In the lead up to the general election on November 26, the Labour Party of New Zealand has released its Overseas Development Assistance Policy. Most notable in the policy is the re-establishment of NZAID, a semi autonomous aid and development agency accountable to the government through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Overseas Development Assistance, with a direct line of advice from the Executive Director for NZAID who will be appointed by the State [...]

Much of today’s media, certainly the stuff that we see the most, is dominated and owned by large business interests. There is an obvious danger in that – whatever news may hurt those interests is either not going to be told, or will be told in such a way that minimizes damages. Because of this, any civil society should see the promulgation and promotion of quality independent media as something of high importance. We need [...]

Many of the news stories covering the Occupy Wall Street protests have expressed that the protesters don’t seem to have defined exactly what it is they want, as if there needs to be one clearly definable outcome that the protesters ‘sell’ so that others can ‘buy’. Such thinking misses the point. From the way I see it from the other side of the world in New Zealand, Occupy Wall Street is a sweeping expression of dissatisfaction about [...]

The current global system of power and finance in its many guises is at an interesting juncture. As markets continue to trip and stumble their way along, driven by greed and fear, protests are happening all over the place for varying reasons. Many are protesting ‘austerity’ measures that seek to cut state costs in various nations – cuts that hurt large portions of populations with the weakest being hurt the most while their wealthy are [...]

I gave one of our young interns (David Tan) at TEAR Fund the task of trying to define poverty as part of his journey of working out what good ‘development’ is – here is what David wrote. Feel free to share your thoughts on the topic with him -Frank The question “what is development?” cannot be answered without first asking “what is poverty?” After all, the purpose of development is to abolish poverty. Defining poverty [...]

On Wednesday night (24th August) a group of TEAR Fund supporters held a special screening of the 90 minute documentary Precious Life - an excellent film for people concerned with peace, justice and humanitarian issues.

In 1996 seven of the nine monks from the monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria were abducted by rebels and killed, possibly during a rescue attempt by government soldiers. Ten years later, Etienne Comar began to turn their story into a film script – Of Gods and Men. A devout Catholic, Comar was fascinated, not by the execution of the monks, but by their decision to stand by the small, rural, Muslim community that they served [...]

Lurking on the Reuters website I happened upon a video about a sixty year old farmer who lost his wife to the ever worsening crisis in The Horn of Africa. I clicked the play button expecting to see something along the lines of “Famine crisis in Horn of Africa” followed by maybe a link to one of the hundreds of aid organisations doing their part to curb the crisis there; but instead I was met [...]

The following article is written by David Tan, a year 12 student from Rangitoto College. As part of the College’s Gateway programme, David is getting some work experience at TEAR Fund. What the heck is “development”? It’s an important question. I wonder what happened to the $45 cheque I gave to TEAR Fund last month… it’s a lot of money for an unemployed seventeen-year old teen. I want lives to be transformed and dreams to [...]

We Kiwis have a real connection with farming.  It’s been the backbone of our economy from the start.  Many of us come from farms, have farming friends or family, or at least have stayed on a farm for a while. We’re not too happy when we see big chunks of our farmland being sold to overseas buyers but at least we’re sure the Kiwi land owner agreed to the sale and sold at a very [...]