Workers Party of New Zealand Totally Explained

Everything about The Workers Party Of New Zealand totally explained

The Workers Party of New Zealand (until 2006 known as the Anti-Capitalist Alliance) is a socialist political party in New Zealand. It publishes a monthly magazine called The Spark

and an academic journal called Revolution.
Its General Secretary is Daphna Whitmore.

Platform

According to the party's official website, the Workers Party aims to build a new political movement based on workers' interests.
The five-point policy platform of the Workers Party is as follows:

Opposition to all New Zealand and Western intervention in the Third World and all Western military alliances.
Jobs for all with a living wage and a shorter working week.
For the unrestricted right of workers to organise and take industrial action and no limits on workers' freedom of speech and activity.
For working class unity and solidarity - equality for women, Māori, other ethnic minorities and gay men and women; open borders and full rights for migrant workers.
For a working people's republic.

The party's magazine The Spark states that the party wants: "A world without poverty and war, a world of material abundance where human potential can be expressed in full," adding that "While these ideas appear untenable today, they were the notions that inspired revolutions in the 20th century."

Elections

Because the Workers Party hasn't yet proven it has sufficient members to formally register as a political party, in general elections it can't gain party votes for New Zealand's proportional representation system, Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). It can, however, put forward candidates in individual electorates.
   In the 2002 elections, it stood four candidates, the highest number for an unregistered party that year . The candidates gained a total of 336 votes between them, placing the Anti-Capitalist Alliance (ACA) in fourth place amongst the unregistered parties which contested.
   In the 2005 election the ACA stood eight candidates, again the highest number for an unregistered party. The ACA won a combined total of 582 votes, placing them first amongst the unregistered parties.
   A nationwide recruitment campaign entitled Let’s Make Workers’ Issues Hi-Viz began in 2006 as an attempt to gain the necessary members to register and contest the party vote in the 2008 general election.
   In the 2007 local elections, the Workers Party stood four mayoral candidates in Christchurch, Dunedin, Waitakere and Wellington. The Workers Party received 4 705 votes nationwide, with 2 101 of those votes being for Waitakere candidate Rebecca Broad.

History

The party was founded in 2002 as the Anti-Capitalist Alliance. It was formed by an electoral alliance of the original Workers' Party (pro-Mao, Marxist-Leninist) and the pro-Trotsky Revolution group, with the intention of fielding candidates in the 2002 New Zealand general election.
In 2004, the original Workers' Party and Revolution merged to become the Revolutionary Workers' League (RWL), which describes itself as a "Marxist current". In 2006, the Anti-Capitalist Alliance was renamed as the Workers' Party. After this name change, the public role of the RWL appears to have been limited to the production of socialist publications, including The Spark.
Recently, publications formerly published by the RWL became Workers' Party publications.

Notable members

In 2003 Paul Hopkinson, who stood as a candidate for the Anti-Capitalist Alliance in the 2002 election, became the first person to be charged under the Flags, Emblems and Names Protection Act, after burning a New Zealand flag at an anti-war demonstration.
   Nick Kelly was elected president of the Victoria University of Wellington Students' Association (VUWSA) in 2006 after holding a string of other positions in the organisation. Prior to this he was the Chair of Paul Swain's Labour Electorate Committee (LEC) in 2000, but was sacked in 2001 for opposing Labour's economic policies. He was also dragged out of a Labour conference for yelling at Prime Minister Helen Clark over Labour's support for the invasion of Afghanistan. In 2002, Kelly was expelled from the Labour Party altogether for standing against Paul Swain for the seat of Rimutaka.
   Another party member, Joel Cosgrove, won the VUWSA presidency in 2008.
   Philip Ferguson, editor of the party's academic journal Revolution, was a Sinn Fein activist between 1986 and 1994, and spent several years as a full-time organiser for the party. Today he's a history lecturer at the University of Canterbury.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Workers Party Of New Zealand'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://workers_party_of_new_zealand.totallyexplained.com">Workers Party of New Zealand Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.