The Spinoff asks:
Why is the Free Speech Union suddenly so involved in the Medical Council?
I’m pretty sure the FSU would rather have never heard of the Medical Council. But when regulatory bodies start imposing political litmus tests, where only people with approved left wing views are allowed to be doctors, lawyers, nurses etc – well then of course the FSU will get interested and involved.
Stuff reports:
An effigy of Foreign Minister Winston Peters was put through a mock guillotine in central Auckland on Saturday as protesters demanded Prime Minister Christopher Luxon sack him over his “go back to your own country” remarks in Parliament.
The Migrant Workers Association of Aotearoa staged what it described as “political satire and theatre” on Saturday, following Peters’ controversial remarks to Chinese-born Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan.
Peters has condemned the protest, describing it as “not political satire” but “a call for violence”.
I recall during the Covid-19 protests, there were sometimes placards that called for Nuremberg hearings against the then PM, which were implicitly a call for executions. They led to scores and scores of stories where all political leaders were asked to condemn them etc, and numerous other stories where it was held up as a sign of extremism.
Now doing an actual mock execution is a step up from that. Also this wasn’t a couple of rogue actors. This was advertised as happening by the organisers of the protest. It was sanctioned by their leadership.
So I would expect media to be doing the following:
This is after all the approach the media took to the Covid-19 protesters.
A guest post by Gary Benner:
I received a report on the Strategy 2022-2026 Review for the InternetNZ Board, and noted one paragraph that has me somewhat bemused, befuddled, and a little concerned.The Board reviewed the success of the prior Strategy 2022-2026, which was named Niho Taniwha, noting significant cultural and organisational transformation has been achieved. The Board acknowledged the courageous values involved in conducting the systemic racism review and the successful transition to our new Strategy 2026-2031, the adoption of Te Korowai o Ipurangi Aotearoa, and our guiding values, Ngā Uara.There are two Board positions coming up for election shortly, and the report further noted:
“The Board reviewed progress for the 2026 Elections and Annual General Meeting (AGM) noting that nominations for the two board member positions have opened, approved the Returning Officer, discussed the safety of board member candidates and the provisions for voting at the AGM.I am also intrigued as to the focus on “safety of board member candidates”, something that I wonder why that would be of any concern here in New Zealand. So I did what any red-blooded IT Professional would do, and researched what our fellow nations consider strategic goals for the Internet in their country: “Internet governance at the national level involves a mix of technical coordination (e.g., infrastructure, standards), policy/regulatory frameworks (cybersecurity, data protection, content moderation), economic strategies (digital economy, innovation), and geopolitical aims (sovereignty, influence).” Common elements across a wide range of different governing styles include:
The Free Press has a great read about how devastating the trial that prince Harry initiated against the media was for him.
He’s lucky he wasn’t done for perjury I’d say.
A guest post by Owen Jennings:
Our neighbours lost their home to a fire. There was no fire brigade in our small district. It was devastating and took a huge emotional toll as well as massive inconvenience. It was, however, the motivation to form a volunteer brigade and obtain a used vehicle suitable for a rural locality.
It became one of 300 rural fire brigades – some community volunteer groups, some council run, some run by DOC and some forestry run. They were by no means a homogenous group. While there was a regulated framework they operated in, it was done in a fragmented and variable manner. Rural brigades involve some 11,000 volunteers who are usually committed, rightly proud of their community contribution but who often feel neglected or ignored at Wellington level.
Peter Dunne, back in 2012, decided there were problems that needed fixing. A typical interfering politician he insisted on a review and then designed a reformed organisation that tried to amalgamate the various parts of fire and emergency work. It was birthed in 2017.
It has been a failure, an abject failure. Only a miracle means the failure hasn’t resulted in greater losses – lives, buildings, property.
At board level the new organisation, Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) was chaired by Paul Swain. It was clearly a ‘job for the boys’ appointment. There was the token Māori appointment. A bean counter and the inevitable lawyer. To say the initial board under-performed is a huge understatement. Boards appointed since have not done any better. The country is paying a high price for DEI and political appointments.
Management has been disastrous and at the last time they were under scrutiny looked even devious being deliberately deceptive answering questions. It is fair to say the organisation is a horrible mess that will take a decade to retrieve and create normality.
Problems include governance and leadership failure, confused accountability, poor strategic direction, mismanagement at the top levels, delays in deploying new equipment, procurement problems, loss of senior staff because of incompetence, gross overspending, breakdown in relationships, harassment claims, poor financial control, cost overruns and a great deal more. In fact, its hard to find an area of activity in the organisation that hasn’t been screwed over.
A ‘tip of the iceberg’ issue emerged when it was shown senior management hired a PR outfit for $90,000 to try and hide their lack of performance at just one public outing.
Of more concern is the purchase of 30 trucks in 2017 that have never done an hour’s work. All a bit hard to believe but the 30 trucks made in the UK had to be shipped back for repairs and now nine years later still haven’t been used.
Another 30 trucks ordered in 2019 had to be returned because of cracked chassis issues. These trucks can easily exceed $1 million each in cost. FENZ will not give any buy price information.
Mainstream media don’t cover much of these shenanigans. It would show up DEI appointments.
Meanwhile services in most rural areas are in poor order with old, regularly-breaking-down trucks. Training is in disarray. Volunteerism is abused with irritating issues like slow reimbursements, difficult admin problems. The urban/rural divide animosity persists. Paperwork and rules have increased but recognition has not.
There has only been a marginal improvement in urban fire fighting services. Too many areas remain under-performing.
It’s a disaster story going back over ten years. It will be interesting to find whether the current Select Committee that is nearly completed questioning FENZ hierarchy will offer an improved road ahead. National’s Tim Costley has been doing a good job of putting heat on senior FENZ officials who have less than helpful and cooperative.
Certainly, change is urgently needed in what is an essential and important agency,
Sky News Australia reports:
Enter the Women Unlimited Leadership Summit, featuring a cameo from the former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. …
VIP tickets at $4,499 – a little over the national average monthly mortgage payment to listen to a failed leader talk about a subject of which she is totally ignorant. …
The Australian Tax Office spent $10,029 on tickets, the Department of Defence and the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security spent $13,371 each, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water spent $15,385 – and the gong for wasteful spending goes to the Australian Signals Directorate torching a whopping $28,975 to learn how to disrespect citizens and suppress their basic rights.
To be fair I’d rather Australian taxpayers fund a Jacinda love fest, than NZ taxpayers!
A guest post by a reader:
As a small island nation in an increasingly volatile global landscape, New Zealand faces two growing pressures: persistent economic headwinds and escalating geopolitical friction in the Indo-Pacific. While our default approach has been to maintain status quo diplomacy and steady trade policy, it is worth asking a bold, fundamental question: Is our current trajectory serving us, or is it time to consider radical integration?
This paper explores the case for New Zealand voluntarily seeking integration as the 51st state of the United States.
New Zealand’s economy is fundamentally constrained by scale, distance, and low productivity growth. Becoming part of the world’s largest economy would immediately transform our economic reality:
Our defense network relies on partnerships, but our actual military footprint remains small. As tension builds across the Pacific, reliance on soft power alone presents growing risk:
The most common objection to integration is the fear of losing national identity. However, under the U.S. federal structure:
Integration does not require abandoning everyday Kiwi life. Under the U.S. federal framework, individual states retain broad authority over local customs and administrative choices:
In the U.S. federal system, individual states have broad authority to run their own state-funded healthcare programs alongside federal ones (Medicare/Medicaid). For example, Hawaii passed its own state universal healthcare mandate back in 1974, and Massachusetts built its own state coverage model in 2006.
So New Zealand could absolutely maintain a state-funded, universal healthcare system funded by state taxes while being part of the U.S.
This proposal is not about diminishing our history or identity—it is about securing our future prosperity and survival in a changing world order. Incremental policy tweaks will not solve New Zealand’s long-term economic isolation. It is time to seriously debate what full integration could offer the next generation of New Zealanders.
Sad to note the passing of Jim Hopkins. I had met him a few times at political retreats, and he was a hugely intelligent and entertaining guy.
Lianne Dalziel has a nice tribute that captures him well:
I often used to travel to Oamaru for the North Canterbury IHC debate. It was always a great event because of the extraordinary energy and wit that Jim brought to the occasion every single time.
He was incredible. I would watch in awe as he scribbled notes on a few pieces of paper just before taking to the stage to mesmerise the audience as he did year in year out. It seemed so effortless, and his sense of the absurd was infectious.
He was a natural talent. I also recall him taking part in celebrity debates and bringing the house down.
There are many people who will remember Jim in this role as a debater, or as a broadcaster, writer, MC, or raconteur, but this was not all by any means. His time as a councillor, first for Banks Peninsula and then for Oamaru, showed his true spirit. Behind the showman was someone with a deep passion for people and place, the essence of what makes a community.
And that was Jim: a deeply committed community advocate, who stood up for what mattered and what he believed in.
He was also a man of quite deep and philosophical political convictions, and was indeed committed to serving the community.
By Lucy Rogers
More factions in the anti-Israel movement in Aotearoa include (a) antizionist Jews and (b) communists. I think the reasons that these factions hate Israel overlap with those of leftwing postmoderns articulated in part 1 of this series: it involves hatred of “the system” and Western culture, even though Israel is not a Western country. In the case of communists in general, the reasons for this are obvious.
As for antizionist Jews, however: I suspect that this demographic are disproportionately the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and that in a proportion of survivors trauma is so extreme that it manifests in counterintuitive ways. I am thinking of for example someone like Norman Finkelstein, himself a Jewish man whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, who went on to argue that the Holocaust death toll of 5-6 million Jews was grossly exaggerated by the “Holocaust grievance industry” to justify supposed Israeli atrocities.
Finkelstein is by the way a favourite amongst a faction in the anti-Israel movement in Auckland I would describe as “classical antisemites”, because given his parentage his good faith is considered to be beyond argument. I think this is flawed reasoning, because it overlooks the possible impact of generational trauma.
I suspect that survivors of the concentration camps were confronted with such a degree of evil that they and their children could not accept that the world is incapable of change. Trauma drove them to the point that they had to believe that it is possible for human beings to avoid a recurrence of the Holocaust. In turn, that drove a proportion of them into utopian movements like communism, or in a milder form hostility to “the system”, just like leftwing postmoderns. (Antizionist Jews do not identify as “white”, but I think they see sufficient cultural similarities between themselves and Europeans for the ethnicities involved to trigger off the need to pathologise everything Israel does.)
I add in passing that as a Christian, I agree with this impulse, but that our answer is different. The answer of the Christian faith is that Christ died not just to suffer the penalty for our sins but also to supernaturally transform human hearts and change us into better people through reorienting our lives towards Him. Then, in the world to come, God will rid the world of sin and evil, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Not every antizionist Jew is as extreme as Norman Finkelstein, and of course within any demographic people’s motivations are diverse. It is important not to generalise. I think intellectual arrogance is another factor influencing the more communist-inclined antizionist Jews. (Communism has rightly been described as “the disease of the intellectual”.)
I also think that people on all ends of the political spectrum (not just antizionist Jews) seek approval from their peers, and that leftwing postmoderns see having antizionist Jews on board as useful to prove that their own views on Israel couldn’t possibly be intellectually dishonest. (See for example Asher Wilson-Goldman’s appointment as a Green Party candidate.) That means there is significant social incentive for some Jewish people to express unbalanced views on Israel.
Antizionist Jews are a tragic case. There is a significant part of me which feels very deep sympathy for people who have been driven to this point after experiencing horrors that Kiwis living in the 21st century can’t really imagine. I try not to judge, and I try to remember that intellectual honesty versus intellectual dishonesty is not a binary thing, and that people have genuine criticisms of Israel in good faith. But it is easy to say that in the abstract, when you’re not having to deal with one of these people standing in front of screaming at you, face contorted with hatred. Or when they attempt to drive you out of your job, as with Stephen Rainbow.
I have with my own eyes seen a member of an NZ-based antizionist Jewish group say on social media that she couldn’t really understand what was so bad about Stalin. I think somewhere very deep down she knows how evil he was, but she cannot accept that because it would mean abandoning her hope for a better world. I feel sad for her: I am told by people who know her that she is a lovely person.
Trauma might go some way to explaining how people get to where they’re at, but at the end of the day, we’re talking in some cases about people who are prepared to murder their political opponents. Understanding how they got there is different from it being justified. People who are so damaged that they are prepared to murder their political opponents do not come out of nowhere: the Nazi concentration camp guards will also have their own stories.
That is also not to say that all antizionist Jews are that extreme, of course: however in my view their views have arisen from something other than the honest pursuit of truth.
Radio NZ reports:
The country’s top public servant has directed the Public Service Association (PSA) to stop handing out its “change the government” campaign material in departments and agencies, saying it breaches expectations of political neutrality.
But the union said that’s an overreaction and is seeking an “urgent meeting” to make its case to the public service boss.
The PSA is effectively a branch of the Labour Party. It is now trying to turn government agencies into the same, by circulating change the government material within agencies. Worse of all, they think they have done nothing wrong.
In an email in response, PSA national secretaries Fleur Fitzsimons and Duane Leo said they disagreed that the postcards amounted to election advertising.
It’s calling to change the government and they claim it isn’t election advertising. They must think we’re morons.
The fuel crisis caused by the Middle East conflict has caused me to think a lot about how we should consider our energy needs in future.
The worst case scenario for the disruption to our energy supply was catastrophic. It wasn’t not enough petrol for cars. It was our industrial and agricultural industries grinding to a halt due to lack of diesel. It was potential food shortages due to lack of fertilisers. The worst case scenario was much more severe than anything else we have faced.
So the first priority for energy should be supply. If New Zealand doesn’t have enough energy to support our businesses and households, we face economic disaster. This isn’t just electricity, but energy. The first focus of energy policy must be ensuring adequate supply. We must ensure supply remains ahead of demand.
The second priority should be domestic resilience. We were and are dangerously exposed to what Iran and the Houthis do in foreign sea lanes. We need to increase domestic production of both energy and electricity. Where we do have to import it, we need greater storage facilities, and where possible more refining done domestically. China has 12 to 24 months of energy supplies in storage. We have a few weeks. This means more power stations, more gas and even more coal (as a backup). Also battery storage.
The third priority should be price. Before this crisis, I would have had price as first or second. But now it is more important we have surplus supply and greater domestic production and storage – even if it costs more. However price is still important. Consumers have to be able to afford electricity and fuel. Businesses that have higher energy costs will pass them on in higher prices.
The fourth priority should be environmental impact. We should have an ETS which covers the external costs of greater greenhouse gas emissions, as that encourages more renewable electricity etc. However it can’t stand in the way of supply and domestic resilience. It is better to dig up coal in New Zealand, than import it from China. 45% of our energy is from renewable sources, which is a lot higher than 15% globally. But purity is not more important the supply and resilience.
Labour managed to remove any combat ability from the Royal NZ Airforce in 2000. Now it seems they want to do the same with the navy!
The Post reports:
The Labour Party is open to the idea of a frigate-less Defence Force, saying it’s yet to take a position on replacing the ageing Anzac-class fleet.
Next they will be open to an Army without guns!
O’Connor said Labour hadn’t completely ruled out upgrading the frigates, though it was worth considering the technological advancements – and steep cost.
“We will have to maintain marine capability – how that is structured is for future discussions when in government.”
“Money always plays a factor but the commitment to our [Cook Strait] ferries is probably more important than the commitment to the frigates at this point in time.”
This is a staggering comment by Labour’s spokespersons. He is saying that they regard the Cook Strait ferries as more important than our navy, There are private ferry operators such as Bluebridge. But it is a core responsibility of the state to defend the country.
Labour signed off on the 2019 defence capability plan which included frigate replacements. They now seem to be walking away from what was bipartisan policy.
The Guardian reports:
Police are “conducting inquiries” into an image shared by Green party leader Zack Polanski on Instagram after Reform UK reported it for “inciting murder”.
The image showed a man wearing a black T-shirt with the words “we’re only making plans for Nigel”, alongside a photograph of a guillotine.
A Green party spokesperson said that Polanski “condemns the image on the T-shirt” and accepted being tagged in a post with 20 images “without realising there was more to it than he had seen”.
Nigel Farage shared a screenshot of the image on X and wrote: “This is what Zack Polanski has just posted on his Instagram.
“If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”
Just days after a Reform figure was bludgeoned to death by a far left activist, it is despicable for the UK Green leader to post a cartoon advocating Farage be executed. Polanski is a despicable figure.
But that doesn’t make what he did a criminal issue for the Police. It clearly was not inciting violence.
However imagine if say a prominent Green Party figure had been murdered by a far right activist, and then Nigel Farage had posted a cartoon talking about executing Polanski. There would have been 1,000 Policer complaints within an hour.
Stuff reports:
A doctor who was arrested at Wellington Airport on his way home to Australia, had his passport confiscated and was held in custody for three nights, has been allowed to return to Sydney after negotiating a deal with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) over a $180,000 student loan debt.
Vic, who had returned to New Zealand in late May to visit his ailing father, was the 15th student loan defaulter arrested at the border in the past decade.
He and his brother Bob* owed almost half a million dollars in unpaid student loans, interest and penalties between them. …
“The IRD are treating me as the Ned Kelly of student loans, but I haven’t killed anyone,” says Vic. “In fact, I spend my working life trying to help people.”
Vic was 23 when he took out his loan; it was the first year of the scheme, he borrowed $20,000 to finish his medical degree, and then “life unfolded, both good and bad”.
I have no sympathy for Vic. He is not a lowly paid charity worker. He is a medical specialist ion Australia. The average income for a surgeon in Australia is almost A$400,000. He has been working for 30 years as a specialist and could have paid his loan off decades ago. He chose not to.
The Parole Board has not published a single decision since May 2025. They used to publish once or twice a week, yet for over a year they have not published once.
This is appalling. We are meant to have an open justice system. The Minister should send them a rocket, and not reappoint anyone who was party to the decision to stop publishing their decisions.
Also of interest is they have made their decisions less useful over time. They used to explicitly include the Roc*Rol assessment which is the risk of conviction and imprisonment. By hiding this data, it frustrates independent analysis of their decisions. But now they have gone even further and decided the public should not have access to any of their decisions at all.
UPDATE: The Parole Board has sent me this statement:
Up until May 2025, the Parole Board did publish hearing decisions that had been requested by the media on its website. After a review, the Board made the decision to stop publishing those decisions on the website while it investigated some matters that needed to be addressed.
It did not, however, stop providing those decisions to media. Since 1 May 2025, the Board has provided more than 350 hearing decisions to the media. We do also make a note of how often these releases – or media attendance at hearings – result in media coverage, although it’s all done manually so it would be very approximate.
And a statement attributable to the Chair:
“We are unable to discuss matters under investigation, but it is our intention to resolve them as soon as possible. In the meantime, anyone is welcome to apply for hearing decisions under the Official Information Act. Since 1 May 2025, the Board has provided more than 350 decisions to the media through the OIA.”
I’m grateful the Parole Board has responded to my story. I would note though that there is a huge difference between media access and public access. As someone who has spent 25+_ years researching law and order issues, I don’t want to reply on the media to choose for me what information is made public, and to what detail. I want to read the full decisions of the Parole Board, just as I like to read full court sentencing notes rather than the media stories.
The ability to request something under the OIA is not a substitute for proactive release. One may not even know there is a decision to OIA it.
My firm belief is all criminal offending documents should be in the public domain (with redactions as needed for name suppression etc) in searchable and machine readable formats. This would be all district and high court judgments and all Parole Board decisions.
Reading between the lines, it looks like there was some unknown reason the Parole Board stopped publishing them, and it may do so again in future. I hope so, and IMO it shouldn’t take 15 months to resolve.
By Lucy Rogers
A faction of anti-Israel protesters I have encountered at the protests in Auckland are Westerners who love the idea of championing indigenous peoples against oppressive white colonisers because it has a moral payoff. They overlap with leftwing postmoderns, but are subtly different from that faction. Their primary motivation is not hostility to the concept of responsibility, but moral pride in being “allies” to the oppressed.
I have a few insights to offer about this faction. Let’s start with an analogy. If a person hears a rumour that a colleague she dislikes has done something morally wrong, she may well sincerely believe the rumour without consciously realising the fact that what she wants to believe about the person affects her willingness to believe what was said. Therefore, it is entirely possible for people to sincerely believe lies and yet to have arrived at those beliefs for the wrong reasons. Now, imagine that but also that the person hears loads of rumours over the period of many years and comes to very entrenched but sincere beliefs which also happen to be wrong.
In the same way, I have encountered severely deluded individuals at the anti-Israel protests who sincerely do not believe that Hamas engaged in atrocities on October 7 2023, and who believe that Israeli casualties were the result of Israel implementing the so-called “Hannibal Directive”. They do not realise the role of moral pride in making that narrative appeal to them. They want to believe that the Israel/ Palestine conflict is a morality play, and they are starry-eyed about the grungy freedom fighters in Hamas while perceiving Netanyahu’s government as being Nazis because they like the idea of themselves as good allies.
The problem is that when someone is that misguided, it takes intensive dialogue to show them the error of their ways. Imagine dialoguing with someone who sincerely denies the Holocaust and you’ll understand why. They do not accept the same academic sources as a normal person: imagine for example showing someone pictures of starving Jewish concentration camp survivors in a textbook, only to have someone question how the author of the textbook came to have those photos in the first place. The person then engages in ad hoc speculation about whether there was some kind of conspiracy that went into the photos being distributed to archivists, without any reason for rejecting the sources other than pre-existing beliefs.
That is, of course, if the moral pride faction are willing to dialogue with you in the first place. They perceive anyone who criticises Hamas as being a Nazi genocide apologist. That’s not conducive to sitting down with people you disagree with over dinner and talking about the issues.
The problems with the white coloniser versus oppressed indigenous peoples narrative ought to be obvious. Jews have a variety of skin colours, including black skin. 50% of Israelis come from Mizrahi backgrounds, meaning they are not from Europe. They were ethnically cleansed from North Africa and parts of the Middle East in 1948, and were forced to move to Israel. And of course, millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the 20th century for not being white. But the moral pride faction either aren’t aware of this, or don’t want to know.
I comment in passing on the extraordinary consistency with which the vast array of diverse human failings all seem to find a way to turn on the Jews, in every era. It’s interesting to me that even moral pride can actually be something truly monstrous.
Simon O’Connor points out:
So Radio NZ ran a story from Reuters about the terrible hate crime attack in Berlin which saw 1 killed and 29 wounded at a pride festival.
However they removed a key detail from the story. That the attacker was an Islamist. Reuters had this in their story, yet Radio NZ removed it.
What is more useful context to NZ readers – that the car used was white, or the ideology of the attacker?
The killer in 2025 had tried to join ISIL in Syria. The German courts must be followers of TOP policy because they treated the 21 year old as a juvenile and gave him a suspended sentence. He was released just a few weeks before he ploughed into the pride festival. Maybe it is a bad idea to treat 21 year old terrorists supporters as juveniles!
The Herald reports:
Ministry officials are denying they deliberately misled a Parliament select committee by not revealing an immigration IT project had been terminated while being questioned about its progress.
Appearing before Parliament’s Privileges Committee today, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) chief executive Nic Blakeley and former Immigration New Zealand (INZ) head Alison McDonald insisted they hadn’t intended to hide the project’s cancellation from MPs and instead had believed the matter was commercially sensitive and couldn’t be discussed as negotiations were ongoing.
Commercial sensitivity doesn’t trump misleading Parliament. Also it is not clear if it was commercially sensitive – they just said they believed it was.
Blakeley and McDonald apologised to the committee of cross-party MPs and conceded a “different approach” could have been taken; an admission at times met by exasperation by sceptical MPs, including committee chairman and National minister Chris Bishop, who at points threw up his hands and declared the project a “disaster”.
This suggests the Committee may not be in a forgiving mood.
At a March select committee meeting, McDonald, who previously headed INZ, which sat within MBIE, was asked by Labour MP Phil Twyford about the risks posed to the project.
McDonald linked delays to the fast-paced evolution of technology and referenced ongoing work to ensure the country’s identity management system was fit for purpose.
Blakeley, who had appeared alongside McDonald, echoed how the ministry was in the process of working out what the programme would look like.
The project was actually dead at this point.
However, he later conceded MPs could have been told the IT project was not continuing or officials could have briefed the committee in a private session.
“In hindsight we should have taken a different approach.
“I agree, we got it wrong.”
Blakeley wouldn’t acknowledge his statements were inaccurate when asked during the hearing, instead accepting they were “incomplete”.
It might not have been a lie, but it was clearly misleading. The Privileges Committee should make clear how unacceptable this was, so other government departments don’t do similar in future.
The FSU released:
This Wednesday at the Ellen Melville Centre, Rob Campbell CNZM, Chancellor of the Auckland University of Technology, sits down with Free Speech Union board member Ani O’Brien to discuss whether New Zealanders holding public appointments are still permitted political opinions. Campbell lost two chairmanships over a LinkedIn post. The subject of the evening is who gets told to stay quiet.
So this public forum (one of a series being done around NZ by the FSU using Ani) is on a very interesting topic. Rob Campbell was removed as Chair of HealthNZ due to his columns attacking the then National opposition. So this discussion is actually giving a voice to a long-term left activist (Campbell) by having a discussion about whether those with public appointments should be allowed to publish their political opinions.
But left wing Auckland Councillor Julie Fairey is trying to have it cancelled.
Auckland Councillor Julie Fairey, who chairs the council’s Community Committee, has emailed council staff to query the booking. She says the venue is a Proud Centre and suggests the event may be incompatible with it. She describes the Free Speech Union as bad faith actors. Members of the public have been encouraged to write to the centre demanding cancellation.
“We could not have arranged a better illustration,” says Jillaine Heather, Executive Director of the Free Speech Union. “Wednesday’s conversation asks who decides which views may be aired inside public institutions. A councillor has stepped forward to answer.”
Fairey is trying to have it cancelled on the basis that the venue is a “safe space for our queer community”. And here is the irony. Ani O’Brien is a lesbian, and I assume Fairey is not as she is married to former Labour MP Michael Wood. So Fairey is trying to get this event closed down because O’Brien is the wrong sort of lesbian. She doesn’t share Fairey’s left wing views. Her crime is she (like most NZers) has views on gender issues that are not left-wing. They use the same logic with Maori – Karen Chhour is the wrong sort of Maori, because she its not left wing.
Julie Fairey sees her role as a Councillor to try and prevent people with non-left views from being able to use ratepayer owned facilities.