ALBERT PARK : THE AFTERMATH

Why has the mainstream media shown little concern that a lawful and peaceful meeting was forcibly suppressed? Why are we being told that freedom of speech is dangerous and encourages extremist ideas? 

WE LIVE IN strange and disturbing times when the New Zealand mainstream media seems to have so little regard for something as fundamental as freedom of speech. In its hostility to the visit of UK women's rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (Posie Parker) it demonstrated that it thinks free speech only applies when the views expressed don't go beyond 'acceptable' perimeters.

It is especially disapproved of when it stands in opposition to such things as the government's promotion and encouragement of gender ideology. Someone like Rosie Parker was never going to get a fair hearing from a mainstream media that had decided that the facts did not matter as long as the narrative was going in the right direction. 

From the moment the mainstream media, almost en masse, labelled Parker an 'anti-transgender activist' rather than a women's rights campaigner, the attacks on her were unrelenting. It did not matter that the charges laid against her were false because the media was simply seeking to discredit her, by hook or by crook. It descended into madness when Newshub claimed that Parker made a white supremacist 'hand signal' during an interview. She was only adjusting the zip on her jacket.

In a column for The Spectator Australia New Zealand author and journalist Yvonne Van Dongen writes:

'Apart from one writer who wrote in favour of free speech, the media here universally panned Keen, repeating the slurs of her critics and the contents of a rubbish Wiki entry, which call her an anti-trans, white supremacist, Nazi simply because of the presence of some LARPing louts doing a Sieg Heil salute at an Australian gathering of women. Their gatecrashing action was dismissed by both the Australian Jewish Association and New Zealand Jewish Council as nothing to do with Keen and publicly denounced by Keen herself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the writers and commentators in the media were male.'

It has come as no surprise that the mainstream media has expressed little concern that a lawful and peaceful meeting was shut down by a protest simply because the protesters disagreed with what they thought it was going to say. The result was mayhem with a number of women assaulted. Posie Parker tweeted that she was scared for her own safety.

Freedom of speech is not a luxury, a 'nice to have' that can be arbitrarily disregarded when it is politically inconvenient.

Reflect on the words of the American social reformer Frederick Douglass: 'Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist'   Or George Orwell: 'If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' Or John Milton: 'Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.' Or the words of Rosa Luxemburg: 'Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for one who thinks differently . . . because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic.'

The protesters and their supporters, like the mainstream media, regard the prevention of the meeting as a 'victory'. But without freedom of speech political movements, whether of the right or the left, will quickly become authoritarian. It becomes a situation where a tiny elite thinks it has the right to control public opinion.

What has gradually emerged in New Zealand is the belief that freedom of speech is dangerous and encourages extremist ideas. But this is what the Hungarian philosopher Michael Polyani described as 'moral inversion'. 

It is an intellectual juggling act in which we are asked, in Orwellian terms, to accept that the forcible prevention of a lawful and peaceful meeting in Albert Park was a moral and ethical victory. In the name of social well-being, society is immeasurably impoverished. In the name of social justice, justice is trampled upon. In the name of freedom, freedom is lost.