Goff challenged to take on Pauline Hanson
Organiser of Hanson appearance calls it perfect setting for mayor to air views
Auckland Mayor Phil Goff has been invited to debate freedom of speech at Pauline Hanson’s first public appearance in New Zealand. The Australian senator, whose One Nation party is best known for wanting tighter controls on immigration, is set to speak at the Auckland Council-owned Takapuna War Memorial Hall on November 24.
The meeting is organised by the Government Accountability League, a group that recently emerged from a hiatus of almost 20 years.
League president John Lehmann invited Goff, who effectively barred Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux from council venues over their extreme views on topics from immigration to Islam.
Lehmann told Goff the meeting would be “a great place to put the record right, or put your views why it’s your job to say who can speak at publicly owned facilities”.
Goff’s office said he was away on holiday and had not yet seen the invitation. They said council venues were available for anyone to hire, provided the use was lawful.
The debate over freedom of speech is gathering momentum, with a group called the Free Speech Coalition yesterday announcing its intention to issue legal proceedings against Massey University Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas over her decision to cancel a speaking event featuring Hobson’s Pledge founder Don Brash.
Hobson’s Pledge says its vision for New Zealand is a society in which all citizens have the same rights, irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived.
Thomas cancelled the event on security grounds but went on to say views held by Hobson’s Pledge came dangerously close to hate speech.
Her decision was criticised by MPs across the political spectrum, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Lehmann, who said Thomas should be “booted out”, believed the war memorial hall was an appropriate venue because it honoured “men and women who fight for freedom of speech”.
Southern and Molyneux’s promoter had originally booked the council-owned Bruce Mason Centre. A subsequent booking at Auckland’s Powerstation was cancelled at the 11th hour when the owner discovered it was for the Canadians.
Lehmann has invited Southern and Molyneux to appear alongside Hanson.
“We are in no way aligned with those two people. However, we as a group believe they have the right under New Zealand law, and should be able to have their say.”
Topics at the meeting would include the “failure of multiculturalism in New Zealand”, Lehmann said. Hanson would discuss the impact New Zealand’s “loose” immigration policies have had on Australia. Her office has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Hanson used her maiden speech in the Australian Parliament in 1996 to propose a big reduction in immigration. She wants Australians to have a vote on migration at their next general election. She has consistently rejected accusations of racism.
Lehmann’s group was first active in the second half of the 1990s when membership peaked at about 13,000.
Don Brash, Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern and Blair Cottrell have a few things in common: they’re all white, express controversial political opinions and are being held up as martyrs in the free speech movement that is gaining momentum in New Zealand and abroad.
The past week has seen each of them denied a platform from which to express their views. And the diverse responses to those denials show how complex it can be deciding when someone should or shouldn’t be given a platform.
This is illustrated in the two most recent examples, involving former National Party leader Brash in New Zealand and far-right activist Cottrell in Australia.
Massey University’s decision to disinvite Brash from speaking has been broadly slammed in New Zealand media (including by publications on the left), with most agreeing that he should have been permitted to talk, even if some people might have found his words objectionable.
The Aussie example provided a counterweight, with Sky News facing an onslaught of criticism for giving a platform to a man who previously expressed the view that Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf should be distributed to schoolchildren. Ultimately, Sky apologised to the public, admitted it had erred and pulled the interview from all its online platforms.
The outrage surrounding Cottrell’s appearance shows that most Australians expect a major broadcaster to make the editorial decision not to give oxygen to someone who has expressed sympathies for Hitler. Just as Cottrell has the right to his views, the editors at a media company have the right to choose what they amplify through their platforms.
Anything goes
But the long-established editorial side of the media has waned in the digital age. Over the past decade, big tech companies have provided possibly the purest manifestation of the quote often misattributed to Voltaire: “I wholly disapprove of what you say — and will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google, Apple and YouTube have spawned an “anything goes” environment in which diversity of opinion and indepth research has found an uncomfortable home alongside racism, sexism, falsehood and misinformation.
This was always going to have repercussions. We’ve seen a man fire a gun in a US pizza store after reading conspiracy theories about a paedophile ring allegedly run by Hillary Clinton. A family has been hounded over claims that they faked their child’s death in the Sandy Hook massacre. Anti-Rohingya sentiment spread via social media has led to murder in Myanmar. And just in case you thought New Zealand was exempt, this week we had National’s Judith Collins call on the Prime Minister to condemn France for passing legislation that supposedly allows for paedophilia.
After years of shirking responsibility and sidestepping moderation, some of the giants of the tech world have finally conceded that the harm caused by the free-for-all is too great to ignore. This week they took a significant step by deleting the accounts of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose greatest hits include 9/11 conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
The move was immediately met by widespread concern over the idea that tech companies were essentially taking a stand in determining what was and wasn’t appropriate to say. While that may be valid to some degree, it overlooks the importance of returning some of the editorial safeguards that historically tried to make sure people weren’t harmed by what media companies amplify.
This balancing act is as old as free speech itself.
In an essay for the Atlantic, Oxford academic Teresa Bejan writes about the continuous conflict between the ancient Greek principles of parrhesia, referring to the right to say what one pleases, and isegoria, which gives equal rights to citizens to participate in public debate.
Freedom v harm
Part of the reason why the New Zealand free speech debate has been so divisive is because the combatants are engaged in different arguments without realising it. While the Free Speech Coalition is focused strictly on the freedom aspect of speech, groups such as Auckland Peace Action stress the importance of equality and worry about the effect that speech might have on smaller groups. It’s like Yanny and Laurel all over again, only this time with the words parrhesia and isegoria.
This is different from censorship in that it’s about collectively bargaining as a society about what we think is and isn’t acceptable.
Indeed, lines of appropriateness are drawn by even the most ardent free speech evangelists. While some applauded alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopolous for his frankness when he expressing transphobic, islamophobic and sexist views, supporters quickly turned on him when he appeared to defend paedophilia. His publisher pulled out of an autobiography deal, alt-right Breitbart terminated his employment and he was no longer called on as a conservative voice by media corporations. The very institutions that gave him his power decided he had gone too far and pulled the rug from beneath him.
New rules
There are no hard and fast rules about what is appropriate, largely because that evolves and shifts according to people’s sensibilities.
In the modern context, these sensibilities are often referred to as “political correctness” — another favourite target of the fiercest free speech acolytes. However, before joining the “PC gone mad” chorus, it’s worth considering the positive impact political correctness has had on the most vulnerable members of society.
It’s a sentiment captured by British comedian Stewart Lee, in his decade-old interview with BBC4, when he says: “I’m of an age where I can see the difference political correctness has made. When I was 4 years old, my grandfather drove me around Birmingham where the Tories had just fought an election campaign saying ‘If you want a n ***** for a neighbour, vote Labour’, and he drove me around saying, ‘This is where all the coons, n ***** s and jungle bunnies live.”’
That sort of speech has gone from being acceptable to cringe-inducing in a generation or two. Now, given what they are seeing on social media, some members of the current generation fear we might be back-pedalling — which in turn has led to the current conflict over free speech.
Political battles are messy at the best of times, and there will be mistakes on the way to working out what constitutes equitable free speech in the modern, digital era. Denying Brash his opportunity to speak was probably a mistake. But ripping away platforms from an abusive Holocaustdenier was years overdue.
To borrow again from Lee’s BBC appearance, if the fallout from this leaves someone uncertain about whether a joke is racist, homophobic or sexist, that seems a small price to pay for the benefits political correctness and moderating free speech have had on millions.
There are no hard and fast rules about what is appropriate, largely because that evolves and shifts according to people’s sensibilities.