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.

Why move to a new country if your first instinct is to change it?

In a recent blog post, I drew attention to the fact that New Zealand’s leading pro-abortion activist, Terry Bellamak, is an American. She has brought to the abortion debate the type of aggressive, hard-ball approach that you might expect from a driven New York feminist and former executive of Goldman Sachs (which she is). Bernard Moran of Voice for Life describes her as coming from the “whatever it takes” school of political combat.  

I also pointed out that the examples of bad behaviour by anti-abortion protesters that Bellamak cited in an article for The Spinoff supporting 150-metre “safe zones” outside abortion clinics were all from America. I suggested that as long as we’re stuck with Bellamak, surely the least she could do is deal with the situation as it applies here, not in Colorado or Arizona. But of course it suited her purpose to portray the New Zealand anti-abortion lobby in the worst possible light, and to hell with the facts.

There’s a broader issue here. As immigration has ramped up, so New Zealand has become home to an increasing number of activists, political aspirants, bureaucrats and academics from countries whose values and mindsets are often dissimilar to ours. They arrive with attitudes moulded and fixed in societies that are, in some cases, thoroughly f**ked up (Somalia and Mexico, for example, though some might say that description also applies to the US) and which can teach us nothing about freedom, wellbeing or human dignity. But that doesn’t prevent these recent arrivals from insinuating themselves into positions of prominence and influence here, stridently finding fault with the way we do things and demanding that New Zealand – an exemplar of liberal democracy and a country respected worldwide for its human rights credentials – reshape itself to conform to their radical ideological prescriptions.

I’m aware that this sounds like textbook xenophobia, but generally speaking, I’m pro-immigration. Would I be happy to have neighbours from Iraq, Zimbabwe or Vietnam? Too right I would. I welcome ethnic and cultural diversity, though always with the proviso that immigration be managed carefully so as not to destabilise the host country or provoke a backlash.

But here’s the thing. Logically, immigrants are drawn to New Zealand because they recognise this as a country where they can live in peace, own their own homes, get a university degree, enjoy freedom of speech, vote for the politicians of their choice in free and fair elections, practise their religion without let or hindrance and enjoy the protection of the rule of law.  

This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t avail themselves of the rights available to native-born New Zealanders: the right to stand for public office, to lobby for political causes, to join political parties, to phone talkback shows and write letters to the editor. In other words, we shouldn't expect immigrants to remain silent and invisible. But neither should they expect those of us who were born and raised here, whose families in many cases have been here for generations, and who have paid taxes and voted in elections all our lives, to welcome newcomers whose first instinct on arrival is to plunge into political activism aimed at refashioning our laws and institutions.  

So if agitators like Bellamak, former poverty campaigner Ricardo Menendez-March (now a Green MP with a stonking sense of entitlement) and Black Lives Matter activist Guled Mire sometimes encounter a bit of pushback, it shouldn’t simplistically be dismissed as xenophobia or racism. Those of us who have been here much longer, and who have a lot more invested in this country, not unnaturally tend to resent new arrivals whose foreign-inspired inflammatory rhetoric magnifies points of difference and undermines social cohesion that has been painstakingly cultivated since the 19th century.  

A related issue that I’ve banged on about before (here, here and here) is the tendency to fill key public service positions with overseas appointees, usually from Britain. We like to think we’ve grown out of the so-called cultural cringe, whereby we instinctively looked overseas for guidance on how to conduct our affairs, but the evidence suggests otherwise. A particularly egregious example was the Labour government’s appointment of Paul Hunt, a Corbynite socialist academic from England, as Chief Human Rights Commissioner – a position in which he’s capable of causing enormous harm.

Like the aforementioned political activists, these globe-trotting careerists often arrive with a set of values, attitudes and ways of doing things that belongs to another culture and doesn’t necessarily transfer easily to ours. When they screw things up, as they too often do, they are able to fly away without so much as a backward glance and get on with their careers elsewhere, leaving someone else to clean up the mess they’ve left behind.

A contributory factor in all this, of course, is our own complacency and passivity. As I said in a column in 2019: “Because we tend to be passive and polite, we make it easy for shouty, highly motivated outsiders to push their way to the top. But they don’t speak for us.”

We're big enough to look after ourselves

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, October 17.)

A long time ago – 1978, to be precise – I wrote an article for The Listener that began something like this: “A funny thing happened at the Department of Maori Affairs recently. They put a Maori in charge”.

The article was about Kara Puketapu, who had the distinction of being only the second Maori to be appointed as head of the department charged with looking after Maori interests.

Today it would be unthinkable for Te Puni Kokiri, as it’s now known, to have a non-Maori in the top job. To appoint a Pakeha would be seen as an intolerable affront to Maori and a throwback to the days of patronising colonialism.

It would be argued that only a Maori could properly understand Maori needs, advise the government on policies affecting Maori and, perhaps most crucially, identify with the people he or she was supposed to represent.

You might well wonder, then, why New Zealanders continue to meekly accept the appointment of non-New Zealanders to the highest levels of both the public and corporate sectors. Surely the same arguments apply.

We haven’t had a British governor-general since the 1960s and we abandoned the right of appeal to the Privy Council 15 years ago. This suggests we feel capable of looking after ourselves. Yet we continue to see a stream of overseas appointees to powerful positions – a notable recent example being the naming of an Australian, Caralee McLiesh, as the secretary to the Treasury, a job that places her at the very heart of economic policy-making.

McLiesh replaced another outsider, the Englishman Gabriel Makhlouf, who left under a cloud after being roundly criticised by the State Services Commission for his handling of an embarrassing Budget leak earlier this year.

The appointment of a virtually unknown Australian raised eyebrows around Wellington. Blogger Michael Reddell, a former top official of the Reserve Bank, found it disturbing that twice in succession, an outsider with no knowledge or experience of New Zealand had been recruited to fill what he described as the premier position in the public service.

Reddell said he didn’t think it was appropriate to recruit foreigners, especially ones with no experience or background knowledge of New Zealand, for such critical roles.

Even more disturbing was the appointment of the British academic and left-wing activist Paul Hunt as Chief Human Rights Commissioner.

The human rights role is a particularly sensitive one because it calls for someone with an intuitive understanding of our unique heritage and values. It’s inconceivable that an English academic, and a highly politicised one at that, was the most suitable candidate.

Similarly, you’d think we might have recruited locally for the position of CEO at Te Papa, an institution that supposedly reflects what it means to be a New Zealander. Yet we’ve now had two British appointees in the job, both of whom have created disruption and resentment by pursuing their own vision of what Te Papa should be.

That leads me to another danger with overseas appointees. Many have no emotional stake in New Zealand or long-standing commitment to the country. They are free to screw things up and move on without so much as a backward glance, leaving whatever damage they have done for someone else to clean up.

This is equally true in the corporate sector, where Fonterra, the ANZ Bank and Fletcher Building have all had to mop up after high-flying but seriously flawed CEOs recruited from the Netherlands, Australia and Scotland respectively.

In academia, too, we have had to suffer the consequences of questionable appointments from overseas. I’m thinking in particular of Massey University’s vice-chancellor Jan Thomas, who deservedly copped a backlash for assuming powers of political censorship on campus. What right did an Australian veterinary scientist have to dictate what opinions New Zealanders should be exposed to?

Another intriguing phenomenon, which I suspect is related, is the high proportion of foreign-born activists at the forefront of radical politics in New Zealand. Examples include the career peace protester Valerie Morse, the abortion rights advocate Terry Bellamak, the anti-poverty campaigner Ricardo Menendez-March and the vociferous Guled Mire, who keeps complaining about our supposedly racist immigration policies.

Such people bring with them an ideological fervour that is alien to New Zealanders, who are essentially a complacent and contented lot. Because we tend to be passive and polite, we make it easy for shouty, highly motivated outsiders to push their way to the top. But they don't speak for us.

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.

The enemies of free speech have seized the moment

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., April 4.)

Changes to the gun control laws are a mere trifle compared with what else might come down the legislative pipeline following the Christchurch mosque massacres.

There are an estimated 250,000 New Zealanders with a firearms licence. Of those, we can assume only a small proportion of gun enthusiasts will be directly affected by proposed changes covering military-style semi-automatic weapons.

Changes to what we can say, write, read and hear, on the other hand, could threaten the essential nature and quality of our democracy. Ultimately they would affect everyone. That’s why we should all be extremely uneasy about the pending review of laws governing so-called “hate speech”.

A review was due this year anyway, but Justice Minister Andrew Little says it will be fast-tracked following the Christchurch atrocities.

I don’t believe that Little is necessarily an enemy of free speech, but no one should be in any doubt that the climate is perversely ripe for a crackdown on freedom of expression.

Authoritarian ideologues on the far Left know that if there’s ever going to be a moment when New Zealanders can be persuaded to accept restrictions on what we can say, it’s now, when the country is looking for ways to atone for the appalling atrocities – although they were not perpetrated by us – on March 15.

Before that happens, we should insist on answers to some crucial questions. Here are a few:

■ In what way are existing “hate speech” laws inadequate? Respected legal academics point out that we already have laws that prohibit statements inciting racial disharmony or hostility against minorities. There is nothing to indicate these laws have failed. In fact they are rarely used, which suggests the problem is not as pressing as hate-speech lobbyists claim.

The Human Rights Commission is concerned that current laws cover race, colour and ethnicity but not religion, which means they don’t protect Muslims or other religious minorities. But that should be easily fixed without imposing wider restrictions on speech.  

■ How would tougher speech laws have prevented the killings? That isn’t clear. They might limit the rights of ordinary New Zealanders while having no effect on fanatics like the Christchurch shooter (who, we shouldn’t forget, was Australian). And they would risk driving potentially dangerous opinions underground, where they are harder to counter.

This latter point was made to me last year by Professor Paul Spoonley when I interviewed him for an article on “hate speech” in The Listener. Spoonley, an authority on extremism, questioned the need for tougher laws and described himself as an ardent proponent of free speech. He now seems to have had a change of heart – as he’s entitled to do, although it seems a sharp about-turn.

■ How is hate speech to be defined, especially when one person’s hate speech is another’s legitimate expression of opinion? And crucially, who will do the defining?

One person who can be expected to wield influence over the review is the Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt.

Never heard of him? No, many New Zealanders haven’t. He was appointed last October as part of a cleanout that followed a sexual harassment scandal at the Human Rights Commission.

Hunt was recruited from Britain. He is an academic, a human rights careerist and an activist whose adulatory entry in Wikipedia makes much of his work with the United Nations. He is also aligned with the Corbynite socialist Left of the British Labour Party.

Is he someone we should entrust with the job of influencing what New Zealanders can be permitted to read, hear and say? I don’t think so. Not for a moment.

■ Could a review result in police being given power to launch what would effectively be political prosecutions against people for saying the wrong things, as happens in Britain? That would be a radical extension of police powers and one that New Zealanders must oppose.

■ Most important, how is the notion of hate speech to be reconciled with freedom of expression – a fundamental tenet of democracy, and a right guaranteed to New Zealanders under the Bill of Rights Act?

New Zealand is internationally admired as a liberal, open democracy. We pride ourselves on respecting freedom of religion, and never more so than in the weeks since the Christchurch shootings.

Freedom of speech is part of the same bundle of rights, but paradoxically we are now being told that one freedom must be restricted to protect another. It doesn’t add up.

The enemies of free speech want to contain political debate within narrow parameters dictated by them, and are prepared to exploit a tragedy to achieve that goal. They must not be allowed to get away with it.

Some more thoughts on the Christchurch massacres and their aftermath

We met her on the walkway to Cathedral Cove, on the Coromandel Peninsula. My wife and I were on our way back to our vehicle and had stopped to admire the view. She was going the other way.

She was a well-spoken, smartly dressed woman whom I guessed to be in her 60s, or possibly a well-preserved 70-something.

She stopped and said she had seen us the previous day in Whitianga. She had wondered at the time whether she should say something about the T-shirt I was wearing.

Let me tell you about that T-shirt. I bought it in the US about three years ago. It has a historical photo on the front showing four Apache warriors holding Winchester rifles. Above the picture, in bold capitals, are the words “HOMELAND SECURITY” and below: “Fighting terrorism since 1492”.

I bought the T-shirt because I liked the way it uses ironic humour to make a point. Since 9/11 America has been understandably pre-occupied with repelling people who want to do it harm. But the message on the T-shirt was that the original invaders of America were white Europeans whose arrival in the late 15^th century had catastrophic consequences for the indigenous inhabitants. In resisting the white man, the Apache warriors were doing what Homeland Security does now – protecting their domain.

It’s not a T-shirt I would wear through Customs and Immigration at LAX, but I’ve never had any qualms about wearing it in New Zealand and it certainly didn’t occur to me, or my wife, that it might be considered offensive  after the events in Christchurch on March 15.

The woman on the walkway to Cathedral Cove, however, saw things differently. She questioned whether it was appropriate to be wearing it only a few days after the shootings.

It was one of those situations where you’re so taken aback that you don’t immediately think of a suitable response. She wasn’t rude or aggressive, but there was an unmistakeable tone of moral disapproval in her voice. 

It was a brief encounter and we politely went our separate ways. It was only after we had resumed our walk that I began to think of things I might have said to her. Probably just as well, because I wouldn’t have wanted to spoil a beautiful day by getting into a discussion that might have turned unpleasant.

If we were to re-run the conversation, I would be curious to know how she could possibly perceive any connection between my T-shirt and the Christchurch massacres.  In what way was it, to use that ghastly weasel word, “inappropriate”? Did she even get the irony of the T-shirt’s message? Possibly not. Moralistic people aren’t noted for their sense of humour.

I mention this incident because it’s representative, in its own tiny way, of the strange mood that has swept over the country in the 12 days since the mosque massacres. There’s a lot to like about this mood, but it has produced some odd side-effects.

It’s a febrile, overheated mood; a rush to judgment that has generated perverse, irrational and even hysterical reactions.

The incident on the Cathedral Cove walkway was at the very benign end of the spectrum. Far more worrying is the grotesque witch-hunt for scapegoats – people who bear not even the faintest responsibility for the killings, but are somehow held to be contributing to a toxic, racist mindset that shelters and encourages haters.

The most lamentable example is the decision by Whitcoulls to withdraw from sale the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s best-selling book 12 Rules for Life because someone found a photo of Peterson posing with a fan wearing a T-shirt bearing the words “I’m a proud Islamophobe”.

Admittedly it was a dumb thing for Peterson to do, but he must pose for hundreds of photos with fans and it’s possible he didn’t even notice what the T-shirt said. In any case, the issue should be whether Peterson’s book promotes race hatred or disharmony – and as far as I can ascertain from reliable people who have read it, it does no such thing.

But Whitcoulls was panicked into over-reacting. The noisy neo-Marxist Left has learned that Western capitalism has a soft underbelly and can easily be bullied into submission by fear of boycotts and bad publicity.

That a major book chain should so cravenly capitulate shows a cowardly disregard for the very values it should be defending. If I were a customer of Whitcoulls, which I haven’t been for a very long time because I regarded it as a lousy company anyway, I would be taking my patronage elsewhere. 

Ironically, Whitcoulls reportedly continues to stock Mein Kampf – a vivid demonstration of the absurd contradictions that can arise when people start censoring books.

Peterson, of course, is the current bête-noire of the neo-Marxists, probably because his message clearly resonates with so many people, as attested by the crowds he attracted on his recent New Zealand tour.  (The Left hate Don Brash for much the same reason. Non-political people generally like Brash, or at least respect his opinions and unfailing civility.)

I haven’t read Peterson’s books and didn’t see him speak, but from everything I’ve read I get the impression he’s a mild conservative whose views would have been considered unexceptionable as recently as 10 years ago.

It’s a measure of how sharply the political and ideological ground has shifted under our feet that Peterson is now widely portrayed in the media as a right-wing ogre. The tone of the public conversation is such that anyone to the right of the centre risks being stigmatised as right wing, “alt-right” (whatever that means), extremist or fascist.

Moreover, the media have almost succeeded in redefining the political ground by shifting that perceived centre sharply to the left, at least in terms of the public conversation. It doesn’t seem to matter that this doesn’t remotely reflect the reality of New Zealand, where the majority of voters at the last election supported nominally conservative parties – as they have done in most elections during my lifetime.

Some of the most hysterical invective against Peterson has come from young(ish) female commentators, and I wonder whether it’s because they have gone through school and university without ever being exposed to even moderately conservative opinions. When they encounter them for the first time, they react with fear and loathing. (I’ll pause here until the inevitable accusations of sexism and misogyny subside.)

The witch-hunters have claimed other scalps too. An Auckland doctor, Jim McVeagh, has been stood down by the Westgate Medical Centre pending an investigation after a fellow doctor complained about “inappropriate” posts (that word again) on the Whale Oil blog.

McVeagh posts under the pseudonym MacDoctor. I’ve seen some of his posts – I think he’s commented on this site in the past – and would describe them as being in the ACT/libertarian mould. On health matters, his posts are often moderate, thoughtful and authoritative.

Nothing I’ve seen by him could be construed as hateful, inflammatory or even exceptionable in a free and open society, although McVeagh himself concedes they could be offensive to some. He has criticised “ordinary” Muslims, for example, for not condemning Islamic extremism, and he has argued that Muslim immigration should be suspended until non-threatening members of the Muslim faith can be distinguished from potential extremists.

But context is everything. It would have been provocative in the extreme if McVeagh had expressed those views during the past week when nerves are raw, but in the context of a long-standing debate about immigration and extremism, they were legitimate. Crucially, they fell far short of inciting hatred or violence against Muslims.

What I find significant is that the comments complained about were made a couple of years ago, but the complainant has waited until now to make his or her objections known. Clearly he or she judged (correctly) that the search for scapegoats following the Christchurch terror made the time ripe for retribution.

The once solidly respectable Otago Daily Times, incidentally, reported: “A senior Auckland doctor has been immediately stood down pending an investigation by his employer into vile, anti-Islamic rants posted on the right-wing blog Whale Oil.”

There you have it, right there. When even the once respected ODT can pepper a news story with subjective and incendiary labels such as “vile” and “rants”, you sense that the rot in journalism may be irreversible.

But it’s important to record that journalists can be on the receiving end too. In a commentary on the Noted website a few days ago, Graham Adams recalled that North&South magazine was accused of racism in 2016 for running an article that asked whether New Zealanders had anything to fear from radical Islam. It made no difference to the critics that the Muslims interviewed for the story had welcomed the opportunity to talk about their faith.

There have been other recent examples of what might be termed mild hysteria. Twitter users responded with outrage (as Twitter users do, their dials being permanently set on furious) to an advertisement by the venerable and staid Auckland department store Smith and Caughey for a fashion garment described as a “lynch mob coat” – a name reportedly inspired by the cult-like following enjoyed by film director David Lynch. (No, I don’t understand it either.)

Judging by the New Zealand Herald’s report, the store changed the name several weeks ago – in other words, well before March 15 – to “lynch coat” and more recently to the spectacularly cautious “check wool coat”. But that didn’t stop an explosion on Twitter.

OK, so “lynch mob coat” may seem a bit silly, as is the fashion industry’s way. But the name had already been changed - and in any case, as with my Homeland Security T-shirt, it’s hard to see any direct connection with the events in Christchurch. It’s just that in the hyper-sensitive emotional climate and retributive mood brought about by the shootings, people are casting about for things to be offended by.

It’s also been reported that husband-and-wife real estate agents from Auckland had their contracts terminated by their employer, Ray White, after someone complained about their Facebook posts relating to Africans and Muslims. Same pattern: the comments were posted in April and August last year but evidently came to Ray White’s attention only last week.

How offensive were they? I don’t know. What’s significant is that the complainant clearly decided now was the time to act, presumably in the expectation that the complaint would carry more weight because of the shootings. And so it turned out. There seems to be an element of vengeful opportunism here – one that has been rewarded with over-reactions that show a worrying disregard for principles of free speech.

Incidentally, I found out about some of these cases from Bruce Russell’s overnight talk show on NewstalkZB. Commercial talkback radio is possibly the last sector of the media that hasn’t been captured by the Left, which must irritate the hell out of them. You can be sure they’re working on it.

PERHAPS all of the above can be forgiven as a collective rush of blood to the head, brought about by the shock of the appalling events of March 15. But far less excusable is the manner in which prominent people, many of them on the public payroll, exploited the deaths of 50 innocent people to further an ideological agenda.

By this I mean people like the Green MPs Golriz Ghahraman and Marama Davidson. In Parliament, Ghahraman blamed unnamed fellow MPs and breakfast radio “shock jocks” – presumably meaning NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking – for the “hate speech” that she claims led to the killings. (Hosking, incidentally, is another bête-noire of the Left, and for the same reason as Jordan Peterson: his daily commentaries connect with a large number of New Zealanders who are not racist or xenophobic and reject extremist ideology of both the Right and Left.)

Ghahraman, a highly accomplished self-publicist, was in such a rush to apportion blame that she wasn’t prepared to wait before making a considered response based on facts and evidence rather than supposition, assumption and prejudice. And why should she, when it was so much easier to make sweeping, unsubstantiated and emotive assertions about the killings being caused by “hate speech” (undefined), “white supremacy” and “gratuitous racism”?

She didn’t even have the decency to wait until all the victims’ bodies had been released to their grieving families for burial. The blame game took priority.

Davidson, meanwhile, took advantage of a vigil in honour of the shooting victims to unleash a barrage of denunciation. “New Zealand was founded on the theft of land, language and identity of indigenous people,” she was reported as saying. “This land we are standing on is land we were violently removed from to uphold the same agenda that killed the people in the mosques yesterday.”

This was not about honouring or mourning the dead. It was about finding someone to blame and settling old ideological scores. It stood in jarring contrast to the tone set by the Muslim community of Christchurch, which was all about reconciliation, forgiveness and unity. No recrimination, no anger, no fulminating about Islamophobia or white supremacy; just shock and sadness that this terrible thing had happened in a country they thought of as inclusive and welcoming. And which remains inclusive and welcoming, because the depredations of a single terrorist (an Australian, we shouldn’t forget) doesn’t change who we are.

I find people like Ghahraman and Davidson almost as frightening as terrorists. They don’t kill anyone, but their power to change society is greater. They use the institutions of a liberal democracy to whittle away at the open society. 

They are, in their way, as totalitarian and intolerant of difference as any gun-toting fascist or jihadist. They virtuously embrace ethnic and religious difference (except when it comes to Christianity, which is seen as part of the white power structure) but are aggressively intolerant of political difference and free speech.

It was no surprise to read that some attendees left an Auckland vigil early, apparently upset at a series of speeches attacking colonialism, white supremacy and white terrorism. One disillusioned early leaver was quoted as saying they wanted the vigil to be more focused on the victims; another said that while she understood the need for a conversation about racism and white supremacy, she felt that a week after the attacks was too soon.

“I think there was too much mention of “white” and colonial times. To me that wasn’t a remembrance of the victims and not the way to push for unity.”

That event was jointly organised by Migrants Against Racism and Xenophobia (MARX), Racial Equity Aotearoa, Shakti NZ, Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga and Auckland Peace Action. In other words it was an overtly political event, organised by radical activists (it was disappointing to see Shakti, which reportedly does admirable work for migrant and refugee women, keeping such dodgy company) and staged to make political capital out of a tragedy that deserved more time for people to grieve and wounds to start healing.

To its credit, the Labour-led government coalition has not bought into this unedifying grudge-fest. As far as I can see, Jacinda Ardern has been nothing but measured and conciliatory in her public statements. It’s the ideologues on Labour’s left who are busy stirring the pot.

Interestingly, political scientist Bryce Edwards noted in a commentary last week that prominent British authorities on multiculturalism had watched the course of the debate over the events in Christchurch and were despondent. Writing in The Guardian, the Indian-born Leftist academic Kenan Malik said it was depressing that much of the discussion that followed the shootings had degenerated into name calling and invective. “The dead deserve better,” he wrote.

In The Times, Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim, said both the far Left and theocratic Islamists were seeking to exploit Christchurch “for their own nefarious ends”.

It should be unacceptable, Nawaz wrote, to use the March 15 attacks to blame critics of Islam or immigration, or to seek to silence the political Right generally. “Shutting down debate in this way will only make matters worse and is precisely what the New Zealand terrorist explicitly told us he wanted, in his diatribe commonly referred to as a manifesto”.

Those words came too late to deter people like Ghahraman and Davidson, who are probably too wrapped up in their own sense of grievance to heed them anyway. Sadly they also came too late to deter the Auckland University historian Dame Anne Salmond and the recently appointed Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt. The blood still hadn’t been cleaned from the Christchurch mosques when both weighed in with finger-wagging commentaries upbraiding New Zealanders for their supposed failings and implying that we all somehow shared the blame.

“White supremacy is part of us, a dark power in the land,” Salmond’s melodramatic piece began. We may look “bland and reasonable”, but according to Salmond our dark side is hateful and violent.

Hunt, an English academic and human rights careerist who had barely got his feet under the desk, seized the opportunity to promote the identity politics agenda and to lecture us on the many ways in which we need to lift our game. Perhaps it’s just me, but I found it galling to read a new arrival (although he claims dual British and New Zealand citizenship) pontificating about the importance of “our” commitment to tolerance and diversity and the values that lie at the heart of “our” multiculturalism.

Among other things, Hunt pronounced that a “sensible dialogue” about our hate speech laws is “long overdue”. This should send a chill through anyone who values free speech, because I suspect that what he means by “sensible dialogue” is one that can be relied on to produce the outcome that the Human Rights Commission wants – in other words, one that puts greater weight on the protection of minority groups from views that they might find upsetting than on the far more fundamental democratic right to free speech and an open society.

It has been instructive to watch the speed and determination with which elements on the far Left (not all on the far Left, it should be noted – stand up, Chris Trotter) have tried to hijack the post-shootings conversation and twist it to their own ends.

Their purpose is to stifle free speech, to shut down legitimate journalism (which is in retreat anyway) and to prohibit people from asking questions that the neo-Marxists think shouldn’t be asked.

I think they may have overplayed their hand. At a time when common human decency dictates that the priorities should be compassion and grieving, they have coldly pursued a transparently ideological agenda.   

People know weapons-grade vindictiveness when they see it. They also recognise it as the diametric opposite of what ordinary New Zealanders have demonstrated in abundance over the past two weeks, which is practical empathy and support for people who have suffered an unimaginable loss.

FOOTNOTE: I wrote two newspaper columns in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings, both of which have been reproduced on this blog site.

Those columns, which were published in a number of papers and on the Stuff website, prompted several critical letters. Some of these I didn’t see, because I was away on holiday, but I want to comment on two that I did see.

One was from someone named Mike Sansom of Island Bay (Wellington), whom I suspect may have been the “Unknown” commenter on this site whom I responded to on March 22. I say that because both Sansom and “Unknown” had the same beef about the column I had written from Long Bay in the Coromandel.

Sansom accused me of writing a self-satisfied column without even mentioning the 50 victims of the shootings. This, he said, demonstrated an appalling lack of compassion.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. He criticised my column not because of something I said but because of something he thinks I should have said but didn’t. But if columnists are going to be attacked for things readers think they should have said but didn’t, then they are on a hiding to nothing. They are always going to be open to criticism for choosing to write about the wrong things. (Note to self: consult Mike Sansom in future before sitting down at the keyboard.)

More to the point though, Sansom implies that because I didn’t express compassion, it can only be because I don’t feel any. Here, laid bare, is the overweening moral conceit of some on the Left, who feel they have a monopoly on virtue. 

In fact the reason I didn’t feel it necessary to say I felt sorry for the Christchurch victims and their families was that as a fellow human being it would have been stating the obvious. I took it as a given, as most readers probably did, that we all grieved. But that’s the world we now live in: we have to publicly parade our feelings or risk censure for not being compassionate enough.

The other letter was from Professor Boyd Swinburn  of  Auckland University, who is deservedly famous as One Of Those People Who Know What’s Best For Other People. We have a lot of them in New Zealand, and especially in the universities.  

Like Sansom, Swinburn made no attempt to engage with the substance of my column, preferring to compare it unfavourably with another column published alongside it which was far more to his liking. That column, written by an Iranian-born female journalist, was headlined Christchurch shootings: The rot behind New Zealand’s cloak of decency. Say no more.

Sansom's letter at least tried to make a point, even if it was off the mark. Swinburn's letter, on the other hand, was a lazy and gratuitous pot-shot that said nothing other than that he didn't like my column.

Well, I have a deal to put to Swinburn. He started his letter by saying “I am an old, white, privileged male like Karl du Fresne.” The usual corollary to this type of statement is that because older white males have led a life of privilege, pushing other people around and generally exploiting their power, they should be disqualified from expressing an opinion on anything.

My suggestion to Swinburn is that if he promises to shut up, so will I. It would be a small price to pay for relief from his tiresome sanctimony.