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.

Frank Newman: “Book burning” at the Hutt City Council

As many readers will be aware the NZCPR recently distributed some 600,000 copies of a booklet called The Treaty of Waitangi – An Explanation by Sir Apirana Ngata. These were distributed as an insert in 31 NZME and Stuff newspapers throughout the North Island. This followed distribution throughout the South Island in July last year. In total 1.1 million inserts have been distributed.

 The Treaty of Waitangi – An Explanation was written in 1922 and was considered of such importance that in 1963 the Ministry of Maori Affairs translated the work into English and distributed it to every Maori household in NZ. Given the current debate about the meaning of the treaty, and the high regard with which Sir Apirana Ngata was held and is still held (his portrait appears on our $50 banknote), the Explanation is a useful contribution to the debate.

 In early February we were tipped off that management at the Hutt City Council had ordered copies of the insert be removed from its premises, so I wrote to the Council’s Chief Executive Officer asking for clarification.

NZCPR Newsletter: Media Freedom to be Muzzled

At a post-Cabinet press conference on the 8th of February, just two weeks after becoming New Zealand’s 41st Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins announced that Labour’s proposed hate speech legislation would be withdrawn and the matter referred to the Law Commission.

He explained the Law Commission had “a good track record of developing guidance on difficult issues.”

The real reason the legislation was dumped was, of course, its unpopularity with voters. For a new PM desperately trying to win an election, abandoning it was the only sensible thing to do.

Karl du Fresne: Lauren Southern, Stefan Molyneux and the Streisand Effect

This is a talk I gave last night to the Masterton South Rotary Club.

It started with two Canadians named Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were on a speaking tour of Australia and tacked on a visit to Auckland. Hardly anyone had heard of them, still less knew what their politics were. But when Auckland mayor Phil Goff barred them from speaking at a council-owned venue in 2018, he touched a sensitive nerve.

The banning order turned out to be a classic demonstration of the so-called Streisand Effect, whereby attempts to suppress or hide something paradoxically result in it being brought to wider public attention.

Ross Meurant: Rule of Law or Rule of Police

Karl du Fresne, in his article: “New Zealand: where being "anti-government" results in police surveillance”(1), defends Cameron Slater’s RIGHT to CHALLENGE, and in the process, Karl exposes police behaviour which tends to validate Voltaire’s lament:

“Beware of the words, “Internal security” for they are the eternal cry of the oppressor”. 

But whether we like or dislike others, provided these “others” confine their critiques to within prescribed rules of law, such as avoiding insulting, offensive, threatening language as per statutory law and to avoid the guillotine of civil litigation, by presenting their opinions based on reliable evidence, “others” do have a right to speak out.

If we are denied the right to challenge, we are no longer a democracy.

Karl du Fresne: New Zealand: where being "anti-government" results in police surveillance

Things are worse than we thought.

Blogger Cameron Slater recently learned from an OIA request that the blog he’s associated with, The BFD, was under police surveillance. An unnamed police intelligence analyst was concerned Slater would “continue to publish uncorroborated information to denigrate labour [sic] party policies and individuals linked to them”.

Guy Steward: Free Speech or Loaded Language?

“The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition”, he said. “We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else.”

- George Orwell, (Nineteen Eighty-Four, London, Secker & Warburg, 1966, p.54).

Our PM has acquired a reputation—or rather reputations—overseas, largely sympathetic and supportive. Her choice of words sometimes gives cause for concern though and has recently earned her a bit of a reputation as the “Don’t talk to your neighbour” PM. Whether extreme speech or just tough love, time will tell, but if your neighbour is fifteen or twenty feet away, then really? you shouldn’t greet them, or talk to them? Or is that not what she meant?

Twenty-three years ago, I wrote a little book entitled Mind Control, the result of a thesis on the subject of cults. It described a suite of ten practices characteristic of cult groups, including the use of fear and intimidation, relationship control, information control, reporting structures, and loaded language. If just some of the practices were present, then it could be called a group with cultic features. If most or all were present, then it was a full-blown cult. In passing I made some parallels with several places around the world, known to all, where it happens on a national scale. I also looked at how, if ex-cultists don’t resolve issues related to those practices, they run the risk of perpetuating them in other contexts.

Bob Jones: Foolish Academics

The utter foolishness of so many academics is constantly brought to our attention. But it’s never been more disgracefully displayed than by Auckland university hierarchy’s sheer mind-blowing stupidity in condemning five of their number for speaking the truth, namely there’s no such thing as maori science. Science has no ethnicity. It’s a system of hard facts based on evidence.

My favourite outburst emanating from this stupidity and definitely the overwhelming gold medal winner, came from an ecologist, Dr Tara McAllister, specifically, “…we (his maori ancestors) did not navigate to Aotearoa on myths and legends”.

Take note Tara. For your ancestors to navigate to New Zealand they must first have known of its existence. Failing that they were simply adrift at sea.

Karl du Fresne: Another dismal setback for intellectual freedom

Attacks on free speech – even freedom of thought, since that’s what the enemies of free speech ultimately want to control – are coming so fast, and from so many directions, that it’s hard to keep up with them.

The latest involves seven University of Auckland professors who have effectively been blacklisted for writing a letter to The Listener politely but firmly challenging the notion that matauranga Maori – which can be defined as the traditional body of Maori knowledge – should be accorded the status of science, as proposed by an NCEA working group preparing a new school curriculum.

In the febrile ideological climate of 2021 the professors’ stance counts as heresy, and it brought the full, vindictive fury of the woke academic left down on their heads. Already the pressure has proved too much for Prof Douglas Elliffe, who has stood aside as acting dean of science. In an email to his colleagues, Elliffe said he was concerned that his involvement in the controversy would cause “division” within the science faculty. That doesn’t say much for the intellectual open-mindedness of his colleagues, but there you go.

Bob Edlin: Free speech in Parliament challenged - Maori Party MPs press the Speaker to bar questions they regard as “racist”

The Speaker was reprimanded by the PM yesterday, in the aftermath of the furore generated when he accused a former parliamentary staffer – to whom he had previously apologised for claiming he was a rapist – of sexual assault.

Then he was chided by Maori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer for failing to stop “racist” questions being asked in Parliament.

Other than Hansard, the only account of this attempt to curb MPs’ right to speak freely in Parliament was a Newshub report headed Rawiri Waititi lashes out at ‘Māori bashing’ in Parliament as Jacinda Ardern challenges Judith Collins to say ‘partnership’

But to whom – we wonder – is the Speaker accountable?

The Darkening Clouds of Totalitarianism

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter, we examine the Government’s radical plan to criminalise free speech and regulate political opinion, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Chris Trotter questions the Government’s implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Christchurch shooting, and our poll asks whether you support Jacinda Ardern’s plan to criminalise free speech.

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Michael Bassett: Free Speech and the New Zealand Herald

I have always believed strongly in free speech. So did my university teachers. I recall my professor saying to me: “I might disagree fundamentally with what you say, but I fought in the War for your right to be able to say it”.

About a month ago I noted in a blog post called “New Zealand’s Modern Cultural Cringe” that there is a strange new urgency to race relations in this country. The editor of the Northland Age, a privately-owned newspaper until 2009 when it was bought by NZME, owners of the New Zealand Herald, asked me if he could publish my article in his paper. Having known and respected his journalism for twenty years, I agreed without hesitation. It never occurred to me that by a backdoor the column would thus appear on the Herald’s website. 

Chris Trotter: The Political Economy Of Shock-Jockery.

Last week, Sean Plunket was awarded the DCM. Mere days after John Banks, standing-in for his fellow right-wing broadcaster, Peter Williams, was driven from Magic Talk Radio’s microphones, Plunket was abruptly advised that his services as the station’s “Magic Afternoons” host were no longer required. 

Magic Talk’s decision was made amidst the furore created by Banks’ failure to fight on-air racism with sufficient zeal, and the subsequent threats from its major advertisers to withdraw their support. Did the prospect of the right-wing contrarian’s imminent return prompt at least one of those major advertisers to issue Magic Talk’s proprietor, MediaWorks, with an ultimatum? Something along the lines of: “If Plunket stays, we go”?

Clive Bibby: You can’t make this up! It’s all true!

It’s a funny old world although l’m not enjoying the crap l have to put up with every time l make a contribution to this debate about the justification for the introduction of Maori wards.

Since my Council’s decision to bypass the voters of this region in a flagrant exhibition of arrogance rarely seen in this community, l have tried to put the case for why this undemocratic move is not in the best interests of all the citizens of Tairawhiti - particularly those who claim Maori decent.

For my trouble l have been defamed by just about every activist who thinks those of us with an alternative point of view are some form of low life with no right to challenge the legitimacy of any Council decision.

Karl du Fresne: In New Zealand today

■ Susie Ferguson is a disgrace. Interviewing Hone Harawira on Morning Report this morning about the police decision to shut down iwi checkpoints on highways in the Far North, she seemed at pains to avoid even the remotest hint that the checkpoints weren’t legitimate in the first place.

I would have been content if she had asked Harawira just one crucial question – namely, by what authority did he and his fellow activists set up the checkpoints? Harawira holds no public office and is accountable to no one. He has no public mandate. On the contrary, Maori voters in Te Tai Tokerau rejected him in the 2014 and 2017 general elections. He leads a far-left political splinter group called the Mana Movement, which won a resounding 0.1 per cent of the party vote in the last election it contested. So who or what gives Harawira the right to stop traffic on public roads?

NZCPR Weekly: Resetting Politics and the Media

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

In this week’s NZCPR newsletter, we outline the danger to New Zealand posed by the Prime Minister’s global socialist ambitions and the media’s engagement in politics, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Australian journalist Gideon Rozner shares his concerns about New Zealand’s leadership and future, and our poll asks whether you believe Stuff did the right thing in apologising to Maori.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
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Anthony Watts: Climate Activists Step Up Calls for Imprisoning Climate Realists

Unable to win the debate in the court of public opinion, climate activists are increasingly calling for the imprisonment of climate realists. The latest example is an article in Carbon Brief titled “How climate change misinformation spreads online.” The authors, who are all University of Exeter professors, advocate fines and imprisonment for people publishing “climate misinformation” online. They justify their call for imprisonment by claiming tremendous harm from “misleading information that is created and spread with intent to deceive.”

That’s one take, another take is that those who publish what the Left deems as “misinformation” are actually publishing what might be dubbed “inconvenient truths.” The 2006 film by Al Gore of the same name is a case in point. Gore, not being particularly good at details, published a boatload of misinformation in that film, and social media responded to correct the record.

Judith Bergman: The Court of Justice of the European Union Limits Free Speech

On October 3, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a judgment that Facebook can be ordered by national courts of EU member states to remove defamatory material worldwide:

"EU law does not preclude a host provider such as Facebook from being ordered to remove identical and, in certain circumstances, equivalent comments previously declared to be illegal. In addition, EU law does not preclude such an injunction from producing effects worldwide, within the framework of the relevant international law which it is for Member States to take into account."

The ruling came after the Austrian politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, chairman of Die Grünen (The Greens) party, sued Facebook Ireland in the Austrian courts.

NZCPR Weekly: Criminalising Free Speech

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we look into the Australian election result and Jacinda Ardern’s plan to regulate the internet and criminalise free speech, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Dr Bronwyn Howell examines the Christchurch Call pledge and explains why it sets up technology companies to become government propaganda machines, and our poll asks how concerned you are about the threat to free speech from Jacinda Ardern’s Government – very concerned, a little concerned, or not concerned at all..

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
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NZCPR Weekly: The Politicisation of a Tragedy

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we look into how the Christchurch tragedy is being politicised by activists and the Government, our NZCPR Guest Commentator Karl du Fresne explains how a moral panic is being created to justify restrictive law changes, and our poll asks whether you believe the Chief Censor was correct in banning the alleged killer’s ‘manifesto’ explaining why he carried out the attacks.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
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COMMENTS:

Comment on Editorial “An Agenda Change”:

Muriel Newman should be congratulated for her article on the political exploitation of the tragic events in Christchurch; and just how the socialists/Greens have taken advantage of this situation to pillory the majority of us as “White Supremacists” and therefore supporters of terrorism.

The fact that is, that under both Labour and National administrations this country has for some considerable time been financing one the most violent and bloody Terrorist Regime in Gaza. Namely Hamas, this “aid” is sent under the guise that it will help the poor and afflicted occupants of that State.

Systematically since the Labour/Green coalition came into power, it has engendered a policy of hatred against Israel. This is a campaign to promote the Jewish state as the villain of the Middle East, which will, endear our Prime Minister even further in the United Nation; and as some have suggested, a Nobel Prize for Peace!

This came to a ahead when our delegation voted against Israel in the UN which in fact was a very obvious ploy to support Islam.

It is evident that anti-Semitism is a strategic integral part of both their socialistic policy, similar in context to the British Labour Party under its present leadership!

The statement by our Prime Minister that any such repeat of this Christchurch massacre must never happen again is a misguided attempt to assure the general populace. Experience of lone wolf terrorist attacks overseas has shown this to be impossible.

Now we see the aftermath of Christchurch turning into a pathway for rabid Iwi aspirations, a hatred of the “white colonialists” all with the purpose of weakening our democracy. It is a prelude to a situation that will occur should Dame Susan Devoy’s call for a “Hate Speech Law” be passed in this country.

The question of such a law being implemented raises issues on our right to Freedom of Speech, the written word, and is a replica of an Orwellian 1984.

In the event of such a threat turning into a reality, it would be grounds for a total governmental control of our media. The very existence of such independent outlets as the Spectator, Sky News Australia, Facebook and the NZCPR would be curtailed, even threatened; and be subjected in the final analysis to left wing censorship.

...“Just after the Christchurch massacre Sky News NZ withdrew SkyNews Australia news channel 85, and substituted a sports edition. I contacted Sky News NZ and was informed that this was in sympathy with what had happened! Later I was also contacted by an officer from that organisation, who informed me that this decision was taken by the Directors of SKYNZ.”...

This raises the legal question of censorship especially when all this went viral beyond our shores. In a Western Democracy the people have a right to know the full details of such an attack. It should not be forbidden on the flimsy pretext that it would be prejudicial to any trial.

The question arises is why we, the general public, cannot be trusted to view this video/manifesto; when outside these shores non New Zealanders have had access to both? If the video presentation is so horrific it is no different to similar “entertainment shows” now visible on our Television.

Are we then so naive, so innocent to judge for ourselves on the full horror of this attack? Or is there a more sinister motive behind the Government’s heavy handed penalties of even possessing this video and manifesto?

What next? Are we to have a banning and burning of books as in Fascist and Communist countries? Such an act would be more in common and reminiscent of the World’s Totalitarian States!

Brian