Zoran Rakovic - The New Political Prison: How Selwyn Council Taught Me to Love the Cage

Denied speaking time by Selwyn Council, I explore how silence by power becomes a badge of honour and a symbol of modern civic resistance.

There is something strangely beautiful in being silenced by power. A grotesque beauty, yes, but beauty nonetheless—the same kind Kafka might have sketched in the margins of The Trial, where Josef K. is devoured not by violence, but by procedure. I was denied a right to speak at the Selwyn District Council meeting. Just a few minutes. Just one voice. Just one democratic forum. But the Chair—backed by the invisible hand of the Chief Executive—said no. The gate was shut, the forum full. Time had “run out.” That’s what they said. But let’s not be fooled. This was not about time. This was about power. And in that moment, I became, willingly or not, a political prisoner of the 21st century.

You think I exaggerate. You think I draw hyperboles like daggers. But listen. We live in a world where speech has been bureaucratised, sanitised, and made safe for consumption by the managerial priesthood. I asked to speak on the agenda—an absurd 634-page bureaucratic bludgeon hurled at councillors just days before the meeting, the very definition of Kafka’s castle. I wasn’t denied for lack of content. I was denied because the right to speak, in Selwyn, is no longer a right. It is a privilege, dispensed by the technocratic elite when it suits their image of order. This—this silencing—is what passes today for civic process.

But what they don’t understand—what they cannot understand—is that by trying to exclude, they have included. By denying my voice in that chamber, they have given me a much louder one in the community. As Antonio Gramsci, writing from his prison cell under Mussolini, warned: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” But sometimes, the act of repression is the midwife. Denial is the spark. The new can be born—on the edge of that silence.

So let us make the stakes clear: this is not just about one man being refused a microphone. This is about the birth of legitimacy. In revolutionary traditions from Yugoslavia to Bolivia, from Birmingham jail to Siberian exile, power has always inadvertently forged its own opposition through its attempts to suppress it. Moša Pijade spent years in a Yugoslav prison translating Marx—not because he was criminal, but because he was dangerous to the ruling order. So too did Tito. So too did Mandela, who once said, “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.” And while I have not yet been shackled in chains, the logic is identical: the system believes that by denying your words, it neutralises your influence. But the opposite is true. Repression breeds resistance.

And what a repression it was! Clean, neat, polite. Sanitised with the cold breath of passive-aggressive professionalism. Unfortunately, the public forum is full. The Chair’s decision stands. You're welcome to attend, but not to speak. This is not authoritarianism of the boot stamping on a face. This is Kafka’s authoritarianism—rules without reason, decisions without deciders, consequences without cause. And it is more frightening in its banality. Because it doesn’t look like oppression. It looks like administration.

Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, reminds us that modern power is not loud and theatrical. It is quiet, diffused, faceless. It does not need to kill; it needs only to classify, to exclude, to record that you are “not scheduled.” We imagine tyranny as a loud man shouting into a megaphone. But the real tyranny today comes in the form of polite emails from Executive Assistants, advising you that your slot has not been approved.

Yet in that moment, I felt it—the electric crackle of an old revolutionary logic. They tried to push me out of the temple, but in doing so, they carved out a holy space beyond it. By excluding me from the forum, they initiated me into something far more powerful: the tradition of the silenced. The margins have always been where truth festers. In Fanon’s words, “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.” But what Fanon didn’t say—though he lived it—is that rejection from that adoption is what sparks authentic identity.

I am now that rejection. I have become the shadow in the council chamber, the one who will not sit down quietly. They can deny my time, but not my meaning. I carry the legitimacy not bestowed by chairs and agendas, but by the silent nods of the ordinary citizens who watch, aghast, as their voice is trimmed down to a bureaucratic schedule.

When I asked to speak, it was not as a hobbyist or crank. I am an engineer. I’ve spent my life solving complex problems and standing up for hundreds of earthquake claimants against powerful institutions like EQC and private insurers. But none of that prepared me for this most banal of battles: the fight to be heard in a public forum governed by elected officials who forgot who elected them. There is no Richter scale for silence. No unit of measure for indignity. But I felt it.

Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of utopia, said that hope is “the most human of all mental feelings.” It is not optimism. It is not naïve cheer. It is the stubborn insistence that another world is possible—even in the shadow of denial. In the moment of being silenced, hope became real. They tried to erase me from the minutes, but they engraved me into history. Not council history—people’s history.

I carry now the mark of refusal, the scar of the excluded. In the revolutionary tradition, this is more than grievance—it is credential. As Lukács would put it, this is the awakening of class consciousness, the recognition that the apparatus of local government no longer governs for the people but operates on top ofthem. When a citizen, having followed all prescribed rules, is still turned away, we must ask: what remains of democracy except its rituals?

The answer is: us. We remain. The excluded, the silenced, the late-to-register, the mispronounced, the re-scheduled. We are the raw material of democracy. And the Council may try to firewall itself with procedures, with Standing Orders, with endless agendas thick as concrete blocks. But their fortress is rotting from within.

I am proud of being refused a platform. I wear it as a badge, just as Moša Pijade wore his prison years, just as dissidents and rebels throughout time have worn their shackles as regalia. The badge says: I was deemed too dangerous to be heard. And what higher praise is there in an age of mediocrity?

Selwyn District Council, with its silent complicity and managerial theatre, has unwittingly transformed me. They sought to contain me, but instead, they initiated me. Like the political prisoners of old, I now see more clearly what this is about: legitimacy is no longer something granted by the system. It is taken—claimed—through sacrifice and exclusion.

Let them keep their microphones and their five-minute timers. I will speak here, and I will speak louder. And others will join me. Because in the absurd denial of the right to speak, the Council has done something they never intended. They have made me representative of something far larger than myself. I am not just one denied speaker. I am every citizen who has been told - unfortunately, there’s no time for you today.

But history always makes time. And so do people.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. He blogs HERE.