The Royal Commission’s report on the Christchurch terror attack has just been released. In response, the Government is ceasing on the opportunity: Jacinda Ardern has announced she wants to criminalise so-called “hate speech”.
Make no mistake, this is a big kahuna — the Government want to ram through laws just like we see in Britain — where you can be arrested for ‘offensive’ tweets, speeches, or emails. That’s why I’m emailing to ask you to step up with a donation, so we can mount a fight back.
“Hate Speech” vs “Hate Crime”
Don’t be comforted that the Government isn’t introducing a new “hate crime” offence per say. “Hate crimes” are when hatred of an enduring characteristic of a person’s identity is a motivating factor in an already criminalised offence. We already consider these kinds of factors as a part of sentencing.
Criminalising “hate speech” (what the Government is now planning) introduces an entirely new offence: the speech alone as the offending act, with no further harm required to be proven.
We say that limiting the freedoms of New Zealanders is a cowardly, short-sighted and pointless response to a terror attack designed to make this country more fearful and closed-minded.
The Government has been planning to legislate hate speech for a while, and the use of a national tragedy to cover this move makes it so much more difficult to motivate public opposition to restrictions on free speech.
The new offence will be based on inciting “racial or religious disharmony” including by intent to “stir up” or maintain “insulting communications”. Depending on the final wording of the section, we say that is a dangerously low threshold.
The UK has seen what happens when vague, far-reaching powers to police speech are implemented:
- a blogger is arrested and charged for causing “gross offence” for sharing a video of his dog doing a Nazi salute.
- a journalist is investigated by the Metropolitan Police for a comment made by his guest deemed racist.
- and 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” are recorded, which put people’s jobs and livelihoods in jeopardy despite no crime being committed.
This isn’t dystopian fiction. This isn’t 1984. This is the reality of hate speech laws.
We have the opportunity to avoid this nightmare, but only if New Zealanders and our politicians get the message that criminalising speech will not make people safer.
We’ve now said several times that existing laws are perfectly adequate to deal with situations that can arise on this subject. There’s little doubt from the experience of the U.K. that there is huge potential for abuse. It doesn’t seems to occur to the Dear Leader & Co. that this is likely to be a double-edged sword that will cause many frivilous cases to be brought before the courts. The only beneficiaries will be lawyers. —Eds
A bogus danger from the ‘far Right’ has been used as a red-herring to get inept police off the hook for their incompetence.
While hundreds of innocent New Zealanders were questioned by the police, following the Tarrant lunacy, most (perhaps all) for no sensible reason whatever, what the extensive enquiries found was that there is NOT a threat from any ‘far Right’. The aftermath took the form of a witch-hunt, and this apparently is something the Government aims to resume in perpetuity.
Nor has the Human Rights Commission shown that there is a history of ‘Far Right’ violence in NZ, HR Commissioner Dr Paul Hunt’s absurd report ostensibly listing examples notwithstanding, nor what often seems to be the muddled and odd claims of Dr Paul Spoonley. The only notable terrorist training in NZ in recent years was the antics of Tama Iti et al in the Ureweras, along with half dozen anarchist imbeciles. Political violence has come from the Left, not the Right.
An extension of authority given to the Human Rights Commission will give further draconian powers to ideologically-driven bureaucrats, whose ignorance is obscured by their privileged status within officialdom.
The HRC links its ‘anti-racism’ campaigns to ‘Far Left’ anarchist and Trotskyite-communist organizations, including a black list, which the HRC regards as a valuable resource. If individuals on the black list are targeted by the Far Left, are the gutless bureaucrats at HRC going to be held accountable, given that they have been fully appraised of the character of those they recommend?
Previously the HR Commission, or more precisely the Equal Opportunities Tribunal, had the authority to drag an individual before a secret court, and pass far reaching judgements, including crippling fines, and even directives to permanently muzzle anyone from expressing political views. The proceedings were not open to public or media scrutiny. It will be interesting to see whether this is the situation that the new laws will reinforce or reintroduce.
The law is a cynical move to prohibit criticism of the government’s dogma on migration and multiculturalism. It cannot be claimed that New Zealanders did not know that this was going to happen when they voted to return perhaps the most scabrous, ignorant and bigoted Government in our history.
I do not at all share the Free Speech Coalition’s confidence that a notable number of New Zealanders will have the guts to make the slightest murmur of protest.
Although the “far right” are the clear target of the proposed new laws, they could just as easily be used in private prosecutions against members of “far left” groups like BLM, Antifa, the Greens and so on. Do we need that?
Private prosecutions against Antifa, BLM et al would be of a totally different type, even if there was the option of initiating such proceedings. Any such action would be condemned by the media, state et al, and would not have the same financial or any other backing. Secondly, the Far Left can use resources in its defence that the Right does not have. Thirdly, the entire premise of any such law is that it is anti-White, and it is not designed to be utilized on an equitable basis. This is already written into the Human Rights and Race Relations laws, in terms of what has been called ‘reverse discrimination’.
‘Hate speech’ is only defined in terms of what serves anti-white bigotry, which manifests high and low on a daily basis, without recourse to comment, objection or litigation. Any objection to this bigotry is itself called ‘hate speech’. An attempt at a definition by the Human Rights Commission is that ‘hate speech’ laws are based on how something its perceived by a third party in terms of how that third party is influenced to think or act against the second party. It is based on subjectivity and there is no objective criterion.
The proposed law is designed to augment what has already been in existence for decades, and being based on this it can be predicted what the results will be:
Private prosecution before law courts will not be an option because it is the Human Rights edifice that is designed to hear such complaints. This operates as a secret Tribunal which has wide-ranging judicial powers and can preclude the. public or media from knowing anything of the matter (hence, secret). The HRC brings its own prosecution before its own Tribunal, and one has as much chance for defending oneself as one would have before Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety.
There seems to be a widespread assumption that the ‘hate speech’ law is something new. Such laws have been in force since the 1970s under the Race Relations and later H R Acts. The proposed changes are meant to extend the definitions to include religion. Muslims who have been avid in pushing for this might find it backfires: will criticism of Israel and Zionism subject them to prosecution for anti-Semitism? If the .law is extended to protect the LGBT ++++++…… from criticism will Muslim parents be prosecuted if they object to the LGBT+++++….. agendas being taught in primary and secondary schools under what is now called ‘relationships education’, which is pervasive ? Will Catholics have recourse to complaint in regard to the widespread anti-Catholic sentiments, or is Catholicism considered still too close to being a European, Western tradition?
The proposed law is ideologically driven and is far removed from any genuine desire to prevent violence, because such laws already exist. What the police witch-hunt found in its Keystone Raids is that there is NOT an impending ‘far Right threat or any such network with which Tarrant was in contact’.
Tarrant , furthermore, was clearly NOT motivated by ‘online hate speech,’ or any other such matter, but by his observations of events in Europe.
Just the year before a youth was thwarted from his attempt to kill ‘for Allah’ in Christchurch, with the use of a knife and a car, after the manner of Wahhabists in Europe. He had been ‘radicalized’ by online matter. At the time Andrew Little said that 30 to 40 Wahhabists are on a watch-list at any given time in NZ. What if the young Wahhabist had succeeded in his kill-quest? Little, Greens, Ardern, media, Gower, ad nauseum would have been at PAINS to state that this does not represent ‘true Islam’. While I agree that it does not, was any such notion entertained that Tarrant’s Islamophobia does not represent the ‘true Right’, which has a common traditionalist outlook with genuine Sunni and especially Shi’ite vis-a-vis modern Western liberal decay?
Further, Ardern now APOLOGISES for the focus of surveillance being on these 30-40 potential Jihadists, instead of a still mythic ‘Far Right’, whose potential to violence remains unproven.