I would like to start with a few words about so-called hate speech:
Hate is a very powerful word. If you hate someone you want to do them harm and possibly even kill them. I don’t think New Zealand is a hateful society. The perpetrator of the Christchurch atrocities, which have been cited as justification for hate speech laws, was an Australian. Speaking for myself, I can truthfully say I don’t hate anyone. Well, maybe Vladimir Putin when he murders defenceless civilians, but I can’t think of anyone else.
What is characterised as hate speech is more often simply speech that upsets or offends someone. But there’s no human right not to be upset, or to be protected from having your values and beliefs questioned and criticised. So I think it would be helpful to get rid of that loaded term “hate speech” because it’s a misnomer.
Hate is a very powerful word. If you hate someone you want to do them harm and possibly even kill them. I don’t think New Zealand is a hateful society. The perpetrator of the Christchurch atrocities, which have been cited as justification for hate speech laws, was an Australian. Speaking for myself, I can truthfully say I don’t hate anyone. Well, maybe Vladimir Putin when he murders defenceless civilians, but I can’t think of anyone else.
What is characterised as hate speech is more often simply speech that upsets or offends someone. But there’s no human right not to be upset, or to be protected from having your values and beliefs questioned and criticised. So I think it would be helpful to get rid of that loaded term “hate speech” because it’s a misnomer.
Moreover I think the pressure for so-called hate speech laws was based on a false premise. The supposition is that tougher hate speech laws would have prevented the Christchurch atrocities, but there’s no evidence to show that. You heard the sociologist Mike Grimshaw say in the documentary that in fact it would have gratified the perpetrator of those atrocities if hate speech laws were enacted, because it would legitimise his warped, paranoid world view. It would have confirmed his view of himself as someone the establishment wanted to silence – a martyr.
My second point is that free speech is not a standard left-versus-right issue. You heard Jacob Mchangama make that point in the documentary.
You would also have heard Kim Hill implying, when she interviewed Jacob on RNZ, that the free speech movement was a right-wing thing, simply because he had addressed the Ayn Rand Institute. But Jacob is happy to talk to groups from any point on the political spectrum, as he said in the documentary.
Kim Hill also said, quite untruthfully, that the opponents of hate speech laws in New Zealand were all from the right. Wrong: some of the most vocal proponents of free speech are old-school lefties such as Chris Trotter, Martyn Bradbury and Don Franks. The political scientist Bryce Edwards is also a free speech champion, and I don’t think anyone would mistake Bryce for a right winger.
The traditional Left believe in free speech because they know it has been a vital tool in fighting for the causes they believe in, such as civil rights in the United States. Jacob makes that point in his book.
Free speech is important to the traditional Left because they know better than anyone what it means to suffer under authoritarian regimes that put you in jail for saying what you think.
You’ll note that I refer to the “traditional” Left. That’s because the opposition to free speech mainly comes from what you might call the new woke Left. I know a lot of people hate that term “woke”, but until someone comes up with a better word, it will have to do.
As a general rule the woke Left are younger and have come through the university system. They have a very limited understanding of history and apparently think they have a human right not to be exposed to opinions they dislike or which challenge their world view. Unfortunately they seem to be encouraged in this belief by their university lecturers.
Universities used to be regarded as bulwarks of free thought and freedom of expression. That’s no longer the case. Universities throughout the western world – even august institutions such as Oxford and Harvard – frequently bring down the shutters on speakers who are deemed provocative or even merely controversial.
There’s no sadder example than the Berkeley campus of the University of California, which was the birthplace of the radical free speech movement in the 1960s but in recent years has earned a reputation as the home of cancel culture, where speakers who challenge ideological orthodoxy are branded as unsafe and de-platformed.
I experienced a very mild form of this phenomenon myself when I spoke at a Free Speech Union event at Victoria University last year. Posters advertising the meeting around the campus were repeatedly torn down and replaced with ones saying “Stop Hate Speech” and labelling the Free Speech Union as racist, homophobic, transphobic hypocrites.
Whoever took down those posters had no idea what I was going to say. They just decided that whatever it was, it was bound to be “unsafe” (and there’s another loaded word that should have no place in rational discourse).
There was a subsequent report of my speech in the Victoria University student newspaper Salient. This report was prefaced with what’s known as a trigger warning, which read: “This article examines some of the racist, transphobic, sexist and otherwise harmful content discussed at the event in question. Please exercise caution when reading.”
As far as I know, my speech is still available on the Free Speech Union website. Anyone who’s interested can decide for themselves whether it was harmful. I’m not aware of anyone who needed medical treatment after hearing it.
I noted in a post on my blog that Salient in its heyday was a lively student paper that thrived on controversy and debate. Many of the people associated with it went on to occupy important positions in public life, including one who became a Labour prime minister. They must shake their heads in despair at the modern version of the paper.
But that’s what universities have become: institutions where groupthink, ideological conformity and intolerance of dissent rule. That was never more evident than when seven eminent professors wrote a letter to the Listener in 2021 in defence of the traditional definition of science and were subjected to a vicious gang-up, led by the Royal Society and supported by the University of Auckland and the Tertiary Education Union.
One Victoria University professor posted a sneering tweet calling the seven respected academics “shuffling zombies” and wondered if someone had put something in their water. There’s a mature, open mind for you.
The furore attracted the attention of leading international scientists and was rightly characterised by the likes of Richard Dawkins as an attack on the professors’ academic freedom. In the end the Royal Society and the university were forced to pull their heads in. I think they were embarrassed by the international outcry. But in the meantime, of course, the Listener Seven had been publicly pilloried and portrayed as pariahs.
It used to be the case that three institutions could be relied on to uphold free speech: universities, the courts and the media. I’ve already mentioned the first of those, so what of the other two?
The courts have a mixed record. My impression is that historically they have taken a liberal approach, but a High Court judge decided it was okay for Auckland Council to bar two Canadians, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, from speaking at a council-owned venue. This was after protesters threatened to picket the event.
The unfortunate consequence of the judge’s decision was that it conveyed the message that all anyone had to do to get a speaker cancelled was to threaten disruption.
The Free Speech Union took up the case, managed to win a partial reversal in the Court of Appeal and took it to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the FSU’s case on what I believe were dry, technical legal points rather than approaching it from a broader human rights perspective.
But there have been legal victories too. A city council that tried to ban anti-transgender feminists from holding a public meeting in the local library was forced to back down, and other councils duly took note. So that’s something.
That brings me to the media, and I’m afraid that there the picture is not encouraging.
Print, broadcast and online media tend to take a uniform, homogenous ideological and political line and publish just enough dissenting opinion to enable them to claim they’re open to opposing views.
Letters to the editor, fortunately, remain an important platform for alternative points of view. But I’ve spent a long time in journalism and I can say with certainty that the media are not as committed to diversity of opinion as they used to be.
I’ll give you just one small example: in all the media furore that raged for days over Roe versus Wade last year, it was virtually impossible to hear an anti-abortion voice. It was as if that side of the debate simply didn’t exist.
It was also depressing to hear Jonathan [Jonathan Ayling, of the FSU] say in the documentary that he invited journalists and researchers to meet Jacob Mchangama, but got no uptake. Journalists – and for that matter, broadcasters such as Kim Hill – should be in the front line of the battle for free speech because they depend on it every day. They couldn’t function without it.
I’ll also note that when the Free Speech Union held its inaugural annual conference last year, not one journalist from the mainstream media covered it.
I’d like to go slightly off-topic here and comment briefly on the Public Interest Journalism Fund, or the Pravda Project as I call it, which has made $55 million of taxpayers’ money available to media outlets provided they fulfil certain conditions relating to the Treaty.
I won’t go so far as to say the media have been bought, although some people put it that way. However I certainly think the media have compromised their independence and created a damaging public perception that they’re beholden to the government. They should hardly be surprised if people question their openness to a wide range of opinions.
I can offer a small personal insight into some individual journalists’ commitment to free speech.
I earlier mentioned the political scientist Bryce Edwards. Bryce compiles a daily summary of political news and comment that he makes available online to anyone who’s interested. He provides links to the source material, which ranges across a very broad spectrum of political comment encompassing left as well as right, although more of the former because that’s the nature of most commentary in the mainstream media. Occasionally Bryce includes links to my own blog posts.
I learned recently that a senior journalist in the parliamentary press gallery had emailed Bryce asking, in a wheedling tone, whether he had given any thought to excluding my blog posts. In other words this journalist wanted me, a fellow journalist of 55 years’ standing, cancelled.
He apparently took this step because he was offended by critical comments I had made about some of his colleagues in the press gallery. Bryce, to his credit, ignored the suggestion.
Perhaps more to the point, this journalist, who has never met me, described me as a racist, a sexist and a misogynist. Not only are these lazy, simplistic stereotypes that shouldn’t belong in any mature journalist’s vocabulary, but they are defamatory and I believe untrue. I would happily challenge my accuser to substantiate them.
In an unrelated event, I was recently invited to participate in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio discussion analysing Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, Ms Ardern having just stood down.
A senior and highly influential New Zealand journalist was also approached to take part but on learning I was a panellist, declined. The explanation she gave was that I was a racist, a sexist and a misogynist – those very same words again – and she didn’t want to “legitimise” me by appearing on the same show.
Again, this person has never met me and had no idea what I was likely to say on the show. As it happens, I deplore the vicious personal attacks made on Jacinda Ardern and believe I was fair in my assessment of her performance as PM.
If this person disapproved of my views, then surely the thing to do was challenge them. But rather than engage in a rational, civilised discussion on air, she recoiled as if the mere act of appearing with me would expose her to the risk of biological contamination.
Is that the response of a mature, rational adult, open to debate? I think it was cowardly and childish.
In a Free Speech Union newsletter sent out only this week, Jonathan [Ayling] points out that the leader of the so-called Disinformation Project, Kate Hannah, has repeatedly declined invitations to meet with him, saying it would be – get this – “unsafe”. That word again.
Now Jonathan doesn’t exactly strike me as a threatening individual, but this is a typical reaction. Rather than engaging in a mature, intelligent exchange of views, the opponents of free speech squeeze their eyes shut, block their ears and run shrieking from the room.
Incidentally, I have yet to see any explanation of where the Disinformation Project gets its money. I entered the word “funding” in the search box on its website and nothing came up. Interesting.
But getting back to those two journalists: I suspect neither of my accusers had taken the trouble to actually read a cross-section of my work as a journalist, columnist and blogger. If they had, I don’t believe they could possibly substantiate their attacks on me. I’m happy to be judged on my record.
But here’s the point: if two senior and influential mainstream journalists have such resolutely closed minds, what hope is there of the media facilitating open and balanced debate?
The really worrying thing is that the latter of the two was in a position to exercise editorial control at the highest level. I could no longer have any confidence in the editorial integrity of any publication this individual was involved with.
Before I finish, three bullet points:
■ First: We shouldn’t count on the National Party to champion free speech. That’s obvious from the way Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis pounced on Maureen Pugh a couple of weeks ago for having the courage and honesty to ask questions about the theory of human-induced climate change.
Neither can you rely on the Human Rights Commission to defend free speech. In fact, quite the reverse. The commission has actively campaigned for restrictions on what New Zealanders can say. It’s possibly the most ironically misnamed government agency in our history.
■ Second: There is a moral panic over misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories. My question is, who decides which information is permissible and which is not?
Misinformation and disinformation are terms that are too easily used to delegitimise dissent and confine public debate within “safe” channels.
In any case, in a free society you have the right to be wrong. The way to determine truth – insofar as that’s possible – is by allowing open debate, not by driving dissenting opinion underground.
As John Milton wrote in his poem Areopagitica, which you heard mentioned in the doco: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”
■ Third, and to finish on a slightly more optimistic note, I wonder whether the tide may be starting to turn.
Many book publishers now employ what are called sensitivity readers, who are paid to read authors’ manuscripts and intercept anything that might be construed as upsetting. That’s how precious we’ve become.
The best-selling British author Anthony Horowitz recently revealed that one of the characters in his latest novel was a Native American doctor who attacked someone with a scalpel. Horowitz had to delete that word “scalpel” for fear that some people might associate it with the Native American tradition of scalping. Although there’s no etymological connection between the two words, Horowitz was told to replace “scalpel” with “surgical instrument”. That’s how absurd things have got.
However (and here’s the optimistic bit), Puffin Books pushed the boat out too far last month when they tried to render Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books politically correct by removing words such as “fat”, “ugly”, “mad” and “crazy”, and by making the Oompa Loompas gender-neutral.
Waddya know: there was an international backlash, and within days Puffin had announced that the texts would again be made available in the original form. In the battle for free speech, such small victories must be cherished. Thank you.
Footnote: Although I’m a member of the Free Speech Union, I don’t purport to speak for it. The views expressed here are my own.
Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.
My second point is that free speech is not a standard left-versus-right issue. You heard Jacob Mchangama make that point in the documentary.
You would also have heard Kim Hill implying, when she interviewed Jacob on RNZ, that the free speech movement was a right-wing thing, simply because he had addressed the Ayn Rand Institute. But Jacob is happy to talk to groups from any point on the political spectrum, as he said in the documentary.
Kim Hill also said, quite untruthfully, that the opponents of hate speech laws in New Zealand were all from the right. Wrong: some of the most vocal proponents of free speech are old-school lefties such as Chris Trotter, Martyn Bradbury and Don Franks. The political scientist Bryce Edwards is also a free speech champion, and I don’t think anyone would mistake Bryce for a right winger.
The traditional Left believe in free speech because they know it has been a vital tool in fighting for the causes they believe in, such as civil rights in the United States. Jacob makes that point in his book.
Free speech is important to the traditional Left because they know better than anyone what it means to suffer under authoritarian regimes that put you in jail for saying what you think.
You’ll note that I refer to the “traditional” Left. That’s because the opposition to free speech mainly comes from what you might call the new woke Left. I know a lot of people hate that term “woke”, but until someone comes up with a better word, it will have to do.
As a general rule the woke Left are younger and have come through the university system. They have a very limited understanding of history and apparently think they have a human right not to be exposed to opinions they dislike or which challenge their world view. Unfortunately they seem to be encouraged in this belief by their university lecturers.
Universities used to be regarded as bulwarks of free thought and freedom of expression. That’s no longer the case. Universities throughout the western world – even august institutions such as Oxford and Harvard – frequently bring down the shutters on speakers who are deemed provocative or even merely controversial.
There’s no sadder example than the Berkeley campus of the University of California, which was the birthplace of the radical free speech movement in the 1960s but in recent years has earned a reputation as the home of cancel culture, where speakers who challenge ideological orthodoxy are branded as unsafe and de-platformed.
I experienced a very mild form of this phenomenon myself when I spoke at a Free Speech Union event at Victoria University last year. Posters advertising the meeting around the campus were repeatedly torn down and replaced with ones saying “Stop Hate Speech” and labelling the Free Speech Union as racist, homophobic, transphobic hypocrites.
Whoever took down those posters had no idea what I was going to say. They just decided that whatever it was, it was bound to be “unsafe” (and there’s another loaded word that should have no place in rational discourse).
There was a subsequent report of my speech in the Victoria University student newspaper Salient. This report was prefaced with what’s known as a trigger warning, which read: “This article examines some of the racist, transphobic, sexist and otherwise harmful content discussed at the event in question. Please exercise caution when reading.”
As far as I know, my speech is still available on the Free Speech Union website. Anyone who’s interested can decide for themselves whether it was harmful. I’m not aware of anyone who needed medical treatment after hearing it.
I noted in a post on my blog that Salient in its heyday was a lively student paper that thrived on controversy and debate. Many of the people associated with it went on to occupy important positions in public life, including one who became a Labour prime minister. They must shake their heads in despair at the modern version of the paper.
But that’s what universities have become: institutions where groupthink, ideological conformity and intolerance of dissent rule. That was never more evident than when seven eminent professors wrote a letter to the Listener in 2021 in defence of the traditional definition of science and were subjected to a vicious gang-up, led by the Royal Society and supported by the University of Auckland and the Tertiary Education Union.
One Victoria University professor posted a sneering tweet calling the seven respected academics “shuffling zombies” and wondered if someone had put something in their water. There’s a mature, open mind for you.
The furore attracted the attention of leading international scientists and was rightly characterised by the likes of Richard Dawkins as an attack on the professors’ academic freedom. In the end the Royal Society and the university were forced to pull their heads in. I think they were embarrassed by the international outcry. But in the meantime, of course, the Listener Seven had been publicly pilloried and portrayed as pariahs.
It used to be the case that three institutions could be relied on to uphold free speech: universities, the courts and the media. I’ve already mentioned the first of those, so what of the other two?
The courts have a mixed record. My impression is that historically they have taken a liberal approach, but a High Court judge decided it was okay for Auckland Council to bar two Canadians, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, from speaking at a council-owned venue. This was after protesters threatened to picket the event.
The unfortunate consequence of the judge’s decision was that it conveyed the message that all anyone had to do to get a speaker cancelled was to threaten disruption.
The Free Speech Union took up the case, managed to win a partial reversal in the Court of Appeal and took it to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the FSU’s case on what I believe were dry, technical legal points rather than approaching it from a broader human rights perspective.
But there have been legal victories too. A city council that tried to ban anti-transgender feminists from holding a public meeting in the local library was forced to back down, and other councils duly took note. So that’s something.
That brings me to the media, and I’m afraid that there the picture is not encouraging.
Print, broadcast and online media tend to take a uniform, homogenous ideological and political line and publish just enough dissenting opinion to enable them to claim they’re open to opposing views.
Letters to the editor, fortunately, remain an important platform for alternative points of view. But I’ve spent a long time in journalism and I can say with certainty that the media are not as committed to diversity of opinion as they used to be.
I’ll give you just one small example: in all the media furore that raged for days over Roe versus Wade last year, it was virtually impossible to hear an anti-abortion voice. It was as if that side of the debate simply didn’t exist.
It was also depressing to hear Jonathan [Jonathan Ayling, of the FSU] say in the documentary that he invited journalists and researchers to meet Jacob Mchangama, but got no uptake. Journalists – and for that matter, broadcasters such as Kim Hill – should be in the front line of the battle for free speech because they depend on it every day. They couldn’t function without it.
I’ll also note that when the Free Speech Union held its inaugural annual conference last year, not one journalist from the mainstream media covered it.
I’d like to go slightly off-topic here and comment briefly on the Public Interest Journalism Fund, or the Pravda Project as I call it, which has made $55 million of taxpayers’ money available to media outlets provided they fulfil certain conditions relating to the Treaty.
I won’t go so far as to say the media have been bought, although some people put it that way. However I certainly think the media have compromised their independence and created a damaging public perception that they’re beholden to the government. They should hardly be surprised if people question their openness to a wide range of opinions.
I can offer a small personal insight into some individual journalists’ commitment to free speech.
I earlier mentioned the political scientist Bryce Edwards. Bryce compiles a daily summary of political news and comment that he makes available online to anyone who’s interested. He provides links to the source material, which ranges across a very broad spectrum of political comment encompassing left as well as right, although more of the former because that’s the nature of most commentary in the mainstream media. Occasionally Bryce includes links to my own blog posts.
I learned recently that a senior journalist in the parliamentary press gallery had emailed Bryce asking, in a wheedling tone, whether he had given any thought to excluding my blog posts. In other words this journalist wanted me, a fellow journalist of 55 years’ standing, cancelled.
He apparently took this step because he was offended by critical comments I had made about some of his colleagues in the press gallery. Bryce, to his credit, ignored the suggestion.
Perhaps more to the point, this journalist, who has never met me, described me as a racist, a sexist and a misogynist. Not only are these lazy, simplistic stereotypes that shouldn’t belong in any mature journalist’s vocabulary, but they are defamatory and I believe untrue. I would happily challenge my accuser to substantiate them.
In an unrelated event, I was recently invited to participate in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio discussion analysing Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership, Ms Ardern having just stood down.
A senior and highly influential New Zealand journalist was also approached to take part but on learning I was a panellist, declined. The explanation she gave was that I was a racist, a sexist and a misogynist – those very same words again – and she didn’t want to “legitimise” me by appearing on the same show.
Again, this person has never met me and had no idea what I was likely to say on the show. As it happens, I deplore the vicious personal attacks made on Jacinda Ardern and believe I was fair in my assessment of her performance as PM.
If this person disapproved of my views, then surely the thing to do was challenge them. But rather than engage in a rational, civilised discussion on air, she recoiled as if the mere act of appearing with me would expose her to the risk of biological contamination.
Is that the response of a mature, rational adult, open to debate? I think it was cowardly and childish.
In a Free Speech Union newsletter sent out only this week, Jonathan [Ayling] points out that the leader of the so-called Disinformation Project, Kate Hannah, has repeatedly declined invitations to meet with him, saying it would be – get this – “unsafe”. That word again.
Now Jonathan doesn’t exactly strike me as a threatening individual, but this is a typical reaction. Rather than engaging in a mature, intelligent exchange of views, the opponents of free speech squeeze their eyes shut, block their ears and run shrieking from the room.
Incidentally, I have yet to see any explanation of where the Disinformation Project gets its money. I entered the word “funding” in the search box on its website and nothing came up. Interesting.
But getting back to those two journalists: I suspect neither of my accusers had taken the trouble to actually read a cross-section of my work as a journalist, columnist and blogger. If they had, I don’t believe they could possibly substantiate their attacks on me. I’m happy to be judged on my record.
But here’s the point: if two senior and influential mainstream journalists have such resolutely closed minds, what hope is there of the media facilitating open and balanced debate?
The really worrying thing is that the latter of the two was in a position to exercise editorial control at the highest level. I could no longer have any confidence in the editorial integrity of any publication this individual was involved with.
Before I finish, three bullet points:
■ First: We shouldn’t count on the National Party to champion free speech. That’s obvious from the way Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis pounced on Maureen Pugh a couple of weeks ago for having the courage and honesty to ask questions about the theory of human-induced climate change.
Neither can you rely on the Human Rights Commission to defend free speech. In fact, quite the reverse. The commission has actively campaigned for restrictions on what New Zealanders can say. It’s possibly the most ironically misnamed government agency in our history.
■ Second: There is a moral panic over misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories. My question is, who decides which information is permissible and which is not?
Misinformation and disinformation are terms that are too easily used to delegitimise dissent and confine public debate within “safe” channels.
In any case, in a free society you have the right to be wrong. The way to determine truth – insofar as that’s possible – is by allowing open debate, not by driving dissenting opinion underground.
As John Milton wrote in his poem Areopagitica, which you heard mentioned in the doco: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”
■ Third, and to finish on a slightly more optimistic note, I wonder whether the tide may be starting to turn.
Many book publishers now employ what are called sensitivity readers, who are paid to read authors’ manuscripts and intercept anything that might be construed as upsetting. That’s how precious we’ve become.
The best-selling British author Anthony Horowitz recently revealed that one of the characters in his latest novel was a Native American doctor who attacked someone with a scalpel. Horowitz had to delete that word “scalpel” for fear that some people might associate it with the Native American tradition of scalping. Although there’s no etymological connection between the two words, Horowitz was told to replace “scalpel” with “surgical instrument”. That’s how absurd things have got.
However (and here’s the optimistic bit), Puffin Books pushed the boat out too far last month when they tried to render Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books politically correct by removing words such as “fat”, “ugly”, “mad” and “crazy”, and by making the Oompa Loompas gender-neutral.
Waddya know: there was an international backlash, and within days Puffin had announced that the texts would again be made available in the original form. In the battle for free speech, such small victories must be cherished. Thank you.
Footnote: Although I’m a member of the Free Speech Union, I don’t purport to speak for it. The views expressed here are my own.
Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. He blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.
7 comments:
Wonderful piece, thanks Karl.
A couple of years ago we organized a Men's Conference that we had been running annually in different centres, to consider issues of relevance to men in particular. That year it was to be in Wellington. Initially we had secured a parliamentary sponsor, the Hon Kelvin Davis, for us to use the Grand Hall conference room at parliament. A week or two before the conference, Davis withdrew his sponsorship on the basis that we might say something that would criticize women! What a champion of free speech, huh? Bloody prat. Left high and dry (because you need an MP sponsor to use the Hall), we secured and paid for the use of a local golf club premises. That club then also pulled the plug a day or two before the conference because they didn't want angry men there or some such thing. Luckily we found another venue and had a good conference. We challenged the golf club and had a meeting with them and a commissioner from the Human Rights Commission. It must have been difficult for the HRC to have to support men but they had little choice given the legislation, and the golf club ended paying substantial damages for its anti-male discrimination. Sadly, Davis had been too cunning in his statements to allow the same. Free speech, yeah right.
A good comment Karl, but I see virtually nothing to be optimistic about. In this last couple of weeks we've had that vile, reputedly taxpayer-funded, 'hate-ridden' poem from Tusiata Avia, and then from that academic lightweight and bigot, Tara McAllister, the 'double-down' on Richard Dawkins and the Listener 7. All the while our Human Rights and Race Relations Commissioners have been pulling their pay cheques and staying completely schtum. If at least some, but preferably all of those bods were rightly now experiencing some real heat under the spotlight of likely sanction and consequences (as they rightly should be), then I might see a glimmer of of hope on the horizon. As it is, I see little but a dark, divisive abyss ahead.
I agree with you, Karl, about the state of the New Zealand media. I find their resolute unwillingness to discuss the latest findings on vaccines and their effects particularly disturbing, presumably because some of these are not in line with their pre-determined narrative. A recent example of this is the article published in The Lancet on February 16 2023. This looked at 65 studies from 19 countries and concluded that ‘For someone previously infected with Covid-19, their risk of hospitalisation or death is 88% lower for at least 10 months compared to those who had not been previously infected.’ Also ‘The analysis also suggests that the level and duration of protection against reinfection, symptomatic disease and severe illness is at least on a par with that provided by two doses of the mRNA vaccines.’ The writers still come down in favour of vaccines as being ‘the safest way to acquire immunity whereas acquiring natural immunity must be weighed against the risks of severe illness and death associated with the initial infection.’ However, this conclusion is open to debate because it ignores possible risks associated with taking the vaccine. It still comes down to individual choice. Although I have searched for reports of this research in New Zealand’s mainstream media, I have yet to find any. Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place. In any case, findings like this should be subject to robust discussion, not carefully ignored, don’t you agree?
Really Karl - you just might hate Vladimir Putin? I unreservedly long for the breath to leave his body - and may no power have mercy on his soul. I don't count that as 'hate speech' - a term I deplore. I think there is more hatred abroad in NZ than formerly - when there was a good deal of rudery. Trying to force people to be kind to one another promotes just the opposite.
I’m baffled why people even bother to mention Kim Hill, let alone listen to her. You’re right Karl, she is ‘hate’ personified, she sets out to destroy people whose views she and her producer dislike, loathe even. Her agenda and views are so totally predictable and yesterday they do not matter.
My father used to tell this joke:
“Why do you keep hitting yourself on your head with a hammer?”
“Because it feels so good when I stop.”
Now transfer that to those who continue to watch or listen to material pushed by the various media, but which rattles their cages/winds them up/infuriates them. Surely they would see the logic of not pursuing that any further. Blot the irritants out/switch them off, they are not going to make a useful difference!
In the manner of freedom of speech, herewith a link to Ricky Gervais’ piece about being offended by what someone says, eg. a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ACpn779PY
[Addendum if link unacceptable] In the video clip he outlines “I am offended by your joke” vs “your joke is offensive”, and sets about elaborating the distinction - which is critically important to the discussion.
A relative posted this to social media:
Am alien being reporting back to its supreme leader ….
“Planet Earth is a wonderful place, inhabited by an amazing race of people called humans, 2/3 of whom are waiting to be offended by something.”
We really are living in crazy times.The disinformation and misinformation that the government and their sponsored media dish out is countered by social media and sites like this which who are labelled sexist,racist, unsafe and more by them. There seems to be an increasing number of alternatives to MSM cropping up.How on earth is this going to play out in the long term ? Thank you Karl for your sane and balanced article,
I would stick up for Kim Hill. Yes, her politics are clearly feminist and her interview questions and responses are searching and often make her bias clear. However, there is no interviewer in the world better at drawing people out and thereby making the most boring topics and people interesting. Unlike most interviewers she has the insight to ask the important questions. Further, she has often read out my emails even when they expressed a view or information that were clearly against her politics and beliefs. Kim's alright.
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