Palestine Solidarity Rally 27/09/25
Kia ora koutou
Ko Tom Roud ahau, Alliance Party candidate for Christchurch City Council in the Central Ward.
I don’t want to speak too long today as many of you are much more informed on this issue than I am. But there’s a few things that we should make really clear: what the government is currently doing, or effectively not doing, is fucking atrocious. It’s that simple.
We are dragging our feet on this. New Zealand actually has a proud history of taking a stand when it matters. For example, against South African apartheid - as you all know. We’ve done these thing before, we could do them again if we had the political will to do so.
In this city there have been some wins. I want to give a shout out to PSNA for doing good work and securing the BDS commitment from the Christchurch City Council. I also want to acknowledge ECan Councillor Greg Byrnes who is here today. He tried to get a motion across the line in ECan to encourage the central government to debate the bill proposing sanctions on Israel.
But shame on those ECan councillors who voted against it. Shame on those CCC Councillors who voted against or abstained on the BDS commitment. And shame in particular to those motherfuckers in their suits and their ties in Wellington doing fuck all. It is outrageous.
As the dust settles from the current iteration of this conflict, as journalists and documentarians get in there and are able to report the reality of the horror that has happened, everyone will have always been against this. That’s what they’ll say, that’s what’s gonna come, and those of us on the side of justice have to remember that they did not and they were not always against it.
When we think about the councils, when we talk about our government, they were not always against it. You were! You were here, every week, sometimes every day for this issue and they didn’t give a shit. Some time in the future they’ll all say - they were against it the whole time.
So-
Yes, we should acknowledge the state of Palestine - of course we should recognise the state of Palestine. But to merely acknowledge a state in which ethnic cleansing has been going on, a genocide has been undertaken, people have been cleared out of their land, it feels a bit like a preemptive land acknowledgement you know? You’ve displaced the people that were living there and now you’re gonna acknowledge a state that can’t function because you’ve already destroyed it. It’s a bit late, in some ways. But we should do it anyway! It’s so easy, and we can’t even manage that.
We shouldn’t be satisfied with that, though.
We should demand our government lives up to its obligations under international law and the ICC. What we’re meant to be doing is not merely saying: “of course, we will arrest Netanyahu if he ever came to this country”, not jus tthat. We have an obligation under international law to pursue people that we believe have been involved in war crimes and genocide. That means that you can’t just have members of the IDF visting here freely, they should be investigated. There are organisations overseas doing this work, the Hind Rajab Foundation are doing this work.
They need to be held accountable, they need to be pursued by all legal means, it needs to be made clear that you cannot do this in Palestine, in Gaza, you cannot set up illegal settlements in the West Bank and think we are just going to leave you to it to holiday wherever you want.
Zionism is an insane ideology that turns an ancient and proud and scholarly religion into an ideology of thuggery. It is a tragedy.
I am running for the Alliance Party. The Alliance Party is clear on this stuff. We need an independent foreign policy and part of achieving that is having an independent economic policy. We have to have sovereignty in this country and not just follow the lead of the United States and the Anglo-American empire.
Because what the Alliance believes is that until every person, between every river and every sea, has the dignity and security of a good life then none of us are free.
