I agree the 50year law needs changing and there should be an expansion of anti discrimination protections but criminalising speech to satisfy the Woke’s low threshold for hate in a triggered outrage culture is a recipe for political disaster!
Incitement to violence is a clear threshold and we allow the Human Rights Commission to act as a filter for that bigotry by bringing people together to educate and attempt to resolve discrimination issues.
The Woke don’t want a filter, they want a weapon.
They see this Hate Speech as a means to smite the dirty filthy racists, the evil transphobes and raping misogynists.
This isn’t social policy, it’s a revenge fantasy!
The woke’s daily to do list would look like this
-meditation
-yoga
-self actualize while taking selfie for Instagram
-correct others on their te Reo pronunciation
-cycle to drop off recycling
-call police and report a misuse of pronouns as a hate crime
-get into Twitter argument about Meghan Markle living her best life, report to Police as hate crime and try to get the person sacked
-juice cleanse
-bake bread & be present with gratitude
Throwing someone in jail for 3years using a law defined by the police is not a liberal progressive democracy no matter how noble the life goals!
We are the NZ Left dammit!
We don’t shy away from debate!
Our forefathers bled on foreign dirt against the Nazis in World War 2 so that no citizen should be forced to live under the tyranny of Fascism!
Our forefathers fought for the belief of the individual protected before the might of the State, that no Government should abuse the gifts of Democracy by enslaving its own people!
WE SHOULD CHAMPION FREE SPEECH NOT CRIMINALIZE IT!
And yet here we are seriously debating moving hate speech into the crimes act, allowing the fucking Police to define hate and expanding jail time from 3months to 3years!
We will include a blasphemy law and could criminalise the misuse of pronouns and political opinion we don’t like – how the hell does that make us safer from the next white supremacy terror attack?
Why has NO ONE asked if this heavy handed over the top approach will actually generate more radicalization?
Look at the recent attempt by the Disinformation Project to have a closed door meeting with mainstream media to have a secret discussion on what opinion Journalists and News Producers should be platforming for the election. TDB tried to get access to the event, but we were declined because apparently in just 2 days the event was ‘booked out’.
How convenient.
The event has been cancelled now because the Disinformation Project claimed social media attention of their secret meeting with news media was intimidating them.
It’s a self feeding nexus now of elite opinion gatekeepers and the voices they are struggling to cancel and deplatform.
Won’t we be inadvertently creating a thousand new radical recruits by allowing Woke activists to play out all their revenge fantasies by constantly demanding Police investigate everyone they hate?
That’s what the SIS nark list on anyone harbouring ‘us and them’ mentalities is about, are we placing the Police into this swamp and demanding they start arresting people as well?
Remember the Rachel Stewart example of last year when woke activists manufactured tweets she wrote as a threat with a gun and had her home swatted with Police taking her guns?
That’s the sort of games we get into if we criminalise speech and call for SIS narks.
Labour need to find a simple solution to this that protects minorities while side stepping the free speech issue altogether.
Labour have made noises about having National on board, but they said the exact same thing to Councils about 3 Waters and that quickly changed didn’t it?
Labour would love National’s support as it gives them political cover, but the Right gain too much political power from a free speech fight, so Luxon would be mad to agree to anything that remotely resembled what has currently been proposed.
This shouldn’t be a free speech issue at all for Labour, this should be an anti-harassment campaign.
Everyone in a liberal progressive democracy deserves the same agency. Muslims, Queer or Trans people shouldn’t feel abused and threatened or frightened of simply being in public. Graeme Edgler has written extensively upon this and makes excellent points on how we could balance freedom of speech with the right to not feel threatened.
The debate must be focused on anti-harassment, not free speech!
Adding gender identity and religion to the existing discrimination legislation is absolutely righteous, our fellow citizens and comrades deserve to live in a society that can’t discriminate against them!
The solutions here are beefing up and expanding our current systems to ensure people aren’t harassed or discriminated against, the solution is not handing the power to censor opinions to the State and throw people in prison!
We must also be focused on better public broadcasting like the RNZ/TVNZ merger and more regulations on social media (including taxes to fund that journalism) to stop the algorithms from weaponising debate.
If Government wants to make NZ more ‘socially cohesive’ they should build more houses, use a wider range of taxes against corporations and fully fund mental health, education and public health – they shouldn’t implement blasphemy laws and criminalising misuse of pronouns!
Labour must urgently ignore the Woke and focus on a law change that protects minorities without green lighting a tsunami of complaints that quickly becomes an attempted purge of opinions we don’t like!
The Left should be championing free speech, not trying to kill it off!
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This is an important part of the standardized corporate left/WEF playbook. Democracy is inconvenient for the elite now that people aren’t buying the garbage the MSM and their feeders are spreading therefore they are attempting to censor opposing thoughts.
Kiri/Jacinda and the current government are just the implementation device. It’s not difficult to see who really benefits from the status quo, who benefitted from covid cult and who benefits from the destruction of democracy and financial independence.
As people will see from the likely red wave next week in the States and next years election the majority have had enough and despite the elite’s best efforts the internet has let the genie out of the bottle and it ain’t never getting back in. In the past 3 months Italy, Sweden and now Israel have gone beyond center right and this process will only accelerate when the recession truly hits in 2023.
I think that analogy of the genie being let out of the bottle absolutely describes our emerging culture. When it suited I think the west, they abandoned honourable treatment of some middle eastern people by spraying them with a dense gas that killed them off in their cellars where they had fled to be safe against shelling. When ‘We’ make the rules, then ‘We. in Power have the right to give open slather against the miscreants who do not comply. The Left are getting tougher and appear to have little or no self-awareness and objectivity.
And Brazil Frank?
Bolsonaro was predicted to lose in a landslide. He lost by a smidgeon over 1%. The rest of South America has gone left. South America goes in cycles with its political leanings. Look deeper into Brazil’s results and the right had a successful night down ticket. Hardly a fantastic result for the left.
The aggregated polls had Bolsonaro in second place but 8 points with something like 15% undecided by the end of September. Either way the psycho bastard lost. I also think there is a world of difference between a Bolsonaro and the Swedish version of right ( with a moderate PM).
Also the US is a red tide in a large part because the public are buying the garbage that Fox News spreads. Are they not part of the msm?
do I hear a sound coming up from the sewers? why yes I do, it’s panzerboi whistling in the dark
Lots of voters are driven to vote on issues that annoy them. So if Labour want to increase voter turnout, then this is a good way to do that.
Yes New Zealanders don’t have to bow to this tyrannical Labour Government.
Vote them out.
How do we defuse the alleged “time bomb”?…maybe by not hyper ventilating and seeing scary monsters which are not really there.
All NZ Labour need to do is add “Religion” along with race etc. that are already there, to legislation, and leave it at that.
No problem with adding religion to the existing legislation, provided the proscription only applies to direct “incitement to harm”. The same goes for ethnicity, sexuality etc. Posting something offensive like “look at all these chinky c*nts lining up to come here” (as a well known Kiwi did a few years ago) is no grounds for an arrest. Neither is expressing a unflattering opinion of Islam or Muslims.
Tiger Mountain Have a read of PM Ardern’s UNO address advocating global censorship of free speech, and you may think differently. Major overseas news outlets have commented vigorously about it.
I am not in any way a supporter of Russia but I feel in a free country like NZ if someone want to collect money to help Russian soldiers why are they treated as law breakers. We praise those who push themselves to represent their country in all ways and this woman is doing the same .
Trevor. Agree.
The far left, & far right, have little interest in democracy or free speech. ACT are more libertarian than far right, but they have the potential to become authoritarian if they come into power. The exact same thing could be said about the greens. The ideology insists that they are right, therefore suppressing opposition is justified.
A pox on both their houses
No.
ACTs policy is to dismantle the levers of power wherever possible. It’s the party that wants to leave people alone.
or the party that wants the rich to have the freedom to buy and sell your daughter for bobbins…andrew
Martyn
Let’s get real. Jacinda and Labour are pushing all this woke shit through because its actually something they can achieve. It’s easy to implement. A bit of paperwork, a majority in the house and its done, ready to be enforced. To do something real, like build more houses and more good roads or even fix broken ones, or to get on top of crime or maybe build a govt owned refinery is just so much harder.
Sour Kraut Capitalising on the tragedy in Christchurch, just like snivelling Prince Harry is forever doing over the long ago death of his mother in a car crash in Paris. Marama and the Green girls used those same Muslin murders to vilify and demonise white New Zealanders, and they got away with it.
If we look at hate, well it’s a normal emotion, just like anger, love, jealousy and horny lustiness. So I don’t see hate as an abnormality, rather an expression of anger. I’m sure survivors of abuse at Gloriavale may well be hateful towards their abusers and possibly religion. Likewise one may hate a politician for implementing benefit cuts, for example. I’m sure many despised and hated Margaret Thatcher. But incitement to harm or actual harm of the person you hate is the crossed line. That is fairly simple to define in law. Strangely look at Putin-never is his speech hateful, in fact it sounds like love speech, but his actions-thats beyond hate.
A bigger problem is arguably disinformation. For example unvaxed were said to be 20 time more infectious ,then suddenly an actual study came out and they were 5 times more infectious. Many people asked their employer for the study that showed they were a higher risk of spreading the disease and could not be shown an actual study. Fake news can be incredibly dangerous. I think we need a Ministry of Truth like Orwell suggested. So a department of fact checkers.
Oh shit whatever way you look at it we are screwed.
Who do you want defining hate speech, the thought police? This person?
“They use Pinterest and Instagram to draw in other women who are interested in interior design, Children’s clothing, knitting, healthy food for children, and it does draw people in towards a set of white nationalist ideas.
I mean, it’s relatively easy to see if you see a very beautiful, fair-skinned blonde or redhead child with beautiful braiding in her hair and some flowers just step back a little bit, which is really distressing because that’s my heritage cooking with the girls”
Kate Hannah (director of the government’s Disinformation Project) from the “documentary” Fire and Fury.
Full marks for this piece Martyn. I’m pleased you’re with us.
Next question: Do you think we’re going to have a free & fair election next year? It’s got so bad that I’m beginning to doubt it.
Endless propaganda on local TV and censorship of opposing views is not what I call ‘free & fair’.
Blasphemy – the victimless crime.
Gordo. Ok then, how about organising a posse to help rescue erudite old Professor Sir Lloyd Geering ?
He ‘s been tried for heresy once before, but he may not get off easily from the terrible trio of Jacinda, Joanne and Kiri.
Well said Karla.
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