Tomorrow night (Monday) at 7pm, David Seymour and I will be live on ACT’s Facebook and YouTube channels, answering your questions.
I’ve loved taking questions on the Paul Henry Unlocked Tour. If you missed it, or didn’t get your question in, this is your chance. We’ll take questions live, but you can also send yours in advance:
Ask about ACT’s policies, the town halls David and I have been running around the country, the other parties cosying up to gangs, or my fashion choices. Nothing is off the table.
Paddy Gower [How does my hair look?]: Good evening. This is a debate and this is serious.
Chris Hipkins [I really like Paddy’s haircut. Maybe I should have got it cut short for the campaign. These things make a difference. How does my skin look?]: Give me your vote and every day I will go to work to continue to earn it.
Christopher Luxon [How does my head look?]: We have to stick with the plan. There is more to do.
Gower [It’s nice to be doing one of these things again. It feels like journalism]: Is what’s happening in the health system right now a crisis?
Hipkins [Why did we go down a point in today’s poll? We should be way ahead. Is there something in our message the voters don’t like? Or is it me?]: Yes. Tonight I got to meet with some nurses who are worried about the deepening crisis in our health system. They are treating children with cancer, giving them their chemotherapy drugs in hospital waiting rooms.
Luxon [Good result in the polls today. I knew it would start to happen. People are wary of alternatives. Even a marriage without joy or sex or money is still a marriage]: Well, look, you know, I freely admit it’s not perfect and we have more to do.
Every time a Kiwi’s speech is shut down, there’s a politician somewhere up the chain who let it happen, and who has the power to stop it. Some politicians are trying to change things and are showing courage, but what they need now is to see that the public is right behind them.
Health NZ decided to sack Cath Simpson over posts she made in her own time. Labour decided New Zealand needs a regulator to police “harmful” content online. Kiwibank decided American copyright law was the answer to jokes about its sheep.
We’ll keep fighting those decisions in tribunals, in the courts and in public. But the people with the power to stop them happening at all are the ones asking for your vote right now.
Regulators aren’t on the ballot. The people who write their rules are. Let’s make our voices as loud as possible between now and the election. Here’s what the last two weeks have looked like at the Free Speech Union & what we’re focusing on in the final sprint to 7 November.
If it’s legal to say, it should be legal to post
On Monday, Labour promised a “Digital Duty of Care”: a law forcing platforms to “protect Kiwis from harmful content”, enforced by a new online regulator with the power to fine them. Note the word. Not illegal. Harmful. Labour hasn’t defined it, and crucially, it doesn’t have to break any law.
Harm is in the eye of the beholder. Labour’s own examples include “bullying”, and one person’s bullying is another’s robust criticism of an MP. If hurt feelings count, almost anything could harm someone.
But I’m not letting National off the hook, personally. It got the ball rolling with the under-16 ban, and its bill is also far more than just banning kids off social media.
Internal Affairs becomes the regulator, and platforms must assess and curb risks to under-18s, including “false or misleading information”. A platform can’t tell which reader is a teenager, so in practice that’s everyone. Who decides what’s false? The bill doesn’t say.
Labour has promised to get National’s bill to select committee in its first 100 days. Regardless of who wins, both main parties are on board with building infrastructure which threatens adults’ speech online.
Today, we have launched a new feature on our website, allowing you to easily email your local candidates, as well as the party leaders, asking them to tell you where they stand online speech before election day.
As we’ve previously written about, Health NZ has sacked Cath Simpson, a mental health nurse of 19 years, over posts on her personal X account. The Tribunal had suspended her for two months. Health NZ’s letter even named us, saying our support for Cath helped make the risk of attention “significantly more immediate”.
Regulators aren’t elected, so this week we wrote to the people asking for your vote: National, ACT, NZ First, Labour and the Greens. We’ve asked each to write regulator neutrality into law, covering employers like Health NZ too.
ACT has already replied, confirming its commitment to professional regulator neutrality.Here’s their statement. I must give credit where it’s due; ACT are backing our professionals this election. We’ll tell you what the others say (or don’t say) before 7 November.
Police have charged Brian Tamaki under the Human Rights Act’s hate speech section, not the Crimes Act. Now, many people will strongly disagree with what Brian said and how he said it. But if a court decides insulting a faith counts as “racial disharmony”, we’ll have brought back blasphemy without Parliament ever voting for it. The Greens want hate speech law extended to religion, and Labour hasn’t said where it stands. Our petition asks every leader to rule out blasphemy laws, on the record. About 8,000 of you have signed.Help us hit 10,000 by election day.
The right to say nothing National wants up to ten years’ jail for anyone who was there and won’t talk to police when a child is killed. These cases are horrific. But the right to silence is one of our oldest protections against the state, and lying to police to cover up a killing is already a crime.
Our line, “Using copyright to remove speech a company dislikes is censorship, even when the subject is a sheep”, went from Canada’s CTV to the Taipei Times and SBS in Australia. The Union was quoted extensively in global media. Even John Oliver gave Buck nearly four minutes.
The College deleted her paper. But now, international judges have put her on a global shortlist. Congratulations, Arna.
If you’re in a part of the country experiencing this weekend’s heatwave, I am very jealous, and I hope you all have a lovely bank holiday weekend.
Best wishes, Adam Waugh, Communications and Marketing Manager | Free Speech Union
PS. I couldn’t fit all of our video content into this week’s blast, so here’s the video’s we’ve produced this fortnight:
Good Faith Yarns Former Federated Farmers president Wayne Langford talks farming and Wellington in Nelson, and Far North councillor Davina Smolders takes on co-governance in Whangārei.
On the podcast Broadcaster Paul Henry on why people shouldn’t be saved from “lunacy and offence”, and Stephen Franks and Kirsten Murfitt on taking on the Law Society and winning.
the British experience shows how bad Leftist attacks on Freedom of Speech and Expression can get:-
by Peter Immanuelsen
Britain is arresting children for social media posts now.
A 15 year old boy was arrested for posting about a politician on the internet. Just when you thought that Britain could not get more Orwellian, it just has.
It really is unbelievable how this can happen in a country that calls itself democratic. Police arrived at his home in the morning. They came prepared for such a case as this. Four police officers with two police cars.
The police took him outside and searched him in view of his neighbours before putting him in the police car and taking him to the station.
Police took his fingerprints, DNA and mugshot before placing him in a cell. Police also seized his devices.
Now, what on earth could have warranted such a police response against a 15 year old boy you may ask?He was arrested for posts on Facebook that criticized and ridiculed a politician — that’s it. For this, four police officers came and arrested the boy at his house.
Police have not clarified exactly what supposed crime the boy is suspected of and neither has he been charged with any crime and remains on bail.
One theory was that Labour and the Leftist Legacy Media had made a deal to replace the disaster show of the Greens with something more palatable to reasonably sensible people — but if the polls can be believed, TOP is taking votes from Labour instead.
Former Opportunity Party board members allege factional infighting, sidelined dissent and bitter power struggles behind the scenes. Can a party promising to end political tribalism overcome claims of it within its own ranks?
Paraprosdokian: figure of speech in which the end of a sentence or phrase takes an unexpected twist. From Greek para (against or beyond) and prosdokia (expectation), meaning “contrary to expectation.”
Examples:
Groucho Marx: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”
Winston Churchill: “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
