I’ve just come out of an emergency board meeting, and I am seriously worried.

It is perhaps the greatest assault on legal online speech rights in New Zealand’s history.

Labour has called it the “Digital Duty of Care”, but a more accurate name would be the “internet police”.

They want to set up a new government watchdog for the internet, with the power to investigate, enforce and fine legal speech.

Facebook, YouTube, X: every platform you use would be legally required to “protect Kiwis from harmful content”.

This isn’t an under-16 ban. It covers every adult in the country and every post you make.

The police can only act when you break the law. Labour’s internet police won’t need you to break any law at all.

I need your urgent support so we can fight it. Fight Labour’s “Internet Police” policy

What counts as harmful?
Labour won’t tell us.

But this policy doesn’t just relate to “illegal” speech. It relates to speech which is legal but deemed “harmful”, and the watchdog gets to decide what that means later. But they’ve told us where they got the idea. They say they’re copying Australia.

And Australia’s first draft gave the minister the power to decide what counts as harm. It was only dropped after warnings it could be used for political censorship.

Geoffrey, in Australia they had to be talked out of letting a politician decide what’s harmful online. And now Labour wants to copy it!

And get this. Labour’s own flier says: “The aim is to prevent harm in the first place.”

“Prevent harm” sounds awfully like the Minority Report…
Right now, you can say what you like online, and if you break the law, you answer for it afterwards. Labour wants to flip that. Your post could be blocked or deleted before anyone even sees it, just in case someone decides it’s “harmful”. There’s a name for that. It’s called prior restraint, and it’s one of the oldest forms of censorship there is.

The internet police won’t come for you directly. They’ll make the platforms do it for them.

The platforms get fined for leaving “harmful” content up and nothing for taking it down. So anything risky or contentious goes.

A mum questioning puberty blockers, a blunt post about immigration or a sermon on marriage.

All gone before anyone reads them, and not one of them breaks any law.
Help us fight Labour’s online censorshipWe’ve seen this lot in action before.
It wasn’t that long ago that Chris Hipkins was a regular at “the podium of truth”, where his government told New Zealanders that unless you heard it from them, it wasn’t the truth.


Now he wants to go a whole lot further, by handing the government and its new watchdog the power to decide what’s “harmful” online. You couldn’t make this up!!

We know exactly what “harmful” will end up meaning: anyone who challenges orthodoxy or shares a dissenting opinion on a contested political or social issue.

And I know a lot of our supporters have real concerns about kids on social media. I’m a mum, and so do I.

But this is not an under-16 ban. It has serious effects on adult speech and goes way beyond affecting children, and Labour hasn’t put any limit on how far it reaches into adults’ lives. Letting you switch off the algorithm is fine. That’s your choice. Building a regulator to decide what adults can say is not.

And Labour want to move fast. Hipkins has promised to get the online safety law moving within his first 100 days. Chippy is racing to follow Albanese, despite the abject failure of the Australian model. And once the internet police exist, every future government gets the keys.

This is the big one. It is the most serious threat to free speech in New Zealand I’ve seen in this job.

If Labour gets in and does this, we will lose our right to speak freely online. And if we don’t have freedom of speech online, we don’t have freedom of speech at all.

Support the Union fighting back

Can you back us?
Most voters have no idea this is coming, because all they’ve heard is “protecting kids”.

We’re going to change that. We’re throwing our whole organisation at this for the next three weeks, putting the truth in front of voters on the very platforms Labour wants to police. It has to happen before 7 November, because after that it’s too late.

Every dollar goes into campaigning and targeted ads so voters know what’s coming. If you can, please chip in today.

Best wishes,

Jillaine Heather

Executive Director | Free Speech Union