Meng Foon, the recently appointed race relations commissioner,
thinks newly elected Tauranga city councillor Andrew Hollis should resign because
he said on Facebook that the Treaty of Waitangi was “a joke” and “past its
use-by date”. The new mayor of Tauranga, Tenby Powell, agrees.
Never mind that more than 7500 people voted for Hollis,
making him the second most popular candidate for the four “at large” council
seats. Never mind that many of the people who voted for him quite possibly
share his view – rightly or wrongly – about the Treaty.
This is the way it is in New Zealand in 2019. The option of
first resort, if you disagree with something someone in public office has said,
is to demand that they resign, and to hell with the democratic process that got
them elected or the voters who supported them. Dissent is dealt with not by
debating the issue, but by trying to silence the dissenter.
This is not the way
things are supposed to be done in a supposedly liberal democracy, but it’s
increasingly the norm in 21st century New Zealand.
Hollis obviously stands in the way of Powell’s wish for a “united”
council. Well, tough; that’s democracy. It’s often messy and peopled by contrary
characters, just as it should be if it’s to reflect the real world.
Tauranga’s new mayor rose to the rank of colonel
in the New Zealand army, and there’s a hint of military thinking in his apparent
desire for order around the council table. But councillors are elected to speak
their minds, not to meekly fall into line with what the mayor wants. New
Zealand is a democracy, and democracy is supposed to provide a forum for all
views. It is not selective.
Besides, forcing Hollis to stand down – or disqualify
himself from any discussion relating to Maori issues, which is Powell’s alternative
demand – doesn’t magically get rid of
his opinions. On the contrary, heavy-handed attempts to stifle dissent serve to
foster anger and resentment, and are likely to reinforce the widely held opinion
that New Zealand has been captured by authoritarian orthodoxy and groupthink.
The really disappointing response to Hollis’s heresy, however,
is not Powell’s, but Meng Foon’s. Powell is just a provincial mayor seeking to
assert himself at the start of his first term, but Foon occupies a position of
power and influence in central government and, unlike Powell, doesn’t depend on
votes to stay there.
Like many people, I welcomed Foon’s appointment as race
relations commissioner. He had seemed an admirable mayor of Gisborne and promised
to bring a grounded, common-sense approach to a job where ideology, rooted in
identify politics, had previously held sway. We are now forced to conclude, regrettably, that it’s still business as usual at the Human Rights Commission.
The furore over Andrew Hollis is only a symptom of a much
bigger problem, which is that freedom of speech is under concerted attack.
Whenever a public figure or institution loudly proclaims
his, her or its commitment to free speech, you sense there’s a “but” coming. It
seems we’re allowed to enjoy free speech, except on certain issues deemed to be
offensive to fragile sensibilities.
Take Massey University, for example. Announcing last week that
it had chickened out of hosting the Feminism 2020 conference, Massey made ritual
noises about being committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech as “values
that lie at the very heart of the tradition of a university and academic
inquiry”. But its supposed commitment wasn’t strong enough to save the feminist
event after it was targeted by a noisy group of precious transgender activists threatening
disruption.
Massey’s excuse for capitulating to the protesters was that cancellation
was the only way to avoid breaching its health, safety and wellbeing obligations.
It was another victory for the enemies of free speech – and an early demonstration
of the danger inherent in the recent High Court ruling which held that an Auckland
Council-owned company was within its rights in cancelling a speaking engagement
at the Bruce Mason Centre following an unsubstantiated threat of protest
action (but with strong evidence of political influence on the part of Auckland's mayor).
There’s a strange and chilling irony here. Feminists were
once at the cutting edge of radical politics, but now, because of their
insistence that a person with a penis cannot be a woman, find themselves
supplanted by a more radical ideology that wants to silence them.
Interestingly, this isn’t a classic left-vs-right debate.
Some of the most vigorous defences of free speech have come from hard-core leftists
such as Chris Trotter and Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury. The threat to freedom of expression comes from the so-called snowflake generation, which loudly
champions diversity but contradictorily has no tolerance of diverse opinions. Sadly,
they are encouraged by academics and some politicians – and now by Meng Foon
and Tenby Powell.
