics. Throughout the nineties a succession of electoral formations were trialed in the country in response to the rightward surge of the NZ Labor Party. In terms of consecutive order it was New Zealand Labour which heralded the keen adoption of free market economic rationalism (dubbed 'Rogernomics' in NZ) that was later embraced by Hawke and Keating in Australia and Blair's New Labour in the UK. This repackaging of traditional "labour values" was accompanied with an aggressive attempt to marginalise the trade union movement -- an implosion that was mirrored here in Australia under Labor's Price and Incomes Accord. But today with projects like the Solidarity trade union which has run so many successful campaigns against casual employers like McDonalds, Starbucks, etc -- there's a lot the rest the left part of the world can learn from the New Zealand experience. So bookmark or subscribe to Unity -- this week's featured blog.
