A free speech whipround shows society’s priorities

It says a lot about our society’s priorities that a hastily throwntogether coalition of ‘‘free speech advocates’’ could raise $50,000 in 24 hours to challenge an Auckland Council decision, backed by mayor Phil Goff, not to allow two alt-Right activists to speak at a council-owned venue.

What the fundraising success of the Free Speech Coalition, which includes members ranging from long-time Leftwing columnist Chris Trotter to former National Party leader Don Brash, tells me is it’s pretty easy in latter-day New Zealand to win backing for some causes, even if their merits might be up for debate, when others, which seek to make a genuine difference to the lives of ordinary people, continually struggle for cut-through.

Maybe it’s just a question of who you know, but there’s a degree of privilege inherent in that situation that’s hard to ignore.

Just as there’s privilege at play in a group of white men arguing that peddlers of white supremacist views, whose pronouncements will almost certainly create justified angst for racial minorities, should be afforded a platform owned by the diverse ratepayer base of our most populous city to spread that toxicity. When you’re not part of a potential target group, the debate can be distilled down to a purely academic exercise.

On Twitter this week, one of the founders of registered charity Good Bitches Baking, which has 1600 volunteers and is ‘‘trying to make NZ the kindest place on earth’’ through baking, talked about celebrating ‘‘getting to $10k donations that mean we can keep going’’.

She explained to me the three-year-old charity was now so big it needed money to run, even though members paid for their own petrol and ingredients.

‘‘A few weeks ago we did an Appeal for Kindness for about 10 days and went hard out through social media and all our channels. That’s how we got the $10k. This means we can operate for a few more months,’’ she said.

It’s a good result, but it’s hardly surprising that, to someone doing that mahi ‘‘it stings that $50k is raised overnight to support the right to hatetalk’’.

Twenty-four hours to find $50,000 to make a point about a principle that wasn’t even realistically threatened by the action the funds were raised to oppose. It wouldn’t be nearly so irritating if the genuine problems of poverty, domestic violence, discrimination, mental illness, illiteracy and others could generate a proportional response.

The Free Speech Coalition’s campaign, which will seek a judicial review of council agency Auckland Live’s decision not to allow Canadians Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux to speak at the Bruce Mason Centre in Takapuna, is framed around the right of people, whatever their views, to express them, within certain common sense limits, like not inciting violence.

I’m absolutely in favour of free speech, but it’s hard to see this purely as a debate around that issue. Because New Zealanders who really want to are free to hear Southern and Molyneux’s views.

As Nesrine Malik wrote in The Guardian in March, after Southern and three others had been barred from entering Britain on the grounds their presence would not be ‘‘conducive to the public good’’, most debates about freedom of speech these days ‘‘start on the false premise that denying someone a platform is censorship’’. Denying someone a single channel of speech did not remove their freedom of speech, she argued.

‘‘The disappeared of Egypt, the jailed and flogged blasphemers of Saudi Arabia, the arbitrarily detained bloggers and journalists of China are being denied freedom of speech. It’s an insult to their ordeals that we equate them with shutting down Milo Yiannopoulos’ Twitter account.’’

I just watched, on YouTube, a recording of a live stream by Southern on Periscope as she and Right-wing European activists attempted, using flares, to stop a boat carrying asylumseekers from Africa reaching Sicily in March 2017. The incident led to Southern and others being detained by the Italian coastguard.

It’s there, it’s free to watch – though, full disclosure, I did so only to make sure it could be done. That’s apparently more than Free Speech Coalition frontman Brash had done before he got on board with the fundraising effort to challenge the venues ban.

Brash said on Wednesday he hadn’t read or reviewed any of the pair’s comments but believed in their right to express them.

‘‘. . . to the best of my knowledge they’re not inciting violence,’’ he said. If he watched that video, I’d suggest he might be less sure in that knowledge.

But the Auckland Live decision didn’t actually stop the pair from coming to New Zealand, unlike, in Southern’s case, both Britain and Australia, which have denied her visas this year, the latter in relation to the speaking tour scheduled to include an Auckland stop.

The Australian decision may end up scuppering the tour, but as it stands, Southern and Molyneux would be free to come here and espouse their white supremacist perspectives to those who want to pay to hear them. It just won’t be at an Auckland Council-owned venue.

If there’s so much genuine desire to hear a pair of alt-Righters, I’m sure those desperate enough will find a way.

However, given the huge diversity of Auckland’s population, and its high proportion of immigrants, the decision is a sensible one.

It’s certainly not the ‘‘thin end of the wedge’’ that will see freedom of speech go down the gurgler in New Zealand, and it’s disingenuous to frame it that way.

We have far bigger fish to fry as a country than some two-bit alt-Righters coming here to peddle prejudice.

Don Brash said on Wednesday he hadn’t read or reviewed any of the pair’s comments but believed in their right to express them.