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)

Pssst ... don't mention the iwi

From disgrace to sham to travesty and back again – that pretty much sums up the Three Waters project so far.  (I won’t use the government’s preferred term “reform”, because reform means a change for the better.)

When it became clear last year that Nanaia Mahuta’s pet ideological project faced concerted opposition across a broad front, the government sought to defuse it by setting up an “independent working group” to review the proposed governance arrangements.

The working group’s report is now in, and it has justifiably been slammed for merely tinkering at the edges – hardly surprising, given that the group was stacked with iwi representatives and people broadly sympathetic to the government. (One example is my own mayor, Lyn Patterson, a reliable friend of Labour who told the Wairarapa Times-Age that the report addresses local government’s concerns. Yet her own council recently joined 29 others in opposing Three Waters and looking at alternative proposals.)

The working group’s most significant recommendation is for a restructuring of shareholding arrangements in the proposed governance structure, in the hope this will create an illusion of greater accountability and so mollify opponents – among them, Auckland mayor and former Labour cabinet minister Phil Goff, who is standing firm despite having been on the working party. (Question: if the recommendations didn’t even satisfy one of the group’s own members, why should the rest of us be convinced?)

To appease those who complain that the existing proposals don’t allow sufficient input for local voices, the working party proposes to strengthen the roles of regional representative groups (RRGs) by creating advisory groups (sub-RRGs – I kid you not) that would “feed into the larger body”. So an already opaque and unwieldy governance structure would become still more opaque and unwieldy, and local voices would be safely submerged and rendered impotent.  The Labour Party is very good at this sort of thing, preferring to place its faith in big government rather than allow local democracy to get in the way.

The report also seeks to divert attention away from crucial governance issues to the supposed risk of privatisation of water, which my former colleague Barrie Saunders rightly dismisses as a red herring. Amid all the debate of the past few months, the fear of privatisation has hardly been raised at all.

Most significantly, the working group ignores the elephant in the room (or should I say the taniwha in the whare). The shibboleth of 50-50 Treaty partnership remains central to the project. The report does nothing to address concerns that Three Waters, as it stands, would represent a massive transfer of power and control to unelected and unaccountable iwi interests.

In the longer term that raises profound constitutional implications, because Three Waters could serve as a test run for implementing a radical re-interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi. If the government gets away with it, we should expect the principle of 50-50 co-governance to be extended into other spheres of government.

Already we’re seeing parallel Maori governance structures taking shape in health and education. The Three Waters project will take that a step further. No one should be in any doubt that what’s underway is nothing less than a subversion of democratic principles and a jettisoning of the notion that all citizens enjoy equal rights.

Interestingly, media coverage of the working group’s report – or at least what I’ve seen and heard of it – has deftly skirted around the crucial issue of tribal influence in the Three Waters project by the simple expedient of not referring to it at all. To paraphrase Basil Fawlty, it’s a case of “Don’t mention the iwi”.

Conspiracy theorists are likely to see this as further evidence of the government’s influence over the media via the Public Interest Journalism Fund – and who can blame them? That’s the type of suspicion media outlets inevitably invite when they line up to take the taxpayers’ money on terms dictated by the government, central among which is the insistence on recognition of arbitrarily defined Treaty rights.

Throughout this exercise, a persistent issue has been lack of transparency. At every step along the way, the government has seemed determined to (pardon the pun) muddy the waters.

A good example is the diagram purporting to show how the governance of Three Waters will work, which is a triumph of obfuscation. I defy anyone to make sense of it. There has to be a reason why it’s so convoluted, and I believe that reason is to disguise where true power and control will reside.

The public still has no idea who came up with the idea of four regional “water service entities” – whose territories just happened to be aligned with tribal boundaries – or what the rationale was. That part of the exercise appears to have taken place out of the public view. It emerged fully formed, without public consultation.

In place of transparency, the government has tried hyperbole, disinformation and scaremongering – witness the infantile and dishonest “public information and education campaign” put together by advertising agency FCB New Zealand (to its everlasting shame) at a cost to the taxpayer of $4 million. The aim was to frighten New Zealanders into thinking our water infrastructure is in a parlous state and thus soften us up for the hijacking of council-owned assets and the removal of democratic accountability mechanisms.

In fact many, if not most, councils manage their water infrastructure efficiently and safely. In any case, the debate now is not so much about whether the management of water can be improved, which many critics of Three Waters accept. What’s contentious is the means by which the government proposes to do it.

As I said in a recent letter to the Times-Age, New Zealanders need to decide what type of government they want: one that serves all citizens equally, or one that recognises a minority racial group as having rights that trump those of the majority.

This doesn’t mean sweeping aside Maori rights. But it’s one thing to treat Maori fairly and respectfully, as is their due, and quite another to undermine the fundamental democratic principles from which all New Zealanders – Maori, Pakeha and everyone else – benefit.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that people of Maori descent enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. These include the right to stand for councils and to get elected, as many have done. That would provide the opportunity to be represented in the running of a legitimately constituted Three Waters governance structure. But the powerful iwi interests that influence the government (and in particular Labour’s Maori caucus, which is a power centre in its own right) want to bypass that process and enjoy a seat at the table as of right.

To put it another way, the Three Waters project, as it stands, involves replacing democracy with another form of government for which we don’t have a name.

An assumed right of veto?

The protest occupation at the site of a proposed Erebus memorial at Sir Dove-Myer Robinson Park in Parnell is the latest evidence of what seems to be an assumed Maori right of veto.

Dame Rangimarie Naida Glavish is leading the protest, claiming it’s a culturally significant site (isn’t it always?) and that there was inadequate consultation with Maori. Yet her own iwi, Ngati Whatua, gave the project its blessing after a consultation process going back to October 2018. In a statement issued on Wednesday, Ngati Whatua Orakei – the hapu with mana whenua (territorial authority) over the site – detailed its involvement in the approval process and reaffirmed its support.

There’s a pattern emerging here. As at Ihumatao and Wellington’s Shelly Bay, protesters are asserting a right to block projects that had been given the green light - in the case of Shelly Bay, after years of squabbling.

In all three cases, dissidents have challenged decisions made by their own iwi organisations. To put it another way, significant public projects have been compromised - some might say sabotaged - as a result of intra-tribal disputes.

In the case of Ihumatao, this will come at a substantial cost to the taxpayer after the government agreed in December to pay $30 million to undo a housing development deal previously agreed between the local iwi and Fletcher Building.

We can safely assume the eventual bill will be much higher once legal costs and consultancy fees are totted up after a process that we’re told could take five years. That’s the price of the government’s eagerness to win the approval of the Ihumatao activists and their media supporters, who ensured the occupation got plenty of sympathetic publicity.

In the Parnell affair, Auckland mayor Phil Goff appears – so far, at least – to be standing firm against demands that the Erebus memorial be placed elsewhere, though I wouldn’t put money on him holding his ground if the heat goes on.

You certainly don’t have to look far for examples of timid councils backing down in the face of Maori insistence that approved projects be reversed. A notable instance was the about-face executed by Hastings District Council in 2018 over a walking track up the eastern face of Te Mata Peak. The $300,000 track was built and paid for by the adjacent Craggy Range winery, which owned the land and did everything by the book. But the local iwi objected at not having been consulted and demanded that the track be removed.

Both the council and the winery meekly capitulated. The estimated cost of “remediation” at the time was $650,000. I don’t know what the final cost came to, but I noted recently that you can still clearly see the outline of the track zig-zagging up the Te Mata escarpment. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

In this case, the iwi veto – which, as far as I can tell, had no basis in law – was exercised retrospectively, making it all the more expensive. But the lesson was clear: bullying works, especially when councils are terrified of being accused of racism.

It worked in New Plymouth last month too, when council workers rushed to remove American flags that had been placed along the main highway to promote a rally of classic American cars.

The organisers had council approval to put them up. But when Taranaki Iwi chief executive Wharehoka Wano took exception to American flags being flown ahead of Waitangi Day, the order went out from the town hall: take them down! Never mind that the council had okayed them in the first place, or that it had also arranged for special Waitangi Day flags to be displayed around the city.  This seemed a case of unelected, unaccountable people exerting authority just because they can.

Of course the council apologised. “We’re sorry we dropped the ball in the run-up to our national day,” it said in a grovelling statement. “We’ve been in touch with iwi to apologise.” The council was taking steps to ensure it wouldn’t happen again, and the flags would be put up again once Waitangi Day had passed and fragile cultural sensitivities were presumably less likely to be bruised.

But “apologise” for what, exactly? Not asking the iwi’s permission? Are councils now expected to anticipate iwi objections to something as harmless as a display of American flags? Should they obtain prior iwi consent to all approvals, even those that look routine and innocuous, just in case they might offend someone?

Here’s the thing. Councils are elected to represent the interests of all citizens. They are required to follow processes laid down in law to ensure fair and equal treatment. Once they start going outside those processes to humour a privileged interest group – whether it’s one based on ethnicity or any other characteristic – then they invite public contempt and distrust. It’s not how democracy is supposed to work.

The buzz and bitchiness of local government politics

(First published in The Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, September 18).

I switched on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report one day last week to hear a babble of raised voices all trying to talk across each other. It was the sort of cacophony you might hear when a rat appears in a chookhouse.

I realised instantly that it must have something to do with the local government elections. Sure enough, it turned out to be a debate – a euphemistic term in this instance – between the three main rivals for the mayoralty of Christchurch.

It’s always a febrile time, this period leading up to council elections. There’s a peculiarly bitchy quality to local government: a propensity for petty squabbles and personality clashes that can make national politics look almost mature and sophisticated by comparison. It may be a far smaller stage, but there’s certainly no shortage of ego or ambition.  

What motivates people to stand for office? The answer, you’d like to think, is a desire to enhance community wellbeing and contribute to sound local governance, and no doubt that’s true for many candidates. They’re certainly not in it for glamour, money or prestige.

But with some local politicians, it’s hard to escape the feeling that they become addicted to the buzz of power. There’s a hint of that in Auckland’s mayoral election, where two former Labour cabinet ministers, Phil Goff and John Tamihere, are slugging it out in an ill-tempered contest tinged with personal venom.

Admittedly things could have been worse. Former mayor John Banks, another ex-cabinet minister, threatened to have another run but mercifully changed his mind. There are too many political retreads in local government already.

Should we care what happens in Auckland? Too right we should. For better or for worse, it’s the economic engine room of the whole country, with a GDP that exceeds those of Wellington, Canterbury and Waikato combined. How well it’s managed ultimately affects all of us.

Auckland isn’t the only arena where things have turned heated. In Wellington, filmmaker Sir Peter Jackson has waded into a fractious dispute over a murky development deal involving former Defence Force land and local iwi interests.

Jackson, who seems motivated by a sincere commitment to Wellington, is backing a mayoral challenge by veteran city councillor Andy Foster. It will be interesting to see which side has the greater pull – the earnest but colourless Foster, backed by Jackson’s money, or sitting mayor Justin Lester with the formidable support of the local Labour Party machine.

Meanwhile, in Invercargill, Sir Tim Shadbolt – famous for once saying “I don’t care where as long as I’m mayor” – is chasing his eighth term, and I assume he’ll romp back in. Southlanders love him because he’s given their province something it never used to have: a profile.

Shadbolt cultivates a buffoonish image, but there’s a calculating politician behind the goofy grin. He knows he can get away with self-aggrandising behaviour - such as spending ratepayers’ money on “I met the mayor” wristbands - because he’s trained the voters of Invercargill to expect that sort of stunt from him.

Christchurch illustrates another quirk of local government. Contenders who must realise they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell nonetheless keep putting themselves forward. Their optimism, or perhaps it’s idealistic zeal, is inextinguishable.

John Minto, one of the Christchurch hopefuls, is a case in point. New Zealand voters have an admirable history of rejecting extremists from both the Left and Right of politics, but Minto - a tireless campaigner for radical causes - is undeterred.  Like Mr Wobbly Man in the Noddy stories, he keeps getting knocked down but bounces back up again.

In Christchurch three years ago he won 13,117 votes, or 14 per cent of the total – not an embarrassing result, and certainly a lot better than the 3 per cent he managed when he contested the Auckland mayoralty in 2013. The Left is good at organising, and my guess is that Minto benefited from the highly motivated activist vote. But he was still more than 62,000 shy of Lianne Dalziell’s winning total.

Speaking of Christchurch, mayoral candidate Michael “Tubby” Hansen deserves a special mention. He has contested every election since 1971 and had his best-ever result in 2013, when he attracted 1.57 per cent of the vote.

What makes him stand time after time? That’s a question only he can answer. If Minto represents one type of local government candidate – the committed activist – then Hansen is another: the quixotic oddball. Every city seems to have one.

The depressing thing is that when all the election drama has subsided and the votes have been counted, what difference will it make? In most councils, real power is exercised by bureaucrats over whom elected councillors wield very limited influence and who sometimes treat their nominal bosses with contempt.

This is especially true in Auckland, where so-called council-controlled organisations have turned out to be anything but. The phrase "grassroots democracy" has a nice ring to it, but it has never sounded more hollow.

It now falls to private citizens to defend free speech

(This column was published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz on September 5. I omitted to put it on my blog at the time but I'm correcting that oversight now. The court's decision is still pending.) 

A court case with vital implications for freedom of speech has been played out this week in the High Court at Auckland.

The proceedings were initiated by the Free Speech Coalition, which is challenging the lawfulness of a decision by Regional Facilities Auckland – an arm of Auckland Council – to cancel an appearance last year by the controversial Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux.

RFA, which controls the venue where the Canadians were to speak, says the action was taken for safety and security reasons after it became apparent that protesters might target the event. But the coalition claims the cancellation was an act of political censorship – and that even if there were genuine safety concerns, which it disputes, RFA shouldn’t have bowed to unsubstantiated threats of disruption.

The coalition argues this set a dangerous precedent whereby a mere threat of trouble can be used to shut down events that protesters disapprove of. This tactic, which is sometimes referred to as the “heckler’s veto”, was also used to justify the ludicrous decision by Massey University’s vice-chancellor to bar the former National Party leader Don Brash.

The real reason for the cancellation of the Brash speech was subsequently revealed to be the vice-chancellor’s objection to his opinions. The Free Speech Coalition suspects there was a similar motive for RFA’s decision not to allow Southern and Molyneux to use the Bruce Mason Centre at Takapuna.

An interesting aspect of the Auckland court proceedings, which took place before Justice Pherose Jagose, was the involvement of the Human Rights Commission as an “intervener” – a status sometimes granted to a person or organisation with no direct interest in the proceedings but with expertise that might help the court in its deliberations.

Anyone expecting the commission to deliver a resounding defence of free speech would have been disappointed. Its 38-page submission canvassed legal issues and precedents but left open the question of whether RFA was justified in denying the Canadians a speaking venue. That will be for the judge to decide.

The commission did, however, say the right to free speech is not absolute, and pointed to a Court of Appeal finding that constraints on “hateful and dangerous speech” – which is what Southern and Molyneux were accused of, although we never found out whether the accusation was justified – were “seldom difficult to justify”. I wonder if that’s a clue to the commission’s thinking, and that it believes banning the Canadians was the correct action.

Certainly it seems we shouldn’t expect the commission to champion what has been regarded for centuries as one of the defining rights of a liberal democracy. It now apparently falls to private citizens, in the form of the crowd-funded Free Speech Coalition, to defend freedom of expression.  

Dry legal arguments aside, the Auckland case was interesting for what it revealed about events behind the scenes.

Documents placed before the court show the speed with which the Auckland Left’s lobbying machine moved into gear once serial protester Valerie Morse learned of the proposed speaking engagement and contacted sympathetic Auckland councillor Cathy Casey.

They knew exactly which buttons to push. Within less than 24 hours, RFA had reneged on a signed contract with the event promoters and mayor Phil Goff had got in on the act and announced on Twitter that the Canadians would be barred from all council-owned venues.

Goff placed himself at the centre of events, telling Radio New Zealand that he wasn’t going to “aid and abet racist nonsense”. He apparently wanted to present himself as the man who saved New Zealand from a pair of racist haters, when in fact the cancellation may have been the action of a risk-averse RFA bureaucracy – albeit one emboldened by the knowledge that the mayor didn’t want the event to go ahead.

One telling email exchange revealed close co-ordination between the mayor’s office and RFA, with an obviously impatient functionary in Goff’s office telling RFA at one point: “The mayor is getting itchy twitter fingers”. Hmmm.

The views of Southern and Molyneux, whom Morse hysterically described as fascists, are almost irrelevant here. Their opinions may be offensive to some, but the main purpose of the court action is to uphold the right of peaceful assembly and challenge the right of bureaucrats and politicians to act as censors.

In any case, free speech includes the right to give offence – and unless the Canadians intended to urge their audience to commit unlawful acts, and there’s no evidence that they did, they were entitled to speak.

More to the point, New Zealanders were entitled to hear them and form their own opinions as to whether the Canadians were poisonous.

Disclosure: I have donated to the Free Speech Coalition. 

Why we should be very suspicious of claims about "hate speech"

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, July 25.)

Hate speech. It’s a phrase you hear increasingly often.

I’ve used it myself as a label of journalistic convenience, but I’m not comfortable with it and never have been.

My first concern is that much of what is emotively described as hate speech isn’t hateful at all. Too often it simply means opinions and ideas that some people find distasteful or offensive. But merely being offended is no justification for stifling expressions of opinion in a liberal, open democracy that depends on the contest of ideas. 

More worryingly, accusations of “hate speech” can be used to intimidate people into silence and put discussion of certain issues and ideas off-limits. In fact I believe that’s the over-arching aim.

Anyway, who defines hate speech? The term is bandied around as if there’s some agreed definition. But there’s not, and freedom of expression is too precious to leave it to an aggrieved minority or an academic elite to define it and therefore determine what the rest of us may say.

It’s also an infinitely elastic term. In Britain, where police have the power to prosecute for hate speech, there have been some frightening cases of overkill and heavy-handedness. 

Better to set the legal bar high to allow plenty of space for free speech, as the courts have tended to do in New Zealand. By all means, draw the line at harmful acts, direct threats to people’s safety or incitements to violence against minorities. But the law already allows for criminal prosecution in such cases.

We have far more to fear from people who want to suppress speech than we do from those who say things that others find objectionable. The real issue here is language control – because if you can control the language people are allowed to use in political discourse, you can control the range of ideas people are permitted to articulate and explore.

This is not a traditional contest between left and right. Enlightened leftists understand that everyone benefits from free speech. The revered American left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky memorably said that if you don’t believe in free speech for people whose views you despise, you don’t believe in free speech at all.

No, language is the latest battleground in what is known as the culture wars. The mounting clamour for tougher laws against so-called hate speech is an outgrowth of identity politics, in which minority groups are encouraged to see themselves as oppressed or disadvantaged because of their colour, ethnicity, gender, religious belief or sexual orientation. 

This has generated a demand for protection from comments that might be seen as critical or belittling – hence the frequency with which we hear people being accused of xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and misogyny.

No one likes to have these labels pinned on them, so people keep their heads down. Accusing someone of hate speech has the same effect. It’s a quick way to shut down debate.

Other code words that are commonly used in an attempt to de-legitimise valid opinions include “far-right” and “alt-right”. These labels are likely to be attached to anyone whose opinions are to the right of the political centre. You can even be labelled far-right for making statements that most people would regard as utterly unremarkable – for example, saying there are only two genders, as the Canadian commentator Lauren Southern did.

Southern is one of the two speakers who have controversially been barred from using the Auckland Council-owned Bruce Mason Centre – a ban which is now the subject of a legal challenge by the hastily formed Free Speech Coalition.

I am not a member of the coalition, but I made a donation to it and unreservedly support its goal of protecting free speech. As a journalist, I regard Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s authoritarian edict as dangerous to democracy. 

Over the past two weeks I have read many tortuously argued commentaries purporting to justify the ban on the Canadians. Stripped of all their prolixity, they can generally be summed up as “I absolutely support free speech, but not in this case.”

What especially dismays me is that I have read impassioned commentaries by idealistic young journalists who think Goff was right to ban the Canadians.

Journalists, of all people, should be ardent advocates of free speech because they have the most to fear if it’s abolished. In totalitarian regimes, journalists are often the first people to be imprisoned (as in Turkey) and even risk being murdered (as in Putin’s Russia).

But the most illiberal pronouncement I have read on the supposed dangers of free speech came from a university vice-chancellor who clearly thought that ordinary New Zealanders can’t be trusted to form their own sensible conclusions about contentious issues.

This pompous academic thought we needed guidance to keep us on the right path. And where from? Why, from universities.

We can infer from this that universities see themselves as having taken over the Churches' role as moral arbiters. God help us all.

"I'm all for free speech, but not right now"

The left is performing all sorts of elaborate intellectual contortions to justify the banning of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. Simon Wilson, who naturally leans sharply to the left, has made a sincere attempt in the New Zealand Herald today to write a balanced analysis of the issue, and he nearly pulls it off. But his ideological convictions ultimately come through and sadly it becomes just another apologia of the “I’m all for free speech, but …” variety.

He gives himself away early in the piece with his casual use of the loaded term “white supremacists” to describe Southern and Molyneux and by dismissively referring to the Free Speech Coalition as an “outfit”. I note that Simon apparently doesn’t view the NZ Federation of Islam Associations as just an “outfit”, with all that word’s negative connotations.

He drags a few red herrings across the reader’s path: flaming crosses on the lawn, that sort of stuff. There are ample remedies under existing law for people who directly threaten harm or violence, so I’m not sure whether that type of emotive imagery gets us any further. 

There is also scope under the Human Rights Act for prosecution of anyone who is found to have incited hostility or ill-will against people on the ground of colour or race. But there has only ever been one such case in New Zealand and the courts quite rightly set the bar quite high for successful prosecution, recognising that freedom of expression is a fundamental pillar of democracy. I make an attempt to explore these issues in a piece about hate speech that will appear in next week’s Listener.

Simon also implies that the Canadians will “stir up hatred”. But how can he know that? And how much respect does he have for his fellow New Zealanders if he doesn’t believe (just as Goff obviously doesn’t believe) that we are perfectly capable of resisting attempts to “stir up hatred”, if indeed that’s what Southern and Molyneux intend to do?

Simon quite rightly says free speech is not absolute and that the argument is about where to draw the line. Precisely. I sharply disagree with him about where that line should be drawn, and so do many, many New Zealanders: not white supremacist New Zealanders, nor racist New Zealanders, nor Islamophobic New Zealanders, but New Zealanders who worry that free speech is under concerted attack, and who believe they’re mature enough to hear Southern and Molyneux for themselves and make up their own minds about whether they are hateful white supremacists.

What strikes me, reading Simon’s rather confused piece, is that he’s trying desperately hard to convince himself that the right of free speech can justifiably be suspended in this instance. He says repeatedly that free speech is meaningless if it doesn’t encompass the right to express views that some people find offensive, but then seems to argue that it would probably be best if we didn’t hear Southern and Molyneux because they express views that he and others, um, find offensive.

But to give him credit, he gets it right at the end. After wandering all over the shop, he says: “If they [Southern and Molyneux] do come, maybe they present an opportunity: we can whack these horrible people with some free speech of our own.”

Isn’t that pretty much what free-speech advocates have been saying? The contest of ideas is what democracy is built on. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I can do no better than quote Milton yet again: “Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”  

You can read Simon Wilson’s column here: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/front-page-top-stories/news/article.cfm?c_id=698&objectid=12087997&ref=CE-NZH-DND-AM

The money has been raised and the judicial challenge will proceed

More breaking news from the Free Speech Coalition:

In less than 24 hours, the Free Speech Coalition has reached its $50,000 fundraising goal and will be engaging lawyers to bring judicial proceedings against Auckland Council for its ban on Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux at Council-owned venues.

Chris Trotter, who is supporting the Coalition, says, "Thank you to every New Zealander who has dug deep to support such an important cause."

“We had hoped to raise this money by 5pm Friday. However, within the first day of this campaign we have been completely swamped by people pledging money to the cause – from $5 to $5,000.”

Melissa Derby, another supporter of the Coalition, says, “We look forward to setting a strong legal precedent that shows the use of publicly-owned venue cannot be dictated by the political whims of those in power.”

“For us this is not about helping these particular speakers, but in defending the rights of all New Zealanders to express and hear controversial views.”

All those who believe in free speech owe a debt of gratitude to Jordan Williams and everyone else who worked to get this campaign up and running so quickly - especially Chris Trotter, who courageously went out on a limb and risked a backlash from fellow leftists (some of whom, to their credit, share Chris's principled commitment to freedom of expression).

Incidentally, the coalition is still accepting donations at nz.free.speech.coalition@gmail.com. You can be confident the money will be put to good use.

Where does the Left - and for that matter the National Party - really stand on freedom of speech?

The New Zealand Left has got itself in a terrible moral tangle over the banning of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. It has allowed its concern for supposedly oppressed minority groups, such as Muslims and trans-gender people, to blind it to foundational democratic values. It was the Left’s own hero, Noam Chomsky, who said: “If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise you’re not in favour of free speech.”

I wonder, who in the Left will have the guts to stand up and say New Zealanders are entitled to hear Southern and Molyneux? Will anyone? Where are the genuine liberals, if any, in the Labour Party?  The present deafening silence suggests the Left’s embrace of human rights is highly selective. Freedom of speech, after all, is the most basic right of all, after the right to life.

And while we’re on the subject, where the hell is the National Party on this issue? Simon Bridges was asked about it on TVNZ’s Breakfast show this morning but was half-hearted and equivocal in his answer, saying he would have let the Canadians in but understood why Phil Goff banned them from using Auckland Council venues. No surprises there. I wonder if Judith Collins would have been so spineless.  

A triumph for left-wing bigotry and intolerance

What a dismal, shameful day for New Zealand, for democracy and for freedom of speech.

July 6 was the day when extreme left-wing bigotry and intolerance triumphed over the democratic values this country has previously espoused.

The left professes to champion diversity and inclusion, but it has revealed just how selectively it interprets those words. Tolerance of diversity and inclusion applies only to favoured left-wing causes. Mysteriously, it stops short of tolerating any opinion that challenges left-wing orthodoxy.

Statements purporting to justify the cancellation of the proposed Auckland speaking engagement by the Canadian “alt-right” commentators Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux are breathtaking in their disregard for democratic principles.

I wonder, what did Auckland do to deserve Phil Goff? His creepy predecessor, the adulterous Len Brown, suddenly looks almost likeable by comparison.

Goff, who has passed himself off for years as a genuine liberal, now stands exposed as just another doctrinaire leftist who wants to control the public conversation. His credibility rating has sunk to zero.

His justification for barring Southern and Molyneux from speaking at Auckland Council-owned venues – that he doesn’t want to “stir up religious or ethnic tensions” – is a sanctimonious copout. It’s a capitulation to fringe extremists like Valerie Morse. It sends a signal that all the extreme left has to do in future to deny a platform to people it doesn’t like is to threaten violent disruption.

At times like this we expect our political leaders to stand up for the right to free speech, because it’s a fundamental tenet of liberal democracy. It’s not overstating things to say that Goff has betrayed us all.

As for Morse, I wonder if she suffers from some sort of personality disorder. She certainly seems blind to the contradictions in her own behaviour.

She purports to represent an organisation called Auckland Peace Action, but seven years ago she was identified as one of the Urewera 18 – a pathetic bunch of pretend urban terrorists who allegedly threw Molotov cocktails around and fired semi-automatic weapons at training camps in the bush.

Morse avoided conviction after the Supreme Court ruled that the police had gathered evidence illegally, but according to the evidence she was filmed holding a Molotov cocktail and had a pistol tucked into her trousers. Very peaceable.

More to the point, Morse was arrested for burning a New Zealand flag in a protest gesture at an Anzac Day service in Wellington in 2007. It was an act that outraged many New Zealanders, but her conviction for offensive behaviour was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Much as I despise Morse and her ilk, I believe the Supreme Court got it right. Freedom of expression quite properly allows New Zealanders to engage in acts that other people find deeply objectionable.

The irony is that having benefited from the right to freedom of expression on that occasion, Morse now insists on denying it to others. I don’t think there’s a word in the English language that captures the scale of her hypocrisy.   

Quick, let's take offence

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, September 14.)

ACUTE sensitivity disorder has broken out again. In New Zealand, the Muslim community has taken offence at Building Minister Maurice Williamson’s after-dinner jokes. In Australia, meanwhile, Olympic swimmer Stephanie Rice, a triple gold medallist at Beijing, has had a sponsorship deal cancelled by Jaguar because she made an imprudent comment on Twitter using the word “faggots”.

The question surely should be, in such instances, whether there was serious intent to stir up hatred or ill-will. In neither case is that apparent.

Mr Williamson was just being the class clown, as is his wont. His joke – about Muslims being stoned after committing adultery while New Zealanders committed adultery after getting stoned – was in questionable taste, but that’s all.

As for Rice, her grammatically challenged tweet, “Suck on that faggots”, following the Wallabies’ win over the Springboks, seemed merely puerile and impetuous – the product of an immature mind rather than a calculated slur intended to incite ill-feeling against homosexuals. It doesn’t even make sense. What’s the bet she had been drinking?

The main lesson to be taken from Rice’s misfortune, and that of countless other not-very-bright celebrities before her, is that Twitter, the very name of which implies empty-headedness, is dangerous as well as pointless.

* * *

MY HEART goes out to the parents of the little boy who was killed by a reversing vehicle in a South Auckland driveway last week, but the question has to be asked: when are people going to learn?

Toddlers and driveways are bad combinations. They are even more lethal when the next-door neighbour’s vehicle is a big four-wheel-drive (as in this case) with poor rear visibility. Anyone who drives an SUV has to be almost obsessively cautious when reversing, especially if there are children in the neighbourhood.

What other lessons can be learned from this tragedy? One is that little kids move fast – a point brought home by the sad death of Lucas Ward, who drowned in Gisborne’s Waimata River while his grandmother was momentarily distracted.

In the case of 18-month-old Sirj-Michaels Siaea, of Otara, who was killed under the wheels of the neighbour’s Land Cruiser, his mother was reportedly having a cigarette with her partner nearby when it happened.

The newspaper account said the little boy was too young to understand the dangers of playing in driveways. Of course he was; that’s why children need adults to protect them.

I wonder if the coroner will say anything about this. It might sound heartless, but too many small children die because the adults responsible for them seem to lack any awareness of how quickly an everyday situation can turn to tragedy.

* * *

FOR AS long as most of us can remember, there has been a clear differentiation between TV One and TV2.

TV One was the channel for the more mature (and, dare I say it, discerning) viewer. It was where TVNZ chose to show its serious drama and current affairs programmes. TV2, on the other hand, was pitched at a younger audience and was largely about fun and frivolity.

But without any public pronouncements, or at least none that I’m aware of, the state broadcaster appears to have abandoned this long-standing policy. Look at the programme schedules now, and it’s virtually impossible to detect any difference between the offerings on TV One and TV2. Most nights they are an interchangeable selection of crass pseudo-reality shows and formulaic American crime dramas.

My question is this: when will the government abandon the pretence that the taxpayer has any interest in owning a broadcaster that goes for the lowest common denominator and doesn’t even pay lip service to the public service values that were once its raison d’etre?

The government might as well own a chain of sex shops or fast-food outlets. TVNZ has become an embarrassment and should be knocked off to the highest bidder without delay.

* * *

CHRIS CARTER was right about one thing: as things stand, Phil Goff looks as if he’s merely keeping the seat warm for whoever will be the next Labour Party leader.

Mr Goff is a decent, personable man. He was an effective and respected cabinet minister. But he has never looked convincing as leader. His minimal impact in the role shows there’s a big leap from being a capable team player to running the show.

Part of the problem is that as leader, he is under much closer public scrutiny than ever before. He has not responded well to that scrutiny, often looking awkward and self-conscious. His media trainers appear to have advised him to be warm and sympathetic, but often the result is that he looks wishy-washy and ineffectual.

My advice would be to stop trying so hard and be himself. Otherwise he risks becoming the embodiment of the Peter Principle, which holds that employees in an organisation rise to their level of incompetence – in other words, they keep advancing through the hierarchy until eventually they find themselves in a job that’s beyond them.

That guy on Q+A

It’s not easy finding positive things to say about TVNZ, but I think political editor Guyon Espiner has earned a big tick.

Espiner is steadily growing into his role as an interviewer on the Sunday morning political programme Q+A. He kicked off the year on an impressive note yesterday with an interrogation of Labour leader Phil Goff that was searching and incisive but never hectoring – not always an easy balance to strike.

As an interviewer, Espiner prepares well, is quick on his feet and has a pleasant manner. He has a slight tendency to interrupt too often, but there’s a fine line between giving interview subjects a fair suck of the sav and letting them control the show (as any politician will do, given half a chance). And he doesn’t shrink from the tough questions, to wit: “Are you a failure as leader?” – a question Goff answered with the same imperturbable smile he displayed throughout the interview. (He has inherited Helen Clark’s practice of grinning even when he’s being serious, which I find slightly unnerving.)

In his pieces to camera on One News, Espiner resists the temptation to grandstand and generally respects the boundary between analysis and editorialising – a skill his blustering counterpart at TV3, Duncan Garner, has yet to master (assuming Garner wants to, which may not be the case). And Espiner passes the most important test of any political journalist, which is that he leaves us guessing as to what his own political views (if any) are.

Best line from yesterday’s Q+A: “You don’t create wealth by taxing people” (Mike Moore). This should be tattooed on left-wing politicians’ foreheads.

Funniest line from yesterday’s Q+A: Asked by Paul Holmes whether he liked being in bed with the Nats, Hone Harawira paused for a moment before answering: “I wake up a lot.” He might have an anger problem, but he’s got a sense of humour too.

There's nothing wrong with Te Papa that a large bomb won't fix

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, January 5.)

ASSUMING the government ever gets around to announcing an appointment, I have some advice for whoever succeeds the late Seddon Bennington as chief executive of Te Papa.

Blow the place up and start again.

The problem with Te Papa is not simply that the architects missed an opportunity to make a dramatic statement – something to rival the Sydney Opera House – on its prime waterfront site. You could excuse that failure if the building worked internally, but it doesn’t.

It’s a haphazard, chaotic jumble, so poorly signposted and lacking in cohesion that every time I leave the building, I have an unsettling feeling that there must be things I have missed.

As if to confirm this, I read last year that Te Papa had decided to close its library because only 5 percent of visitors bothered going there. I’m hardly surprised. Despite having been to Te Papa many times, I didn’t realise there was a library.

As for the art gallery, I heard the artist Grahame Sydney comment recently that you needed to be a bloodhound to find it.

Admittedly it must be challenging for museum designers to create a coherent, sequential flow that guides the visitor past most of the important exhibits, but some manage it.

Te Papa misses by a country mile. There’s no sense of order or logic in the way things have been arranged.

Moreover, Te Papa makes things worse by trying too hard to be clever with the use of gimmicky signage and captions full of laboured puns that get in the way of clarity. Bizarrely, many captions and explanatory signs are hidden in semi-darkness where they are almost impossible to read.

Interesting exhibits are easily missed. On a recent visit I noticed for the first time, high on the wall in the entry foyer, a massive iron anchor left behind in a Northland harbour by the French explorer de Surville. Despite its size it’s easy to overlook because the attention of people coming and going through the doors is focused elsewhere.

When you do spot it, and wonder what story lies behind it, you have to search to find a tiny, obscure plaque explaining the anchor’s significance.

A good museum leads visitors on a voyage of discovery. Te Papa leaves them to stumble about and hope that with time and luck, they’ll find their way all around the interesting bits. Not good enough.

* * *

THE cumbersomely titled Capital Markets Development Task Force, which delivered its recommendations to the government last month, wants faith in the sharemarket restored so that more people are encouraged to invest in productive enterprises rather than ploughing their savings into property.

It’s a worthy goal, but you can hardly blame people for being cynical about the way the market treats small investors.

Take my own case. I wanted to invest in a New Zealand company that produced something useful, drew on New Zealand technological expertise and was export-focused, because ultimately that’s what New Zealand depends on for growth. I also looked for a company that had solid names behind it – not flash Harrys, but people with a proven track record. I didn’t want big dividends and was happy to park my money long term.

I bought shares in Provenco, which ticked all the necessary boxes. The presence on the share register of names like Peter Maire, Sir Stephen Tindall and Todd family interests was reassuring.

Alas, the rest is history. Provenco merged with a company called Cadmus – they were both in the business of providing eftpos equipment – and eventually it all came crashing down.

Well, them’s the breaks. Every investment has a risk attached.

What irks me, though, is that in the five months since ProvencoCadmus went into receivership, I haven’t heard a word from the company or the receivers. Not a word. It seems that in such situations, there’s no obligation on anyone to advise shareholders of the fate of their investment.

This is surely a simple matter of courtesy, if not of law. If the ProvencoCadmus experience is typical of the contempt with which small investors are treated, it’s scarcely surprising that people don’t trust the markets.

* * *

I SINCERELY hope Labour leader Phil Goff has a better year than he did in 2009, when he was barely more than a spectator. But I wonder whether his party has learned anything from the last election.

Labour recently distributed a glossy pamphlet in which Mr Goff talks about his grandmother being widowed with three kids and struggling to make ends meet, then goes on: “My story is like that of a lot of New Zealanders. I raised a family. I spent seven seasons in freezing works. I joined Labour because it stands alongside New Zealanders’ values.”

Freezing works? Widowed mothers? This is pure “old” Labour. It will resonate with those who remember Mickey Savage, Walter Nash and Norm Kirk: voters who will go to their graves voting Labour anyway, out of sheer habit. But it completely fails to connect with the vital voters of Generations X and Y whom Labour must capture, and for whom nostalgic evocations of the party's proud working-class history must seem quaint and irrelevant.

One of the lessons of the last election was that there has been a generational changing of the guard. If Labour still hasn’t grasped that, it’s stuffed.