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)

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.

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. 

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.   

Let's hear the Canadians for ourselves and decide then whether it's dangerous

It is often the first instinct of the far left, when confronted with ideas or opinions they don’t approve of, to try to shut them down.

There was a tiny but telling example of this in a letter to the Dominion Post a few days ago from a reader who didn’t like my column outlining the advance of neo-Marxism. He said it was “disappointing” (note the morally superior tone and phony sanctimony) to see such opinions being given oxygen by a “credible New Zealand paper”.

In other words, he didn’t like what I said, so I should have been censored. Well, suck it up, buster. It’s called free speech.

But a far more serious and alarming threat to freedom of expression has emerged today with attempts to bar two so-called “far right” speakers from entering New Zealand next month.

There’s the first problem, right there. Both the New Zealand Herald and Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report used that term “far right” to describe the Canadians Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who are planning to follow a tour of Australia with a single engagement in Auckland.

I hadn’t consciously heard of Southern before today and was only vaguely aware of Molyneux, but experience has taught me to be very sceptical when the media refer to anyone as “far right”. It’s a subjective judgment that has no place in a news story, which we rightly expect to be unbiased (in contrast with this blog, which is clearly an expression of opinion).

Decoded, “far right” can mean anyone to the right of the political centre. To be consistent, the Herald should have described the activist Valerie Morse, who wants the Canadians kept out of New Zealand, as “far left”. But of course it didn’t, and thus it gave her an aura of political legitimacy that it denied to the Canadians.

In any case, whether or not Southern and Molyneux are “far right” – however that’s defined – is neither here nor there. We live in a liberal democracy that depends on free speech and the free exchange of ideas and opinions. Let’s hear for ourselves what the Canadians have to say and decide then whether it’s dangerous.

When it comes to free speech, I’m an absolutist. The only exceptions should be blatant incitements to cause harm. The moment we give in to the clamour from left-wing bigots seeking to stifle ideas they disapprove of, or for that matter anyone trying to stifle ideas they disapprove of (although it’s invariably the left that pushes for political censorship and suppression), we’re stuffed. Book-burning won’t be far behind.

It will surprise no one that the push to have Southern and Molyneux barred from New Zealand comes from Auckland Peace Action, whose spokeswoman, the serial protester Morse, claims the Canadians are coming to New Zealand to “empower local racists and to encourage racist violence”.

It’s perhaps more surprising that the New Zealand Federation of Islamic Organisations is backing the call for a ban. This is not what New Zealand Muslims should be doing if they want to persuade us that they reject the totalitarian theology of  many of their co-religionists elsewhere.  

So just what makes the two Canadians so poisonous? According to Radio New Zealand, they have “far-right, alternative” views on feminism, gender, Islam and mass immigration.

As one example of their extreme, “alternative” positions, RNZ cited Southern’s statement that there are “only two genders”. It’s an indication of how totally the so-called progressives  have seized control of the public conversation that Southern could be held up as a pariah for expressing an opinion that’s shared by many New Zealanders – possibly even a majority – and which only a few years ago would have been considered utterly unremarkable.

Judging by an audio clip played by RNZ, Southern has also inflamed leftists and feminists by calling out the exquisite hypocrisy of their position on Islam, a religion they’re so eager to empathise with that they conveniently turn a blind eye to its repression of women.

We're told that Southern was barred from speaking in Britain, as if that’s all the justification the New Zealand government needs to turn her away. In fact she’s only one of several speakers to have been detained or turned back at British airports on the spurious pretext that their presence was “not conducive to the public good” or was “likely to incite tensions”, which really meant that they made the timid authorities feel a bit queasy.

But this shouldn’t be a case of “where Britain goes, we go”, to use Michael Joseph Savage’s famous line. Far from giving New Zealand a lead, all the British bans demonstrate is that the country from which we inherited our democratic traditions has betrayed its honourable record as a defender of free speech. We can’t allow the same thing to happen here.

Back to Val Morse. The Herald quotes her as saying: “They [Southern and Molyneux] come to recruit people to their fascist ideology. It is imperative that this type of racism is given no room to be promoted and encouraged in Aotearoa. If they come here, we will confront them on the streets. If they come, we will blockade entry to their speaking venue.”

Well, there you have it. Even if the government allows the Canadians in – and I’ll be the first to take to the streets if they’re barred – the bigots of the left will do their best to ensure no one can hear them. I ask you: who are the real fascists here?

Shouting people down is something the far left has a lot of practice at. They do it all the time in the US, Britain and even Australia. You can hear it on one of the audio clips played on today’s Morning Report, in which shrieking protesters try to prevent Southern being heard.

In the US, ironically, the Berkeley campus of the University of California, which was the birthplace of the radical student free-speech movement in the 1960s, is now synonymous with the practice of no-platforming – the very antithesis of free speech. Just as ironically, some of the speakers recently turned back at British airports had been engaged to deliver addresses at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, where traditionally all comers have been allowed.

Let’s assume for a moment, as a purely hypothetical exercise, that Morse’s shrill hyperbole is even remotely accurate, and that Southern and Molyneux would come here with the aim of inflaming local racists. I could only say good luck with that, because New Zealand is by world standards a remarkably tolerant and moderate society, and stolidly resistant to inflammation by extremists of any stripe.

Perhaps even more importantly, it’s a robust democracy that is perfectly capable of being exposed to rancid opinions without being swayed. I always come back to that wonderful line from Milton’s Areopagitica: “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

Here, in a way, is the essence of the issue. It all comes down to trust and control. Leftist fanatics like Morse don’t trust people to make their own sensible judgments, so they want to control what we hear and read. If we value free speech and representative democracy, we can't let them.

Footnote: I was saddened to hear Massey University professor Paul Spoonley say on Morning Report that he wasn’t opposed to the Canadians being denied entry. I respect Spoonley and have never doubted him when he described himself as a supporter of free speech. On Morning Report today, however, he added the dreaded “but …”. Spoonley said he didn’t see free speech being advanced by views that he described as “hateful and extreme”.

I have two problems with that. The first is the assumption that the opinions expressed by Southern and Molyneux are hateful and extreme. That depends entirely on the ideological prism you happen to be looking through. But more importantly, I believe that the moment we start putting qualifications around freedom of speech, we’re in trouble. Big time.