Post-Weinstein, we're navigating new territory

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 29.)

In 2014 the then leader of the Labour Party, David Cunliffe, controversially apologised for being a man.

Some commentators ridiculed him for wallowing in liberal male middle-class guilt. To others, it just looked like an attempt to ingratiate himself with women voters.

But you could see what Cunliffe was getting at. He was speaking at a Women’s Refuge symposium and the subject was male violence. He made the point that most sexual abuse and domestic violence was perpetrated by men, and who could dispute that?

Cunliffe’s mistake was to assume personal responsibility for what some other men did. But following the worldwide outpouring of women’s fury at sexual harassment, I imagine many more men are now wondering whether they should feel ashamed to be male.

A couple of things are clear. One is that sexual harassment by rich and powerful men has been going on for a very long time. The other is that the perpetrators have been protected and encouraged up till now by the silence of their victims – a silence that almost amounted to complicity.

I’m not sure what’s changed, but women who previously kept quiet have now come out into the open. Perhaps there’s an element of opportunism in some of the accusations being made, but what’s not in doubt is that far too many men behave abominably toward women.

And while we’ve heard a lot about celebrities who have gone to the media with their accounts of harassment and molestation, there remains an infinitely greater number of powerless, anonymous women suffering silently in factories, restaurants, offices and other workplaces.

Sexual harassment mystifies me. What pleasure could a man get from sex with a woman who doesn’t want it? Groping, Donald Trump-style, is equally hard to explain. It can only be about humiliating and demeaning the victim.

In those circumstances sex isn’t about mutual pleasure. It becomes a means of asserting power. The feminists are right about this.

I have known men who used their positions to obtain sexual favours. They didn’t boast about it, so perhaps there was some part of their conscience that told them it wasn’t something to be proud of.

It was usually the victims who revealed it, and I was shocked by their apparent acceptance of it, as if having sex with the boss was something they had to do to get ahead.

Some of these women were young and attractive while the men they slept with were decades older and slobs – Harvey Weinstein types. Even if one accepts that power is an aphrodisiac, and that some women are attracted to men in positions of influence, there are surely limits.

Anyway, back to David Cunliffe. In the light of what has now been revealed about rampant sexual harassment at the highest levels of politics and the entertainment business, should all men feel guilty?

There is an extreme school of feminism, after all, which holds that all men are rapists. It’s not unusual to hear the entire male sex disparaged as if all men can’t help behaving like dogs around a bitch on heat.

But I would guess that only a relatively small proportion of men are sexual predators, and those who are not in that category don’t need to do a Cunliffe in atonement for the sins of others.

What we will have to do, however, is learn some new rules, because one consequence of the “me too” harassment saga is that it will redefine relations between the sexes, and not necessarily for the better. 

Men will find it harder to discern where the boundary lies between mere flirtation, which many women welcome and enjoy, and harassment.

Physical contact, in particular, has become a minefield. It brought down Garrison Keillor, the revered former host of the American radio show A Prairie Home Companion.

What Keillor characterises as a misdirected pat on a female colleague’s bare back years ago, which he says he apologised for at the time and thought had been forgotten because the woman seemed to remain friendly with him, came back to bite him last month when he got a phone call from her lawyer. 

Now he’s in disgrace and his former employer has taken such fright that it’s changed the name of his old show.

At what point, I wonder, does a touch or a kiss become harassment?

Blatant groping or an uninvited hand up a skirt can’t be mistaken for anything other than molestation, but there’s now an undefined grey area between what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Like the kindergarten teacher who no longer feels it's safe to cuddle an upset child, we're all having to navigate new territory.

If you want to see what real hate speech is like, check out the attacks on Don Brash

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, December 27).

Don Brash could be excused for feeling a little bruised as 2017 draws to a close.

The former leader of the National and ACT parties used his Facebook page to criticise Guyon Espiner, one of the presenters of Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, for repeatedly showing off his fluency in Maori.

Brash objected because, as he pointed out, hardly any listeners to the programme would know what Espiner was saying. According to Brash, the presenter’s use of te reo is an example of “virtue signalling” – in other words, flaunting his moral superiority.

It was a legitimate comment about a high-profile figure employed by a publicly owned institution, but Brash’s Facebook post was the signal for one of the most brutal media gang-ups I can recall.

As the former leader of two right-of-centre political parties and the founder of a supposedly racist pressure group called Hobson’s Pledge, he’s considered fair game by the so-called “liberal” Left. And predictably, they piled in.

I put that word “liberal” in inverted commas because many of these people are angrily intolerant of opinions they don’t approve of. In other words, they are illiberal.

Many of the attacks on Brash were striking for their sheer malice and venom, and I’m not just talking about those that appeared in the Wild West of online social media. Some of the most vicious were published in mainstream media, where editors normally keep a check on spiteful and gratuitous personal attacks.

One columnist who makes his primary living as a comedian – a word which now seems interchangeable with “smug moralist” – harrumphed about Brash creating a “storm in a teacup” over te reo. But if there was a storm in a teacup, it was entirely due to the furious, over-the-top reaction from Brash’s attackers. All he did was write something on his Facebook page.

Brash was also subjected to an openly hostile interview (for want of a better word) with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand – a rare example of a state-owned broadcasting organisation publicly exacting utu against a critic – and was subsequently ridiculed for not pronouncing “whanau” correctly. If your name is Don Brash you can’t win, even when you try to play the game.

Brash, of course, has been a marked man ever since he delivered what is routinely described in the media as his “infamous” Orewa speech in 2004, when he was National Party leader. In that speech he espoused one rule for all New Zealanders and an end to special treatment in law for people of Maori descent.

“Infamous” it may have been in the eyes of some journalists, but it struck a chord with many New Zealanders. Brash took the National Party from its worst-ever defeat in 2002 to near-victory in 2005, which the Left explains by insisting that the 890,000 New Zealanders who voted for National were all racists. Yeah, right, as they say.

Since then, Brash has made himself even more unpopular with politically correct thinkers by forming Hobson’s Pledge, which has the mantra “one law for all”. The organisation takes its name from a statement attributed to Captain William Hobson at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi: “He iwi tahi tatou” – “We are all one people”.

In the eyes of his critics, Brash’s stance makes him a racist. But how do you define “racist”? A racist, to me, is someone who believes some races are inherently superior or inferior to others and discriminatory treatment is therefore justified.

By that definition, Brash could more accurately by characterised as anti-racist, since he opposes special treatment for a racial minority.

He mounts perfectly cogent arguments against racial privilege on the basis that it runs counter to the principle that everyone in a democracy should have equal rights. The most obvious example of Maori being treated differently is the anachronism of Maori seats in Parliament, which become very hard to justify when there are 23 MPs of Maori or part-Maori descent representing general electorates.

That’s not to say that Hobson’s Pledge doesn’t have members who are truly racist. It’s possible some are, although I would guess that many of the organisation’s members (I’m not one, incidentally) are simply older New Zealanders who are struggling to come to terms with the prevailing spirit of biculturalism. That may seem quaintly out-of-touch, but it doesn’t make them racist.

That raises another striking aspect of the attacks on Brash. A recurring theme was that he should shut up because he’s old, male and white, which apparently disqualifies him from having any right to express an opinion. We hear a lot of talk about the need to embrace diversity, but apparently it doesn’t extend to Pakeha men of a certain age.

We also hear a lot from the Left about the need for tougher laws against “hate speech” to protect vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities and the gay community. But ironically, the closest I’ve seen to hate speech in 2017, by far, was the outpouring of loathing for Brash.

Dominatrix vs dinosaur

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 15.)

Don Brash made two big mistakes recently.

The first was to think he could criticise a high-profile Radio New Zealand presenter on Facebook and get away with it. The second and much bigger mistake was to accept an invitation to explain himself on Kim Hill’s Saturday morning radio show.

Inevitably, Brash was savaged. It was as close as RNZ will ever get to blood sport as entertainment.

I gave up listening after 15 minutes. By that time Brash had been hanged and drawn and I didn’t care to stick around for the quartering. 

The metaphor is apt because being hanged, drawn and quartered was once the punishment for treason, and Brash had committed an act which was treasonous in the extreme: He had criticised Morning Report host Guyon Espiner for what Brash regarded as his excessive use of the Maori language.

Brash described Espiner’s flaunting of his fluency in te reo as “virtue signalling” – in other words, displaying one’s superior moral and cultural values.

For this offence against the spirit of biculturalism, the former National and ACT leader was summoned for a discipline session with Radio NZ’s resident dominatrix.

The result was entirely predictable. Hill was acerbic and sneering from the outset.

She didn’t bother to conceal her contempt for Brash and neither did she bother to maintain any pretence that this was a routine interview, conducted for the purpose of eliciting information or expanding public understanding of the issue.

It was a demolition job, pure and simple – utu, if you prefer – and I doubt that it was ever intended to be anything else. Its purpose was to expose Brash as a political and cultural dinosaur and to punish him for criticising Hill’s colleague.

Had it been a boxing bout, it would have been declared a mismatch and called off after the first round. Hill was in her natural milieu – home-ground advantage, you might say, in her familiar personal domain with an unseen crowd of adoring fans urging her on. 

Hill doesn’t hesitate to use her command of the medium to chew up and spit out anyone whose political views she doesn’t approve of. Brash didn’t stand a chance.

But being Brash, he was civil. He addressed Hill throughout by her first name, as if hoping they could be mates. He would have had more luck trying to pat the head of a komodo dragon.

What on earth made him go on Hill’s show in the first place? Vanity, perhaps, or the misguided hope that he could appeal to Hill’s better nature. Faint chance.

Of course there will be those who say Brash is a political and cultural dinosaur who deserved everything he got. But the last time I checked, you were allowed to criticise Radio New Zealand in a Facebook post without having to undergo a public disembowelment.

Here’s where we get down to the real issue. RNZ is a public institution.  It belongs to us.

The public who fund the organisation and pay its presenters' salaries are entitled to criticise it. But can we now expect that anyone who has the temerity to do so will be subjected to a mauling by RNZ’s in-house attack dog? Or is this treatment reserved for despised white conservative males such as Brash, to make an example of them and deter others from similar foolishness?

Either way, Hill’s dismemberment of Brash was a brazen abuse of the state broadcaster’s power and showed contemptuous disregard for RNZ’s charter obligation to be impartial and balanced.

This is nothing new, of course. The quaint notion that RNZ exists for all New Zealanders was quietly jettisoned years ago. Without any mandate, the state broadcaster has refashioned itself as a platform for the promotion of favoured causes.

You’re more likely to see an aardvark driving a tractor down The Terrace than to hear a conservative voice, or even a middle-of-the-road one, on smug groupthink fests such as RNZ’s current series of Smart Talk.

Brash has a perfectly valid point. Whatever the benefits of learning te reo, it is not the function of the state broadcaster to engage in social engineering projects for our collective betterment – for example, by encouraging us to refer to Auckland as Tamaki Makaurau and Christchurch as Otautahi, as now seems to be the practice of some RNZ reporters.

RNZ does many things very well and my quality of life would be greatly diminished without it, but no one will ever die wondering about the political leanings of many of its presenters and producers.

And clearly, no one should expect any restraint to be imposed on them by their bosses – in fact probably less so than ever under an indulgent Labour-led government. 

A political high-wire act without safety harnesses

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, December 13.)

It’s always interesting to watch a new government bedding in, and never more so than when the Labour Party gets its hands on the levers of power after squirming with impatience on the opposition benches for several terms.

National regards itself as the natural party of government, which is perhaps understandable when it’s been in power for 47 of the past 68 years. National is also, generally speaking, the party of the status quo. It does what it needs to do to win elections and no more.

Labour, on the other hand, is a party of change. Whereas National in opposition bides its time, confident its chance will come again soon, Labour chafes with frustration at all the things that need fixing. By the time it finally gets a crack at the job, it’s jumping out of its skin.

History shows a clear pattern: long periods of stable but mostly unadventurous National government, punctuated by short, sometimes exhilarating bursts of ground-breaking reform under Labour.

People of a certain age will recall the speed with which Norman Kirk’s new government changed the political settings in 1972 – recognising communist China, withdrawing from the unpopular Vietnam War and adopting a forthright stance on apartheid and French nuclear testing.

Labour under David Lange in 1984 showed similar boldness, tackling the challenge of economic restructuring while simultaneously honouring Kirk’s legacy by taking an independent line in foreign affairs. But it was utterly chaotic and fatally divided ideologically.

Under Helen Clark, Labour took a more cautious and disciplined approach, probably realising that it needed to stay close to the political centre if it was to defy the hex that had seen previous Labour governments tossed out after one or two terms. And it worked: Clark became the most successful Labour leader since Peter Fraser in the 1940s.

Now we find ourselves once again watching a new Labour government – or at least a Labour-led one – grappling with the unfamiliar demands of power. And as in the 1980s, it’s a bit like watching a high-wire act performed without safety harnesses.

One crucial disadvantage for the new government is that it’s wearing L plates. Jacinda Ardern ran a remarkably assured election campaign but she is new to the demands of power and has a cabinet that is extremely light on ministerial experience.

Labour came to power with a highly ambitious – some would say reckless – 100-Day Plan that it seemed determined to fulfil even as neophyte ministers were still moving into their new offices, appointing key staff and getting to know the relevant officials.

I wonder whether it would have been wiser to take exactly the reverse approach: that is, do nothing for the first 100 days so while it caught its breath, took proper stock of things and got over the intoxication of finding itself back in power.

As it is, Labour pitched headlong into an unnecessary and avoidable spat with Australia over the Manus Island asylum seekers (who saw that coming?), and then fast-tracked a crowd-pleasing but suspiciously light-on-detail no-fees bonanza for first-year tertiary students that has been costed at $380 million for the first year alone.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins impatiently brushed aside Treasury concerns that the financial implications hadn’t been properly considered. Government officials didn’t get to determine political priorities, he haughtily pronounced.

Hmmm. Is this is a case of an over-eager reformist government putting its heart before its head in its haste to get things done? It wouldn’t be the first time.

On other policies, Labour is having to learn that there’s a world of difference between making promises on the campaign trail and having to deliver results in government. Supporters of Labour and the Greens will be disappointed by the spectacle of the government equivocating and even back-pedalling on a range of key issues, from the TPPA to Pike River, but they daren’t complain too vociferously because it would be letting the side down.

Similarly, fans of Winston Peters have been remarkably quiet about the convenient disappearance of New Zealand First’s pledge to abolish the Maori seats. But feelings of betrayal can only be suppressed for so long.

Speaking of Peters, there are bound to be bumps in the road ahead as policy tensions arise between the “progressive” Labour Party and its socially conservative coalition partner, New Zealand First.

We got a brief glimpse of this ideological divide when New Zealand First’s Shane Jones recently espoused a “work for the dole” policy that Ardern promptly tried to douse because it conflicted with Labour dogma.

To all those pressures, add a large and formidable National Party opposition, still seething because it believes it was shafted in post-election coalition negotiations that were controlled and manipulated by Peters.

We may never get to the bottom of what really happened in those talks, because Ardern doesn’t want to make the details public. This makes a mockery of Labour’s supposed commitment to openness and leaves her coalition government ineradicably tainted by the shonky circumstances in which it was formed. 

A rampant culture of entitlement

(A slightly shorter version of this column was first published in The Dominion Post, December 1.)

A pervasive culture of entitlement and self-indulgence seems to have taken root in some of our public institutions.

At its most egregious, it can be seen in the case of Nigel Murray, the disgraced former Waikato District Health Board CEO who treated himself to $218,000 worth of unauthorised spending on personal travel and expenses.

By comparison, the extravagant restaurant bills totted up by Peter Biggs and Chris Whelan, respectively the chairman and former CEO of the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency (Wreda), are a mere bagatelle. But it’s only a matter of scale.

Inquiries by this paper under the Official Information Act flushed out the information that Biggs and Whelan had given their Wreda credit cards a thrashing at some of Wellington’s classiest restaurants.

Is this anyone else’s business? Too right it is, because Wreda is largely funded by Wellington ratepayers.

Biggs has since paid back $4673 – this, after Wellington mayor Justin Lester blew the whistle. Biggs’ restaurant bills included $875 for dinner with New Zealand’s London Trade Commissioner and his wife, a $585 dinner with Wellington City Council chief executive Kevin Lavery and a $318 dinner with Derek Fry, also from the city council.

No restaurants were named in the Dominion Post report, but I think we can safely assume we’re not talking about Burger King.

The fact that Biggs voluntarily repaid the money suggests that after talking to Lester, he had second thoughts about whether his spending was justified. But before his own taste for fine dining became public, he was unapologetic about Whelan’s expenses (which he had approved), and defended his former CEO’s right to bury his snout in the city’s poshest troughs.

According to Biggs, Whelan’s selfless hard yakka over the fine white linen table cloths at Logan Brown, Zibibbo and Shed 5 produced measurable results. It had helped attract a call centre and Singapore Airlines to Wellington and generated business for Westpac Stadium.

When asked whether Whelan really needed to put 36 Bluff oysters on his credit card at Shed 5 (cost: $216) in order to secure that new business, Biggs rather testily rebuked the reporter for taking a “cynical” view.

The spending could be looked at as a way of showcasing Wellington’s “vibrancy and sophistication, and also building collegiality”, he said. “It depends on whether you know how the real world works.” Hmmm.

Here we get to the heart of the issue. In the “real world” that Biggs inhabits (his background is in advertising), it has become accepted wisdom that lavish lunches and dinners are an indispensable part of doing business.

This suits the participants splendidly. They all fete each other and then justify it by insisting it’s generating business or “building collegiality”.

And because everyone does it and expects it, it becomes self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. No one ever questions whether it’s necessary. Why spoil things?

Biggs gave the additional justification that Whelan’s job involved showcasing the Wellington region’s cuisine and wine. Well, of course. That’s all the excuse anyone needs to slurp some of New Zealand’s most expensive wine. “We’ll try the Martinborough Vineyard pinot noir next, waiter.” There’s $155 gone, right there.

But hang on a minute. Biggs’ explanation that it’s all about promoting Wellington unravels when you consider that an $1100 dinner for 10 at Zibibbo was for the boards of Wreda and its subsidiary agency, Creative HQ. After all, you hardly need to promote Wellington to people whose job is to, er, promote Wellington.

Presumably the dinner in this instance qualified as “building collegiality”. But to most people it just looks like an excuse to have a grand time at someone else’s expense.

In the light of Biggs’ previous comments, you also have to wonder what business he generated for Wellington by dining with Lavery and Fry. I mean, he surely didn’t need to convince them – council executives both – of Wellington’s “vibrancy and sophistication”.

Fry, incidentally, is now the interim chief executive of Wreda after Whelan stepped down earlier this year. In this role, Fry will be expected to curb the excesses of which he has previously himself been a beneficiary. It all looks decidedly clubby.

As for Lavery … well, some of us remember an era when town clerks cycled to work carrying a paper bag containing luncheon-sausage sandwiches and a granny smith apple. Now they’re called chief executives and, in Lavery’s case, pocket more than $400,000 a year. Can’t he afford to buy his own lunch?

Part of the problem is that Wreda is one of those agencies that inhabit the nebulous territory between the public and private sectors. And while Wreda has “rules” on how entertainment money is to be spent, they are loose enough to allow very liberal interpretation – which is exactly what seems to have happened on Biggs’ watch. We’re left with a clear impression of a culture where a sense of entitlement was rampant.  

The traditionally frugal public-sector ethos doesn’t stand a chance when it has to compete with the temptations presented by a corporate credit card. To put it another way, what CEO with pretensions of grandeur is going to choose a sandwich in the office over lunch at Logan Brown? After all, this is the real world we’re talking about.

Freedom of speech, Rachel Stewart-style

New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart is a true champion of free speech. Except, that is, when someone wants to say something she doesn’t like.

In her column this week she savaged an occasional Otago Daily Times columnist named Dave Witherow. Witherow is guilty of the unpardonable sin of being (like me) an ageing, conservative male. In the eyes of the left-leaning bigots who have acquired almost total control of the public conversation in New Zealand, this automatically disqualifies him from having a valid opinion on anything.

What specifically pushed Stewart’s buttons is that Witherow wrote a column criticising Maori Language Week – or as he put it, “media apologists the length and breadth of the land prostrating themselves before the holy altar of te reo”.

He was especially critical of Radio New Zealand. “For the last couple of years,” Witherow wrote, “RNZ has been ahead of the pack in obsequiousness. Everything indigenous is sacrosanct, and even formerly redoubtable interviewers now shrink from the slightest demur when boring bigots drone on about the mana of all things native.”

Witherow used provocative language, as he’s entitled to do, and duly copped a barrage of self-righteous condemnation.

One of the more frenzied responses came from someone named Glenn McConnell, who was described as a Stuff reporter. That word “reporter” used to mean someone who reported, but that was before journalism training was politicised and new entrants to the profession were inculcated with the view that their mission was to correct the world’s iniquities. Many of them struggle to string three coherent words together, but they can spot sexism and racism a mile off and never hesitate to pass judgment. So McConnell had no compunction in labelling Witherow as a racist and accusing him of “casual bigotry”.

Hmmm. I wonder who the real bigots are here, but we’ll come back to that.

McConnell condescendingly allowed that most racists don’t know they’re racist. Ah, but he knows a racist when he sees one. Such are the superior moral insights conferred by modern journalism training.

Meanwhile, on the news website The Spinoff, Madeleine Chapman (no, I hadn’t heard of her, either) indulged in her own casual bigotry. She apologised for having to condemn yet another “bad column” (sigh – it’s just so tiresome having to constantly correct all these knuckle-dragging reactionaries) but justified it by saying she hoped it would be “the last goodbye to a generation of old men standing on their media platforms, yelling at clouds”.

You almost have to admire the conceit underlying that statement. Chapman seems to think the irresistible force of her argument will shock people like Witherow into silence. Good luck with that, as they say.

Another Spinoff contributor, Danyl Mclauchlan, categorised Witherow as representative of a “mostly older, mostly Pakeha subset of the population” whom he said were routinely provoked into outrage by Maori Language Week. Mclauchlan sneeringly referred to “drunken uncles at summer barbecues, bores holding forth in work tea-rooms and columnists and cartoonists on provincial papers”, all perpetuating their own ignorant versions of New Zealand history.  

(If I can slightly digress here, you can’t help but note a striking consistency in both Spinoff pieces. In an era when the Left is vigilant to the point of obsession in condemning stereotypes and prejudice, the one form of discrimination that’s not just tolerated but encouraged is the disparaging of older white males. The epithet “male, pale and stale” now serves as a coded synonym for someone who is misogynistic, racist, homophobic and stubbornly resistant to everything that’s progressive and enlightened. It’s a caricature, used to dismiss the legitimacy of anything that older white men might say or any opinions they might hold. So much for the Left’s supposed embrace of diversity.)

Witherow’s column also attracted the inevitable admonishment from Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy, who unfortunately has emulated her immediate predecessor, Joris De Bres, by morphing into a tedious, finger-wagging prig.  But the most poisonous attack, and I use the word deliberately, came from Stewart.

Stewart has the gall to say she believes in free speech – “absolutely” – before going on to say she “struggles with what basically amounts to gratuitous hate speech”. But she can’t have it both ways.

What she really wants is to deny Witherow a right that she claims for herself – that of free speech. She goes a step further by attacking the Otago Daily Times for publishing his column and therefore, in her eyes, being complicit in hate speech.

That’s why I describe her attack as poisonous. In a breathtaking display of moral and intellectual conceit, Stewart wants us to accept that her opinion is legitimate and noble while that of Witherow is hateful and contemptible. But she can’t exercise her own right of free speech while simultaneously seeking to deny it to others. A democratic society is built on the contestability of ideas. The moment any set of ideas is outlawed, democracy is diminished. Enlightened leftists (that is, those who can genuinely lay claim to the honourable term “liberal”) realise that. Stewart either can’t, or doesn’t want to.

In any case, who defines “hate speech”? Stewart doesn’t explain, so I’ll attempt it for her. Hate speech, in the eyes of some on the Left (not everyone, by any means), can essentially be defined as any opinion that runs counter to identity politics. This is the ideology that seeks to polarise society by breaking it down into supposedly oppressed minority groups, all pursuing their own divisive agendas, and which assesses everything in Western civilisation – art, literature, history, politics, the media – in terms of class, race and gender.

Playing the “hate speech” card is one of a range of tactics now routinely employed to marginalise any opinion the Left doesn’t like. Others include dismissing any expression of conservative opinion as a “rant”, thus implying it’s the product of a deranged mind, or caricaturing even moderately right-of-centre opinion as extreme, as New Zealand writer Ben Mack did in a hysterical, pants-wetting Washington Post column describing New Zealand First as a “far right” party and its involvement in the coalition government as “terrifying”. (The headline read: How the far right is poisoning New Zealand. Notwithstanding my own detestation of Winston Peters and his role in the shonky formation of the new government, I didn’t recognise the country portrayed in that headline and I don’t know any New Zealander who would.)

“Denier” and “denialist” (which are used in the context of the climate change debate to imply that global warming sceptics are on a par with Jew-hating Holocaust deniers) are part of this repertoire of attack too, along with the terms “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobe” and “misogynist” – all of which are used to portray the person so labelled as either stupid, evil or both, and thus to shame or intimidate them into silence. The ultimate objective of this strategy is to redefine the boundaries of public discourse so as to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to the neo-Marxist agenda.

But here’s the thing. Stewart’s entitled to fume all she likes about hate speech, just as long as she doesn’t attempt to shut other people down. I’m not in the habit of attacking other columnists and wouldn’t be criticising her here if she hadn’t stepped over that line. (Incidentally, I don’t know of any conservative group that argues people like her should be silenced. It’s always those on the Left who seek to stifle opinions that upset them.)

Now, back to McConnell, the Stuff columnist who accuses Witherow of bigotry. But who are the real bigots in this debate? My Oxford dictionary defines a bigot as an obstinate and intolerant believer in a religion or political theory. If that accusation is going to be hurled at Witherow, then it should be thrown right back at some of those attacking him. People should never make the mistake of equating bigotry with conservatism. Some of the most resolutely closed minds I’ve encountered have belonged to diehard lefties.

Fortunately there are left-leaning commentators who see the danger of the route people like Stewart would take us down. They are prepared to defend Witherow’s right to an opinion, and the ODT’s right to publish it, even if they don’t agree with what he says. On Pundit, for example, Tim Watkin described Witherow’s column as insulting and narrow-minded (fair enough), but drew the line “when criticism becomes an attack on civil debate and free speech”. And in the Herald, veteran writer Gordon McLachlan chided Stewart for thinking her own opinion sacrosanct. She should accept, he wrote, that she was not in command of ultimate truths.

Amen to that, but I suspect Stewart is so wrapped up in her own conceit, and so lacking in critical self-awareness, that reasoned criticism will fly straight over her head.

This debate still has some way to run. It’s likely to be revived tomorrow when Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill interviews Don Brash, who endorsed Witherow’s column and posted a statement on Facebook saying he was “utterly sick” of hearing Te Reo Maori on RNZ. Brash identified Guyon Espiner of Morning Report as the worst offender and accused him of “virtue signalling”. (Good on Espiner for learning Maori, but he does give the impression that he enjoys showing off his fluency. And it’s hard to see the point of the increasingly frequent usage of Maori on Morning Report, unless it’s to make listeners feel that they’re not being good New Zealanders unless they learn it too. RNZ needs to understand that it’s not the function of the state broadcaster to inspire us to good works – we can go to church for that – or sign up to some idealistic vision of biculturalism.)

I can’t decide whether Brash is being foolhardy or courageous entering the lion’s den with Hill, since he has about as much chance of fair treatment as I have of being crowned Miss Universe. In my experience, the only time Hill interviews conservatives, it’s with the intention of trying to demolish them or make them look stupid. But good luck to him.