Source: ACT Party
The Haps
The media spent last week trying to blame Nicole McKee for March 15. ACT is used to being attacked but this is final proof of something Free Press has long said. The media are not going broke because of the internet but because they are not selling a good product. As for Nicole, she is a calm and classy act.
Boot on the other Foot
We campaigned to end the Human Rights Commission, and it should still be gone. However, recent events have almost changed our mind.
Watching the left and media react to people with the ‘wrong’ views being made Human Rights Commissioners is what the lecturing class used to call a ‘teachable moment.’
We long warned that the Commission was being politicised by appointments with a view and an agenda that didn’t mesh with most New Zealanders’ views of human rights. There have been so many howlers it would be quite funny if we taxpayers didn’t have to pay them, which is basically ACT’s position.
There was Susan Devoy who tried attacking white men when her job was to promote racial harmony. There was the even more hapless Meng Foon, who made a series of gaffes then resigned in embarrassing circumstances.
There was Paula Tesoriero, the Disability Commissioner who talked the halls of Parliament campaigning against the End of Life Choice Act. Her basic logic was that people with a disability were too feeble to make choices. In doing so she undermined decades of hard-won recognition for people living with disability.
These, however, were harmless in comparison with Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt. This delightful character needed to be dragged kicking and screaming by Kim Hill to denounce antisemitism. At one point, on his watch, the Commission defined lesbians out of existence (by saying you couldn’t insist a woman was biologically female).
We could go on, but you get the picture. Enter into this sorry tale some genuinely good and principled people. Stephen Rainbow is a long-time gay rights activist who passionately believes in human rights, including free speech, for everybody.
Here’s part of a write up in the Herald, quoting Rainbow.
Asked if some people might feel excluded from the aims of the Commission because of what he’d posted online, Rainbow said he was “open to talking to anybody … about any issue”.
“I think one of the things that is desperately needed in New Zealand at the moment is more honest dialogue about the issues we’re facing.”
In a free society, we had to accept there was “no one set of correct views”, but a range of views, and we were privileged to be free to express and debate those views with others who might not share them “in order to reach the truth”, he said.
“That’s the whole basis of our free society, and I’m going to be absolutely committed to upholding that … clearly I’m not going to disavow the views that I formed over 60 years, but I am utterly committed to honest, open dialogue about the key challenges that we face.”
What a breath of fresh air! This cannot stand, according to no less than the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark, who says “Looking at profiles of some new appointees to Human Rights Commission, there are grounds for concern. Such senior statutory appointments need to be able to command respect. Ideologically extreme appointments won’t & would diminish the institution.”
Well, Helen, look who the Race Relations Commissioner is! Dr Melissa Derby is a founding member of the Free Speech Union, one of the people who has been championing academic freedom in an increasingly suffocating campus environment.
The Spinoff, after a brief interlude producing the brilliant Juggernaut podcast, are back to left-wing identity politics fundamentalism, denouncing the appointments as the end of life as they know it (which could be true).
Where does that leave us? Layers of delicious irony.
For those who believe in high taxes and big government, the ‘teachable moment’ is that you can take our money for political purposes we disagree with, but we can do it to you, too.
For the intolerant left, who believe they own human rights and tolerance, a terrible conundrum. Why can’t they tolerate people with different views at the HRC?
Now, it would still be better if there was no Human Rights Commission, but these appointments will do good in two ways. One is they’ll continue to expose the hypocrisy of the intolerant left. Two is they’ll actually promote real human rights, universalism, tolerance, free speech: the things New Zealand needs.
If you’re a Free Press reader, you can take a little credit for these appointments, we just can’t say how.
