Brash vs Hooton – how the wealthy use defamation law to gag free speech

Matthew Hooton asks Court of Appeal to strike out Don Brash defamation case

Matthew Hooton acknowledges he went too far by personalising his comments and proposing that Don Brash was dishonest during a 2024 podcast.

Hooton’s lawyer Brian Dickey KC conceded this, but says his client’s subsequent apology was enough, particularly as he’s apologised “almost exactly for what he’s being sued for”.

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The long-running defamation case between the pair was before a three-person panel at theCourt of Appeal in Wellington this morning.

Hooton, a political commentator and recently appointed editor-in-chief of the Post and Sunday Star Times, wants Brash’s defamation claim struck out in its entirety.

Brash, the former National Party leader and Hobson’s Pledge founder and trustee, wants it to go back to court, where he is seeking $750,000 in damages.

The case centres on comments Hooton made during The Working Group political podcast, hosted by Martyn Bradbury and Damien Grant, in August 2024.

Hooton’s comments about Brash and Hobson’s Pledge were focused on the issue of Māori customary rights to the foreshore and a controversial Hobson’s Pledge advertisement in the NZ Herald.

Court documents outline in detail some of the comments Hooton made in a monologue of more than four minutes, including:

• Brash was a “fundamentally bad person”.
• He “divided this country for no apparent reason, despite being certainly intelligent enough to know the things that he says are not true”.
• Hobson’s Pledge was a “profoundly dishonest organisation”.

The hypocrisy of the Free Speech Right is an intellectual joke.

The Free Speech Champions of the Right have weaponised Free Speech and astroturf groups gatekeep what is and what isn’t Free Speech not on any philosophical grounds, but to further their interests while masquerading as civil rights crusaders.

The Free Speech Champions of the Right quote Voltaire right up until you say something they don’t like, and then suddenly it’s the use of their power and their money to gag you.

Here is why I think Don Brash is one of the worst politicians in NZ History.

I read The Hollow Men.

The expose by Nicky Hager using leaked emails from Don Brash’s Office while he put together the infamous Orewa Speech.

Brash’s Orewa Speech changed politics in New Zealand. His articulation of Māori Privilege, that they had a grievance culture and his one law for all rhetoric  forever caused a Trump orange shit stain on New Zealand’s race relations.

His Speech was the greatest insult since the betrayed promise of the Treaty itself.

Hager’s magnificent coverage of what was really driving the Orewa Speech that Brash gave has been utterly ignored by the mainstream media and as such is never front and centre whenever Brash returns from the grave with his latest attempt at legitimacy.

We know from the emails that were leaked to Hager that Brash and the people around Brash who wrote the Orewa Speech KNEW that what they were claiming when it came to Māori privilege and special treatment and the so called grievance industry were all bullshit myths that they couldn’t prove.

They had a media plan to throw journalists off the scent when the media came demanding examples of all this Māori privilege because they knew they couldn’t prove any of the hateful things they were claiming.

They knew they were creating a false fabrication but went ahead with it anyway.

They manipulated us by playing to the worst angels of our nature, and they knew that. The Orewa Speech wasn’t the tell it like it is musings of a polite Gentleman who was prepared to challenge the PC thought Police, this was a carefully stitched together lie  that everyone of them knew they couldn’t prove!

That’s not Free Speech, that’s not intellectually courageous, that’s spitefully Machiavellian.

Māori have been horrifically impacted by our brutally passive racism. Māori are 380% more likely to be convicted of a crime and 200% more likely to die from heart disease and suicide. Māori are paid 18% less and 34% leave school without a qualification. Māori die earlier and suffer more. Māori had 95% of their land taken from them in less than a century and were almost wiped out at the turn of the 1900s.

Couple all of that with a pittance in terms of reparations for stolen land, and to have that legacy defined by Don Brash as ‘privilege’, when he knew it they couldn’t prove it is unforgivable.

To repeat a lie you believe is true is ignorance. To repeat a lie you know to be untrue is politics at its most ugly.

Free Speech in a Democracy is not about your right to stand up and mouth off any old bullshit opinion you have. You get that protection by extension and the narcissistic culture we wallow in makes us believe Free Speech is all about ME, but the truth is it’s not a ‘right’ for you as an individual for your own selfish purposes, it’s an obligation as a citizen’s only weapon to strike out against the hegemonic structures of economy, culture and society to be able to speak truth to powers that don’t want to hear it.

Brash and his enablers knew that what they said in the Orewa Speech wasn’t provable, free speech is the power to stand up to Brash and point out to the rest of those listening how he manipulated them and made them fools.

The power of free speech is when you hear a part of the argument you didn’t know existed, and that on hearing it, changes every preconceived certitude you previously had.

I suspect the more NZers who really understood how contrived and calculating the Orewa Speech really was, the more infuriated they would be at how they had been fooled and deceived.

Go and read The Hollow Men now!

 

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