Permission to speak freely
An activist group has raised $500,000 to fight free speech battles in New Zealand. But how serious is the threat? Philip Matthews reports.
The cancellation was both bizarre and completely predictable. Even those who were cancelled didn’t look entirely surprised by it.
This happened in Auckland on Tuesday. Activist Daphna Whitmore hoped to present a public talk at AUT University on the subject of ‘‘feminism, advocacy and free speech’’.
Those on campus would have heardWhitmore lead ‘‘a discussion about free speech in the context of often polarising transgendergender-critical feminism debate’’, according to a Facebook post.
Ninety-nine people on Facebook said they were interested. Eighteen said they were definitely going. Or weren’t going, as it turned out.
The back story is that Whitmore took on the Palmerston North City Council and won after the council cancelled a booking for her group to speak in a library in 2021. The group, Stand Up for Women (SUFW), had issueswith amendments to the Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Act that allows people to identify their own gender on a birth certificate.
The law passed in 2021 and transgender people can now identify their gender without medical, financial or legal barriers, as Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti put it.
Small but vocal groups of activists on both sides made this an issue out of all proportion to its impact, especially on social media.
But the greater pointwas that SUFW won a ruling in which Justice Gerald Nation said the Palmerston North City Council failed to recognise SUFW’s rights under the Bill of Rights Act.
It was later revealed that the council spent $30,436 on fighting the group in court. When the talk finally went ahead, it drew an audience of about 20 people.
And then history repeated at AUT. Whitmore and Jonathan Ayling, the chief executive and spokesperson of the Free Speech Union (FSU), made a short video that asked the rhetorical question, ‘‘Is there no end to woke intolerance?’’
Ayling said AUT told the FSU there was a bureaucratic hurdle. But Ayling and Whitmore were sure that lobbying led to the cancellation.
Indeed, the Rainbow NZ Charitable Trust applauded AUT’s decision to cancel, and said in an online post that ‘‘AUT spokesperson and trust board member Jessie Lewthwaite said, ‘AUTwill not allow hate speech masquerading as free speech to be platformed on any of our campuses.’’’
Lewthwaite isAUT’s rainbow community co-ordinator, but is she really a spokesperson?
‘‘No,’’ says AUT’s corporate communications manager, Cathy Wood. However, ‘‘she’s a highly valued employee atAUT and we’re grateful to have Jessie’s knowledge, connections to the community and skills to support our students’’.
Wood reiterated that a technicality saw the FSU banned from campus. ‘‘AUT recognises the right of trade unions to host meetingswith their members on our campuses. An event planned by the Free Speech Union had been advertised as a university lecture and as a result, AUT cancelled the room booking.’’
One way of thinking about what happened at AUT on Tuesday is that banning a group draws much more attention to amarginal cause than letting a relatively small meeting go ahead. This is known as the Streisand Effect.
The ban only strengthens the FSU’s case, as nothing proves there is ‘‘woke intolerance’’ like the woke actually being intolerant.
Ayling says the FSU is taking legal action and will be holding the event again. He also says his paperwork was in order and the AUT’s line was ‘‘a quintessential bureaucratic dismissal’’.
As for the greater purpose, ‘‘we have academics who are union members at every university in the country, and the purpose of these events was to both grow our membership and support those whose speech is being undermined in the academic contexts’’.
‘Authoritarian impulses’
Yes, he said ‘‘events’’. Whitmore’s eventwas to be the first in a series, followed by former newspaper editor Karl du Fresne talking about safe spaces and free speech in Wellington on Thursday and former National Party leader Don Brash talking about ‘‘the unfinished work of free speech’’ at Massey University in Palmerston North on May 5.
The Brash event is another sequel, or possibly a victory lap, as he was cancelled by the same university in 2018, before his talk was reinstated.
The series of provocative oncampus events follows a survey of New Zealand academics, who were asked about academic freedom.
Working with polling company Curia, the FSU found the email addresses of about 17,000 academics and sent them a questionnaire.
They got 1266 responses, or about 7%, and Curia principal David Farrar has conceded that the low response rate and the fact it was selfselecting was a ‘‘limiting factor’’ but he felt the range of opinions meant a reasonable cross-section of academic staffwere consulted.
Ayling says this was the FSU’s first annual survey on academic freedom, as ‘‘we see the cultural shiftwhich is occurring, where free speech is viewed with suspicion at best, and often just outright antagonism, as stemming most aggressively from the university’’.
This partly refers to the stoush over mātauranga Māori and science, which saw seven leading academics fall out with their own university.
Ayling believes the FSU survey is the first of its kind in New Zealand, which is ‘‘problematic, given the responsibilities universities have under the
Education and Training Act 2020. As a statutory duty, more work should be done to assess the reality of academic freedom and free speech on campuses. It is either well protected ... or it’s not, and our law requires them to do better. Of course, our results show they really must do better.’’
But what are the results? The academics were asked generally about the freedom to express ideas, and then specifically about the Treaty of Waitangi and colonialism, and sex and gender issues. While there were regional variations, these were also the main concerns of respondents.
As the FSU press release says, ‘‘In terms of freedom to debate or discuss Treaty issues, 30% said it was very low and 36% said it was very high. It is unknown if this correlates to what their actual views on Treaty issuesmight be.’’
Ayling found these results to be ‘‘deeply concerning’’.
When it comes to the Treaty and colonialism, ‘‘if almost one-third of our academics feel constrained on an issue of such significance and prominence, I believe it is credible to think structural issues are limiting crucial speech rights.
‘‘Given the response to mātauranga Māori and the interaction we’ve had with many academics over the past year, we knew there was a problem in this space.’’
Theremight be a degree of hyperbole there, which is not unusual. In a podcast recorded soon after the AUT cancellation, Ayling called the cancellation nothing less than ‘‘a critical juncture for the cultural direction of our nation’’.
Political commentator Bryce Edwards, who runs the Democracy
Project at Victoria University, developed the survey results into a much larger argument about cancel culture at New Zealand universities. He wrote that ‘‘this elite left-wing approach is very compatible with a more censorious approach to politics and that partly explains the authoritarian impulses we are seeing today’’.
But he clarified that his own universitywas actually ‘‘very supportive’’ of his attempts to fulfil his critic and conscience role.
Other academics were much more sceptical of the survey.
‘‘I make nothing of the results,’’ says Jack Heinemann, who has been at the University of Canterbury since 1994 and founded Academic Freedom Aotearoa. ‘‘The replies were polarised. I see no apparent trends.’’
He says ‘‘the press release added up some results to contrast with others, but these were arbitrary, and I could not distinguish between them being indicative or only grouped in such a way as to create the impression that there was evidence for a preferred conclusion’’. In short, he was unconvinced. As was Sandra Grey, the national secretary of the Tertiary Education Union, who warns against confusing free speech with academic freedom. Talking about the cancellations of Whitmore and Brash, Grey says, ‘‘The right or otherwise of a nonacademic to speak on campus is not an academic freedom issue.’’ Heinemann says, of the survey: ‘‘My initial and lingering take is that FSU is conflating freedom of speech and academic freedom, misleading any of my colleagues who may also be unclear of what the distinction is and why it matters, and then drawing them into a murky scenario where academic freedom is framed as in conflict with the rights of Aotearoa’s indigenous peoples.’’
Science or myth? There is a generalisation that free speech used to be a left-wing cause and is now a rightwing one. Back in the 1960s and 70s, radical leftists challenged bans of political and artistic expression. Think of the censorship battles fought by film festivals and art galleries against those promoting ‘‘community standards’’, among many other examples.
Now, so the story goes, we have a progressive orthodoxy and woke leftists are in charge, meaning the political right now act like an oppressed and silenced minority.
The traditional political signals are scrambled. Think of the bizarre vision of a Labour prime minister made to look like Hitler and accused of running a communist dictatorship, aswas seen during the recent Wellington occupation.
That might oversimplify the trend but it is true that the FSU began life as the Free Speech Coalition, which campaigned to allow far-right, anti-Islamic extremists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux to speak in Auckland.
Ayling, who worked forNational
MPs David
Bennett and Simeon
Brown, is at pains to point out that the FSU has members from across the political spectrum. Its governing board contains both former ACTMPStephen Franks and left-wing journalist Chris Trotter, and volunteers include aMarxist blogger and a church pastor.
‘‘We don’t take stances on substantive issues because we couldn’t, even if we wanted to,’’ he says. ‘‘We simply agree that individuals should be allowed to peacefully make their case.’’
Free speech is not so much left versus right, he says, but libertyorientated versus authoritarian.
Had the Free Speech Coalition formed to advocate for a pair of leftwing speakers rather than two right-wingers, ‘‘it would have been interesting, and the tone would have been slightly different, but I don’t believe it would havemade a big difference in the long run’’.
The FSU now has 75,000 supporters, meaning those who have signed up for the emails, and more than 4000 of them donated nearly $500,000 over the past year. It has two full-time staff.
Ayling initially came on board to run a campaign against proposed hate speech laws, which saw the FSU generate 15,000 of the nearly 20,000 submissions against the nowdelayed laws. Justice Minister Kris Faafoi has said that ‘‘strong feedback’’ played amajor part in the delay. Ayling adds that the FSU generated 92% of the submissions against Netsafe’s online safety code, and ‘‘succeeded in forcing them back to the drawing board’’.
But the big one, a genuine academic freedom issue, involved the so-called ‘‘Listener Seven’’.
It started in July 2021 with a letter to the magazine from seven Auckland University professors, including the distinguished psychologistMichael Corballis, arguing that mātauranga Māori should not be taught in schools as part of NCEA science.
It went back and forth. The university’s vice-chancellor, Dawn Freshwater, publicly chastised the seven for the ‘‘hurt and dismay’’ they caused.
Not only did the Royal Society Te Apārangi not back the errant professors, it planned to drag Corballis, who has since died, Garth Cooper and Robert Nola before a disciplinary committee. Cooper and Nola eventually resigned.
When he resigned, Nola wrote that ‘‘the main issue underlying this dispute has to do with freedom of speech in the area of science. It has been long recognised that science best advances when it is open to the critical discussion of any of its doctrines, whether alleged to be indigenous or not.’’
By last month, 70 of the Royal
Society’s 400 fellows had called a noconfidence motion in the society, which finally backed down.
Auckland Universitywill hold a symposium on mātauranga Māori and science.
In a long letter published in the New ZealandMedical Journal this month, titled ‘‘In defence of mātauranga Māori: a response to the ‘seven academics’’’, Waikaremoana Waitoki, a clinical psychologist and senior research fellow at the University ofWaikato, saw ‘‘white saviour’’ thinking in the way some academics portrayed the situation.
‘‘This iswhere Māori are told which elements of our indigenous knowledge are important and to whom,’’ Waitoki wrote, adding that ‘‘the writers (as is their inherent privilege) relegateMāori knowledge to archival value, ceremony, management and policy’’.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the argument about science and indigenous knowledge, many agree it was poorly handled by the university and the Royal Society. And it was something of a godsend to the FSU.
They helped turn it into an international drama. Scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker went into bat for the renegade professors. ‘‘No indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes,’’ Dawkins wrote, in a stern letter to the Royal Society.
Spectator magazine associate editor Toby Young was just as critical and even printed the email address of the Royal Society’s chief executive in case readers wanted to complain. Young is also the founder and director of the UK’s Free Speech Union, which New Zealand’s FSU is associated with.
It was a revealing stoush, almost an intellectual equivalent to arguments about co-governance, asking how different knowledge systems can collaborate or co-exist.
It also gave FSU a boost in confidence. ‘‘The Royal Society backed down because of pressure on them from prominent international critics like Dawkins and Jerry Coynewho only engaged the issue because we publicised the fact that the professors were being investigated,’’ Ayling says.
‘‘We are gettingmajor runs on the board, and we’ve only been
Not the woke but the managers
But there is another way of looking at academic freedom. This view says academics are not constrained by the fear of offending against progressive values, but by the very real pressures at a timewhen universities are stretched and understaffed. The battle is not with woke-ism, they say, but withmanagerialism and neoliberalism. When Sandra Grey thinks of constrained academic freedom she has two recent examples, which are ‘‘tertiary institutions reprimanding academics for research that management doesn’t agree with, and using confidentiality statements to constrain the ability of academics to speak out when they see their fields harmed by restructuring. ‘‘Managerialism, the overall strain on resources, and the constant threat of restructuring also has a chilling effect on academics, who feel fearful of repercussions for pursuing research that is unpopular with their managers.’’
Jack Heinemann agrees. The academic freedom issues he hears about are from within the community itself rather than university versus academic or society versus academic. But the latter conflicts are the most visible and contentious.
‘‘Most of the former are either dispatched appropriately through academic processes or left to fester, leading to issues of staff disengagement or bitterness. The cumulative toll is huge ... But each individual case is small scale and most go unnoticed by most.’’
As other academics have said, it’s hard to speak freely if you think you might be made redundant or your department will cease to exist. Ayling doesn’t disagree that academic freedom can be threatened by managerialism and neoliberalism, but says ‘‘we have been approached to work on opposition from the censorious ‘woke’. According to our members, it is the greater threat.
‘‘Were academics to approach us and outline the fact that academic freedom and speech are being limited by the other factors, we would happily work with them to address that.’’
Tgoing less than one year. The more battles we fight, the more our supporters also realise that free speech is the foundational right on which all our democratic liberties are founded.’’
here is yet another dimension to this. In the same week that Whitmore was cancelled, and Du Fresne got to speak, seven male academics from Massey University posted an article on The Conversation website arguing that while ‘‘a great deal has been written about threats to academic freedom’’, including from ‘‘intrusive or risk-averse university managers, the pressures to commercialise universities’ operations and governments bent on surveilling and stifling internal dissent’’, misogyny should not be overlooked.
Misogynistic attacks on female academics and students are a subset ofwider misogyny, including in politics.
The example was given of academics Rebekah Tromble in the Netherlands and Patricia Rossini in the US, who were bombarded with rape and death threats when they researched civility and tolerance online.
‘‘With academic freedom comes the moral responsibility to challenge misogyny and not stay silent,’’ the Massey seven argued.
‘‘As male academics we have an obligation not just to call out these sorts of behaviour but also to identify some of the corrosive consequences of the misogyny directed against women academics, wherever they may work.’’
In this case, freedom to be heard could also come with an equivalent duty to speak up for others.