Why the woke Left is so rattled by Camp Freedom

[A technical glitch occurred with the original version of this post and I had to take it down. This version is the same except that it no longer contains links to the source material I refer to, which were the cause of the problem. Unfortunately, in taking down the post, I couldn't avoid deleting some thoughtful comments.  I apologise to those who posted those  comments and invite them to re-submit them.]

It’s been fascinating over the past couple of weeks to observe the intellectual contortions of people who forcefully uphold the right to protest, just as long as those ghastly lowlifes on the other side don’t do it.

Veteran old-school leftist Don Franks deftly skewered the hypocrites in a poem published on this blog, but it hasn’t deterred them from continuing to recoil in disgust at the sight of the “rabble” (a word suddenly much favoured by the illiberal Left, as opposed to those like Franks who believe in free speech) on the lawns outside Parliament.

There’s an unmistakeable note of panic in the posturing of the woke Left. They suddenly realise they no longer control the public debate and are wildly lashing out at the scruffy mob that usurped their right to make a nuisance of themselves.  How dare they!

Over the past few days we’ve seen a stream of desperate attempts to argue that the Freedom Convoy has no legitimacy; that the only "proper" protests are those endorsed by the leftist elite. By definition, no other protest can have any validity, least of all one mounted by a loose coalition of mostly working-class, provincial people driving utes and house trucks.

Camp Freedom is something new and threatening. In the eyes of its critics, it can only be explained by seeing it as an imported phenomenon – an ideological virus, smuggled in by the global far-Right, to which stupid and gullible New Zealanders have allowed themselves to be exposed.

The level of condescension and intellectual snobbery on display from people who think of themselves as liberal has been breathtaking. The tone has alternated between sneering at this supposedly feral underclass and alarm at their sudden, forceful presence on the national stage – a stage the wokeists are accustomed to hogging for themselves.

Mandy Hager – president of the Society of Authors, sister of Nicky and a fully paid-up member of the leftist cabal that normally dominates the public conversation – revealed the Left’s anxiety, hypocrisy and intellectual confusion in an opinion piece for Stuff last weekend.

As the author of a book entitled Protest! Shaping Aotearoa, Hager evidently regards herself as an authority – perhaps the authority – on New Zealand protest movements. But it was clear from her article that her definition of protest is a narrow and self-serving one which excludes any group that could be classified as conservative or right-wing.

She applauded historic protests in support of homosexual law reform, women’s suffrage, MMP and New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance. Their end goals, she wrote, were “designed to strengthen our existing political frameworks, social cohesion and civil rights”. They were based on the values of the “greater good”.

Peaceful resistance and civil disobedience is fine in Hager’s eyes if it’s against the 1981 Springbok Tour or climate change, but she isn’t at all happy with what’s happening in Molesworth St. That’s different.

“For a start, there are many factions, and no one concrete outcome articulated” … “a disparate group awash with grievances, much of it stoked by insidious overseas interference” … “dubious scientific backing only from the fringes”.  In other words the Molesworth St protesters aren’t playing by the usual rules. And who sets the rules? Apparently, people like Hager.

She concludes: “This protest works against the overall needs and values of a healthy, cohesive, inclusive society.” Apparently that’s not allowed. And who decides what a healthy, cohesive, inclusive society looks like? Why, people like Hager, that’s who. As I said in a letter to The Dominion Post: “[Hager’s] article confirms the impression that the Left claims the right to protest exclusively for itself and its own favoured causes.” 

(Bizarrely, Hager also dived down a blind alley with the assertion: “Of course we’ve also seen the ugly side of protest here, a pick and mix of racist, anti-Maori/migrant/LGBTQIA+/Muslim/Jew/Asian/women and other prejudices given air.” Really? Apart from thankfully very rare offensive gestures against Jewry, which are presumably the work of a tiny, attention-seeking lunatic fringe, I can’t recall protests against any of these groups and suspect they are figments of Hager’s febrile imagination. Or perhaps she includes late-night talkback calls from angry old men in her definition of “protest”.)

On Tuesday morning it was the turn of someone named Byron C Clark, supposedly a “disinformation and conspiracy researcher” on Morning Report. The theme was that stupid people had allowed themselves to be indoctrinated. Ergo the protesters have been misled and their grievances should be disregarded.  

Obligingly fed a series of soft, leading questions by the Usual Suspect, aka Susie Ferguson, Clark sounded the alarm about the Freedom Campers being radicalised by sinister alien forces and global disinformation networks. Oddly enough, we never hear experts on Morning Report expressing alarm about people being radicalised by the extreme Left, although it’s been happening for decades and has succeeded in transforming New Zealand into a country that some of us barely recognise.

Similarly, we should conclude that ideological manipulation is a problem only if it’s practised on an ignorant lumpenproletariat, but not when it happens to gullible middle-class students in university lecture theatres, where it flourishes unchallenged.

Clark talked of nefarious far-right conspiracies and distrust of the government (you're kidding me) and media (no, surely not). It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that if New Zealanders have been driven into the arms of dodgy alternative news sources such as Counterspin, it might be because they have learned not to trust the mainstream media. (As it happens, I don't either.) 

Asked by Ferguson who might be bankrolling the protest, Clark mentioned the name of Steve Bannon. Donald Trump was also mentioned. You can see the irony here: a man who professes to investigate conspiracy theories was indulging in them himself.

Prior to this, I’d never heard of Clark, who described himself as an amateur, freelance conspiracy researcher. Despite his flimsy credentials, the interview was allowed to run for nearly 8 minutes – slightly more time than the woman who runs the country got on the same morning. Say no more.

The ubiquitous Morgan Godfery, whose column mugshot suggests an overweening self-regard, also chimed in again yesterday and made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the protesters, ridiculing them while at the same time acknowledging that “constructing an ‘us versus them’ situation isolates the protesters further, plunging them deeper into their personal paranoias and collective conspiracies”. So he recognises the danger of marginalising the protesters but goes ahead and does it anyway.

What we can infer from this barrage of anti-Camp Freedom propaganda is that the woke Left is terrified of losing the initiative in the culture wars. It’s desperate to reclaim its sole right to lecture the rest of us and wants to do so without the distraction of an unruly mob that has the effrontery to adopt the Left’s own tactics.

The irony here is that having spent most of their lives kicking against the establishment, the wokeists are the establishment. They have won the big ideological wars and are on the same side as all the institutions of power and influence: the government, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, the arts  and even the craven business sector.

The dissenters, disrupters and challengers of the status quo – in other words the people protesting outside Parliament – are the new radicals. This requires the moralisers of the left to recalibrate their political thinking, and I get the impression it’s more than some of them can cope with.

Footnote: For the record, I neither wholeheartedly support nor oppose the Molesworth St protesters. This may sound like a copout, but it’s hard to take a position because their causes are too disparate and there are too many rogue elements among them. What gets my back up is people who have long claimed the right to protest for themselves seeking to deny it to others for no better reason than that they don’t like what they’re saying.

Jim Hartley, journalist

Dear me. It was never my intention - still less my wish - that this blog become a Roll of Honour, but that’s the way it seems just now. I learned last night of the death of Jim Hartley, a greatly respected former journalist who became a journalism tutor at what was then Wellington Polytechnic (since absorbed by Massey University).

Jim will no doubt be fondly remembered by the hundreds of journalists who were taught by him, but I recall him from his time as a reporter at The Dominion in the early 1970s. He came to the Dom from the New Zealand Press Association, where he had recently covered the inquiry into the sinking of the Wahine with his NZPA colleague Max Lambert. The two collaborated on a book that became the definitive account of the tragedy.

As a young and clueless reporter in the Dom newsroom, I benefited enormously by being sandwiched between two great role models. Jim sat on one side of me and farming reporter Judith Addinell, who would become the New Zealand Herald’s Wellington bureau chief and the first female chair of the Press Gallery, was on the other. (Judith, sadly, died in 1995.)

Dublin-born, Jim was gentlemanly, good-natured and softly spoken, with a quiet sense of humour. But no one should have made the mistake of thinking he was a pushover.

At the Dom he took over what was called the civic round, which meant reporting the affairs of the Wellington City Council. This was journalistic territory traditionally dominated by the Evening Post, but in his relatively short time in the job, Jim made it his own.

He was an investigative reporter before we became familiar with the term, putting the heat on the council in a manner to which it was not accustomed. He never did it in an aggressive, gung-ho way, but pushed and prodded patiently, politely and methodically. Accountability was another word rarely if ever heard in those days, but Jim believed it was the function of journalists to obtain and disclose information that those in power would have preferred to keep to themselves.

It was a loss to journalism when he went to the Polytech. He spent the rest of his career there.

In fact it was at the Polytech in the early 1980s that I last saw him. I was working for The Listener when Jim invited me to run a course for his students one afternoon a week on feature writing, in the mistaken belief that I could pass on some helpful advice.

At the end of the course Jim and his fellow tutors (one was Gill Shadbolt, former wife of the novelist Maurice Shadbolt; I can’t recall the third) were eager to find out which of their pupils had most impressed me. Jim was astonished when I told him it was a gawky young rooster named Steve Braunias. Braunias couldn’t write a formulaic news story to save himself, and accordingly Jim and his fellow tutors had written him off as a no-hoper.

Jim, who had lived in Greytown since retiring, died in Wellington Hospital on Tuesday, aged 81. He had apparently suffered a fall the previous week. His wife and a son pre-deceased him but he is survived by three daughters.

The unstoppable Brian Lambert

I was saddened this morning by the news that Brian Lambert, cyclist extraordinaire, had died in Masterton Hospital.

Brian was one of the most remarkable men I ever knew. He died, aged 70, still holding the record for the quickest bike ride ever between Auckland and Wellington: 19 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds. He had extraordinary willpower as well as stamina and in his later years refused to allow Parkinson’s Disease to keep him off his bike, despite repeated falls.

I first met Brian when I bought our son a mountain bike from his Masterton shop in the early 1990s. After moving to the town I got to know him better and went on several group mountain-bike rides that Brian organised. He was first and foremost a road cyclist, but that didn’t stop him enjoying a challenging off-road excursion.

On one such trip organised by Brian in 2014, a group of us rode the Heaphy Track. His illness was already well advanced – he’d been diagnosed 12 years earlier – and he crashed repeatedly, finishing the two-day ride covered from head to toe in bruises and abrasions. “Take me out and shoot me,” he said after one gruelling day’s ride. But he bounced back and within a day seemed fully recovered. He was a man of indomitable spirit.


Brian Lambert (with bloodied knee) on the Heaphy Track, 2014.

I bought several bikes from Brian over the years, including an Avanti Competitor mountain bike that was the best bike I ever owned and possibly even the best purchase I ever made.

I'm still reminded of him almost every time I ride the Specialized road bike he sold me - not so much because of the bike itself, but because of the leather Italian seat he later persuaded me to buy. It was expensive, but insurance money paid for it after the previous seat was munted in a pile-up during a race in the Whangaehu Valley.

Brian reckoned it was the best seat available and naturally I believed him. It's still on my bike, but I've always found it a bit uncomfortable and it took me a while to figure out why he recommended it. It's an unusually wide seat that would have suited Brian perfectly because (how can I put this delicately?) Brian's bum was a lot more ample than mine. I guess I'll have to keep it now as a memento, despite the discomfort.

I wrote about Brian in the following story for The Dominion Post, published in 2011 and headlined The Unstoppable Brian Lambert. He will be mourned by Masterton’s large cycling community.

In 1984 Brian Lambert rode a bike from Auckland to Wellington. In 19 hours, 59 minutes and 27 seconds. It’s a record that still stands.

It would have been slightly quicker if his bike hadn’t slipped on a greasy railway line that crosses Aotea Quay just one kilometre from his goal, throwing Lambert off. And it would have been quicker still if his support team hadn’t unthinkingly consumed all the food they’d bought at Taumarunui, leaving Lambert with only fluids to get him from Wanganui to Wellington.

They hadn’t bargained on all the shops being closed when they rolled through Wanganui at 5am, he explains, and after that his stomach was no longer in a state to digest solids.

It was an epic ride for which Lambert prepared by going on 290 km solo training rides. Starting from his home town of Masterton late at night, he would complete a loop that took him north to Woodville, through the Manawatu Gorge, south to the Kapiti Coast – where he would stop at a mate’s place for breakfast – and back home via the Akatarawas and the Rimutakas.

For variety he would sometimes do the route in the other direction. When the former Olympic Games cyclist Neil Lyster, in a car, came across a bicycle light piercing the darkness near the lonely summit of the Akatarawa road in the middle of the night, Lambert jokes, “he didn’t have to guess who it was”.

On the wall of Lambert’s bike shop there’s a photo commemorating his Auckland-Wellington ride. It’s the sort of achievement that has made the Masterton man, now 56, something of a legend in cycling circles.

It’s years since he rode competitively – a 1989 Nelson-Christchurch race, which he won in just over 14 hours, was one of his last triumphs – but he continues to cycle recreationally, both on the road and on mountain bikes.

For the past 10 years he has taken part in the stamina-sapping 106km Rainbow Rage mountain bike race from St Arnaud to Hanmer Springs, and every year he rides the 42 Traverse – a 46km route through wild bush country in the Central North Island.

Twice in the past three years he has travelled to France with a group of fellow enthusiasts to ride part of the Tour de France route. On the toughest climbs in the French Alps, he still leaves some of his companions in his wake.

Okay, you might say; he’s just another very fit 56-year-old. But what makes this all a bit unusual is that in 1999, Lambert was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s Disease – a chronic degenerative disorder, caused by a deficiency of the hormone dopamine, that typically causes stiffness, slowness and tremors.

He first noticed something odd when his left leg began twitching during a training ride up the steep Limeworks Hill, east of Masterton. At first he attributed this to an accident on his mountain bike on the Wairarapa coast the previous week, when he hit a sheep and dislocated his shoulder. But when the problem persisted, he visited a specialist. The diagnosis was immediate.

He realised then, with hindsight, that the symptoms had been evident much earlier. In 1990, he had won two veterans’ titles at the national road cycling championships. The following year, he couldn’t even complete one lap of the same event. He noticed that his training rides didn’t seem to be making him any fitter or faster, that he was tiring more easily and taking longer to recover after each ride.

For several years now Lambert has been under the care of Wellington neurologist Stuart Mossman, an authority on Parkinson’s. Happily, Mossman is also a keen cyclist. It was he who invited Lambert to join a cycling trip in France in 2005, confident that the Masterton man was up to it and knowing they had a support van in case of emergency.

Lambert relates that on last year’s 1500km Tour de France ride from Paris to Marseilles, again with a group that included Mossman, he beat half his companions up the 2600m Galibier Pass, finishing the 18 km climb with a sprint.

And he’s still going. On Wellington’s Anniversary Day last month, he was part of a group that completed a punishing six-hour mountain bike ride in withering heat in steep Wairarapa hill country.

Another member of that group, Martinborough winemaker Clive Paton, describes Lambert as an inspiration. Paton knows only too well how debilitating Parkinson’s Disease can be – he watched his father suffer from it for 15 years – and marvels at Lambert’s ability to “ride over the top of it and carry on”.

Like many accomplished sportspeople, the unstoppable Lambert is not entirely helpful when you ask what drives him. He simply says it’s a great feeling to be fit and active. “You might feel scungy at the start of a ride, but you always feel better at the end.”

Mossman describes him as a hero. He confirms that Lambert rode up the Galibier pass like a steam train, leaving two cycling companions “wobbling all over the place” in his wake.

It’s the nature of Parkinson’s that sufferers have good days and bad days, says Mossman, but on good days Lambert is able to out-perform most healthy people his own age. He says there is some evidence that physical exercise is beneficial to people with Parkinson’s, though it has not been well studied.

Personality and attitude can also be important in how people react to the illness, Mossman says, although ultimately “you can’t fight the chemistry of dopamine deficiency”.

Lambert is quietly proud of his achievements, but he’s no boaster. A naturally reticent man with a quiet, wry wit, he speaks slowly and quietly – more so since his illness developed. On the frequent group rides he organises, he’s content to be just one of the bunch.

He says he started riding as a boy in Masterton because it was good way to get around and it gave him independence. He gave it away for several years when he worked on a diamond drilling rig in the Australian Outback but picked it up again when he came back home, entering the Dulux seven-day race from Auckland to Wellington in 1974 and finishing a creditable 26th. He competed in three Dulux events and thinks his best result was 15th.

A thickset man, heavy-boned, he admits he doesn’t have the ideal physique for a cyclist – least of all on hills. But he makes up for it in stamina and mental grit.

And though he never made the top rank of New Zealand cyclists, his endurance rides command respect. In 1984, the same year he set his Auckland-Wellington record, he finished second in an 800-mile (1300km) preliminary qualifying event for a planned race across America.

The race consisted of eight laps around a 100-mile circuit in California in temperatures that ranged from searing heat to near-freezing point, and took him 54 hours. But when he returned to the US to take part in the main event, the sponsors had withdrawn and the promised prize money had evaporated. Faced with the expense of competing and no reward at the end, a frustrated Lambert came home.

Cycling was starting to seem like an unpaid job, he says – and besides, he had a wife and four children to consider.

Lambert opened his bike shop in the mid-1980s and has since seen cycling boom in popularity to the point where 12,000 people take part in an annual ride around Lake Taupo. He has had staunch support from his wife Barbara and recently managed, after 35 years, to coax her into joining him on tandem rides.

Of his illness, he says the symptoms have become steadily worse. Drugs help control the symptoms, though they can’t treat the cause, and medication can create its own problems, such as drowsiness. In the long term, stem cell research holds out the best hope for a cure.

He says he has to be careful not to overdo things and to ride at his own pace. “I’m only as good as my last pill,” he says with a grin.

 

 

Not a bad team

 

I've been searching for a photo of my old friend and colleague Barrie Watts, whom I obituarised here, and I finally came across this gem from about 1968, sent to me several years ago by Robin Bromby. It shows the editorial staff of the Dominion Sunday Times. On the left, Jack Kelleher (then editor of the Sunday paper, later of  The Dominion); standing at rear, left to right, Robin Bromby, Frank Haden (then chief sub-editor) and George Taucher (printer); in front, left to right, reporter Graham Billing (also a published novelist, best known for Forbush and the Penguins), sub-editor Neil Anderson, Barrie Watts (at typewriter) and sub-editor Paul Taylor. Quite a team.

Dial an abortion

New Zealand women will soon be able to procure an abortion simply by lifting the phone, and the taxpayer will obligingly pick up the tab.

Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall has proudly announced the government will fully fund a telehealth service called Decide, describing it as the latest milestone in the provision of abortion services.

I can think of only one word for this: grotesque.

It means pregnant women will be able to obtain an abortion as easily as they can dial up a home-delivery pizza or order a movie from YouTube. And why not? I mean, what’s so special about human life that makes it worth protecting?

Users of the service will be able to order two pills which, when taken during the first nine weeks of pregnancy, will induce a miscarriage.

It’s called a medical abortion as opposed to a surgical one. It’s less gruesome, in so far as the unborn baby isn’t scraped or vacuumed out of the womb, and hence it’s a much easier sell to women who might have qualms about the process.

But both types of abortion involve the extinguishing of a human life. And if society measures its humanity by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable, this latest “milestone” marks a shocking new low – one that’s strikingly at odds with the our prime minister’s carefully cultivated image of compassion and the Left's supposed concern for the powerless.

Generations of New Zealand women have now been thoroughly inculcated with feminist ideology which treats the unborn child as an inconvenient lump of tissue that prevents them from fulfilling their social or professional aspirations. They have been encouraged to believe that removing this encumbrance is a matter of no more consequence than the extraction of a problem tooth.

Stuff’s story on the new service comments that while the law changes of 2020 have made abortion more accessible, which is a euphemistic way of saying New Zealand now has one of the most wide-open abortion laws in the world, “there is still a long way to go”. In other words, it’s not enough that nearly one in five New Zealand pregnancies already ends in a human life being snuffed out. We must redouble our efforts!

I wonder what they’ll call the new abortion hot line. Presumably something easily memorised, such as 0800-killmybaby. That’s pretty catchy.

 

 

Sterile video is no substitute for flesh-and-blood court proceedings

Today the Supreme Court in Wellington continues hearing the Free Speech Union’s appeal arising from the controversial banning of Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux in 2018.

It’s a significant case – the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal confirms that – and I was looking forward to watching proceedings. In fact I was on the verge of heading into Wellington yesterday morning when I received an urgent email from the FSU saying that because of Covid restrictions, the case would be heard entirely by video link.

Even the lawyers are not physically present. The FSU urged that the hearing be live-streamed so that its supporters could watch remotely, but the Supreme Court judges wouldn’t have that. Instead it's a virtual hearing, conducted via the sterile medium of VMR (Virtual Meeting Rooms) software. Interested parties were told that a maximum of 100 participants could register in advance so that the court could send them a link.

I declined. I find it utterly absurd and slightly alarming that when New Zealanders are able to attend sports events, go to movies, eat in restaurants, drink in bars and travel on public transport, the nation’s highest court locks its doors in apparent terror of the pandemic. Whatever happened to transparent, accessible, open justice?

In its email yesterday, the FSU cited the disruption caused by the protest at Parliament as an additional factor in the court’s decision. But the fact that the judges issued their ruling on Friday, when the protest was well contained within the immediate parliamentary precinct (in fact still is), suggests Covid was uppermost in their thinking. 

I suppose it's possible the judges' hand was forced by an over-cautious bureaucracy panicking at the Omicron outbreak, but there’s an important matter of principle here. As the FSU points out, any member of the public can normally walk into court and watch what’s going on. Only extreme circumstances would seem to justify suspension of that right, and you have to ask whether the almost negligible risk of infection from Covid meets that test. I mean, a Supreme Court hearing is hardly likely to be a super-spreader event.

There are other considerations too. I’m no lawyer, but I’ve sat through enough judicial proceedings to know that courtroom dynamics can be important. The way lawyers interact with the judges and with each other can have a bearing on the way the hearing plays out. Body language can tell you something.

It might seem an odd analogy, but I recall it being suggested at the inquiry into the Wahine sinking that if the ship had had open wings on its bridge, the captain would have been able to step outside and physically feel the brute force of the storm. But he was cocooned in a fully enclosed bridge and might not have fully appreciated what his ship was sailing into.

In the same way, it seems reasonable to suggest that it makes a difference when the participants in court proceedings are physically together in the same room – appropriately masked and distanced, of course – rather than forced to engage via the arid means of digital technology, even when the case is likely (as in this instance) to involve a lot of dry legal argument.

To put it another way, the quality of the judicial decision-making may be influenced by the circumstances in which the case is heard. Justice is ultimately a flesh and blood business, after all, and judges shouldn’t allow it to be dehumanised. 

For those interested in the background of the hearing, the FSU issued the following media advisory note:

Supreme Court to hear appeal of Moncrieff-Spittle v Regional Facilities Auckland Ltd

21 February 2022

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Time: 2.15 pm Monday, 21 February and continuing Tuesday, 22 February

Location: Supreme Court of New Zealand

Background

This is the first case to come before our appellate courts of attempts to de-platform by resorting to the heckler’s veto. Backing our case, Professor Philip Joseph, the author of New Zealand’s leading textbook on Constitutional and Administrative Law, will appear with the Free Speech Union’s lead barrister, Jack Hodder QC.

The Free Speech Coalition (now Union) was born out of an effort to crowdfund for this legal fight after Mayor Phil Goff ostensibly ‘banned’ two controversial Canadian speakers, Lauren Southern and Stephen Molyneux, from speaking at a Council-owned venue.

What happened in the Courts previously?

Once we filed proceedings in the High Court, we found out that Goff had lied. The decision to cancel the event was actually made by Regional Facilities Auckland Ltd (RAFL) personnel only hours after receiving an email threat from Auckland Peace Action to blockade the event venue four weeks before the event was to take place. No investigation into the credibility of the threat or what measures might have been taken to manage it took place at any stage. The Court ruled that our plaintiffs were on a “personal crusade” and didn’t have standing to bring the case. The Court also held that the decision to cancel the event was not judicially reviewable because RFAL’s decision did not, in the Judge's opinion, involve an exercise of public power and the venues were technically held in trust.

To our relief, the Court of Appeal reversed the most disturbing parts of the High Court Judgement, holding that RFAL must uphold free speech rights as if it were the Council. It also held that our plaintiffs did have standing to bring the case and we were relieved by the appeal decision to cut the costs awarded against us by 70% because of the importance of the issues and public interest in our bringing the case.

That being so, the Court of Appeal ultimately found the decision to cancel the event to be a ‘justified limit’ on freedom of expression under section 5 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. In holding that the decision to cancel the event was a justified limit on free expression, the Court of Appeal considered the purported failings of the event organisers (in particular the Court of Appeal was critical of the event organisers for not warning RFAL venue management of the possibility of law-breaking protest at the time of booking), the experience of RFAL personnel, the venue hire agreement and the protest noise over the preceding week. The Court of Appeal held that the “heckler’s veto” concept we put forward had a general application as part of the section 5 analysis but did not go on to analyse it or consider its implications under section 5 in any detail.

Why this further appeal?

The Court of Appeal judges stopped after describing the thug's veto problem as if solving it was not their job, instead treating it like some sort of abstract long-term project when they had a perfect opportunity to​ address it head-on. We asked them to say how much should be done about thuggish threats before they can override free speech rights but after summarising the different approaches in other countries, they passed that ball into space.

While the Court of Appeal Judgement improved upon the High Court Judgement, it leaves the right to freedom of expression vulnerable to vague threats of violence. We wish to argue that the Court's failure to address the heckler's veto concept was wrong. The judgement allows for a threatened unlawful action (a blockade, with an implicit threat of intimidation) to effectively curtail the lawful exercise of fundamental rights. Free speech rights in public spaces and venues across New Zealand need protection from such a dangerous precedent.

Further, cancelling the contract for the event didn’t serve any objective aimed at substantive and urgent concerns (RFAL had other options to deal with the security concerns rather than outright cancelling the event). For example, RFAL took no genuine steps to obtain professionally based, reliable information about the security concerns, either by engaging with the police, its own security personnel or the event organizer. Rather, RAFL cancelled the event having succumbed to unsolicited threats of unlawful action. This is a disproportionate response to a breach of fundamental rights.

The Court of Appeal judgment also emphasised the event organisers’ non-disclosure of security arrangements for comparable events in Australia, and labelled this “contributory fault” but they were under no such obligation to disclose these (they were required to submit a health and safety plan 10 workings days before the event but RFAL cancelled the contract 28 days in advance.). In any event, it is standard for human rights cases to involve conduct that is near the margins.

Footnote: I originally posted this column yesterday, but took it down when confusion arose as to how the hearing was being conducted. I'm now satisfied that what I've written is a fair account of the situation.

How to Protest Properly

We support the right to protest, but
and the But is important,
It can’t be any sort of protest,
You should not have any persons disapproved of
at your protest, no one whose ideas are amiss
Who are they? Don’t worry, we'll provide a list

We support the right to protest, but
There must not be too many
How many is ok? We’ll tell you,
Ideally?
Not any.

We support the right to protest, but,
Please
It cannot be connected with
Some other protest overseas
From other countries there is nothing whatsoever you need learn
Be contented gazing on the silver fern

We support the right to protest, but
It must not be too loud
No amplifiers thank you, chanting is ok
No, not as loud as that, or with those words
Be silent if you can’t chant in
a proper way

We support the right to protest, but
it must not disrupt anything
The normal flow of life must be protected
Have all your placards disinfected

We support the right to protest, but
Preferably, you’ll postpone.
Or
If you really really must protest,
make sure to do it silently,
at home,
alone.

(Don Franks is a Wellington musician, poet and veteran left-wing activist)