The Listener's ringing defence of free speech

The latest Listener has an outstanding editorial on freedom of speech and the need to oppose those who clamour to shut it down. It will be all the more effective because it's published by a magazine with a generally left-leaning readership that may feel uncertain or conflicted over what position to take in the speech wars. The editorial should leave readers in no doubt.

https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/currently-social-issues/free-speech-world-is-on-dangerous-path-to-stifling

Never mind democracy - off with his head!

Meng Foon, the recently appointed race relations commissioner, thinks newly elected Tauranga city councillor Andrew Hollis should resign because he said on Facebook that the Treaty of Waitangi was “a joke” and “past its use-by date”. The new mayor of Tauranga, Tenby Powell, agrees.

Never mind that more than 7500 people voted for Hollis, making him the second most popular candidate for the four “at large” council seats. Never mind that many of the people who voted for him quite possibly share his view – rightly or wrongly – about the Treaty.

This is the way it is in New Zealand in 2019. The option of first resort, if you disagree with something someone in public office has said, is to demand that they resign, and to hell with the democratic process that got them elected or the voters who supported them. Dissent is dealt with not by debating the issue, but by trying to silence the dissenter. 

This is not the way things are supposed to be done in a supposedly liberal democracy, but it’s increasingly the norm in 21^st century New Zealand.

Hollis obviously stands in the way of Powell’s wish for a “united” council. Well, tough; that’s democracy. It’s often messy and peopled by contrary characters, just as it should be if it’s to reflect the real world.

Tauranga’s new mayor rose to the rank of colonel in the New Zealand army, and there’s a hint of military thinking in his apparent desire for order around the council table. But councillors are elected to speak their minds, not to meekly fall into line with what the mayor wants. New Zealand is a democracy, and democracy is supposed to provide a forum for all views. It is not selective.

Besides, forcing Hollis to stand down – or disqualify himself from any discussion relating to Maori issues, which is Powell’s alternative demand – doesn’t  magically get rid of his opinions. On the contrary, heavy-handed attempts to stifle dissent serve to foster anger and resentment, and are likely to reinforce the widely held opinion that New Zealand has been captured by authoritarian orthodoxy and groupthink.

The really disappointing response to Hollis’s heresy, however, is not Powell’s, but Meng Foon’s. Powell is just a provincial mayor seeking to assert himself at the start of his first term, but Foon occupies a position of power and influence in central government and, unlike Powell, doesn’t depend on votes to stay there.

Like many people, I welcomed Foon’s appointment as race relations commissioner. He had seemed an admirable mayor of Gisborne and promised to bring a grounded, common-sense approach to a job where ideology, rooted in identify politics, had previously held sway. We are now forced to conclude, regrettably, that it’s still business as usual at the Human Rights Commission.

The furore over Andrew Hollis is only a symptom of a much bigger problem, which is that freedom of speech is under concerted attack.

Whenever a public figure or institution loudly proclaims his, her or its commitment to free speech, you sense there’s a “but” coming. It seems we’re allowed to enjoy free speech, except on certain issues deemed to be offensive to fragile sensibilities.

Take Massey University, for example. Announcing last week that it had chickened out of hosting the Feminism 2020 conference, Massey made ritual noises about being committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech as “values that lie at the very heart of the tradition of a university and academic inquiry”. But its supposed commitment wasn’t strong enough to save the feminist event after it was targeted by a noisy group of precious transgender activists threatening disruption.

Massey’s excuse for capitulating to the protesters was that cancellation was the only way to avoid breaching its health, safety and wellbeing obligations. It was another victory for the enemies of free speech – and an early demonstration of the danger inherent in the recent High Court ruling which held that an Auckland Council-owned company was within its rights in cancelling a speaking engagement at the Bruce Mason Centre following an unsubstantiated threat of protest action (but with strong evidence of political influence on the part of Auckland's mayor).

There’s a strange and chilling irony here. Feminists were once at the cutting edge of radical politics, but now, because of their insistence that a person with a penis cannot be a woman, find themselves supplanted by a more radical ideology that wants to silence them.

Interestingly, this isn’t a classic left-vs-right debate. Some of the most vigorous defences of free speech have come from hard-core leftists such as Chris Trotter and Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury.  The threat to freedom of expression comes from the so-called snowflake generation, which loudly champions diversity but contradictorily has no tolerance of diverse opinions. Sadly, they are encouraged by academics and some politicians – and now by Meng Foon and Tenby Powell.

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.

Captain Cook and the consequences of colonisation

(A slightly shorter version of this column was published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz, October 16.)

Gisborne is one of my favourite places. It has a distinctive character formed partly by its isolation – it’s a long drive to get there, through wild country that leaves you in no doubt that you’re off the beaten track – but also because 45 per cent of its population are tangata whenua, considerably more than any other New Zealand city. 

An old friend, a Pakeha who has lived up that way for a long time, once said to me that when you get north of Wairoa, you’re in “their” country – meaning it’s a part of New Zealand where the Maori presence and influence is all-pervasive.

That’s part of Gisborne’s appeal. No city beats it for sheer New Zealandness.

My wife and I were last there last year.  We strolled on Wainui Beach in the bright winter sunshine, had lunch with the aforementioned friend at the Tatapouri Sports Fishing Club (a Gisborne institution), enjoyed a tasting at the excellent GisVin winery, and marvelled at what must surely be one of the most impressive supermarkets in the country (hint: It’s a big yellow one).

Oh, and we drove to the top of the Kaiti Hill, which brings me to the point of this column.

The view over Poverty Bay from the top of Kaiti Hill, or Titirangi as the tangata whenua call it, is magnificent. But Kaiti Hill was, until recently, the site of a controversial statue – now relocated to Tairawhiti Museum – of Captain James Cook.

I read the plaque on that statue last year, and although I don’t recall exactly what it said, I remember recoiling at what would now be regarded as a very Eurocentric view of our history. It may not have credited Cook with discovering New Zealand, in so many words, but that was the implication.

Since then, of course, the 250^th anniversary of Cook’s first landing at Poverty Bay has served as the catalyst for a reassessment of our history and Cook’s place in it. And it’s probably fair to say that we’ve emerged from the ensuing debate with a more nuanced and balanced understanding of our past than was the case in 1969, when the statue was erected.

As a thoughtful Stuff editorial observed, Cook’s landing was an event that had to happen. In an age of imperial expansion, New Zealand was bound to be (re)discovered.

The editorial wisely went on to say that the benefits and the harms that resulted can't be separated from each other, and that we should resist demonising or sanctifying either party in that historic encounter.

In other words, colonisation produced good and bad consequences, and both Pakeha and Maori should be honest in acknowledging all of them.

Cook has been described as a white supremacist. Well, of course he was. He was a man of his time - a product of his society and culture. To judge him according to 21^st century sensibilities is pointless.

In any case, who could have blamed him for thinking European society was superior to the one he encountered in Poverty Bay? Compared with many indigenous societies, Maori culture was relatively advanced. But to a man brought up amid the trappings of Western civilisation – great cities, science, literature, music, cathedrals, universities – it would have seemed primitive.

That didn’t stop Cook from recognising the admirable aspects of Maori culture. In a strictly literal sense he may have been a supremacist, but he was also, by most accounts, a humane man who treated Maori respectfully.

And while much is made of the fact that nine Maori died in that first encounter, we shouldn’t forget that pre-European Maori knew all about conquest. They lived by it.

Neither should we delude ourselves about the culture Cook encountered. Heretaunga Pat Baker’s 1975 novel Behind the Tattooed Face, which was based on the author’s knowledge of his own tribe’s oral history, depicted a society in which savage tribal warfare was the norm, along with slavery and cannibalism.  

In the very first chapter, a slave is buried alive with a massive corner post for a palisade – a post that took 20 men to lift – implanted on top of him.

And that’s just the start. Naked, bound bodies are thrown alive onto red-hot hangi stones. The blade of a taiaha is thrust into a captured warrior’s chest and his still-beating heart is plucked out and ritually cooked on a fire.

Women and children are bound and thrown to the ground before being impaled alive on spears thrust through their bodies at the navel. A chief is beheaded and his tongue is skewered with a sharp stick.

Much of this is done amid triumphant hakas, chanting and sadistic joking.

It’s fashionable to talk of the lasting damage done to Maori by colonisation; Justice Minister Andrew Little did so in a breast-beating speech at the United Nations last January. But Baker’s book was a reminder that life could be merciless and precarious for pre-European Maori.

Colonisation brought benefits that included education, medicine, a written language and, above all, the rule of law and democratic government. But we must acknowledge that it also had serious negative impacts on Maori in the form of introduced disease, alienation of land, cultural decline and the gradual but irrevocable loss of control over a land where Maori once exercised exclusive domain.

Some of that is now being addressed, but it’s not hard to sympathise with claims that it’s often too little, too late.

On the positive side, each culture has absorbed some of the best qualities of the other, resulting in a society that has evolved into something unique and internationally admired.

Maori and Pakeha are inextricably intertwined. There is a bit of Pakeha in virtually all Maori, even if the activists prefer to disregard that inconvenient part of their heritage, and a bit of Maori in most white New Zealanders, even those with no Maori lineage.

You can’t grow up here and not absorb at least some Maori culture. It’s one of those things that sets us apart, and it should be celebrated.

Jim Flynn: a hero of free speech

Further to my recent post (October 9) on academic freedom of speech, Stuff's Your Weekend has an excellent piece by Yvonne van Dongen on Professor Jim Flynn's refusal to kowtow to leftist authoritarianism:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/116443386/the-complicated-issue-of-hate

News flash! Academics defend freedom of speech

This was by far the most important thing in my Dominion Post – in fact anywhere in the New Zealand media – this morning:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/116407248/refusal-to-publish-nz-academics-book-is-a-worrying-blow-for-free-speech

It’s a resounding defence of free speech, and the heartening thing is that it comes from university academics.

Less heartening is the fact that the six signatories to this article are a courageous minority. Their championing of Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn stands in stark contrast to the chillingly censorious open letter signed last week by Auckland University academic staff demanding that the university silence an attention-seeking fringe group accused of promoting "white supremacy" - a phrase which appears to encompass everything from Nazism to simple pride in the values and achievements of Western civilisation.

Ask yourself: who presents the greater threat – an anonymous group (for all we know, it might just be one person) putting up stickers around the Auckland campus, or the pompous high priests of academia and their herd-like acolytes who seek to outlaw any opinions they hold to be “unsafe”? George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about suppression of free speech, would have been proud to have coined that particular term.

It's now obvious even to blind Freddy that academic freedom and the contest of ideas, two of the key values underpinning liberal democracy, are under sustained and determined attack. Ask yourself: who are the bigots here? Who seeks to impose a new style of totalitarianism? Who's calling for the enforcement of rules prohibiting secular heresy? Ironically, it’s not the supposed white supremacists. They’re not trying to silence anyone.

Another irony is that Flynn, the eminent Otago University professor who now finds himself at the centre of a censorship controversy, has impeccable leftist credentials. Sadly that wasn’t enough to protect him from leftist totalitarianism that has taken hold to the extent that Flynn's British publisher got cold feet over his latest book, which promotes – irony of ironies – free speech on university campuses.

Meanwhile, the Free Speech Coalition is calling for donations so that it can appeal against a High Court decision last week which effectively gives risk-averse municipal functionaries and their political masters carte blanche to deny the use of public venues to any speaker whose views might cause political offence or trigger protests. It’s a frightening decision which must not be allowed to stand. You can donate here: https://www.freespeechcoalition.nz/donate?utm_campaign=fsc_funding_for_appeal&utm_medium=email&utm_source=freespeech

In praise of the Remutaka Hill

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, October 3.)

There’s a man named Graeme Farr who’s standing for the mayoralty of all three Wairarapa councils. He’s using his candidacy primarily to promote a road tunnel under the Remutaka Hill.

I can’t see a tunnel happening, because the economics don’t stack up. But I have a sneaking suspicion my wife voted for Farr, contravening my strict instructions. She’s Polish, and genetically programmed to disregard orders.

No doubt there are others living in the Wairarapa who, like her, don’t much care for that steep, winding road over the hill, and many more who believe that a tunnel would unlock (to use a vogueish word) the region’s untapped potential.

But as for me, I want a Remutaka road tunnel about as much as I want a third nostril.

I like the hill. I like the sense of geographical separation from Wellington and the Hutt Valley. When I go to Wellington, it’s always a pleasure to get into the car at the end of the day and point it in the direction of home.

I especially relish the drive back over the hill, which has the almost mystical sensation of passing into a different realm. There’s a point about halfway down the northern side where the Wairarapa valley suddenly comes into glorious view.

It’s always bathed in golden sunshine, no matter how foul the weather on the Wellington side. (Okay, perhaps not always, in fact very rarely at nighttime, but often enough to make me feel smug.)

John Hayes, a former Wairarapa MP, once tried to whip up public interest in a tunnel and approached me for support in the tragic misapprehension that, as a columnist, I might wield some influence.

I politely told him to bugger off. I didn’t want the Wairarapa being invaded by the masses then, and I still don’t. No offence to my friends in Wellington, but I love the fact that there’s a big, formidable barrier to deter interlopers.

I’ve seen what happened to the Kapiti Coast when it morphed from being a pleasant and sleepy seaside retreat to a choked, claustrophobic extension of suburbia.

We lived at Raumati Beach in the 1980s and I knew the rot was setting in when the council insisted on laying a footpath along our street, which had previously had the charming feel of a country lane. We sold up just before they built a housing subdivision in the paddock where our kids used to play.

Since then I’ve watched Kapiti’s infrastructure vainly struggling to catch up with its burgeoning population. It can only get worse when Transmission Gully kicks in.

There’s a lot of growth here in the Wairarapa too, but there's room for it, and it’s manageable.

New subdivisions are going up all over the place and the traffic has intensified to the point where, in what passes for rush hour, you can get stuck at a roundabout for … oh, maybe 20 seconds.

But the Wairarapa still has the distinction of having no traffic lights. How long would that remain the case with traffic pouring through a tunnel?

We can tolerate weekend visitors, with their convoys of motorbikes and classic cars streaming across the hill in search of wide blue skies, open roads, rural pubs and charming rustic scenery, just as long as they head back home at the end of the day.  

We’re okay too with those refined, affluent types from Wadestown and Kelburn who buy weekend retreats in Greytown and then decide it’s so nice that they can do without their house in Wellington. That’s the sort of place Greytown is.  But who knows what impact a tunnel might have on the town where I live?

One of Masterton’s charms is that it’s still a traditional farming town. I like the fact that when you drive into town, you run a gauntlet of agriculture machinery dealers.

I love hearing topdressing planes flying out at first light from Hood aerodrome and returning home at dusk, and I like the tractors and stock trucks that constantly rumble past our place.

I like the friendly and obliging shopkeepers and tradies, and I like the fact that when I ring a plumber he’s pulling up outside before I hang up the phone. (Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration too.)

I don’t want any of this put at risk by intensified urbanisation and more people, which would be the inevitable result of a tunnel. So my message to Graeme Farr is the same as it was to John Hayes.

On the other hand, if Farr promised to lobby for a high-speed bypass around Carterton, which is surely the world's most boring town to drive through (though only by a slim margin over Dannevirke), he might get my vote in 2022. A flyover would be better still.