It's not booze that's the problem - it's us

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, June 1.)

It has become accepted wisdom that New Zealand has a serious drinking problem. But do we? And if we do, what’s the reason?

Let’s start by tackling that first question. In 2014 the World Health Organisation published a table showing per capita alcohol consumption in 190 countries.

New Zealand was ranked 31^st . At first glance, that seems a bit of a worry. It suggests we’re among the world’s heaviest boozers.

But that ranking needs to be put into perspective. In many of those 190 countries, especially those in Asia and Africa, alcohol has never been a big part of the local culture. Consumption is accordingly modest.

Many Asians have a good biological reason to avoid liquor. It’s estimated that 36 per cent of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans lack the vital enzymes (technically known as acetaldehyde dehydrogenases) that enable their bodies to metabolise alcohol.

For these unfortunate souls, drinking can induce nausea, trigger a rash and cause the heart to race – all good reasons for abstaining.

Now, factor in the many countries where drinking is discouraged and even prohibited for religious reasons. That includes the entire Islamic world.

Take all that into account, and the list of countries that New Zealand can meaningfully be compared with becomes a lot shorter.

A better way of assessing where we stand in terms of alcohol consumption is to look at countries that are broadly similar to us culturally and ethnically. Here we emerge in a more favourable light.

According to the WHO figures, New Zealanders drink 10.9 litres of pure alcohol per year. That’s less than the French and Australians (12.2), the Irish (11.9), the Germans (11.8), the British (11.6) and the Danes (11.4).

So what conclusion what can we draw from our WHO ranking? A common reaction might be one of surprise.

We have been so bombarded by anti-liquor propaganda – some of it verging on hysterical – that many people are convinced we really are in the grip of a ruinous binge-drinking culture.

Relax. We’re not.  In fact official figures show that alcohol consumption in New Zealand is in gradual decline – another fact at odds with the constant barrage of anti-liquor rhetoric.

Does this mean we don’t have a drinking problem after all? Well, no.

The vast majority of New Zealanders who enjoy alcohol do so responsibly and in moderation. They drink without causing harm to themselves or others.

Panic over binge drinking is generated by a small but highly visible minority of mainly young drinkers who haven’t learned to control their consumption.

These are the drunks the TV cameras love to show fighting, falling over and vomiting in the gutter in Wellington’s Courtenay Place or Auckland’s Fort St in the early hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings.

They are a problem, but they are not typical of New Zealand drinkers. Just ask yourself: when did you last witness a brawl in a café where people were drinking, at a family gathering or even in the local pub?

Now, let’s return to the second question I posed at the start of this column. If we do have a drinking problem – and we do, though it’s a very limited one – then what causes it?

The finger-waggers in the universities and the public health bureaucracy will say it’s the demon drink. That’s the justification for their determined campaign to reduce alcohol availability – in other words, to limit the free exercise of choice by other New Zealanders.

But if alcohol is the problem, how is it that most of us are able to enjoy it without turning violent or causing mayhem on the road? If alcohol has us in its grip, how come we’re able to drink in moderation and know when to stop?

An answer was provided in a report written last year by British anthropologist Anne Fox, who has made a career out of studying drinking cultures.

Fox was commissioned by the liquor conglomerate Lion to study drinking behaviour in New Zealand and Australia. Predictably her credibility was questioned because of where her funding came from, but no one has seriously challenged her main finding – which was, in a nutshell, that it’s not alcohol that’s the problem: it’s us.

For whatever reason, a culture has developed in Australia and New Zealand in which alcohol is used as a convenient excuse for behaving badly and failing to exercise self-control. 

But bad behaviour is not an inevitable consequence of drinking, and it doesn’t happen elsewhere in the world.

In a recent column in the Listener, Berlin-based New Zealand journalist Cathrin Schaer marvelled that alcohol is freely available everywhere in Germany and drinking is considered a pleasurable part of everyday life.

German laws, she wrote, tend to emphasise individual responsibility. Behave badly and you’ll be busted, but otherwise you’re free to drink where and when you like.

Getting drunk, Schaer added, is considered uncool. “It’s as though an unwritten social code says if we treat you like an adult, you’d better act like one.”

In New Zealand, the reverse is true. Drinkers are expected to behave badly because it’s not their fault – it’s the booze. This view empowers the control freaks who want to change us by making alcohol harder to get.

But if the Germans can drink responsibly (and the French, and the Spanish, and the Dutch), then why can’t we? For the answer to that question we have to stop blaming alcohol and take a hard, critical look at ourselves.

Who is Rachel Stewart and why is she saying these awful things about me?

Someone drew my attention a couple of days ago to a comment posted on Twitter by a newspaper columnist named Rachel Stewart.

I hadn’t consciously heard of Stewart but she knew about me. She tweeted: “I read Karl du Fresne in the Dom and, quite apart from the fact that I agree with him on nothing, I think to myself they could have me.”

The first thing that struck me about this desperate cry for attention was her stupendously inflated self-regard. A quick look at Stewart’s Twitter account reinforces the impression that she has an ego the size of Mt Taranaki.

I imagine it’s even more rampant now, since she advertises the fact that she was voted the top opinion writer in the recent Canon Media Awards. I, on the other hand, have never won any sort of award. I don’t enter awards because they don’t generally count for a hell of a lot, other than to the people who win them.

The judges who matter, ultimately, are the people who read the paper. And it’s just possible that one reason why I get published is that there’s an audience for the opinions I express. This may not have occurred to Stewart. Perhaps she’s so accustomed to bathing in the admiration of her Twitter followers – people for whom the 140-character limit is a blessing because it saves them from having to develop any coherent arguments – that she’s been deluded into assuming that everyone thinks just like her.

Well, they don’t. The angry left-wing wasps who swarm on Twitter are far less representative of mainstream opinion than I am. I suppose that’s why they’re so bitter. They’re frustrated, and they give vent to their frustration through infantile personal attacks on anyone whose opinions they dislike. Just ask Mike Hosking, who weathers a barrage of venomous abuse every day.

Same old, same old, you might say. But Stewart amps it up a notch when she suggests I should be sacked and replaced by her, presumably because she believes the public would be better served by reading her opinions. This is a novel position for a newspaper columnist to take. It suggests a very low tolerance of free speech, which ultimately is what all columnists – Stewart included – depend on.

Am I over-reacting? Probably. “Rise above it,” a wise friend said. But the Irish in me (du Fresne being a proud old Hibernian name) makes it hard for me to ignore a taunt. Besides, you get to a point where you feel the urge to strike back at the buzzing wasps.

Here’s something for Stewart to consider. I don’t object to her having a platform for her views and I expect the same in return. Indeed I don’t object to any left-wing commentator having a platform. I often read them and sometimes even nod in agreement. I have never believed that any “ism” has all the right answers.

I would go further and suggest Stewart should force herself to read my stuff, even if she has to hold her nose while she does it. Having to confront the unpalatable fact that other people have different opinions can only be good for her – that is, unless she really doesn’t like the idea of a pluralistic democracy, in which case things are worse than I thought.

And here’s something else for her to consider. There might actually be issues on which we agree – the environmental damage done by industrial-scale dairying, for starters. As far as I know, I was writing about this long before Stewart launched the public crusade against the dairy industry that made provincial headlines this week.

Trouble is, some people – and Stewart may well be one of them – are locked into a binary view of the world that requires people to be categorised as either bad or good, with no grey area in between.

I’ve noticed that one strange consequence of this mindset is that when I write something that lefties might be expected to agree with – an expression of support for trade unions, for example, or a condemnation of the historical treatment of Maori, or the aforementioned dirty dairying – they magically don’t see it. A mysterious fog comes over their eyes. It doesn’t register with them because it doesn’t fit the binary world view that people must be either totally right or totally wrong.

Put another way, they’re more comfortable seeing me as an unreconstructed right-wing dinosaur who couldn’t possibly have anything of value to say about anything. Nothing can be allowed to disturb settled assumptions.

It’s all a bit tiresome and infantile, but the consoling factor is that criticism of me by Stewart and the type of people who follow her on Twitter is arguably the highest form of flattery. If I wasn’t getting under their skin, they’d ignore me.

The parlous state of our Defence Force

(First published in The Spectator Australia, May 14.)

In the same week that Australia announced it was spending $50 billion on a fleet of new submarines, the New Zealand army admitted it couldn’t muster enough soldiers to fire the traditional rifle salute at an Anzac Day service in the country’s third-largest city, Christchurch. Two weeks before that, it was revealed that two modern patrol ships from the New Zealand navy’s modest fleet hadn’t been to sea for years because of crew shortages.

It’s hard to imagine a more vivid demonstration of the parlous state of New Zealand’s military forces, or of the growing defence capability gap between New Zealand and Australia. But was anyone embarrassed by these disclosures? Not that you’d notice.

In complacent New Zealand, defence ranks so low in the order of political priorities that it’s virtually off the radar. Endangered native parrots get more attention. Politicians take their cue from opinion polls which show that while New Zealanders support their Defence Force, they don’t want to spend any more money on it.

Two generations of Kiwis have grown up with the notion that the military exists mainly to contribute to feel-good operations such as international peacekeeping and relief efforts. Defence policy seems predicated on the hope that in the event of a major conflict, New Zealand will escape the attention of the combatants. Failing that, Australia and the United States will ensure its protection.

The principal function of the navy and air force is to patrol New Zealand’s massive exclusive economic zone, the fourth largest in the world. The air force tries to accomplish this using 1960s-era Orion aircraft - planes that predate the Holden Kingswood and which have been miraculously kept flying as a result of endless engine and electronics upgrades. The RNZAF’s Hercules transport planes are of a similar vintage.

No one pretends New Zealand is capable of mounting a credible defence effort if the country came under attack. In 2001, Helen Clark’s Labour government decided to mothball the air force’s only combat aircraft, a squadron of ageing Skyhawks.

Clark famously justified that decision by pronouncing that we lived in “an incredibly benign strategic environment”. Only months later jihadists destroyed the Twin Towers, and suddenly the world looked very different. But Labour doggedly stuck to its defence-lite credo, cancelling a deal under which New Zealand would have cheaply acquired 28 F-16s to replace the Skyhawks.

By common consent, the strategic environment now is highly unstable –not just in the familiar flash points of the Middle East, but in New Zealand’s own area of strategic interest. North Korea is ruled by a belligerent madman and an ascendant China is flexing its military muscles with provocative displays of military power in the oil-rich South China Sea, where any conflict would threaten vital trade routes.

If that happened, defence commentators say, New Zealand would be under pressure to help keep sea lanes open. But with just two frigates (one of which has been in port since the end of 2014, undergoing an upgrade), it would struggle to make even a token contribution to a multinational task force.

Even when the navy sticks to its core role of protecting the country’s fisheries, there are doubts about its effectiveness. In January last year, in what seemed a striking demonstration of the navy’s impotence, HMNZS Wellington proved powerless to stop three Equatorial Guinea-flagged ships caught poaching valuable Antarctic toothfish.

All this must cause Australians to wonder whether New Zealand is pulling its weight in the defence partnership. Admittedly the two countries have different strategic priorities, partly due to Australia’s size and closer proximity to Asia.

New Zealand stayed out of the Iraq War, for example, while Australia assumed the role of America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.

New Zealand remains excluded from the Anzus Treaty as a result of its anti-nuclear stance, which was initiated by Labour and continued by the centre-right National Party. But as commentators point out, the relationship with Australia remains a cornerstone of New Zealand defence policy – and the widening capability gap between the two countries has been noted.

In a scathing speech at a symposium in Wellington last year, Kiwi defence analyst Chris Salt – an amateur, but a well-informed one – said New Zealand’s defence plan hinged on buying enough time to run to Australia and America for help. He described it as a policy “devoid of honour and integrity”.

So what happened to the notion that defence of national sovereignty is a core role of government? The answer, in New Zealand at least, is that it has been the victim of a profound generational change.

Until the 1970s, the country was led by politicians with painful memories of the Second World War. The defence portfolio was invariably assigned to a senior cabinet minister and the Returned Services Association was arguably the country’s most powerful lobby group.  RSA members had personally experienced the consequences of being thrust into war ill-prepared and warned constantly about the danger of running down New Zealand’s defence capability. The baby-boomer generation mocked them as crusty old warmongers.

As the old soldiers died and memories of the war grew dimmer, defence slipped down the priority list. The election in 1984 of a Labour government led by pacifists and idealists who had cut their political teeth in the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s and 70s, and who remained gripped by a mindset that regarded any sort of offensive military capacity as bad, was a turning point.

But it’s hardly fair to pin all the blame on Labour. The National Party, which has governed for much of the post-Anzus era, shows no greater commitment to defence than its left-leaning opponents.  

And while New Zealand defence personnel continue to serve with distinction on the ground (they’re helping train Iraqi troops right now), their political and bureaucratic masters in Wellington often give the impression of being incompetent and dysfunctional, with a long record of catastrophically ill-advised equipment purchases, bitter inter-service rivalry and disruptive shifts in policy with every change of government.  

Given the sustained neglect of defence in New Zealand, it’s a strange paradox that attendance at Anzac Day services has never been greater. The inescapable conclusion is that New Zealanders in the 21^st century are more comfortable commemorating past wars than dwelling on the possibility of future ones.

Footnote: Please excuse the annoying changes in the typeface. I have no idea what causes this and have given up trying to fixing it. 

An opinion column with moving pictures

I forced myself to watch the Bryan Bruce documentary about New Zealand education on TV3 last night. Past experience told me not to expect an even-handed assessment of the issues, but the optimist in me hoped that Bruce might offer some insights into where our education system has gone wrong. Faint chance.

If there’s a word that describes Bruce’s broadcasting style, it’s tendentious – in other words, calculated to promote a particular cause.

Viewers might have learned something worthwhile had he approached his subject with an open mind, but no. He clearly started out with a fixed goal in mind. Bruce doesn’t like choice, doesn’t like competition and doesn’t like individualism. He despises Treasury and the disruptive neo-liberal reforms it has championed since the 1980s.

And he might have some valid points. Trouble is, he destroys his credibility by the way he cherry-picks information and opinions that support his own. He flies around the world (at our expense, incidentally – the doco was funded by New Zealand On Air) interviewing academics whose views he approves of, and then presents those views as if they’re incontrovertible.

In this respect he reminds me a bit of the American documentary maker Michael Moore, who’s similarly selective in the way he marshals and edits his evidence. The difference is that Moore’s sardonic wit, in contrast to Bruce’s earnest lecturing, is at least entertaining.

It doesn’t seem to matter to Bruce, or perhaps hasn’t even occurred to him, that his approach sometimes produces glaring contradictions. Hence he admiringly cites the Chinese education system for producing results that put Chinese pupils at the top of the OECD achievement rankings while New Zealand kids are falling behind. Then, later in the programme, he condemns test-based regimes and “authoritarian” systems. But hang on; the Chinese education system is both highly test-focused (as Bruce acknowledges) and about as authoritarian as it gets. He can’t have it both ways.

I noticed too that while he professes to deplore authoritarianism and “social control”, he included footage of pupils at Manurewa Intermediate – a school he obviously admires – chanting in compliant unison before a messiah-like principal. It reminded me of a Destiny Church service.  

Perhaps Bruce is so obsessively focused on proving New Zealand kids are the victims of a heartless neoliberal experiment that he’s prepared to disregard such inconsistencies in the hope that viewers won’t spot them.

Even setting aside the polemics, the documentary was seriously flawed as a piece of filmmaking; a string of unconnected ideas with little attempt to join up the dots. I’d mark it as a “fail”.

I find his style irritating and tiresome too. The meaningful downward glances, the hand gestures and the solemn lecture-theatre tone (Bruce is a former teacher, and it shows) are clearly intended to convey a sense of moral authority, but it’s a style that hovers on the edge of priggishness.

I’m perfectly prepared to believe there are a lot of things wrong with New Zealand education, and that some may indeed be the result of what Bruce calls neoliberalism. I’d quite like to see a robust, critical examination of the system by someone prepared to approach the subject without predetermined conclusions. But Bruce is not that person, and his much-hyped documentary was really just an opinion column with moving pictures and sound.

Catholicism's calcified celibacy dogma

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, May 18.)

On a recent Monday morning I sat at the press desk in the Wellington District Court and watched as a former Catholic priest was sentenced to six years and seven months in prison for historical sex offences.

Peter Joseph Hercock left the priesthood in the 1980s. He is 72 now, and married with a son. But in the 1970s he was a chaplain and counsellor at Sacred Heart Girls’ College in Lower Hutt.

The four women who pursued complaints against him were then pupils in their early teens. They were grappling with personal problems or came from troubled home environments – sometimes both.

They went to Hercock thinking he would help them. Instead he groomed them for his sexual gratification. He raped and indecently assaulted them in his bedroom in the Catholic presbytery and at a Kapiti Coast bach used by nuns.

One victim, then aged 14, vividly recalled a “wretched” Leonard Cohen record playing in the background as she was raped. Another was given two glasses of whisky and carried to bed.

Much as we have become accustomed to sordid stories of sexual abuse by priests, the women’s victim impact statements were painful to sit through.

All four told of long-lasting psychological and emotional damage. One had a breakdown, another tried to kill herself.

The betrayal of trust was breathtaking. One victim said her father worked two jobs to send her to Sacred Heart. His belief in the value of a Catholic education was rewarded by the rape of his virgin daughter.

She was later expelled for drinking and drug-taking. When her mother died, she didn’t attend the funeral. She was scared she would see Hercock there.

Another complainant said the girls had been taught that men couldn’t be trusted because of their lust and it was up to women not to tempt them. At the time, she blamed herself for corrupting Hercock.

As a priest, Hercock was supposedly dedicated to the care of his flock. In betraying those vulnerable girls he destroyed their faith. It’s impossible to overstate the breach of trust.

One victim said that her sense of cultural identity came from being part of a small Catholic community. Having been brought up Catholic myself, I knew what she meant.

Catholics of that era, living in a predominantly Protestant society, defined themselves by their faith. To have it betrayed by a priest would have been shattering.

Listening to the victim impact statements, I felt myself getting angry, but not so much with Hercock – he was finally getting his due punishment, after all – as with the Church that allowed this to happen.

Hercock entered the Catholic seminary at the age of 17 and was in his 20s when most of the offending took place. Few men at 17 have a clear idea of what they want to do for the rest of their life; fewer still have the emotional maturity to commit to a life of celibacy. Yet that’s what the Church expects them to do.

It is an expectation that priests often fail to live up to. The need for human intimacy isn’t easily suppressed, and when it is, it can lead to twisted outcomes.

Some priests end up having illicit but consenting relationships with women; a few even father children. Others, like Hercock, become predators.

You might call this Catholicism’s dirty little secret, except it’s not; it’s a dirty big secret. The shocking pain and guilt caused by the vow of celibacy is hidden behind a wall of silence and hypocrisy.

Before anyone accuses me of being anti-Catholic, a declaration: I’m not one of those bitter and resentful ex-Catholics. I value my Catholic upbringing; it’s a big part of who I am.

Moreover, I know far too many genuinely good and holy Catholics, priests included, to dismiss the Church out of hand.

Catholicism’s problem is that it remains in the grip of calcified, twisted dogma which is stubbornly defended by a male hierarchy that has a disturbingly ambivalent attitude toward women.

A good friend of mine who attended a Catholic girls’ boarding school says the nuns warned the girls about young priests. That confirms the Church knew some priests couldn’t be trusted to honour their vow of celibacy.

It almost makes the nuns complicit in what went on, yet I don’t entirely blame them. They were caught up in a warped system that required them to defer to male authority. In a sense, they were victims too.

An editorial on the Hercock case in the latest issue of the Listener says the Church should have been in the dock with him. That’s not an overstatement.

Despite its many apologies and payments of compensation (often given grudgingly) to victims of sexual abuse, the church still refuses to confront the harm caused by the cruel and unnatural rule of celibacy.

Other institutions change and move on when evidence of the damage done by their doctrines becomes too overwhelming to ignore. Why can’t the Catholic Church?

Case studies in self-absorption and overkill

(First published in The Dominion Post, May 13.)

Is the world going mad, or is it just me?

On second thoughts, don’t answer that. But please consider, just for a moment, some of the issues that have been making headlines over the past couple of weeks.

First, Hilary Barry. The announcement of her resignation from MediaWorks was reported as if Earth had momentarily tilted on its axis.

Here I was thinking Barry was just a newsreader – a competent newsreader, admittedly (although her pronunciation and personal asides sometimes grate), but just a newsreader, nonetheless – someone who reads words written by other people.

Obviously I completely misunderstood her place in the life of the nation. If the media coverage of her resignation is any guide, she’s a totemic figure whose career moves are a matter of urgent and compelling public interest.

No doubt media people would justify the fuss over Barry’s resignation by saying it was the tipping point that led to the departure of the unloved MediaWorks boss Mark Weldon. But they didn’t know that then.

Even if they did, it was an example of media people being too absorbed in their own affairs, and assuming that the ordinary punter in the street shares their fascination. My advice would be to get over themselves.

In television especially, detached judgment in journalism is old-hat. The rule now is that if journalists are interested in it, it must be news.

Hence the deaths of David Bowie and Prince also dominated news bulletins. On TV3, Bowie’s demise in January took up the entire first segment of the 6pm news.

This can’t be justified by any objective measurement of public interest or importance. The reason the two singers’ deaths got saturation coverage, quite simply, is that the journalists who make decisions about what’s important are of the generation that idolises Bowie and Prince, and they insisted that everyone should share their grief and desolation.

Bowie was a unique talent, to be sure, but he hardly justified the emotional incontinence triggered by his passing. As for Prince, hmmm.

Now, the Panama Papers. After all the frenzied media coverage of the past couple of weeks, I have to ask: where’s the smoking gun, exactly?

Reporters eagerly burrowed through truckloads of leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca and came up with … nothing much at all.

The conspiracy theorists struck out here. The only damning disclosure related to John Key’s lawyer, who used his relationship with the prime minister as leverage to secure a meeting with Revenue Minister Todd McLay – a worrying blurring of the lines of propriety, but that's par for the course from a government that sometimes gives the impression of having had an integrity bypass.  

And oh, the schadenfreude. While media outlets that had been granted advance access to the latest Panama Papers leak struggled to find anything newsworthy in it, those denied that privilege (if that's the right word) took delight in pooh-poohing the whole affair as a non-event.

Hence TV3 political journalist Lloyd Burr triumphantly announced that no bomb had gone off. In other circumstances Burr, if he’s like most political journalists, would have been keen to find the bomb and detonate it himself. It was hard to escape the conclusion that he was more concerned with scoring a point against TVNZ, which was one of the media organisations that had the inside running on the release.

As for the general public, I imagine a lot of people would have switched off the moment they learned Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager was a key player in the leak. People are justifiably sceptical about those who describe themselves as journalists but pursue a political agenda.

There was a breathless post on the Radio New Zealand website about the thrill of collaborating with Hager in sifting through the supposedly incriminating documents, but RNZ and TVNZ severely compromised their credibility by aligning themselves with a man whose ideological crusades are a matter of public record. What on earth were they thinking?

For the third placing in this column’s trifecta of weirdness we must turn to the police, who have bullied two Canterbury secondary schools into cancelling after-ball parties under the threat of a $20,000 fine.

One of those parties has been run by the Ashburton Community Alcohol and Drug Service for 17 years, apparently without problems. Now the police have told the organisers they’re breaking the law.

It’s a sad commentary on law enforcement priorities that while 111 calls from victims of crime routinely go unheeded because police are supposedly too busy, they always seem to find the time and resources to crack down on soft targets.

Burglary clearance rates are a scandalous 10 per cent, brazen young thugs virtually rule the streets of South Auckland and hapless motorists are subjected to extortion by criminal windscreen washers, but don’t worry: you can rest easy in the knowledge that the police are fearlessly cracking down on the organisers of harmless after-ball parties, heavying law-abiding citizens with oppressive alcohol checkpoints at all hours of the day and supplying the media with a seemingly endless procession of officers eager to lecture us on our bad habits.

A Wicked abuse of free speech

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 4.)

A good friend recently asked what I made of the fuss over Wicked campervans and their suggestive slogans.

He believes strongly in freedom of speech and knows that I do too. He thought the crackdown on the Australian-owned company looked disturbingly like a witch hunt.

Besides, he thought some of the slogans painted on Wicked’s vans were amusing. We need more irreverent humour, he argued.

I’m with him some of the way. But not far.

Where freedom of speech involves the right to express political opinions or to push literary and artistic boundaries, there is a legal presumption in its favour. It’s enshrined in our Bill of Rights Act.

But free speech has never been an absolute right. The American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, for example, that it didn’t entitle someone to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

Limitations on free speech vary across different societies and at different times, according to what the community finds acceptable. There will often be powerful countervailing arguments, and the challenge lies in getting the balance right.

By and large, I would suggest we have it about right in New Zealand. We are certainly an infinitely more liberal society than we were 40 or 50 years ago.

The great censorship battles of the 1960s and 70s are far behind us. That was the era when the prosecutor in the famous Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial in Britain asked jurors whether D H Lawrence’s sexually explicit novel was one they would be happy for their wives or servants to read. His question was ridiculed as symptomatic of outdated paternalistic attitudes.

New Zealand had its own bizarre censorship controversies – none stranger than the film censor’s ruling in 1967 that a film adaptation of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses had to be screened separately to male and female audiences.

These days it probably comes as a surprise to many people to learn that we still have a censor – which brings us back to Wicked.

A couple of weeks ago, chief censor Andrew Jack ruled that the slogans and images on three Wicked campervans were objectionable and banned those vehicles from New Zealand roads.

It’s unlikely to be the end of the matter. Further complaints may result in other vans from the company’s fleet being ordered off the road – in which case, good riddance.

The banned vehicles were decorated with eye-catching images showing well-known cartoon figures – Snow White, Scooby-Doo and Dr Seuss – appearing to use drugs.

Other Wicked vans display sexually suggestive slogans. One was turned away from Piha Domain Camp near Auckland because it was decorated with the words “Blow job better than no job”. Camping grounds at Kaiteriteri and Queenstown have also told Wicked van renters that they’re not welcome.

The censor’s decision was unusual for more reasons than one. For a start, it’s probably the first time a vehicle has been judged to be an objectionable publication.

The ruling was also notable because it’s relatively rare these days for the censor to use such a blunt instrument as a ban. But having found that the slogans and images were offensive, Jack had few options.

Wicked posed an unusual challenge because while people make a choice to watch a pornographic movie or read a sexually explicit book, Wicked campervans are in people’s faces whether they want to see them or not. An R16 restriction is hardly effective when the vehicles use public roads and are visible to everyone.

But the censor's job was made easier in the case of the allusions to drug use, because the images could be construed as encouraging criminal behaviour. Ruling on sexually suggestive slogans will be trickier because it calls for judgment on matters of taste.

A recurring concern is that curious children, seeing Wicked vans, are likely to ask their parents what the slogans mean. Even the most liberal parent would probably struggle to explain “If God was a woman, sperm would taste like chocolate” to an inquisitive eight-year-old. But fellatio, unlike drug use, is not a crime - so the issue becomes one of defining what's injurious to the public good or highly offensive to the public in general, to quote the relevant legislation.

I not only believe the censor got it right in the case of the drug-related imagery, but that he would be justified in ruling against Wicked's use of sexually explicit signage on the basis that it's highly offensive to most people (my friend excepted).

Freedom of speech is one of the defining characteristics of a liberal democracy, but this crass and arrogant Australian outfit (I say "arrogant" because it didn't even bother to defend itself when complaints were made against it to the Advertising Standards Authority) is unlikely to go down in history as a heroic standard-bearer for human rights.

If anything, the company debases free speech by nakedly taking advantage of it purely to be provocative and to attract attention for commercial gain. In this respect it’s strikingly similar to the Hell pizza chain.

Wicked’s lawyers were unable to advance any compelling defence of political or artistic freedom. Instead, they tried lamely to justify Wicked’s slogans and images as humorous parodies.

Admittedly humour is subjective, but Wicked’s misogynistic brand of wit is hardly worth dying on the barricades for. It’s a smart-arse, advertising-agency type of humour that appeals chiefly to sniggering schoolboys.

In fact one of the striking things about the Wicked controversy is that the company’s supposed humour has managed to offend almost everyone, liberals as well as conservatives.  

My one reservation is that it was the police who took the complaint against Wicked to the censor and who will have the responsibility of enforcing his ruling. There’s a potentially dangerous blurring of roles here.

The job of the police is to enforce criminal law, and I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling uneasy about the prospect of them exercising power over matters of judgment and morality. No doubt they would argue that their intervention in this instance was justified on the basis that the campervans appeared to condone criminal activity, but I hope their involvement ends there. We get enough finger-wagging lectures from them already.