SPEAK UP FOR WOMEN ANNOUNCE NEW WELLINGTON VENUE

Meghan Murphy : One of the speakers at Feminism 2020.

Speak Up for Women have announced they have booked a new Wellington venue for Feminism 2020. Despite a concerted by its political opponents to shut it down, the event has sold out.

THIS WEEK Speak Out for Women announced that a new Wellington venue for Feminism 2020 had been booked. However, fearing yet another campaign of harassment and intimidation, Speak Out for Women say they will be keeping the location under wraps until closer to the date. Feminism 2020 will happen on Wellington on Friday November 15 and Auckland on Monday November 18.

Feminism 2020 was originally scheduled to take place on the Wellington campus of Massey University until the university cancelled the booking on, it claimed, 'health and safety' grounds.

“We really hope everyone can make this new date, but we will of course refund any tickets that need to be cancelled,'  said Speak Up for Women spokeswoman Ani O'Brien.' We tried to find a venue on the same date but there was nothing available that could be guaranteed not to ‘do a Massey”

Meanwhile Massey University has continued trampling on the right to free speech and expression. This week saw it tearing down posters put up by students from Hong Kong supporting the protest movement in their homeland.

Massey University communications director James Gardiner told the media said the posters were removed following complaints from staff and students and because the group didn't have permission to put them up in the areas controlled by Massey University. But the posters were also pulled down from areas controlled by the Massey University Students Association, which had given permission for the posters to be displayed.

The Listener has also warned of the encroaching dangers to free speech. In an editorial, the magazine comments:

'We live in a time when the merely contradicted are claiming persecution so successfully that any debate deemed controversial is immediately shut down. Whether or not the Government decides we need to strengthen our hate-speech law, the world is already on a dangerous hair-trigger path towards vigilante censorship of free speech.'