Free Speech Alert: AUT University disgracefully cancel feminist event on campus

For the love of Christ, if you can't debate feminism from a feminist perspective on a fucking University campus, where the fuck can you have it?

By
Martyn Bradbury
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48
2407

An outrageous decision last night by AUT to cancel and deplatform an event to discuss free speech and feminism!

Daphna Whitmore is a staunch socialist feminist who was discussing the insanity of banning feminist critiques of the trans movement, here’s the description of the event…

Join us for a discussion about free speech in the context of often polarising transgender-gender-critical feminism debate.
Daphna was the plaintiff in Whitmore v Palmerston North City Council, which saw the Palmerston North library forced to honour a booking for the feminist group Speak Up For Women. Speak Up For Women booked the library for a public meeting to discuss their concerns about amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act. After initially accepting the booking, the library later cancelled, saying it would only host a debate where ‘all views could be heard’. Speak up For Women applied for interim relief, which was granted, forcing the library to honour the booking. Justice Gerald Nation held that the Council’s decision to cancel the event ‘involved a serious failure to recognise the BORA rights of Speak Up For Women and its members.’
So, what lessons can we learn from this episode? Is it ever appropriate to limit free speech in public venues?

 

…surprise, surprise, Trans activists had this event looking at their cancel culture cancelled by putting pressure on AUT to silence this event!

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For the love of Christ, if you can’t debate feminism from a feminist perspective on a fucking University campus, where the fuck can you have it?

Universities are supposed to be places of intellectual rigour and have the responsibility and obligation to be a conscience of society.

They have the philosophical and intellectual safeguards to allow these types of debates to occur!

I was intending to go to this, but we had The Working Group on last night, it is an appalling day in the history of AUT that they are too gutless and spineless to merely host a discussion on cancel culture and its impacts on feminism!

Disgraceful behaviour by AUT and they deserve to be publicly shamed for their gutlessness!

 

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48 COMMENTS

  1. Did AUT give any reason for cancelling this? Is AUT a proper University or is it one of these glorified former polytechs? You say universities are supposed to be places of intellectual rigour, and Aquinas said the raison d’être of the university is the intellect for the intellect’s sake, but today’s university vice chancellors wouldn’t have a clue you’re talking about the way that classical academics would have.

    Time perhaps to mourn the demise of the university. Nevertheless they can’t just cancel without reason and hopefully will start wriggling like maggots like Massey did when their vc cancelled Brash and the media found out about it. She looked a nice lady, Australian I think. They come here and get good perks and are pc culture vultures; Canada and the USA also provide fattish blondes with names from tragic pop hits of the 1960’s for vc jobs, commissions of enquiry, consultants and so on, but they need to explain themselves here.

    • Yes, you should be a proper university to have intellectual discussions.

      Surely Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale would be the sorts of places, not here in NZ.

      Maybe we can put it to the Privy Council for a ruling.

  2. Disgusting. Why is this not in the msm? They are complicite with the woke shut down.

    I am so angry. Its got to stop.

    Thanks Martyn for publishing it and considering going to the talk.

    • Anker Me too. I recall when university students could debate anything and host anything, and in retrospect, how exciting it was. We flocked out of hours to hear speakers who always got written up in the student newspapers, and were thence picked up by the dailies. I think I can say that Otago University’s ‘Critic ‘ was a direct feed to the ‘ODT,’ and that the universities at least equaled the fearless leader writers of the pre-electronic press era. Now they’re scared, and that’s not good.

      The LGBTQ people can be profoundly irritating but so what ? They’re not manufacturing Molotov cocktails.

      • In my time at uni there was heated debate outside the library about the SpringBok Tour and activists groups moving that discussion onto confronting racism in this country. No one came to blows. However, Muldoon’s guest lecture was cancelled when the FAIR group (Fight Against Institutional Racism) called in a bomb threat. Don Brash was cancelled because some staff member or student could feel mentally unwell if Brash was in a 1km range of a complainant individual. Surely, anyone who cannot hear the other side of a debate is either already mentally unwell or a fascist.

        • Joseph, If there was a bomb threat, then cancellation would have been the smart thing to do. With Brash at Massey, I thought the VC said that they were protecting Brash from having eggs and tomatoes biffed at him… They could have just bought him a raincoat – and I rather think that he’d have coped anyway, he’s had messy stuff thrown at him before. If the kindly paternalistic AUT vice chancellor is protecting ladies from eggs and tomatoes, it mightn’t have occurred to him that many students can’t afford to buy that much food now, and wise women would have been grabbing those tomatoes, taking them home, and making chutney with them, although I imagine that egg catching is an acquired skill.

          (There used to be a Chinese greengrocer in Wellington who gave away old tomatoes for free to people to preserve or whatever, but nowadays poor folk scrabble through the rubbish bins at farmers’ markets, and I gather, at supermarkets, or queue for NGO’s food parcels.)

          Anybody triggered by a speaker or even the sight of them, doesn’t have to go and see them – and some of this sort of thing is dopey posturing – eg some of the Auckland Pride Parade protestors – with agendas.

    • Delia. Every time I see your lovely grandmother’s name, it reminds me of the Delia in my childhood, mother of two school children with her husband killed in an accident, catching the tram daily to go to humdrum work, the hard life of single-self supporting women far too busy being unwitting trailblazers to do a hang of a lot of other things, and far more graceful role models than they probably ever knew, or who are seen very often now. I salute her and all of those splendid ladies.

  4. Totally agree Martyn.

    I exhort other readers to join the Free Speech Union – they are doing great work fighting back against all this pervasive controlling BS. On Anzac day, I was thinking that they are one of the few groups left in NZ today who represent what the Anzacs stood for. Equality and a fair go. The right of all New Zealanders to be heard and to engage in genuine debate.

    They are not politically aligned and need support both monetarily and as advocates to do this on behalf of all New Zealanders. https://www.fsu.nz

  6. The Vice Chancellor of AUT is Damon Salesa, and regardless of his links with the Labour Party he should be stood down if he is the the person responsible for denying women’s voices in 21st C New Zealand.

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