New Zealand's most useless public servant

The man masquerading as the guardian of New Zealanders’ human rights has weighed in, from his Olympian heights, on the Posie Parker affair.

As usual, Paul Hunt’s opinion is worthless and leaves us wondering once again what we did to deserve this third-rate British import and how much longer we should be expected to put up with him.

The chief human rights commissioner writes, as if we all eagerly awaited his insights, that he wants to provide a human rights perspective on the issues raised by Parker’s visit. He adds, in Uriah Heep fashion, that he does this “from where I sit with my multiple privileges and advantages”.

Oh, please. Breast-beating liberal white guilt has rarely been more cringingly displayed. We can only hope his $365,000 salary eases the pain.

Hunt wrings his hands over the scenes that forced Parker to abandon her rally in Auckland last weekend but conspicuously refuses to condemn outright the behaviour of the mob that assaulted her, harassed her and shouted her down.

He gives away his bias in his very first sentence by revealing he attended the rally because he wanted to show support for his “trans friends”. Ingratiating himself with the wokerati is more important to Hunt than demonstrating the impartiality we’re entitled to expect from a senior public servant. Clearly, it’s also more important than standing up for free speech.

Hunt doesn’t just pass up the opportunity to emphatically defend free speech; he effectively aligns himself with its enemies.

At one point he pays token lip service to freedom of expression, acknowledging that it’s “a vital pillar of our democracy”. But he negates that in his very next sentence by quoting the late radical Maori lawyer Moana Jackson, who said “No one’s exercise of free speech should make another feel less free”.

So free speech is okay just as long as it doesn’t make anyone feel bad? That’s a novel new take. If the elected representatives who make New Zealand law took that view, they would have written it into the Bill of Rights Act, Section 14 of which unequivocally guarantees freedom to “seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form”.

Nothing about making exceptions for injured feelings there, but apparently the chief commissioner of human rights thinks we should regard Moana Jackson, rather than the New Zealand Parliament, as the ultimate authority. That's a very peculiar position for a senior public servant to take.

Hunt goes on to remind us of a supposed link between transphobia and colonisation. He quotes Tina Ngata, another radical activist, as saying “Transphobia was brought here on a boat”.

No one who approvingly cites such palpably absurd extremist rhetoric can expect to be taken seriously on anything. That whooshing sound you just heard was Hunt launching himself in the direction of Planet Woke, which orbits in a distant ideological universe no one realised existed. Tina Ngata is probably already there.

You have to persevere well into Hunt’s piece before he grudgingly acknowledges that Parker was entitled to share her views without being assaulted or shouted down. But you have to wonder at the sincerity of his position, given that he’s spent the preceding few paragraphs effectively excusing the behaviour of the Albert Park mob on the grounds that trans people have historically been oppressed and brutalised. (Really?)

Even then Hunt can’t bring himself to condemn the bullies. It turns out he believes it was the responsibility of the state to ensure Parker could speak safely. Not a word about the protesters’ violent disregard for her rights. It was all the fault of the police.

It’s a rambling, irrational and contradictory article that in the end, dissolves in a morass of meaningless woke-speak.

Meanwhile, we read that the Human Rights Commission has received more than 90 complaints about Marama Davidson’s deranged claim that cis white men are responsible for the world’s violence. We’re still waiting for a journalist to ask Davidson whether she categorises New Zealand gang wars (to take just one example) as non-violent, given that the participants are nearly all non-white. But then she’s so fixated by retributionist ideology that she’s beyond reason.

As for those complaints, expect them to be buried for as long as it takes for the commission’s dissemblers and apologists to find a reason, no matter how spurious, to dismiss them.

Hunt, of course, has been silent on Davidson’s explicitly racist outburst, as he always is when it’s the woke Left inciting ill-will and division.

Is he New Zealand’s most useless public servant? It’s a crowded field, but I think he has that title safely in the bag.

ACT should make abolition of the Human Rights Commission a bottom line

The Human Rights Commission says it’s “very disappointing” that the government isn’t going ahead with law changes that would curb New Zealanders’ right to free speech.

Let me repeat that, just in case you didn’t get the irony. An agency ostensibly set up to protect our rights is upset that the government isn’t introducing new laws that would restrict them. What better evidence could there be of the commission’s highly selective interpretation – you might say perversion – of its own name?

The commission says it’s frustrated that planned amendments to the Human Rights Act won’t go as far as it would like. As it stands, the law quite properly makes it unlawful to incite ill-will or hostility against people on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origins. The commission wanted these protections extended to “other groups who are vulnerable to harmful speech, such as women, disabled people, and the rainbow community”.

Women? Really?? They make up half the population. There are now more of them in Parliament than there are men. They occupy the three most powerful positions in the country. Does the HRC really expect us to believe they are so vulnerable to “harmful” speech that they warrant special statutory protection? Come to that, couldn’t the same argument be made in respect of men – especially those who feel picked on by being disparaged as male, stale and pale? If so, don’t the two cancel each other out?

And note the “such as” in the commission’s statement. This leaves room for other groups – transgender people, for argument’s sake, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why I would choose them as an example – to also be protected against statements that might offend them. Who knows where the list of protected groups could end? It could be extended ad infinitum as political whim dictates. But Justice Minister Kiri Allan, pulling back from Labour’s original sweeping but vaguely defined proposals (and no doubt taking note of mounting public opposition), now says protection will be extended only to religious groups.

This is a nod to the royal commission that investigated the Christchurch mosque massacres and recommended tougher hate speech laws, no doubt with a view to protecting Muslims – a worthy aim but an ineffectual one, given there’s no evidence that the absence of such laws was a factor in the atrocity.

The government’s retreat from its original intention is clearly a blow and a setback to the HRC, which is so obsessed with identity politics and the supposed menace of hate speech that it completely ignores its bigger responsibility to protect New Zealanders’ freedom of expression. The commission is silent on this most crucial of democratic rights, despite it being enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified by New Zealand in 1978) and our own Bill of Rights Act. 

You’d think the commission’s own name was a bit of a giveaway, but no; its interpretation of the phrase “human rights” is selective, self-serving and unfailingly woke. Rather than concern itself with upholding and promoting New Zealanders’ rights generally, it directs its energies toward protecting us from racism, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia and white supremacy. These endanger all of us, according to chief human rights pooh-bah Paul Hunt, arguably the most useless bureaucrat on the government’s payroll (in fact worse than useless, since the effect of his job, if not its purpose, is to promote a sense of division and drive wedges into the community).

To put it another way, the commission thinks it’s okay in a democracy to sacrifice the free-speech rights of the majority in order to protect supposedly vulnerable minority groups. It justifies this by arguing that restrictions on speech are needed to counter “violent extremism”. This is worryingly similar to the spurious pretexts – such as public order and public safety – routinely cited by authoritarian regimes that want to control what people think and say. Iran and Xi Jinping’s China come to mind.

Reconciling free speech with the interests of minority groups calls for a balancing act, but the commission doesn’t even attempt it. It solves the problem by simply ignoring the free speech side of the equation altogether.

All this adds up to a compelling case for abolishing the commission, as urged last year by David Seymour. It has been captured by ideologues and morphed into an extravagant travesty, endlessly haranguing and seeking to shame the public that funds it. Even Meng Foon, who as mayor of Gisborne seemed sensible and grounded, comes across as a tiresome, shouty nag in his role as Race Relations Commissioner.

The commission is a $13 million-plus per annum deadweight on the economy – money that could be redirected to any number of more worthy projects. Teaching dogs to ride bikes, for example. 

Seymour called for the commission's abolition after it was revealed that Hunt, a refugee from the barmy socialist Corbynista wing of the British Labour Party, made a $200 donation to the Waikato chapter of the Mongrel Mob as koha for his attendance at a gang hui.

The ACT leader should now go further and insist that the axing of the HRC will be a bottom line in any coalition negotiations with National after next year’s elections. It would be better still if National decided for itself that the HRC has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had, but the party of Christopher Luxon would run in fright from anything so bold and radical.

National, after all, is the party that signed us up to the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and was in the process of appointing an Indigenous Rights Commissioner when the Labour-NZ First coalition took office in 2017. Far from resisting the advance of wokery, it has enabled the process.

In any case, half-baked, rinse-and-repeat policies bereft of imagination or political courage (army boot camps for teenage offenders come to mind) are more National’s style.

New Zealand, meet Paul Hunt - the man who will shape our human rights policy

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, May 2.)

We’ve finally been properly introduced to the man who will shape our human rights policy for the next few years, and who will almost certainly seek to tighten the boundaries around what New Zealanders can legally say.

British academic Paul Hunt was appointed as Chief Human Rights Commissioner last October but to my knowledge, hadn’t been wheeled out for public inspection until Kim Hill interviewed him on RNZ National last Saturday.

It wasn’t a reassuring interview. Hunt’s responses to Hill’s questions served only to confirm suspicions that he will push for tougher hate speech laws that could erode the right to freedom of expression.

He talked at length about wanting a respectful and inclusive debate about free speech, but at the end of the interview many listeners would have been left with the impression that he already had firm ideas about what the outcome should be.

Hunt failed to explain why the Christchurch mosque massacres had suddenly made it imperative that we review the laws governing speech. To put it another way, he didn’t satisfactorily answer Hill’s question about how tougher hate speech laws might have averted the atrocity.

The truth is that they almost certainly wouldn’t have. But the massacres gave human rights activists – and we can include Hunt in that category – a perfect opportunity to generate a moral panic. The objective is to stampede politicians into making changes for which there is no demonstrated need.

The push for tighter hate speech laws should be seen as an opportunistic and ideologically driven exploitation of a tragedy. The momentum is coming not from the Christchurch Muslim community, but from left-wing activists and a politicised, media-savvy faction of New Zealand Muslims who purport to speak for all their co-religionists.

As an aside, you might well wonder why the supposedly liberal Left so fervently champions the interests of a religion that, in its more dogmatic forms, oppresses women and persecutes homosexuals.

Equally contradictory is the neo-Marxist Left’s habit of condemning even the most reasoned criticism of Muslim practice and belief as Islamophobic, while simultaneously seizing every opportunity to deride Christianity (the name Israel Folau comes to mind). Don’t hold your breath waiting for the neo-Marxists to explain these inconsistencies.

But back to Hunt.  The question posed in my last column remains: is an English human rights careerist, albeit one who apparently also has New Zealand citizenship, the right person to be in charge of the Human Rights Commission?

Hunt comes from a political and cultural milieu far removed from ours. It grates when I see this newcomer writing about “our” multicultural values, or hear him telling Hill that “we” New Zealanders are very used to striking a balance between competing rights.

Securing a highly influential public position doesn’t make Hunt one of us. It doesn’t magically endow with him an intuitive knowledge of how New Zealand society functions.

On that note, readers may recall that I sought information from Justice Minister Andrew Little on the appointment process. Among other things, I asked who the other applicants were, who was on the interview panel and who made the final decision.

In his reply last week, Little declined to name the other contenders for the job on the basis that applications were made in confidence. Fair enough.

The panel that assessed the applicants consisted of Pauline Winter, former chief executive of the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, Sir John Clarke, former chief executive of the Ministry of Maori Affairs, and Al Morrison, then a deputy commissioner with the State Services Commission. 

Four candidates were interviewed and Hunt was judged to be the best suited to the job. Little accepted their recommendation.

I also asked Little whether the government was aware of Hunt’s involvement in British politics. (As disclosed in my last column, he was associated with the socialist Corbynite wing of the British Labour Party.) Little replied that he understood this came up in the interviews but was not identified as a conflict of interest or a disqualifying factor. Hmm.

Kim Hill homed in on this aspect too, and in particular, on Hunt’s support for Corbyn – a politician who has been widely and rightly condemned for condoning anti-Semitism. Hill wondered how this squared with Hunt’s championing of human rights. His answer could only be described as highly equivocal.

Oh, and an intriguing sidelight: Little’s letter revealed that Hunt’s appointment was made in line with a United Nations convention called the Paris Principles, which dictates how human rights commissioners should be appointed. New Zealand is a signatory so must comply.

You never heard of the Paris Principles? Me neither, and it raises an interesting question: what other binding UN agreements has New Zealand committed to without parliamentary debate or even public knowledge? So much for autonomy.

Is this the man we want to shape our human rights policies?

(First published in The Dominion Post and Stuff.co.nz., April 18.)

I did something a couple of weeks ago that I’ve never done before. I made a request under the Official Information Act.

I suppose it might be seen as shameful, as a journalist, to admit that I’ve never previously had recourse to the OIA, but there you are. I never felt I needed to.

My request was to Justice Minister Andrew Little and asked for information about the appointment of the Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt.

Hunt is in a powerful position to influence laws that could affect the quality of New Zealand democracy at its most fundamental level. We can assume that he will be very closely involved in the fast-tracked review of our “hate speech” laws, which has serious implications for freedom of expression.

Yet prior to his appointment last October, virtually no one in New Zealand, outside a narrow political and academic elite, had heard of him. Even now, he’s largely an unknown quantity. But what we do know about him isn’t reassuring.

Hunt is described as a New Zealand and British national, but he comes from a British academic background. He has made a career in the burgeoning international human rights industry.

His lengthy Wikipedia entry, clearly written by an admirer, describes him as a “human rights scholar-activist” and a professor of law at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex. He has held senior appointments with the United Nations, including that of rapporteur on the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

“Rapporteur” is a fancy word for a UN official who checks to ensure that member countries measure up to the UN’s high expectations. Readers with long memories may recall that a UN rapporteur, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, was sent to New Zealand in 2005 and gave us a telling-off for our multiple human rights failings.

Countries represented on the UN commission that sent Stavenhagen here included Sudan, Zimbabwe, China and Cuba – nations internationally admired for their unstinting commitment to freedom.

Similarly, Hunt’s fellow rapporteurs 20 years ago included representatives from Russia, Belarus, Cameroon and Egypt, all of which are ranked as “not free” by the international organisation Freedom House. So we may be entitled to feel just a tiny bit sceptical about the credentials of UN officials professing to champion human rights.

But wait, there’s more. When Hunt wasn’t busy polishing his human rights credentials, he was dabbling in British politics.

To be precise, he contributed to a website called Left Foot Forward, which describes itself as “the home of political news and comment for progressives”. Hunt’s writing on social justice issues aligned closely with the policies of the Corbynite socialist (aka “progressive”) Left of the British Labour Party.

Last year, Hunt put himself forward for election to the party’s National Policy Forum. The aim was to “ensure Labour has an election-winning manifesto”. In a pamphlet, Hunt wrote that he could help strengthen and deliver Labour’s “exciting social policies”.

Of course he’s entitled to embrace whatever brand of politics he likes. But at the same time, we’re entitled to ask whether Hunt, a man steeped in British left-wing activism, is the right person to shape New Zealand’s human rights policies.

We’re also entitled to ask whether there was no suitably qualified candidate from a New Zealand background – someone with an intuitive understanding of New Zealand society and unencumbered by imported leftist ideology. This is one of the questions I’ve put to Little.

Many New Zealanders first heard of Hunt on the Tuesday following the Friday Christchurch mosque shootings, when he had an opinion article published on Stuff. In that article he warned of “violent, transnational, neo-fascist ideology” and issued a thinly disguised call for tougher hate speech laws.

He wrote passionately about the importance of protecting tolerance, diversity and equality, but strangely his polemic made no mention of one of the most fundamental human rights of all: freedom of expression.

Hunt certainly wasted no time seizing the moment. The opportunity was apparently too good to pass up. But New Zealanders might have been more impressed if he hadn’t so quickly rushed to judgment about what caused the shootings – which, after all, were perpetrated by someone from Australia – and deciding what, if anything, needs to be done to avoid a repetition.

No doubt Hunt’s CV ticked all the boxes for Labour and even more so for the Greens, but I wonder whether New Zealand First thought to challenge his appointment. The party’s supporters would surely have expected it to.

I also wonder whether the National Party raised even a squeak in protest. Probably not, since the Nats' election strategy for 2020 seems to consist of keeping their heads down and hoping not to be noticed.