Dr Muriel Newman A peek at a sinister future

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s election victory, like Brexit and the US presidential election, showed a strong undercurrent of voter disillusion. One of the issues touted as defining the election was climate change, but veteran Sky News broadcaster Alan Jones also believes the hate speech ban proposed by the Green Party did not help Labour.

The same dynamics are happening here, including the Green Party’s push for a hate speech ban. But unfortunately for New Zealand, now the Greens are in power with Labour, it will happen. Already Justice Minister Andrew Little is undertaking a review of hate speech laws to determine which need strengthening.

Proponents of hate speech bans appear to have forgotten that throughout history it is free speech that has enabled those who are oppressed and disenfranchised to achieve emancipation and equality. Now our elite ruling class wants the power to sit in judgment and decide who will be given the right to speak freely, and who will be criminalised for doing so.

Worse, the Prime Minister is now using the Christchurch tragedy to regulate the internet. Reassuring words have not eased concerns that she is leading us towards mass censorship that criminalises people for their views, especially given the involvement of the French President.

France, of course, suffered horrific terror attacks in 2015. As a result, then President Francois Hollande closed the borders and declared a state of emergency. Once elected in 2017, President Macron made permanent the extraordinary powers that had been imposed during the two-year state of emergency.

New Zealand journalist Branko Marcetic: “The new law allowed authorities to close places of worship supposedly putting out radical ideas (no proof needed from the investigators), carry out stop-and-search measures in more places, put individuals suspected of terrorist links under a form of house arrest for as long as a year (even if they haven’t been accused of a crime), and much else.

“In language that may now sound familiar to Kiwis, Macron assured the public this would allow authorities to ‘deal with terrorist threats while preserving citizens’ rights’…

“Macron and his government appear particularly hostile toward journalism… Early this year, on the orders of the French public prosecutor, police demanded to search without a warrant the office of online news outlet Mediapart, which had just published scandalous and politically damaging stories about two of Macron’s former security guards.”

It alleged that more than 80 journalists have been arrested, detained or attacked by authorities . . . This led to a meeting between the President and the media at the E´lyse´e Palace earlier this year, “where he appeared to suggest the French government needed to take a stronger hand in the news business… and suggested the state should establish financing bodies to fund the news and ‘make sure that it is neutral,.”

Concerns are now being raised that in giving the French President the opportunity to regulate the internet, and the media, New Zealand’s Prime Minister will end up being responsible for restricting free speech around the globe.

Clearly Jacinda Ardern is exploiting the Christchurch tragedy to advance her agenda of state control. She used it to force through Labour’s firearms restrictions, trampling on democracy and riding roughshod over the longestablished rights of law-abiding Kiwis to own and use their guns. So it was no surprise to see it being used again — this time to introduce state control of the internet.

Dr Bronwyn Howell, a programme director at Victoria University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is extremely concerned that the process has been hijacked for political purposes:

“At first glance the pledge appears, as intended, a positive example of collaborative negotiation toward a selfgoverning regime . . . A deeper examination, however, leads to a more worrying conclusion. While governments have agreed to a range of difficult-to-enforce aspirational goals, the tech companies have agreed to take a number of concrete, observable and measurable steps on which it will be much easier to hold them explicitly accountable.

“. . . they have agreed in effect to act as the agents of the governments in delivering their political objectives of countering ‘distorted terrorist and violent extremist narratives’ and engaging in ‘the fight against inequality.’ Rather than simply removing offending content, as they might be required to do for pornographic or addictive content, they have been recruited to promote community-led efforts to counter violent extremism through the ‘development and promotion of positive alternatives and counter-messaging’ and to ‘redirect users from terrorist and violent extremist content’ — that is, to develop and distribute government-sanctioned propaganda. This is further reinforced by the tech firm-specific undertaking to use ‘algorithms to redirect users from such content or the promotion of credible, positive alternatives or counternarratives’.”

While an investigation into internet regulation by former Prime Minister Helen Clark found that “it is difficult to establish a causal link between online hate speech and violence,” this will do nothing to temper the regulatory zeal of Jacinda Ardern.” Newshub reports that she hasn’t ruled out blocking Facebook altogether to achieve her goal.

It is understood that more than 300 people are now on the police ‘watchlist’ for the crime of expressing themselves freely.

Magic Radio host Sean Plunket says callers to the station are describing how armed police are turning up at their houses to ask them about their political opinions. In one case they were warned not to use Facebook. In another case the accusation was: “You called the Prime Minister a socialist.”

What we are now seeing is a sinister taste of what’s to come if Jacinda Ardern is allowed to press ahead with her campaign against free speech. The reality is that under the cover of the terrorist attack, this country’s ruling elite is in the process of restricting what people can say and think.

"Now our elite ruling class wants the power to sit in judgment and decide who will be given the right to speak freely, and who will be criminalised for doing so."