It’s taken a while, but the speech wars have reached New
Zealand – and an Australian is in the thick of the strife. Problem is, she’s on
the wrong side.
Jan Thomas, the vice-chancellor of Massey University,
recently banned Don Brash, a former leader of the centre-right National party,
from speaking at a campus event organised by a student politics society. It was
the first occurrence at a New Zealand university of the ugly phenomenon known
as no-platforming. Now Thomas, who came to New Zealand from the University of
Southern Queensland, has been exposed not just as an enemy of free speech, but
as a dissembler who was less than honest about her motives.
