A reflection on why it is so hard for the Left to get its act together on the housing crisis, and what can be done about it.

An introduction to this special issue of Counterfutures.

This article is, in part, an extended report from a national workshop held at Kotare in May 2018 in which participants from around the country considered the question: ‘A progressive Basic Income (or UBI) in Aotearoa New Zealand?’ It includes primary research which provides the first known attempt to bring together a history of BI/UBI advocacy from a left and community-based perspective, with some interrogation of that history. I also include brief background context around nomenclature, history and definition; consider the defining characteristics of a ‘left’ BI and the question of how to pay for it; look at some of the main arguments for and against BI from left and union perspectives, and consider the opportunities and dangers for those of us on the left who may wish to engage in this work. I finish with a short conclusion which places our debates within the international context and offers some thoughts of my own on the path forward.

Members of the core crew of Kōtare Research and Education for Social Change in Aotearoa have attended each of the five conferences in the Social Movements, Resistance, and Social Change series. We have always been excited by the possibilities these conferences have offered for engendering deeper connections and new opportunities for group formation and action across different sectors in the left-activist and academic worlds. We offered three workshops in the conference, seeing this as an opportunity both to contribute usefully to the overall goal of ‘activating collectivity’ and as a way of demonstrating a small sample of Kōtare’s pedagogical methods. In this article, we have taken up the invitation from the conference organisers to contribute a few reflections on our overall experience of the fifth SMRSC conference.

This paper was first presented at the thirteenth conference of the Ecopolitics Association of Australasia, held at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 29 November-2 December 2001. The theme of the conference was 'Green Governance: From Periphery to Power'. This article was included in Ecopolitics, vol. 1, no. 3, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the publisher, the Pluto Press of Sydney, and of the editor, Martin Mulligan.