Hate Speech Masquerades As Free Speech – Media Matters NZ

The Justice Committee is calling for submissions on the Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Bill with a closing date of 11:59pm on 13 January 2025.

This is a useful piece of legislation certainly and we must commend the Minister for it. This is a Minister who has shown himself responsive to public opinion in this instance and in the Broadcasting area.

He and his Government need to be aware that much more needs to be done. It has to be said that our Legislature, wearing different stripes over the past 10 years has generally failed to deal with the onset of the effects of unregulated social media on young people in this country.

This problem should have not reached the stage it has, where it has cost the life of a young female student to prompt our government into some action against the blight caused in the lives of many young New Zealand women, by the legislative license allowed here for global gangsters to perpetuate sexploitation, and threats of rape and violent death, to continue to be allowed here everyday.

This is a welcome piece of legislation certainly and we must commend the Minister for it. However, it should be also be noted that Hate Speech, which this proposal serves to discourage, is poisoning our social and political discourse, fuelled by on-line platforms who have no accountability to anyone, pay no tax, and who work to no standards, save their own financial profit. They do so under the banner of Freedom of Speech,

As has been noted already, stalking is a word which has an outdated feel about it because it suggests that the practice is about following somebody as if they were animal prey but recent advances in technology make it much more sophisticated and permeative including such things as hidden cameras GPS tracking but also , and much more insidious and dangerous, is the practice of attempting to shame or intimidate the victim through the use of Social Media.

We can safely predict that many more deaths and substantial injuries will be caused to the young and the vulnerable unless or until both this and the previous government green light legislation now in place in many other countries like our own, to create Safer On-Line platforms for our young people. The European Community has done it, The UK has done it, Australia and Canada have done it. Why not here?

Our own viewer advocacy agencies have all spoken out against the lack of curbs in NZ on sexploitation, threats to kill and maim, bullying and like behaviour which our lack of restraints allows. These agencies include the Broadcasting Standards Authority, Netsafe, Internet NZ, and the University research and Mental Health people.

The growth of powerful agents like the richest man in the world, who owns a major Social Media platform and who is trying to undermine the elected governments of other countries, as the leaders of France, Germany and Canada have recently drawn attention to, speaks to the extent that we are failing to protect our own citizens in this country against powerful forces within the Blogosphere which are actively trying to undermine elected democratic governments in the West.

Freedom of Speech is not a license to say anything you like.