Cultural protest for Canadian pair

Far-Right Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux and their supporters will face a cultural protest when they visit Auckland on Friday.

The pair will speak at a stillsecret venue in Auckland, which will be disclosed to ticket holders by text or email with 24 hours’ notice.

The Migrant Workers’ Association is planning a peaceful, united cultural front to protest against the ‘‘hate speech’’ by Southern and Molyneux.

‘‘As soon as we find out the location where they’re going to be speaking, we plan to be outside there from 7.30pm onwards on Friday evening,’’ association spokeswoman Anu Kaloti said.

‘‘We just want to show these two speakers that here in Aotearoa we have many many different ethnicities and cultures living together and they live happily and they live peacefully.

‘‘So we don’t need hate speech like theirs and we don’t need divisions between cultures,’’ Kaloti told Radio Tarana.

Southern and Molyneux have generated controversy through their views on faith and immigration, and prior to Auckland Council’s move to ban them from speaking at a council venue, the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand had asked that they be denied visas.

A haka performance is expected to kick off the cultural showcase.

‘‘Our plan is to showcase all the cultures that we have here,’’ Kaloti said.

‘‘We plan to start with the haka because we are on Maori land in Aotearoa so it is fitting that they start the event off, then we plan to have dances, songs, other activities from as many cultures as we can.’’

Kaloti said at the moment they had at least six cultural groups confirmed to take part, and more were keen to contribute.

‘‘[We have] Pacific island groups, we’ll have more than one group doing the haka, we’ve got the Indian cultural dances, at least two from the Indian community.

‘‘Every day we have more and more people making contact and wanting to contribute,’’ she said.

Kaloti said the Far-Right movement was small but it was going all out to build a racist movement.

‘‘They do have a very small but very influential and rich group of people who are obviously supporting them.

‘‘And we also know that they have Nigel Farage coming over in September; he is the former leader of the United Kingdom Independent Party, another FarRight wing party, and then we have also heard that Pauline Hanson could be visiting soon,’’ Kaloti said.

‘‘So it looks like it’s not just a case of a one-off event where the speakers are coming, looks like they are trying to build a really racist Far-Right wing movement. We want to make sure that there’s a united front that can put a stop to this.’’