Lauren Southern, Stefan Molyneux and the Streisand Effect

This is a talk I gave last night to the Masterton South Rotary Club.

It started with two Canadians named Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were on a speaking tour of Australia and tacked on a visit to Auckland. Hardly anyone had heard of them, still less knew what their politics were. But when Auckland mayor Phil Goff barred them from speaking at a council-owned venue in 2018, he touched a sensitive nerve.

The banning order turned out to be a classic demonstration of the so-called Streisand Effect, whereby attempts to suppress or hide something paradoxically result in it being brought to wider public attention.

The term comes from Barbra Streisand’s efforts to prevent publication of a photograph showing her clifftop mansion in Malibu, California. The photo was taken in 2003 to show the effects of coastal erosion and was initially seen by only a handful of people. But then Streisand took legal action to remove it from the public record, and in the following months the picture was downloaded 420,000 times. I believe the technical term for this is shooting yourself in the foot.

In the case of Southern and Molyneux, a controversy erupted over freedom of speech which, four years later, is still being played out in the courts. Although they were virtual unknowns, their banning led directly to the creation of a national movement to protect free speech – something no one previously thought necessary in a country with a long history as one of the world’s most liberal democracies.

Most New Zealanders believed their right to free speech was unassailable, but what happened to Southern and Molyneux showed that this was no longer the case. Cancel culture – the phenomenon whereby the enemies of free speech try to shut down any opinion they don’t like – had arrived.

It wasn’t an isolated occurrence, because it followed several years during which free speech had come under increasing attack – in social media, to a lesser extent in mainstream media and even in universities. But the Southern and Molyneux incident turned out to be a tipping point.

Word had gone out on social media that the Canadians were dangerous activists from the far-Right. Valerie Morse, herself a career activist but from the opposite end of the political spectrum, called for them to be barred from entering New Zealand. She said Southern and Molyneux intended to stir up racist violence, a provocative claim for which there was no evidence.

Radio New Zealand reported that the two Canadians had “far-Right, alternative views on feminism, gender, Islam and immigration”, though we were never told what these views were so were unable to judge for ourselves whether they were dangerous.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Lauren Southern had been reported as saying there were only two genders, male and female. This is a view probably shared by at least 99 percent of the population and one that would have been totally uncontroversial a few years ago, but is now apparently evidence of far-Right extremism.

Despite none of the claims about Southern and Molyneux being substantiated, Phil Goff saw it as an opportunity for some political grandstanding. “I have made my views on this very clear,” Goff declared on Twitter. “Southern and Molyneux will not be speaking at any council venues.” This was after the council had accepted a booking for the event at the Bruce Mason Centre, which it owns. The event was subsequently cancelled.

To this day we don’t know what Southern and Molyneux intended to say and so can’t judge whether they were a threat to public order and wellbeing. We were denied the right to hear them and form our own opinions. Goff apparently didn’t think the public was mature and wise enough to be exposed to their views. He took it upon himself to protect us.

The upshot of all this – and here’s the Streisand effect – was that the Canadians suddenly became a cause celebre. Goff’s unilateral action in misusing his power by banning Southern and Molyneux, as if Auckland was his personal fiefdom, was the catalyst for the formation of the Free Speech Coalition, which subsequently morphed into what is now the Free Speech Union. University lecturer David Cumin, one of the coalition’s founders, said that if the mayor of Auckland was allowed to ban people he didn’t like, all sorts of groups would be in deep trouble.

I should stress here that the coalition was formed not because its founders endorsed the opinions of Southern and Molyneux and thought they were worthy of wider promulgation. The people behind the coalition ranged right across the ideological spectrum.

Remember that at this stage, virtually no one knew what the Canadians’ opinions were, so were in no position to either endorse or oppose them. The coalition was concerned with one issue only: protecting the principle of free speech and the right of New Zealanders to be exposed to ideas and opinions regardless of whether people happened to agree with them.

This, after all, is the very heart of democracy. Democratic government depends on the contest of ideas, and the contest of ideas in turn depends on people being able to engage openly in free expression and debate. Free speech is where democracy starts. I would argue that it’s even more fundamental than the right to vote, because people’s ability to cast an informed vote depends on them first being able to participate in free and open debate about political issues and ideas.

Subsequent to Goff’s intervention in the issue, Auckland Council, possibly realising the mayor had overstepped his authority, shifted its ground by arguing that there were health and safety reasons for banning the Canadians. This was because protesters, including the aforementioned Valerie Morse, had threatened to blockade any meeting where they spoke.

But that raised an important free speech issue too, because it meant that protesters could force the cancellation of speaking engagements simply by threatening disruption.

Alarmed by these developments, the Free Speech Coalition began legal proceedings, funded by money raised through a public appeal, in the hope that the courts would declare Auckland Council to have acted unlawfully.

Lawyers for the coalition argued that the council’s action was inconsistent with Section 14 of the Bill of Rights Act, which states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.”

Note that the law doesn’t just refer to the freedom to speak; it gives equal weight to our right to seek and hear alternative views. There’s nothing in the Act that says opinions and ideas must be approved by people in power, such as the mayor of Auckland, before we can be safely allowed to hear them.

That court action has advanced all the way to the Supreme Court and is still in progress. Essentially New Zealand’s highest court is being asked to rule on a specific point – namely, whether Auckland Council was wrong to bow to threats of disruption and therefore restrict the rights of people who wanted to hear the Canadians speak.

Southern and Molyneux weren’t the only speakers to be cancelled on health and safety grounds. The urgency of the issue was reinforced when the vice-chancellor of Massey University barred Don Brash from speaking at an event on campus, again on the spurious pretext that people might be harmed if they attended.

It later emerged that the supposed “threat” came from a single disaffected student who said he never intended to do anything more violent than wave a sign. The real reason for the cancellation, as revealed by an information release under the Official Information Act, was that the vice-chancellor regarded Brash as a racist because of his views on the Treaty of Waitangi.

The vice-chancellor’s banning of a notable New Zealander didn’t go down well. Some people might have felt unsure about Southern and Molyneux, given that they were an unknown quantity, but Brash is a high-profile New Zealander whose opinions are very well known and who represented no threat to anyone. I wrote in the Australian edition of the Spectator that the Massey vice-chancellor, who comes from Queensland, had made herself the least popular Australian on this side of the Ditch since Greg Chappell instructed his brother to bowl underarm in 1981. Even the leader of the Massey students’ association, himself a Maori, said students had no confidence in her.

The Massey furore was another signal that free speech, which New Zealanders have historically taken for granted, was under attack by people in positions of authority. It was, to use a cliché, a wake-up call. There have been many more such episodes since then, some of which I’ll refer to later.

Events such as these formed the backdrop to an event I attended in Auckland last Saturday – the first annual conference of the New Zealand Free Speech Union, or FSU. As I mentioned earlier, the union evolved out of the Free Speech Coalition. It’s modelled on a similar organisation on Britain, where freedom of expression is also under sustained attack.

As in Britain, the Free Speech Union is officially registered as a trade union – an inspired idea which means it has the right to formally represent members whose free speech rights are threatened in the course of their work. The union has successfully invoked its statutory rights on numerous occasions, some of which I’ll mention shortly.

A vital point to note about the FSU is that while some of its critics dishonestly try to portray it as a right-wing front or an arm of the ACT Party, ideologically it’s very broad-based. Prominent figures in the union include Chris Trotter and Matt McCarten, both lifelong leftists. Members of the union’s council include a Maori university lecturer, a member of the Jewish community and a lesbian feminist.

Thinking people on the left side of politics have a very good reason to defend freedom of speech. They understand better than most that suppression of free speech has historically been used most often against the powerless and the advocates of change. Trade unionists, communists and campaigners for racial equality from Martin Luther King to Nelson Mandela all suffered under repressive controls on speech and recognised the importance of free speech as a weapon against oppression.

From the other end of the ideological spectrum, former ACT MP Stephen Franks and conservative blogger David Farrar have both been key players in the formation of the union and its precursor organisation. It follows that the FSU doesn’t take ideological positions on the left or the right and recognises that to be effective, consistent and credible, it must be politically non-partisan. Its only commitment is to freedom of speech.

The union is fighting across a very broad front because attacks on free speech are constant and come from multiple directions. But in its short existence, and despite extremely limited resources, the union has chalked up some notable victories. I’ll mention just a few.

■ It took legal action that forced city councils to back down after they refused to allow council venues to be held for meetings organised by a feminist group called Speak Up for Women, which opposed men being able to legally redefine themselves as female.

■ It took up the case of seven eminent academics who were threatened with expulsion from the Royal Society after they wrote a letter to the Listener challenging the scientific validity of Matauranga Maori, or traditional Maori knowledge. The professors were effectively subjected to a modern heresy trial and vilified in a letter from 2000 fellow academics who accused them of condoning something called scientific racism. The sheer weight and vehemence of the denunciation sent an unmistakeable message to the academic community: express dissent at your peril. But after being subjected to an embarrassing storm of international criticism and ridicule, the Royal Society backed down and concluded the professors had not breached its code of conduct. In fact I understand the society copped a furious backlash from many of its own members for betraying principles of academic freedom.

Sadly, the need for freedom of speech is nowhere more evident than in academia, where groupthink prevails and any deviation from approved ideological orthodoxy is likely to incur punishment in one form or another, whether it’s simply ostracism by colleagues or actual disciplinary action.

■ Speaking of academic freedom, the FSU also defended a Waikato University history lecturer’s right to describe people as cranks for believing, on religious authority, that the earth is flat and that humans lived alongside dinosaurs. The university threatened disciplinary action against him but backed down after the union pointed out its obligation to uphold academic freedom. Interestingly enough the Tertiary Education Union refused to support the lecturer while at the same time it was organising a conference on … academic freedom.

■ The FSU has supported several members who found themselves under attack in the workplace for opinions they had expressed in a personal capacity. In one case the union obtained an apology and retraction from a senior district council manager who harassed and intimidated a schoolteacher at his place of work for writing a submission in a private capacity in which the teacher expressed an opposing view to the manager on the issue of Maori wards. In another case a nurse was the subject of a complaint to the Nursing Council for expressing views on Facebook about transgender issues. You can probably guess what those views were.

■ In another recent case, a hospital doctor laid a complaint against a mortuary worker who used the pronoun “he” to refer to a deceased person who was biologically male but had identified as a woman. As I understand it, the employee avoided a disciplinary hearing only after the Free Speech Union intervened.

■ The union also met with the board of NZME, publishers of the New Zealand Herald, after the paper refused to publish an ad that consisted simply of the Oxford Dictionary’s incendiary definition of a woman as an adult human female. Just those words – nothing more. Newspapers, like universities, have traditionally been defenders of free speech but now seem frightened to upset transgender activists by publishing an ad that did nothing more than state a previously uncontroversial truth. You have to wonder, how did we get to this point, and where will it lead unless we resist?

These are cases that the FSU took up, but there have been plenty of others. There was the cancellation of a Harry Potter quiz at the Featherston Booktown Festival because someone objected to J K Rowling’s views on transgenderism and thought the quiz might distress the transgender community.

There was the British publishing firm that suddenly changed its mind about publishing a book by the world-famous Otago University professor the late Jim Flynn because the book raised “sensitive topics of race, religion and gender”. The book’s title? In Defence of Free Speech. So a book about the dangers of censoring free speech for fear of causing offence was itself cancelled for fear of causing offence. I think that’s called irony.

There was the bulldozer owner in Marlborough who painted the words “ALM Equal Rights for Kiwi Whites” on the blade of a bulldozer parked on his private property. This was at the height of the Black Lives Matter furore following the murder of George Floyd in the US. The letters ALM stood for All Lives Matter, but a neighbour complained that the words were racist and the bulldozer owner received a visit from the police who persuaded him to paint over them.

The concerning aspect here is the involvement of the police. There’s a very real prospect that with the proposed criminalisation of so-called “hate speech”, which I’ll come to shortly, it would fall to police officers to determine what opinions cross the legal threshold. We have ample evidence from Britain of the dangers that arise when the police are politicised and over-zealous officers take it upon themselves to decide what words are “safe”.

On a slightly lighter note, there was a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about a Street’s ice cream sign that said “Ice cream makes you happy”. The complainant said the sign promoted an unhealthy relationship with food. Now it seems absurd that the authority would take the complaint seriously, but sadly I have to tell you that it agreed with the complainant and the sign was removed. The enforcers of free speech are not noted for their sense of humour.

In addition to those individual cases I mentioned earlier, the Free Speech Union has been grappling with some much bigger issues, and none bigger than the proposed adoption of so-called hate speech laws.

This issue arose following the Christchurch mosque massacres and the subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry. Recommendations for revised hate speech laws formed a small and relatively insignificant part of the commission’s recommendations. Deficiencies in existing laws were not identified as a cause of the massacres and there’s no evidence to suggest that tougher so-called hate speech laws would have prevented the atrocity. But there’s a saying in politics that every crisis presents an opportunity, and the government seized on the massacres as justification for the introduction of new laws restricting what we can say or write, ostensibly to protect vulnerable minorities. This is the era of identity politics, and Labour wants to look good to minority groups seeking protection from adverse comment. But history shows that hate speech laws can be weaponised to crush dissent – just look at Iran, which tried to have Salman Rushdie killed because he dared criticise Islam.

The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they could impose unreasonable and undemocratic limitations on public discussion of legitimate political issues. Hurtful is different from hateful. Someone might feel insulted or offended by a statement but that doesn’t mean it’s intended to incite hatred or harm, and the courts have traditionally been liberal in recognising people’s right to express opinions that upset others – with good reason, because judges are reluctant to interfere with the fundamental right to free speech.

In any case, offences such as incitement to violence are already criminalised under existing laws and there’s no evidence to indicate those laws are inadequate. It’s an offence under the Human Rights Act to publish anything likely to excite hostility against, or bring into contempt, any group of persons in New Zealand on the ground of colour, race or national or ethnic origins. There’s a sound argument for adding religion to those categories, but you get into trouble once you move beyond that point by trying to define what is hateful, especially in a society where people are primed to take offence on the basis of sex, gender identity, race and religion. You then risk introducing what lawyers call a chilling effect which makes people reluctant to discuss issues for fear that they might be breaking the law. It becomes safer to say nothing at all.

As an aside, I was astonished to learn recently that according to the New Zealand Police website, a hate crime is an offence perceived by the victim to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or age. So it’s down to victims to decide whether they’ve been the subject of a hate crime. This goes far beyond what the law says and shows that the police have already been well and truly politicised.

I mentioned this to my wife and she asked whether it meant that if I called her a silly old bag (not that I ever would, you understand) she could make a complaint to the police. I had to agree that it meant exactly that. This is how free speech rights are insidiously eroded, inch by inch. I'm not disrespectful toward the police, but I would have no confidence whatsoever in them exercising control over what I can say. That’s not their role.

The difficulties in defining hate speech were illustrated last year when neither the then minister of Justice, Kris Faafoi, nor the prime minister were able to explain how tougher hate speech laws would work. The Free Speech Union campaigned vigorously against a law change – 20,000 submissions to Parliament, 80 percent of them opposed – and the government quietly consigned the proposal to the too-hard basket.

Job done, the union thought. But now we have a new justice minister, Kiri Allen, and suddenly hate speech laws are back on the agenda. Not only that, but the prime minister recently delivered an address at the United Nations in which she talked about the need to combat threats from so-called disinformation – a word that seems to mean whatever the user wants it to mean.

All this points to the possibility of the government seeking to control the dissemination of information and opinion that it disapproves of, perhaps even relating to issues such as climate change, Covid vaccination, transgenderism and immigration. Hate speech and the right to dissent could become crucial issues in next year’s election, in which case it will be interesting to see whether the National Party takes a stand or leaves it to ACT to be the standard-bearer for free speech.

I want to leave you with a couple of quotations. The first is from the poet John Milton, who in 1644 wrote a famous defence of free speech called Areopagitica that included the stirring lines: “Let truth and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” In other words, it’s only through free and open debate that society tests competing ideas and chooses which ones to adopt.

The other is from the left-wing American philosopher Noam Chomsky, who said that if we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, then we don’t believe in it at all. In other words we must defend the free speech rights of people we disagree with, because whoever tries to silence them might also one day try to silence us.

Thank you.

You can find the Free Speech Union website here: Free Speech Union (fsu.nz)

Is this what we've come to?

What sort of country have we become?

The New Zealand Herald broke the news this week that former cabinet minister Kris Faafoi, who resigned only 12 weeks ago, has set himself up as a lobbyist. It’s already an overcrowded field, but he should have a distinct advantage over all the other political hustlers who infest Wellington because of his inside knowledge and contacts. “We know how the government works at the highest level,” his company’s website boasts. Translation: Faafoi’s mates in the cabinet and his former underlings in the bureaucracy are only a phone call away.

The pseudonymous Thomas Cranmer – the same blogger who blew open the Nanaia Mahuta nepotism scandal – points out that Faafoi’s new gig wouldn’t be allowed in most comparable democracies. Australia, Britain and Canada all impose stand-down periods before former ministers and other public figures can profit as lobbyists from their connections and inside knowledge. In Canada it’s five years.

But here? Go for your life, mate. Fill your boots. We’re cool with it. No worries.

And it gets worse. Cranmer reveals that Faafoi will be working for Dialogue 22, a company set up by an Auckland ad man named Greg Partington. Dialogue 22 will presumably come under the umbrella of Partington’s Waitapu Group, which also includes the “cultural consultancy” Tatou. And Tatou’s CEO is Skye Kimura, who just happens to be the wife of Faafoi’s former cabinet colleague Peeni Henare, the Minister of Defence.

It all starts to look uncomfortably cosy. In fact cosyism is the word used by leftist commentator Max Rashbrooke, in a courageous column last week, to describe what he called a chronic problem in New Zealand public life. Rashbrooke wrote: “We are largely spared, thankfully, the envelopes-stuffed with-cash-corruption that infects other countries. [Editor’s note: Not necessarily, but we’ll come to that shortly.] But we’re suffused with overly close relationships: nepotism, jobs for the boys, all that jazz.”

He described cosyism as “those insidious processes by which public positions, jobs and contracts sometimes go not to the best-qualified applicants but to the friends, contacts and family members of people in power”. A cosy society, he went on, “tolerates the most colossal conflicts of interest”.

Rashbrooke cited several examples, but it seemed that what finally prodded him to sound the alarm was the Mahuta-Gannin Ormsby affair – a seething morass of nepotism and conflicting interests that Mahuta herself seemed to think was magically rendered acceptable because she met technical disclosure requirements so wide open you could paddle a double-hulled waka through them.

When even Labour’s friends start spitting the dummy – and I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that Rashbrooke’s natural inclination would be to support a social-democratic party such as Labour – then you know Jacinda Ardern has a serious integrity issue on her hands, even if she won’t admit it.

Cosyism is an appropriate word to describe relationships between people in power which, while not necessarily breaking any rules, nonetheless cause unease about the possibility of improper influence being brought to bear behind the scenes. Another example was back in the public spotlight recently when Justice Minister Kiri Allan and RNZ presenter Mani Dunlop proudly announced their engagement.

When I wrote about their relationship in June, I said many people would feel uncomfortable that a senior government politician was in an intimate relationship with RNZ’s director of Maori news, but I could put it no more strongly than that. I’ve had a rethink since then and come to a more emphatic position. I think it’s plain wrong that the partner of a minister holds a key editorial position – and a politically sensitive one at that – in a major state-owned news organisation. The only honourable remedy, though I don’t expect it to happen, would be for Dunlop to stand down and take another job within RNZ where there could be no suspicion of improper influence being exercised on news and current affairs.

Nepotism and cosyism, however, are not the only threats to the integrity of public life in New Zealand, nor are they necessarily the most worrying ones. We were reminded of another this week by the guilty verdicts in the trial of three Chinese businessmen charged with fraud in relation to political donations.

For me, by far the most significant revelation from the trial was the degree to which some New Zealand party officials seemed prepared to ingratiate themselves with potential foreign donors whose generosity, we can safely assume, wasn’t motivated by an altruistic desire to enhance New Zealand democracy.

Simon Bridges and the disgraced Jami-Lee Ross were both implicated in this scandal. Bridges was not charged with any offence and Ross was found not guilty, but both were tainted by their apparent eagerness to court potential foreign donors about whom they apparently knew little.

The groveller-in-chief, however, appears to have been former National Party president Peter Goodfellow, whose hunger for donations was such that he wrote a glowing testimonial for one of the defendants, Yikun Zhang, whom Tim Murphy of Newsroom has identified as a key figure in organisations that serve as a front for the Chinese Communist Party.

In a reference written on National Party note paper, Goodfellow wrote: “It gives me great pleasure to support the nomination of Yikun Zhang for a New Zealand royal honour, in respect of business, philanthropy, community services and NZ-China relations.”

Goodfellow went on: “Throughout the time I have known him, Yikun has been one of the most highly regarded members of the Chinese community in New Zealand, or in China. Yikun is well known for his genuineness, aptitude and generosity.”

The extravagant endorsement appears to have worked. Zhang was subsequently made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours. Now he’s a convicted criminal facing a possible prison term of seven years.

Was it pure gullibility, desperation for funds or a combination of the two that persuaded Goodfellow – who was reportedly admired by some within National for his fund-raising ability, though no other talent was publicly evident – to compromise his party by seeking Zhang’s patronage?

Whatever the explanation, the donations scandal - even though it was exposed - is a hugely damaging blow to New Zealand’s reputation as a country immune from the curses of bribery and corruption. The apparent readiness of New Zealand political parties - Labour as well as National - to snuggle up (almost literally) to donors of dubious repute was a signal that we’re available to the highest bidders, no questions asked (other than a polite request to break the money down into small amounts so they don't have to be disclosed).

Is this what we’ve come to?

Footnote: As an afterthought, I've inserted a link to the Waitapu Group. Readers can form their own conclusions about what sort of organisation it is.

 

 

Why we should be sceptical about Kris Faafoi's grand broadcasting project

In a previous life, I served for two years as a member of the Library and Information Advisory Commission (LIAC).

You’ve never heard of it? That’s hardly surprising. Not many people have. It was established by Helen Clark’s government for the purposes of, among other things, “maintaining a strategic overview of the library and information sectors” and “providing stakeholder perspectives on issues and proposals”. Make of that what you will.

I was nominated for a seat on the board by the Newspaper Publishers’ Association and accepted, naively thinking LIAC might occasionally deal with issues related to freedom of information.

I can’t pretend it was an onerous job. It involved driving to Wellington once every couple of months for an all-day meeting where various people reported on various things and we were given a pleasant but simple lunch. For this I was paid a modest emolument.

Our minister was Marian Hobbs, whose responsibilities included the National Library. I recall the board strolling across Molesworth Street to the Beehive for a meeting with her and wondering why we bothered, since there seemed nothing of any substance to tell her. But apparently it was a statutory requirement.

My fellow board members were a likeable bunch but came from the public sector and spoke what seemed to me to be a foreign language. That is to say, I recognised the words but struggled to comprehend the sentences they were arranged into.

I particularly remember the late Paul Reynolds, a loquacious Scotsman with a background in IT, who would talk at great length and with irrepressible enthusiasm about the rich potential of the digital information sector. It was impossible not to like Paul, but he needed an assertive chair to rein him in. More to the point, I don’t recall anything actually happening or being decided as a result of his effusive rhetoric.

My occasional protestations that I needed a translator were usually met with the slightly condescending assurance that I served a valuable purpose by keeping my fellow board members grounded in the real world. But after serving one term I decided that keeping LIAC grounded in the real world – if indeed I succeeded in doing so, which I doubted – wasn’t enough to justify my continued presence. So I resigned.

Here’s the thing: at the end of my two years, I was no clearer about LIAC’s purpose than I was at the start. I still had no idea what I was doing there and couldn’t see what, if anything, our meetings were achieving. To me it was just talk, talk, talk, with no discernible outcome, though I admit I seemed to be alone in reaching this pessimistic conclusion. Perhaps I missed something.

Before writing this, I went to the Department of Internal Affairs website to check that LIAC still exists (it does), and to remind myself what it was set up to do. I’m still none the wiser, since its terms of reference are described in woolly bureaucratese that can mean anything and nothing.

Its remit is a masterpiece of vague abstractions and circular reasoning, empowering LIAC to do whatever it thinks might be worth doing, but not actually explaining in simple, practical terms what that is, or guaranteeing that anyone will take any notice of it anyway. It’s there because it’s there. Where LIAC’s reason for existing should be clearly explained, there’s a vacuum.

I came to the conclusion that LIAC was one of those quangos that Labour politicians, in particular, love to create because they create a perception of action, change and dynamic forward momentum.

You can see how this happens. Labour typically languishes in opposition for prolonged periods (in that case, nine years), chafing with frustration and grinding its teeth at all the things it thinks the government should be doing. By the time it eventually gets its hands on the levers of power (mixed metaphor alert!), a massive head of reformist zeal has built up.

All that energy has to go somewhere, so it tends to get diffused in a frantic welter of political and bureaucratic activity that employs legions of public servants, consultants and advisors but often produces no lasting, tangible or beneficial results.

Labour, after all, is a party of change. It has a compelling urge to re-invent the wheel; to re-arrange things, sometimes for no better reason than that it has the power to do so. In this respect it’s fundamentally different from National, whose instinct is to leave things alone. (Unfortunately, National’s inertia means quangos created under Labour often survive a change of government, which may explain why LIAC still exists.)

No doubt there are other LIACs lurking out of the public view, all hoovering up taxpayer money and consuming energy that might be better expended elsewhere. In fact on a government profligacy scale of one to 10, LIAC would barely register 0.5.  I mention it only because I happen to have had personal experience of it. (The Taxpayers’ Union does a very good job of exposing the countless other government feel-good exercises which squander public money, like the new Hamilton-Papakura commuter train that in its first week often carried fewer than 30 passengers per trip.)

This brings me to the point of this blog, which is the work going on behind the scenes toward a reinvention of public broadcasting in New Zealand – or to be more precise, a merger (although the government doesn’t like that word) of TVNZ and RNZ.

No one has satisfactorily explained why this is necessary, still less urgent (as Broadcasting Minister Kris Faafoi seems to think), or what benefits it will bring. But it’s going ahead regardless, at pace and mainly out of public view, and you get the feeling it’s likely to happen whether it makes sense or not. It looks like Faafoi’s big legacy project – one that’s almost inevitably fated to be dismantled and reconstructed by some other reformist minister further down the track, because that’s what happens.

The potential pitfalls in the proposed amalgamation are obvious. The two organisations’ cultures are fundamentally incompatible. Yoking TVNZ and RNZ together would be like trying to mate a komodo dragon with a barn owl.

Admittedly, the model the government is considering, which would combine a commercial television service and a non-commercial radio network under common management, has worked satisfactorily in the past. It’s pretty much how the old New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation operated before it was broken up (under a Labour government, as it happens) in 1975.

The NZBC was funded by commercial revenue not only from television but also from its profitable ZB radio network, which was sold off in the 1980s. This income was supplemented by a licence fee, similar to the one that funds the BBC, which everyone with a TV set was required to pay, and which theoretically funded non-commercial broadcasting.

But that was then and this is now. Under the NZBC and its immediate successors, a strong public broadcasting ethos prevailed despite the hybrid funding model. The people who ran the two state TV networks that emerged from the 1975 overhaul were still influenced, consciously or otherwise, by the lingering legacy of British-born Sir James Shelley, New Zealand’s first director of broadcasting. That was apparent from their programming policies, which strove for a balance between populist entertainment and more serious content – and mostly achieved it. Ratings were important, but not paramount.

That can’t be said of TVNZ, which long ago shed any trace of its origins as a public broadcaster. It has been commercially driven – aggressively so – for decades, despite futile attempts (notably the Clark government’s meaningless “TVNZ Charter” in 2003, which the broadcaster appeared to ignore) to impose public service obligations on it.

I would be the first to applaud the restructuring of broadcasting if it signalled a return to public broadcasting values, but I suspect that genie is well and truly out of the bottle as far as TVNZ is concerned.

People might feel happier if Faafoi could at least present a succinct, compelling case for change, but he hasn’t. We’re told the new organisation must be “fit for purpose” – but what purpose, exactly? That’s conveniently undefined. “Fit for purpose” is a fashionable phrase that, like LIAC’s terms of reference, can mean anything or nothing. We should be very suspicious of politicians who take refuge in jargon whose meaning is impossible to pin down.

A key justification advanced for the creation of a “strong new public media entity” (the officially endorsed terminology) is that the media sector is in crisis and needs government help. But a cynical interpretation is that the “crisis” – if it exists, which commentators such as Newsroom's Mark Jennings dispute – offers a perfect opportunity for a deep-pocketed government to step into the market and swamp private operators.  This raises the worrying prospect of a state-controlled media behemoth.

Commentators on all sides have expressed scepticism, and not all of it can be dismissed as self-interest or politically motivated. They have also expressed disquiet at a lack of transparency.

As Stuff’s Tom Pullar-Strecker wrote in a perceptive analysis a couple of weeks ago, the longer the government holds out against demands for wider involvement in the exercise, “the more likely it is that people may feel the merger is something that is being done to them, rather than for them”.

Pullar-Strecker also pointedly asked: “Might this simply be a case of public sector empire-building by Faafoi, himself a former TVNZ journalist?”

He went on to suggest that it’s possible “there simply is no strong thinking behind the new public media entity and it is just the product of ill-defined aspirations that have been allowed to snowball in a policy vacuum”. 

In other words a bit like LIAC, perhaps, but on an infinitely grander and costlier scale.

 

On freedom of expression and that $55 million media handout

 

It seems I’ve achieved the great distinction of being deleted from Reddit. A friend emailed me recently to advise that my Spectator Australia article – ‘NewZealand is being transformed, but not in a good way’ – had been uploaded to Reddit several days previously, but had then been taken down. A notice explained: “Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators”. This was followed by what appeared to be a standard explanatory note: “Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil and true to their purpose”.

Who are these moderators? They’re not identified. Neither did the weasel-word explanatory note say exactly what the problem was with my article. I’m left to conclude that the anonymous moderators deemed it “unsafe” – but in what way?

We should be very suspicious of the word “safety” when used in this type of context. It has become another cover for the Stalinist authoritarianism that infects public discourse and seeks to silence and marginalise dissenters. “Unsafe” used to apply to situations where one’s health or physical wellbeing was at risk. Generations of New Zealanders grew up being told that it wasn’t safe to play with matches or go too close to the water. Then we started hearing the phrase “cultural safety”, especially in the context of health care. An invention of neo-Marxism, it broadened the definition far beyond its traditional and accepted meaning. Ensuring “cultural safety” became a coded synonym for purging the health system of supposed institutionalised racism. Notions of power and identity were central to this approach. Nursing students who pushed back against the doctrine, insisting that the same standard of care should apply to all patients regardless of ethnicity, paid a price for their defiance. Some readers of this blog may recall the celebrated case of Christchurch Polytech nursing student Anna Penn, who was branded as “culturally unsafe” – a term then new to most of us – by the polytech’s kaumatua in 1991 for daring to challenge the denial of her right as a woman to speak on a marae. Penn failed the “culture and society” component of her course and was subsequently described in a vindictive Polytech report as having demonstrated “such flaws of judgment and behaviour that she would not now be welcome back as a nursing student”. (She later graduated in Brisbane.) Soviet-style suppression of dissent was emerging even then, and today is nowhere more rampant than in the health sector, where the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation – to take just one example – has been convulsed by bullying race politics.

Since the Penn affair, this highly inventive concept of “safety” has widened even further, to the extent that it’s now invoked if there’s a risk that some fragile soul might feel offended or psychologically damaged by something written or said. But in the case of my Spectator article there’s more to it than that, because talk of “safety” is, of course, a red herring. The only threat my article presented is that it challenged the woke Left’s attempt to control the public conversation.  That’s what we’re really talking about here.

And how interesting that the sanctimonious moderators should mention the need to keep things civil. Let’s examine that for a moment.

My article wasn’t abusive or insulting.  It didn’t use offensive language, it didn’t attack anyone personally and it didn’t seek to incite hatred, violence or ridicule. It merely expressed opinions that the people who control Reddit think should be suppressed.

Yet the same moderators who took down the link to my column, supposedly out of concern for safety and civility, were obviously untroubled by some of the comments that appeared beneath it, which they left on the page. These included one (anonymous, of course – aren’t they all?) that attacked me in terms so coarse that I refuse to dignify my attacker’s words by reproducing them here. Civil? Pffft.

This was my first encounter with Reddit, and it seemed to validate my impression that much of what we inaccurately call “social” media is a seething, toxic snake pit. Reddit, which Wikipedia describes as a social news aggregation and discussion platform, is supposedly the world’s 18^th most visited website. But like many “social” media platforms it seems infested by angry, raging cowards hiding behind puerile pseudonyms.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that I won’t lose any sleep over my article being pulled, and still less from the accompanying comments. When something I’ve written provokes a keyboard warrior into anonymously responding with infantile vituperative, I take that as a moral victory. But the deletion of my article, and the conveniently vague and self-serving justification given by the Reddit moderators, says something about the profound change in the tone and scope of public conversation in New Zealand.

At the dawn of the Internet era, we were encouraged to think of social media platforms as anarchic and liberating. They were supposed to free us from the shackles of the “old” media, where editors (who were routinely caricatured as old, conservative white men) served as gatekeepers controlling the dissemination of news and comment. That promise now stands exposed as fraudulent; a giant con. Many social media platforms have turned out to be far more controlling and authoritarian than the despised “legacy” media they displaced, which were committed to principles of fairness, accuracy and balance.

As Chris Trotter (an old-school socialist, but a courageous champion of free speech) wrote recently, “citizens determined to spread ‘unacceptable’ ideas can no longer rely upon the major social media platforms for their dissemination. Increasingly, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are ‘de-platforming’ individuals and groups (including a former President of the United States!) whose beliefs have been anathematised by the woke”.

There’s an irony here. The young(ish) entrepreneurs who control social media, such as Mark Zuckerberg, are infinitely wealthier, greedier, more powerful and more controlling than the reviled press barons of old, the sole survivor of whom is Rupert Murdoch. They exercise their power in a way that acknowledges no public accountability or responsibility for the consequences of the harm they do. They use their resources to influence public opinion in a far more direct and active way than the “old” media. Yet they seem magically immunised against criticism.

The crucial difference, presumably, is that in age and appearance they are not dissimilar to the commissars of wokeness. They wear jeans and tee-shirts rather than suits and ties, and they give the impression of being anti-establishment (which they are, though not in the sense that the term was originally used a generation ago). Perhaps this makes their ruthless style of capitalism acceptable.  

Unfortunately the malaise isn’t confined to social media. In a recent blog post about Magic Talk’s sacking of John Banks, I wrote that both the range of subjects New Zealanders feel free to discuss, and the language they may use in discussing them, is constantly being narrowed down. Authoritarian wokeness is increasingly crowding out alternative conservative views, even where those views may represent mainstream thinking.

Since Banks’ sacking, of course, Sean Plunket has been added to the list of deplorables – not because of any fresh complaint against him (the one upheld by the Broadcasting Standards Authority in December related to a broadcast last May), but because Magic Talk, panicked by pressure from woke vigilantes and virtue-signalling advertisers, threw him under the bus.

Peter Williams, as the only surviving high-profile conservative host at Magic Talk, must now be feeling rather lonely and exposed – the more so since deputy prime minister Grant Robertson announced he would no longer be making his regular weekly appearance on Williams’ show because he objected to the host’s valid questions about the so-called Great Reset, which Robertson huffily dismissed as a “giant conspiracy theory”.

Jordan Williams of the Free Speech Coalition called the decision petulant and suggested Robertson should harden up. “Maybe Mr Robertson should seek the advice of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who has fronted often extremely hostile interviews with Mike Hosking,” Williams suggested. “Would she enjoy such grillings? Unlikely. But the PM clearly understands that she has a duty to not only address misinformation, but to engage with Kiwis on the other side of the political fence.

“We counter bad ideas with better ideas, and address misinformation with facts. This is why free speech is so central to democracy: bad and false ideas can be freely aired precisely so they can be addressed by more informed speech.”

Amen to all that. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Robertson’s decision was the timing, which made it look like a calculated attempt to undermine Williams (who, incidentally, is no-one’s idea of a far-Right ranter) when his position already seemed precarious following the defenestration of his fellow hosts. That would be contemptible.

It’s in this worryingly censorious environment that the government recently announced funding of $55 million for the news media. Broadcasting minister Kris Faafoi framed the decision as one driven solely by noble public interest motives, aimed at helping the media through a rough patch. But an alternative view is that virtually all politicians secretly dream of controlling the media, and it’s possible this government has cynically chosen an opportune moment to ensure the industry’s co-operation in achieving it.

Don’t be fooled by seductive talk of the government wanting to subsidise “public interest” journalism. Any journalism that provides citizens with “the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies and their governments”* is, by definition, public interest journalism.  But when used by left-wing academics in journalism schools, the phrase has a much narrower and more ideological meaning. In that context, “public interest journalism” is code for journalism that attacks power structures – that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”, to use a definition much favoured by those who see journalism principally as a form of activism, and who believe the only journalism worth supporting is that which has an ideological purpose.

So here, for what it’s worth, is my take on the proposed government media bailout:

■ If I could be confident that the government was truly and wholly committed to a vigorous, balanced, independent, non-partisan media;

■ If I could be confident that media owners were capable of resolutely asserting their independence while simultaneously accepting state funding;

■ If I could be assured that most media bosses weren’t already ideologically aligned with the government on such crucial issues as climate change and hate speech;

■ If I could be confident that media bosses were truly and wholly committed to the principles of editorial balance and freedom of expression;

■ If I could be confident that government politicians could be trusted not to exert influence over where the money went, and what type of journalistic activity it supported;

■ If I could be confident that government appointees charged with deciding how the money should be spent could be trusted not to worry about getting offside with their political masters should they give it to the wrong people;

■ If my confidence in the media were not already gravely undermined by journalists who consistently confuse journalism with activism and advocacy, and who bombard us relentlessly with their own opinions;

■ If I could be confident that some of that $55 million wouldn’t be used to further swamp us with fashionable wokeism;

… then I might think the proposed state bailout of the media was a good thing. But that adds up to a lot of worrying “Ifs”, and somehow I don’t think my misgivings will be easily assuaged.

*The definition comes from The Elements of Journalism (2001), by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. I’ve yet to see a more succinct description of what journalism should be about.