Alison McCulloch
Genre:
Skills:
Branch:
Central Districts
Location:
Mt Maunganui
Publications:
Fighting to Choose: The Abortion Rights Struggle in New Zealand
June 2013
Fighting to Choose: The Abortion Rights Struggle in New Zealand chronicles one of the most important yet neglected chapters in New Zealand’s recent political history.
More than thirty-five years ago, at the height of the second wave of feminism, New Zealand passed a conservative abortion law that bucked a trend in the West toward liberalisation. How did this happen in a country proud of its progressive social policies – particularly its record on women’s rights? And why is such a cumbersome, expensive, endlessly litigated set of statutes still on the books? In Fighting to Choose Alison McCulloch sets out to answer those questions by taking a close look at the people involved and the tactics they employed in waging what was – and continues to be – an intense and impassioned battle.
Alison McCulloch has worked in journalism for more than twenty years, first in New Zealand and then in the United States, where she spent six years as a staff editor at theNew York Times. She has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, and is active in the pro-choice movement in New Zealand, where she lives and works as a freelance journalist.
Paperback, 232 x 152mm, 300 pages
The Democracy Manifesto. A Dialogue On Why Elections Need To Be Replaced With Sortition
January 2022
The Democracy Manifesto is about how to recreate democracy by replacing elections with government that is truly of, by and for the people.
Written in engaging and accessible dialogue form, the book argues that the only truly democratic system of government is one in which decision-makers are selected randomly (by sortition) from the population at large, operating much the way trial juries do today, but 100% online, enabling people to govern together even across great distances.
Sortition has a storied history but what sets The Democracy Manifesto apart is its comprehensive account of how it can be implemented not only across all sectors and levels of government, but throughout society as well, including the democratization of mass media, corporations, banks, and other large institutions. The resulting Sortitive Representative Democracy (SRD) is the true heir to ancient Greek democracy, and the only means of ensuring ‘we the people’ are represented by our fellow citizens rather than by the revolving groups of elites that dominate electoral systems. In the process, the book grapples with myriad hot topics including economic issues, international relations, indigenous rights, environmentalism and more.
Related article: This Is Not a Democracy