Australia’s Labor government has successfully passed a “hate speech” bill that’s plainly aimed, at least in part, at suppressing pro-Palestine organizations as “hate groups”.

Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about the new laws, saying their extremely vague wording, lack of procedural fairness and low thresholds for implementation mean groups can now be banned if they make people feel unsafe or upset without ever actually posing any physical harm to anyone.

For me the most illuminating insight into what these laws are actually designed to do came up in an ABC interview with Attorney-General Michelle Rowland on Tuesday.

Over and over again throughout the interview Rowland was asked by ABC’s David Speers to clarify whether the new laws could see activist groups banned for criticising Israel and opposing its genocidal atrocities in a way that causes Jewish Australians to feel upset feelings, and she refused to rule out the possibility every single time.

Australia’s hate speech law            Video: ABC 7.30

“Let’s just go to what it means in practice: would a group be banned if it accuses Israel of genocide or apartheid, and as a result, Jewish Australians do feel intimidated?” Speers asked.

Rowland didn’t say no, instead saying “there are a number of other factors that would need to be satisfied there” and saying that agencies like the AFP and ASIO would need to make assessments of the situation.

“Okay, just coming back to the practical example though, if a group is suggesting that Israel is guilty of genocide, what other measures or factors would need to be met before they can be banned?” Speers asked.

“Under the provisions that are now before the Parliament, there would also need to be able to demonstrate that there are for example, some aspects of state laws that deal with racial vilification that have been met as well,” Rowland responded, again leaving the possibility wide open.

Australia’s frightening new ‘hate speech’ law         Video reading by Tim Foley

(It should here be noted that Greens justice spokesperson David Shoebridge has pointed out that “state laws that deal with racial vilification” can include “tests like ‘ridicule’ and ‘contempt’,” meaning people could wind up spending years in prison for associating with groups that were essentially banned for upsetting someone’s feelings.)

The only reason the Attorney General wouldn’t rule out the criminalisation of dissent and criticism of foreign countries and heads of state is if that’s exactly what Labor intends to cover here. pic.twitter.com/rV3e8TRB0l

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) January 20, 2026

“Just to be clear, if a group is saying Israel is engaged in genocide, or they’re saying that Israel should no longer exist, that is not enough for that group to be banned?” asked Speers.

“Well, again, that would depend on the other evidence that is gathered, David, so I would be reluctant to be naming and ruling in and ruling out specific kinds of conduct that you are describing here,” Rowland replied.

All this waffling can be safely interpreted as a yes. Rowland is saying yes.

Speers pushed this question three different times from three different angles because it’s the most immediate and obvious concern about these new laws, and instead of reassuring the public that they can’t be used to target pro-Palestine groups and aren’t intended for that purpose, the nation’s Attorney General confirmed that it was indeed possible.

So that’s it then. Under the new laws we can expect to see the Israel lobby crying about Jewish Australians feeling threatened and unsafe by every pro-Palestine group under the sun, and then from there all it takes is the thumbs-up from ASIO to put the group on the banned list and cage anyone who continues associating with it for up to 15 years.

The bill that ended up making it through Parliament is actually a narrowed down version of an even scarier bill that was scrapped by Labor due to lack of support which went after individuals as well as groups.

The earlier version contained “racial vilification” components which could have been used to target any individual who voices criticisms of Israel or Zionism – so it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing any prison time for my writing any time soon. The new version moved its crosshairs to groups with the obvious intent to disrupt pro-Palestine organising in Australia.

And we’re already seeing the Israel lobby pushing to resurrect the laws targeting individuals. A new ABC article titled “Jewish leaders call for vilification offence to be revisited as Coalition splits over watered-down hate laws” cites Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim arguing that the new laws don’t go far enough.

So we can expect the Australian Israel lobby to both (A) push to get pro-Palestine groups classified as “hate groups” under the new laws and (B) keep pushing to make it illegal for individuals to criticize Israel in the form of new “racial vilification” laws.

They’ll keep trying over and over again, from government to government to government, until they get their way.

This comes after Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council executive manager Joel Burnie publicly stated that he wants to ban pro-Palestine protests and criticism of Israel throughout the nation, and as prosecutors drag an Australian woman to court for an antisemitic hate crime because she accidentally butt-dialed a Jewish nutritionist and left a blank voicemail.

So things are already ugly, and they’re getting worse.

It’s so creepy knowing I share a country with people who want to destroy my right to normal political speech. It would never occur to me to try to kill Zionists’ right to free speech, but they very openly want to kill mine.

They want to permanently silence me and anyone like me. I find that profoundly disturbing.

Israel supporters are horrible people. And I hope my saying that hurts their feelings.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A group of Australian Palestine supporters in the state of Victoria have been attacked as tensions continue over the right to protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the wake of the Bondi massacre last month.

As Geelong and Victoria Southwest branch members of Independent Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) were packing up their “Peak Hour for Peace in Palestine” action — the first for the year on Friday — they were attacked.

A lone provocateur, on foot, snatched a Palestinian flag from one, ripping it and clipping the activists’ ear with the flagpole, before taunting and pushing another onto the road, before fleeing the scene.

Police and an ambulance were called and an older activist was transported to hospital — they needed hip replacement surgery for a broken hip.

IPAN said the attack was “unprovoked”, given the network was “peacefully exercising their democratic, legal right to protest against the continuing genocide in Gaza”.

One IPAN member, who tried to retrieve the Palestine flag, told Green Left the attacker had called them “a bunch of terrorist bastards”.

IPAN Geelong and Victoria Southwest organiser Jaimie Jeffrey told GL that politicians and the media have whipped up a “blame game” that is “dangerously divisive”.

Blaming protest movement
“They have tried to blame the Palestine movement for the horrific Bondi massacre. This is outrageous, because the Palestine movement opposes violence, opposes all forms of racism, including antisemitism and is trying to stop a genocide.”

The group started a weekly action in April 2024 with three activists; it has now grown to a regular group of 15–20 activists flying Palestinian flags and holding signs opposing genocide and local weapons manufacturing that assists in arming Israel.

IPAN said that, before the cowardly attack, it had noticed “more supportive toots and less abuse than . . .  towards the end of last year”.

It said government and media spin about “hate speech” and “improving social cohesion” is “having the opposite effect”, by “tacitly encouraging violence against those of us campaigning to stop the genocide”.

“We have never let aggression from those who disagree with our views deter us from protesting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or any other injustice,” IPAN said.

“We won’t be deterred after this latest incident. Because we are on the right side of history and our commitment is unshakeable.”

Tough hate speech law
Meanwhile, the Parliament in Canberra today passed the toughest federal hate speech laws in Australia’s history.

The Albanese government’s Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026 faces growing criticism over the risk of restricting the ability of ordinary Australians to protest.

Republished from Green Left.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The calls by the Israel Institute of New Zealand for Peter Davis to resign from the Helen Clark Foundation because of comments he made with regard to an ugly, hateful piece of graffiti are absurd.

The graffiti in question said “I hated Jews before it was cool!” On social media, Davis made this comment :

“Netanyahu govt actions have isolated Israel from global south and the west, and have stoked anti-Semitism. Yitzak Rabin was the last leader to effectively foster a political-diplomatic solution to the Israel-Palestine impasse. He was assassinated by a settler. You reap what you sow.”

IMO, this sounds like an expression of sorrow and regret about the conflict, and about the evils it is feeding and fostering. Regardless, the institute has described that comment by Davis as antisemitic.

“‘You cannot claim to champion social cohesion while minimising or rationalising antisemitic hate,’ the institute said. ‘Social trust depends on moral consistency, especially from those in leadership. Peter Davis’s actions erode that trust.’”

For the record, Davis wasn’t rationalising or minimising antisemitic hate. His comments look far more like a legitimate observation that the longer the need for a political-diplomatic solution is violently resisted, the worse things will be for everyone — including Jewish citizens, via the stoking of antisemitism.

The basic point at issue here is that criticisms of the actions of the Israeli government do not equate to a racist hostility to the Jewish people. (Similarly, the criticisms of Donald Trump’s actions cannot be minimised or rationalised as due to anti-Americanism.)

Appalled by Netanyahu actions
Many Jewish people in fact, also feel appalled by the actions of the Netanyahu government, which repeatedly violate international law.

In the light of the extreme acts of violence being inflicted daily by the IDF on the people of Gaza, the upsurge in hateful graffiti by neo-Nazi opportunists while still being vile, is hardly surprising.

Around the world, the security of innocent Israeli citizens is being recklessly endangered by the ultra-violent actions of their own government.

If you want to protect your citizens from an existing fire, it’s best not to toss gasoline on the flames.

To repeat: the vast majority of the current criticisms of the Israeli state have nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism. At a time when Israel is killing scores of innocent Palestinians on a nightly basis with systematic air strikes and the shelling of civilian neighbourhoods, when it is weaponising access to humanitarian aid as an apparent tool of ethnic cleansing, when it is executing medical staff and assassinating journalists, when it is killing thousands of children and starving the survivors . . . antisemitism is not the reason why most people oppose these evils. Common humanity demands it.

Ironically, the press release by the NZ Israel Institute concludes with these words: “There must be zero tolerance for hate in any form.” Too bad the institute seems to have such a limited capacity for self-reflection.

Footnote One: For the best part of 80 years, the world has felt sympathy to Jews in recognition of the Holocaust. The genocide now being committed in Gaza by the Netanyahu government cannot help but reduce public support for Israel.

It also cannot help but erode the status of the Holocaust as a unique expression of human evil.

One would have hoped the NZ Israel Institute might acknowledge the self-defeating nature of the Netanyahu government policies — if only because, on a daily basis, the state of Israel is abetting its enemies, and alienating its friends.

Footnote Two: As yet, the so-called Free Speech Union has not come out to support the free speech rights of Peter Davis, and to rebuke the NZ Israel Institute for trying to muzzle them.

Colour me not surprised.

This is a section of Gordon Campbell’s Scoop column published yesterday under the subheading “Pot Calls Out Kettle”; the main portion of the column about the new Pope is here. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Gordon Campbell: On The New Pope, And The Israeli Attack On Peter Davis https://t.co/UWiLiI6J7d pic.twitter.com/xkWXusJEio

— Scoop Independent News (@ScoopNZ) May 9, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“Wherever Palestinians have control is barbaric.” These were the words from New Zealand’s Chief Human Rights Commissioner Stephen Rainbow.

During a meeting with Philippa Yasbek from Jewish Voices for Peace, Dr Rainbow allegedly told her that information from the NZ Security Intelligence Services (NZSIS) threat assessment asserted that Muslims were the biggest threat to the Jewish community. More so than white supremacists.

But the NZSIS has not identified Muslims as the greatest threat to national security.

In the 2023 threat environment report, NZSIS stated that it: “Does not single out any community as a threat to our country, and to do so would be a misinterpretation of the analysis.

“White Identity-Motivated Violent Extremism (W-IMVE) continues to be the dominant IMVE ideology in New Zealand. Young people becoming involved in W-IMVE is a growing trend.”

Religiously motivated violent extremism (RMVE) did not come from the Muslim community, as Dr Rainbow has also misrepresented.

The more recent 2024 NZSIS report stated: “White identity-motivated violent extremism (W-IMVE) remains the dominant IMVE ideology in New Zealand. Terrorist attack-related material and propaganda, including the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto and livestream footage, continue to be shared among IMVE adherents in New Zealand and abroad.”

To implicate Muslims as being the greatest threat may highlight Dr Rainbow’s own biases, racist beliefs, and political agenda. These false narratives, that have recently been strongly pushed by the US and Israel, undermine social cohesion and lead to a rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

It is also deeply troubling that he has framed Muslim and Arab communities as potential sources of violent extremism while failing to acknowledge the very real and documented threats they have faced in Aotearoa.

The Christchurch Mosque attacks — the most horrific act of mass violence in New Zealand’s modern history — were perpetrated not by Muslims, but against them, by an individual radicalised by white supremacist ideology.

Since that tragedy, there have been multiple threats made against mosques, Arab New Zealanders, and Palestinian communities, many of which have received insufficient public attention or institutional response.

For a Human Rights Commissioner to overlook this context and effectively invert the victim-aggressor dynamic is not only factually inaccurate, but it also risks reinforcing harmful stereotypes and undermining the safety and dignity of communities who are already vulnerable.

Such narratives are inconsistent with the Human Rights Commission’s mandate to protect all people in New Zealand from discrimination and hate.

The dehumanisation of Muslims and Palestinians
As part of Israel’s propaganda, anti-Muslim and Palestinian tropes are used to justify violence against Palestinians by framing us as barbaric, aggressive, and as a threat. We are dehumanised in order to normalise the harm they inflict on our communities which includes genocide, land theft, ethnic cleansing, apartheid policies, dispossession, and occupation.

In October 2023, Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, described Palestinians as “horrible, inhuman animals” and was perplexed with the growing global concern for us.

That same month Yoav Gallant, then Israeli Defence Minister, referred to Palestinians as “human animals” when he announced Israel’s illegal and horrific siege on Gaza that included blocking water, food, medicine, and shelter to an entire population, the majority of which are children.

In making his own remarks about the Muslim community being a “threat” in New Zealand as a collective group, and labelling Palestinians being “barbaric”, Dr Stephen Rainbow has shattered the credibility of the Human Rights Commission. He has made it very clear that he is not impartial nor is he representing and protecting all communities.

Instead, Dr Rainbow is exacerbating divisions within society. This is a worrying trend that we are witnessing around the world; the de-humanising of groups to serve political agendas, retain power, or seek public support for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Dr Rainbow’s appointment also points a spotlight onto this government’s commitment to neutrality and inclusiveness in its human rights policies. Allowing a high-ranking official to make discriminatory remarks undermines New Zealand’s commitment to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A high-ranking official should not be allowed to engage in Islamic and Palestinian racist rhetoric without consequence. The public should be questioning the morals, principles, and inclusivity of those currently in power. Our trust is being eroded.

Dr Stephen Rainbow’s comments can also be seen as a breach of human rights principles, as he is supposed to uphold equality and non-discrimination. Yet his beliefs seem to be peppered with racism, often falsely based on religion, ethnicity, and race.

Foreign influence in New Zealand
This incident also shines accountability and concerns for foreign influence and propaganda seeping into New Zealand. The Israel Institute of New Zealand (IINZ) has published articles that some perceive as dehumanising toward Palestinians.

In one article written by Dr Rainbow titled “With every chant Israel’s case grows stronger”, he says:

“The Left has found a new underdog to replace the Jews — the Palestinians — in spite of the fact that the treatment of gay people, women, and political opponents wherever Palestinians have control is barbaric.”

By publicising these comments, The Israel Institute of New Zealand signalled its support of these offensive and racist serotypes. Such statements risk reinforcing a narrative that portrays Palestinians as inherently violent, uncivilised, and unworthy of basic rights and dignity.

This kind of rhetoric contributes to what many describe as anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, and it warrants public scrutiny, especially when shared by organisations involved in shaping public discourse.

Importantly, the NZSIS 2024 threat report stated that “Inflammatory and violent language online can target anyone, although most appears directed towards those from already marginalised minority communities, or those affected by globally significant conflicts or events, such as the Israel-Gaza conflict.”

Other statements and reposts published online by the IINZ on their X account include:

“Muslims are getting killed, is Israel involved? No. How many casualties? Under 100,00, who cares? Why is this even on the news? Over 100,000. Oh, that’s too bad, what’s for dinner?” (12 February 2024)

“Fact. Gaza isn’t ‘ancestral Palestinian land’. We’ve been here long before them, and we’ll still be here long after the latest propaganda campaign.” (12 February 2024)

Palestinian society was also described as being “a violent, terror-supporting, Jew-hating society with genocidal aspirations.” (16 February 2025)

The “estimate of Hamas casualties, the civilian-to-combat death ratio could be as low as 1:1. This could be historically low for urban warfare.” (21 February 2025)

“There has never been a country called Palestine.” (25 February 2025)

Even showing a picture of Gaza before Israel’s bombing campaign with a caption saying, “Open air prison”. Next to it a picture of a completely destroyed Gaza with a caption that says “Victory.” (23 February 2025)

“Palestinian society in Gaza is in my eyes little more than a death loving cult of murderers and criminals of the lowest kind.” (28 February 2025)

Anti-Palestinian bias and racism
Portraying Muslims and Palestinians as a threat and extremist reflects both Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bias and potential racism. These statements risk dehumanising Palestinians and are typical of the settler colonial narrative used to erase indigenous populations by denying our history, identity and legal claim.

The IINZ has published content that many see as mocking the deaths of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which is not only ethically questionable but can be seen as a complete lack of empathy.

And posting the horrific images of a completely destroyed Gaza, appears to revel in the suffering of others and contradicts basic ethical norms, such as decency and compassion.

There also appears to be a common theme among pro-Israeli organisations, not just the IINZ, that cast negative connotations on our national symbols including our Palestinian flag and keffiyeh.

In an article on the IINZ webpage, titled “A justified war”, they write “chorus of protesters wearing keffiyehs, waving their Palestinian and terrorist flags, and shouting about Israel’s alleged war crimes.”

It seemingly places the Palestinian flag — an internationally recognised national symbol– alongside so-called “terrorist flags,” suggesting an equivalence between Palestinian identity and terrorism. Many view this language as dehumanising and inflammatory, erasing the legitimate national and cultural characteristics of Palestinians and feeding into harmful stereotypes.

The Palestinian flag represents a people, their identity, and national aspirations.

There is nothing wrong with our keffiyeh, it is part of our national dress. The negative connotations of Palestinian cultural symbols have to stop, including vilifying other MPs or supporters who wear it in solidarity.

This is happening all too often in New Zealand and must be called out and addressed. Our keffiyeh is not just a scarf — it is a symbol of our Palestinian identity, our resistance, and our rich, historic and deeply rooted cultural heritage.

Pro-Israeli groups attack it because they aim to delegitimise Palestinian identity and resistance by associating it with violence, terrorism, or extremism.

In 2024, ISESCO and UNESCO both recognised the keffiyeh as an essential part of their Intangible Cultural Heritage lists as a way of safeguarding Palestinian cultural heritage and reinforcing its historical and symbolic importance.

As a safeguarded cultural artifact, much like indigenous dress and other traditional attire, attempts to ban or demonize it are acts of cultural erasure and need to be called out as such and dealt with accordingly.

In the same IINZ article titled “A Justified War”, the authors present arguments that appear to defend Israel’s military actions in Gaza, including the targeting of civilians.

Many within the community (most of us have been affected), including survivors and those with direct ties to the region, have found the article deeply distressing and feel that it lacks compassion for the victims of the ongoing violence, and the framing and tone of the piece have raised serious ethical concerns, especially as some statements are factually incorrect.

The New Zealand Palestinian communities affected by this unimaginable genocide are suffering. Our family members are being killed and are at threat daily from Israel’s aggression and illegal war.

Unfortunately, much rhetoric from this organisation aligns with Israeli state narratives and includes statements that some view as racist or immoral, warranting further scrutiny from the government.

There is growing public concern over the association of Human Rights Commissioner Dr Stephen Rainbow with the IINZ, which promotes itself as a research and advocacy body.

A Human Rights Commissioner requires neutrality and a commitment to protecting all communities from discrimination; aligning with Israel and publishing harmful rhetoric may lead to bias in policy decisions and discrimination.

It is also important to remember that we are not a monolithic group. Christian Palestinians exist (I am one) as well as Muslim and historically Jewish Palestinians. Christian communities have lived in Palestine for two thousand years.

This is also not a religious conflict, as many pro-Israeli groups wish the world to believe, and it is not complex. It is one of colonialism, dispossession, and human rights. A history that New Zealand is all too familiar with.

The need for accountability
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith’s inaction and disrespectful response, claiming that a staunchly pro-Israeli supporter can be impartial and will be “very careful” from now on, hints that he may also support some forms of racism, in this case against Muslims and Palestinians.

You cannot address only some groups who are discriminated against but then ignore others, or accept excuses for racist, intolerable actions or statements. This is not justice.

This is the application of selective principles, enforced and underpinned by political agendas, foreign influence, and racism. Does Goldsmith understand that justice is as much about human rights, fairness and accountability as it is about laws?

Without accountability, there is no justice at all, or perhaps he too is confused or uncertain about his role, as much as Dr Rainbow seems oblivious to his?

There needs to be accountability for Goldsmith. Why has he not removed Dr Rainbow from office and acted appropriately? If Dr Rainbow had said that Jews were the biggest threat to Muslims or that Israelis were the biggest threat to Palestinians, would this government and Goldsmith have sat back and said, “he didn’t mean it, it was a mistake, and he has apologised”?

Questions New Zealanders should be asking are, what kind of Human Rights Commissioner speaks of entire peoples this way? What kind of minister, like Paul Goldsmith, looks at that and does very little?

What kind of Government claims to champion justice, while turning a blind eye to genocide? This is betraying the very idea of human rights itself.

Although we are a small country here in New Zealand, we have remained strong by upholding and standing by our principles. We said no to apartheid in South Africa. We said no to nuclear weapons in the Pacific. We said no to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And we must now say no to dehumanisation — anywhere. Are we a nation that upholds justice or do we sit on the sidelines while the darkest times in modern history envelopes us all?

The attacks against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must stop. We have already faced horrific acts of violence against us here in New Zealand and currently in Palestine. We need support and humanity, not dehumanisation, demonisation and cruelty. This is not what New Zealand is about, we must do better together.

There needs to be a formal enquiry and policy review to see if structural biases exist in New Zealand’s Human Rights institutions. This should also be done across some government bodies, including the Ministry of Education and Immigration NZ, to determine if there has been discrimination or inequality in the handling of humanitarian visas and how the Education Ministry has handled the complaints of anti-Palestinian discrimination at schools.

Communities have particular concern at how the curriculum in many schools deals with the creation of the state of Israel but is silent on Palestinian history.

Public figures should be held to a higher standard, with consequences for spreading racially charged rhetoric.

The Human Rights Commission needs to rebuild trust in our multicultural New Zealand society. The only way this can be done is through fair and just measures that include enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, true inclusivity and action when there is an absence of these.

We are living in a moment where silence is complicity. Where apathy is betrayal.

This is a test of whether New Zealand, Minister Goldsmith and this government truly uphold human rights for all, or only for some.

Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab is a New Zealand Palestinian advocate and writer.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Nothing, but nothing, is worse than those Jews who level totally unfounded allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the State of Israel. They are repulsive and revolting human beings. Their relatives who were murdered by the Nazis – the role models for Hamas – will…

— Mark Leibler (@LeiblerMark) February 8, 2025

COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein

As someone Jewish, the son of Holocaust survivors and members of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, it is hard to know whether to characterise Mark Leibler’s tweet as offensive, appalling, contemptuous, insulting or a disgusting, shameful and grievous introduction of the Holocaust, and those who were murdered by the Nazis, into his tweet — or all of the foregoing!

Leibler’s tweet is most likely a breach of recently passed legislation in Australia, both federally and in various state Parliaments, making hateful words and actions, and doxxing, criminal offences. It will be “interesting” to see how the police deal with the complaint taken up with the police alleging Leibler’s breach of the legislation.

In the end, Leibler’s attempted intimidation of those who might have been thinking of going to the rally failed — miserably!

There are many Jews who abhor what Israel is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) but feel intimidated by the Leiblers of this world who accuse them of being antisemitic for speaking out against Israel’s actions and not those rusted-on 100 percent supporters of Israel who blindly and uncritically support whatever Israel does, however egregious.

Leibler, and others like him, who label Jews as antisemites because they dare speak out about Israel’s actions, certainly need to be called out.

As a lawyer, Leibler knows that actions have consequences. A group of concerned Jews (this writer included) are in the process of lodging a complaint about Leibler’s tweet with the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission.

Separately from that, this week will see full-page adverts in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — signed by hundreds of Jews — bearing the heading:

“Australia must reject Trump’s call for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish Australians say NO to ethnic cleansing.”

Jeffrey Loewenstein, LLB, was a member of the Victorian Bar and a one-time chair of the Anti-Defamation Commission and member of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. This article was first published by Pearls & Irritations public policy journal and is republished here with permission.

This full-page ad appears in today’s @smh and @theage with the names of 500 Jews, many more signed but couldn’t fit onto the page!, to clearly say that they’re utterly opposed to removing Palestinians from Gaza. Notice the silence from most “mainstream” Jewish groups? It’s… pic.twitter.com/GuUqvVMWNZ

— Antony Loewenstein (@antloewenstein) February 24, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Australians are being urged to stay united following the horrific events in Sydney last week, reports the ABC’s Saturday Extra programme.

Five women and one man were killed in a mass stabbing at Bondi Junction last Saturday by a man with a history of mental illness, and a nine-month-old baby baby was among the eight people wounded.

The attacker was shot by a police officer and died at the scene.

Two days later at a church in Wakeley, a suburb in Western Sydney, controversial Assyrian Orthodox preacher Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel suffered lacerations to his head when he was attacked during a sermon that was being live-streamed. Nobody was killed.

Three other unrelated knife attacks took place in Sydney this week. Only the Wakely church attack was officially described as a “terror” attack although there had been widespread media speculation.

Those attacks coupled with anger and division caused by the war on Gaza as well as the polarising impact of the Voice referendum last year and Australians are seeing their sense of community and social cohesion challenged.

The ABC has spoken to a panel of analysts about the solutions to staying united and their comments were broadcast yesterday.

The panel included Khairiah A Rahman, an intercultural communications commentator from Auckland University of Technology who is also secretary of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and a member of Muslim Media Watch.

The programme highlighted New Zealand’s experience in March 2019 when an Australian gunman entered two mosques in Christchurch and killed 51 people while they were praying.

Asked what her message had been to the New Zealand government through the Royal Commission established to look into the mass killing, Rahman replied:

“Overall, social cohesion when we think about it has got to do with the responsibility of all people and groups at all levels of society. So we can’t actually leave it to the government or the leaders, the Muslim leaders.

“At the end of the day, the media also had a hand in all of this and my research had to do with media representation of Islam and Muslims prior to the attack. One of the things I found was unfair reporting, so pretty much what you have experienced in your media reporting of Bondi.

“The route that extremists take from hate to mass murder is a proven one, and you need to report fairly and stay calm in a society.”

Interviewees:

Dr Jamal Rifi, Lebanese Muslim Community leader, Sydney

Tim Southphommasane, Australia’s former race discrimination officer

Khairiah A Rahman, intercultural communications researcher, Auckland University of Technology

Producer: Linda LoPresti

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Aotearoa New Zealand has become hugely polarised and it is little wonder Jacinda Ardern has decided to call it a day, says Helen Clark.

The former New Zealand prime minister and Labour Party leader is no stranger to the ups and downs of politics. However, she said current politicians faced vitriol 24/7 thanks to social media.

She said Aotearoa was seeing some of the worst elements of US politics.

Clark, who is in Switzerland at present, said she awoke to find she had received dozens of messages on her phone and was stunned, but, after a moment of reflection, not surprised by Ardern’s decision.

“I’ve seen the public pressures of vitriol and mouthing against Jacinda in a very, very unfair way and at some point, as she said, you’re human, at some point you don’t have any gas left in the tank, and she’s made the call that is absolutely right for her and her family.”

While Clark faced a huge amount of unpleasant criticism during her nine years as prime minister, she told RNZ Morning Report social media had given it more licence.

“The amount of anonymous trolling and venomous commentary is absolutely ghastly.

‘Anti-vaxxers . . . extreme language’
“I was going through the responses to the tweet I put up and the hate brigade is out in force — the anti-vaxxers, the people calling Jacinda a dictator, really just extreme and absurd language.”

In Clark’s time, talkback radio was the dominant outlet for people to express hateful views, but there was not the “24-hour trolling and viciousness on social media”.

Clark said she considered herself lucky to have led the country before the advent of social media which had made the role so much tougher.

She believed Ardern may have had an enjoyable summer and would have seriously considered if she could continue in the face of the antagonism she was experiencing.

The Waitangi Day barbecue had been cancelled late last year for security reasons and demonstrated the level of pressure the prime minister faced, Clark said.

Ardern’s programme could not be announced in advance because of the risk of “these militia-shouting crowds turn up”, she said.

“We haven’t experienced this in New Zealand for the most part. We’ve become very polarised. We’ve taken on a lot of the worst aspects of American politics, I think.

‘Time for society to reflect’
“So I think it is time to reflect as a society how we’re letting ourselves be so divided and polarised by this.”

Clark said normally mild-mannered people were proclaiming vicious views and the country did not used to be like this.

The covid-19 pandemic and the need for vaccinations had been a huge factor in the dissemination of extreme views.

Clark recalled going to school with a boy who had a withered leg, the result of polio, and there was a general acceptance of the need for vaccinations.

“It has been extraordinary to see this deterioration of basic science.”

She was not prepared to say publicly who should take over as Labour leader, but she was in no doubt there were well-qualified candidates within the caucus.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Anusha Bradley, RNZ News investigative reporter

Within hours of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation announcement in Napier, a small crowd gathered outside the city’s conference centre.

Unlike the steady stream of shocked Labour MPs still coming to terms with the news, these folks were celebrating.

“Ding dong the witch is gone,” a placard read.

Online, there have been similar sentiments to be found among groups bitterly opposed to Ardern. The Freedom and Rights Coalition even takes credit for Ardern’s departure in a post on Facebook: “We can now celebrate the departure of this leader of division. We did it!”

The comments on the post are unfit to repeat here.

Entering what would have been her sixth year, Ardern is the longest-serving Labour Prime Minister after Peter Fraser and Helen Clark. But in an emotional speech to her caucus in Napier she revealed she “no longer had enough in the tank” to do the job.

“It’s time,” she said.

“As much as I have taken great joy in this job, I would be giving a disservice to this country and to the Labour Party if I continued, knowing that I just don’t have enough in the tank for another four years.”

Violent abuse
While it wasn’t explicitly stated, it’s hard to imagine the increasingly violent abuse directed at her was not part of the reason.

“It is no surprise to me at all … she could not, not be affected by this,” says Disinformation Project director Kate Hannah.

Ardern probably tops the list for the amount of vitriol endured by any political leader in this country, Hannah believes.

“In the earlier parts of her first term we got sort of commentary about her looks and her lack of perceived experience. The fact that sort of she was, you know, well spoken, and really good at communicating complex issues was kind of a slur against her.”

But in the last two years the misogyny and violence directed towards Ardern has not only increased in volume, but also become more dangerous, says Hannah, who studies online hate speech and disinformation.

“The language and imagery used to talk about the Prime Minister has become more violent, more vulgar, more crude and repetitive.”

According to a recent study, published just before Christmas, which charts the rise of misogynistic language towards female leaders and women in the public sphere, the most prevalent word used to describe the Prime Minister in these circles is “the C word, and the most prevalent visual image is of witchcraft”.

“And this is old data. This is data from the middle of last year. So it’s actually got worse.”

Grim factoid
Another grim factoid from the paper shows the word “Neve” – referring to Ardern’s pre-school daughter — is also on the most prevalent list.

In June, it was revealed the number of threats towards Ardern has almost tripled in the past three years.

Hannah, who herself has been subjected to similar abuse — including death threats — says she presented the paper’s findings to Ardern and a range of MPs late last year.

How did Ardern react?

“As we all do . . . trying to laugh it off and saying the job is more important . . . and you just have to get on with the job,” says Hannah.

But this is no laughing matter, she says. This new virulent brand of misogyny is on the rise and it affects all women.

“The international disinformation, far right, pro-Putin community is incredibly misogynistic.

‘Incredibly abusive’
“It is incredibly abusive and derogatory, and what it does is attempts to reduce a person to their basic self, and in doing so signals to every other person who shares characteristics with that individual who has been targeted that they are equally worthless, equally base, equally loathed.

“So has this purpose of both targeting individually her as a woman, her role as prime minister, and then all women or all people who share some of those characteristics with her,” says Hannah.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s biggest moments.    Video: RNZ News

Massey University senior lecturer Dr Suze Wilson, who studies leadership and has examined the vitriol aimed at Ardern, says even the coining of “Jacindamania”, referring to her meteoric rise in popularity as leader served as an early warning of what was to come.

“As if somehow people were losing their heads to be excited by the prospect of a potential Prime Minister, who was young and female and articulate, through to the last couple of years where it’s become increasingly violent, the kind of abuse to which she’s been subjected.”

While the pandemic has been a factor, research also shows that generally it is becoming more challenging for women to be taken seriously, says Wilson.

“Particularly if they are younger and particularly if they don’t cleave to a masculine style, which Ardern does not.”

Worryingly, misogynistic sentiment is also on the rise globally. The latest Reykjavik Index for leadership tracks views about whether a man or woman would be more suitable to a certain position.

Backwards trend
“The most recent data came out just before Christmas, and it is showing that in some countries for the first time that there was actually some backwards moving trends,” says Wilson.

“It was showing, alarmingly, that it’s particularly among younger men, and those are the ones that are being exposed to the likes of Jordan Petersons and Andrew Tates of the world who are learning from them a really just disrespectful and antagonistic view towards women.”

Wilson says she first started noticing a shift in sentiment towards Ardern during the first 2020 lockdown. But it didn’t come from the dark corners of the anti-vax movement, but on the mainstream business social networking site LinkedIn.

‘”I started seeing people, you know like business leaders, using words like tyrant and dictator to describe the prime minister, and I was kind of quite disturbed by that.

“The fact that they can make those kinds of statements and think that somehow that would be a credible statement, tells you kind of something about the shifting norms of what’s considered an OK way to talk about our prime minister.”

Dr Wilson believes this must have taken its toll on Ardern.

“It’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t affect you, right? I mean, it would affect anybody . . . Having people talk about wanting to hang her, wanting to harm her child, the persistent rumours about her partner. She’s human, of course it’s going to take quite a toll.”

‘Look in the mirror’
Ardern herself has rarely acknowledged the abuse publicly. Wilson can understand why.

“I can understand why she doesn’t want to highlight it, because it would be, perhaps for those that are engaged in that behaviour, some kind of reinforcement that what they’re doing is having an effect.

“But really, they should just look in the mirror and be deeply ashamed of their conduct.”

Hannah says it’s also worrying the violent rhetoric towards the prime minister is now considered the “new normal”.

“This type of language and abuse is now so normalised that it’s very hard to pull back from. When people have become accustomed to using the C word, as the most commonly used word to describe the prime minister, then, you know, I just don’t know how we come back from that in any kind of quick way.”

For some, the issue was so pervasive it defined the way they viewed the announcement of her resignation. A number of public figures referred to it in posts on Twitter:

#PrimeMinister @jacindaardern resigned today. I am not surprised nor do I blame her. Her treatment, the pile on, in the last few months has been disgraceful and embarrassing. All the bullies, the misogynists, the aggrieved. She deserved so much better. A great leader. Thanks PM! pic.twitter.com/7b1AhjBXrW

— Sam Neill (@TwoPaddocks) January 19, 2023

History will judge Jacinda Ardern as a remarkable leader.

She is genuinely kind and has an incredible intellect, she’s made more of a contribution than she will ever appreciate.

I can’t help but feel like we need to find better ways to support women and mothers in politics.

— Fleur Fitzsimons (@FleurFitzsimons) January 19, 2023

Apart from wartime, no New Zealand Prime Minister has faced the challenges Jacinda Ardern has handled. And certainly none has had to govern through the kind of deranged abuse and threat to which she has been subject in the past two years.

— Russell Brown (@publicaddress) January 19, 2023

No matter what you thought of her politics, the sustained personal attacks and hatred levelled at Jacinda was unlike anything I’d seen- from critiques of her motherhood to hysteria and conspiracy theories to threats of violence.

It’s not safe to be a woman in public light

— Mohamed Hassan (@mohamedwashere) January 19, 2023

And on the streets of Auckland, kilometres away from the dwindling crowd outside Napier’s conference centre, an emotional Tessa Williams from Taupō, perhaps summed up the view of those most disturbed by the vitriol Ardern received.

“She’s put up with a lot of really tough stuff. I mean, I was surprised that she has hung in kind of as long as she did,” Williams said.

“It was pretty rough how she’s been treated. Yeah, I think it’s a good decision. It was so hard for her. She did a really good job.

“It’s sad that people were so mean to her.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Sunday’s announcement by Justice Minister Kiri Allan about forthcoming legislation on hate speech has sparked concerns that the country is headed for a second round of culture wars over free speech. As one journalist states today, Allan is “reigniting last year’s political firestorm”.

Some have suggested that Labour are about to make another attempt – after former Justice Minister Kris Faafoi had earlier put the hate speech law proposals on ice – to push through divisive and controversial legislation. Campaigners against hate speech have expressed their gratitude for Allan’s announcement, while free speech campaigners have warned that they are ready for a big fight.

The reality is likely to be much more prosaic – instead of Labour implementing far-reaching and radical reforms on speech regulation, Kiri Allan can be expected to simply make some tweaks to the current laws. Allan and Labour will be hoping a minimal or watered-down approach will satisfy those calling for hate speech to be suppressed more vehemently.

The background to the current hate speech law reform

The Labour Party has long been keen on tightening up laws on hate speech. And advocates for tighter rules on speech, such as the Human Rights Commission, have campaigned for government action.

But it was the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks that resulted in 51 deaths that initiated the current reform programme. The subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry recommended 44 changes, including reform of hate speech laws. The Commission report complained that the current laws do not “provide a workable mechanism to deal with hate speech”.

The Government agreed to implement these, with Minister Andrew Little being responsible for overseeing the response to the Commission report.

There are a number of possible areas that hate speech campaigners want changes on. The most basic reform is to adjust which groups in society should have legal protection from hate speech – i.e. what forms of speech can be criminalised. At the moment, hate speech laws only target discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin. Religion is the most obvious missing category, with others also calling for gender and gender-diverse groups to be specified as needing protection from hate speech.

The Government has previously been keen to go much further than simply adding religion and gender to the groups to be protected from hate speech. There is an argument that the current definition of hate speech in the law makes prosecutions too difficult, because the threshold for the courts to convict is far too high. And as evidence of this, there has been only one prosecution for hate speech in the last three decades. The Royal Commission argued that the current law “does not provide a credible foundation for prosecution”.

The Labour Government therefore attempted last year to implement a thorough reform of hate speech laws, with the notion that the current rules are “not fit for purpose”. But what they proposed was full of serious problems, and produced a backlash.

This was most vividly exposed when both the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice were unable to explain the reforms to the public. Labour politicians couldn’t promise that the reforms wouldn’t lead to prosecutions for examples such as young people blaming the “Boomer” generation for monopolising housing wealth.

The moderate, watered-down fix on hate speech

There really is no chance that Labour wants to spark a culture war on free speech as it’s about to go into election year. It’s quite the opposite – the Government has an interest in getting this issue off the agenda as quickly and quietly as possible. As many commentators have rightly pointed out, a big debate about Government clamp-downs on political speech would not go down well in an election year.

It’s not surprising, and quite telling, that Labour is talking about wanting to obtain National’s support for their legislative changes. It points strongly to the likelihood that Labour has been developing a very moderate, or watered-down, fix for the hate speech problem.

The Prime Minister is reported as wanting to introduce “a slimmed down reform package” that National could support. As Newsroom’s Marc Daalder argues today, “To get National’s support, the reforms would have to be dramatically different from what was proposed last year.”

There are some clear signs that Labour wants to just focus on fixing the omission of religion from the current hate speech laws, with the PM saying: “I would have thought that amongst politicians there should be good support for saying, actually, you should not experience hate speech and incitement based on your religion. It’s a fairly simple concept”.

Ardern also told media this week that the Government is only aiming at minimal change: “Where there were issues last time was because there were other amendments around some of the thresholds in language that caused some concern, but let’s get back to our first principles on this one.”

It seems obvious from such statements that the upcoming reforms will simply add religion and gender to the list of protected groups, but won’t involve more radical changes to definitions of hate speech. We might also expect that the Government could modernise the legislation to take into account digital communication, and this is also likely to be uncontroversial.

The backlash from advocates of strong laws on hate speech

Justice Minister Kiri Allan made her announcement of hate speech reform this week on TVNZ’s Q+A, saying “I can make this promise to you, I will be making announcements on hate speech by the end of this year” and “I guarantee I will be introducing law I intend to have concluded and put into law by the next election”.

Allan had good political reasons for making this statement, and for keeping the details under wraps. The Government is under pressure to fulfill their promises for reform in this area, and this week the Government had to front up to the second He Whenua Taurikura hui on counter-terrorism and violent extremism, where they knew that would be challenged on this issue. Therefore, a pre-emptive announcement was necessary for this audience, as well as for the Labour Party conference this coming weekend.

Andrew Little is also under strong pressure from the Kāpuia advisory group that he has established to consult with the Government over implementing the Royal Commission recommendations. The chair of Kāpuia, Arihia Bennett, has made numerous complaints to Little about the Government’s “lack of clarity, a lack of funding or a lack of observable progress” in dealing with issues like hate speech.

Other voices for reform such as political commentator Morgan Godfery and Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon have been demanding radical changes on speech regulation. Foon has accused the Government of “dragging its heels” on the reforms and saying that this was allowing “hate allowed to fester”.

Advocates of a much more radical clampdown on political speech are likely to be extremely disappointed by what the Government eventually announces. If the National Party is able to sign up to a minimal change to the legislation, the Green Party and others will almost certainly feel aggrieved that the Government isn’t taking a more radical approach, and Labour might well be accused of capitulating to the free speech brigade.

So although some are expecting free speech advocates and maybe even the National and Act parties to come out fighting against Labour’s upcoming reforms, it’s much more likely is that the advocates of radically-tightened laws on speech will have more cause to revolt against Labour’s mild changes.

Further reading on free speech, hate speech and extremism

Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Hate speech debate overshadows Royal Commission progress
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Disinformation seminar cancelled amid threats, harassment
Ripu Bhatia (Stuff): More action needed to protect vulnerable groups from hate – Amnesty International
Jonty Dine (RNZ): Community groups urge need to combat online hate speech at second counter-terrorism hui
Waatea News: Māori ready to tackle extremism fall-out

Other items of interest and importance today

ECONOMY, BUSINESS, EMPLOYMENT, HOUSE PRICES
Bernard Hickey (Interest): Actually, we’ll almost all be just fine
Richard Harman (Politik): The end of the golden weather (paywalled)
Geraden Cann (Stuff): No money, in negative equity and facing double interest costs a year after buying first home
Morgan Godfery (Stuff): The big banks are making obscene profits. Let’s tax them
Julie Anne Genter (Herald):  Prioritising people over profit with a fairer tax regime (paywalled)
RNZ: Tax cuts not the only tool to help low-income workers – National
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Banks’ big profits ‘mean they have duty to help struggling borrowers’
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Reserve Bank issues warning about rising mortgage rates, falling house prices
David Hargreaves (Interest): RBNZ says house prices still above sustainable levels
David Hargreaves (Interest): Paying our way – how are we managing the mortgage hikes?
Imogen Wells (Newshub): National, Labour back spatting over tax as report paints grim picture for housing market
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): Financial stability: Dark cloud over NZ’s economy as interest rates jump
RNZ: Housing downturn grim, but not another financial crisis – economist
Liam Dann (Herald): Can low unemployment and high wage growth really be a bad thing? (paywalled)
Esther Taunton (Stuff): Here’s what a near-record low unemployment rate really means for workers and businesses
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): Unemployment still at near-record low of 3.3%
Herald: Biggest leap ever recorded in wage growth, unemployment flatlining near record lows
RNZ: Unemployment rate holds steady at 3.3%, wages rise strongly – Stats NZ
David Hargreaves (Interest): Private sector wage rise blows all forecasts out of the water – 8.6%
Jenny Ruth (BusinessDesk): NZ unemployment rate steady at 3.3% in third quarter, wage inflation hot
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Countdown staff agree to 12% pay rise deal

HOUSING CRISIS
Herald Editorial: Getting action on social housing (paywalled)
Denise Piper (Stuff): Government’s $55m funding to help whānau living in tents and cars in Northland
Ashleigh McCaull (RNZ): Govt partnership with Māori aims to fund up to 100 homes in Te Tai Tokerau

PARLIAMENT, HAMILTON WEST BY-ELECTION
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Biggest Budget decision coming next month (paywalled)
Michael Neilson (Herald): National ‘disappointed’ no compromise on Māori electoral roll options
Rachel Maher (Herald): Andrew Little claims Hamilton West Labour candidate was ambushed, not the ambusher
Jonah Franke-Bowell (Stuff): Labour Hamilton West candidate seen at ambush protest against own minister
Richard Prebble: Where Hamilton West goes, goes the country
RNZ: Another step in Hamilton West by-election with issuing of writ
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Convictions quashed for man who was drunk when he emailed PM threatening to kill
Craig Kapitan (Herald): Conviction quashed for Michael Cruikshank, who sent threatening emails to Jacinda Ardern

THREE WATERS
Kate MacNamara (Herald): $70m from Covid fund fuels Three Waters spend up (paywalled)
Te Rina Kowhai (Newshub): Tribal leaders slam mayors’ Three Waters replacement plan
RNZ: Auckland treatment plant that just got $2m upgrade shutdown due to contaminant

LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Todd Niall (Stuff): Less pay for top councillors as Auckland mayor Wayne Brown ‘spreads jam further’
Steven Walton (Stuff): $75,000 by-election sparked by community board member’s resignation
Emily Ireland (Local Democracy Reporting): Wairarapa leaders weigh in on lowering voting age
Caley Callahan (Newshub): Gore officially home to youngest-ever New Zealand mayor after recount application thrown out
RNZ: Gore mayoralty: Tracy Hicks’ bid for recount turned down

HEALTH
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Revealed: The hospital radiology departments at high risk
Stuff: Advocate ‘gutted’ as Pharmac reviews blanket funding of child cancer medicines
RNZ: Pharmac reviewing child cancer funding after patients voice concerns of inconsistencies
RNZ: Covid-19: ‘Variant soup’ set to drive up infections – expert
Jane Nixon (1News): Cure Kids CEO weighs in after Starship rejects $570k donation
Jane Nixon (1News): Starship Foundation fronts amid backlash over $570k rejected donation
Rachel Smalley (Today FM): I am baffled by the decision made by The Starship Foundation
John MacDonald (Herald): Starship shows how beggars can be choosers
Matthew Rosenberg (Local Democracy Reporting): Gisborne falling behind in water fluoridation
Simon Mercep (1News): Families dipped into pockets in bid to save Auckland rest home
Darren Bevan (Newshub): Mike King breaks down discussing latest suicide rates, makes tearful plea to improve Aotearoa’s mental health services

ALCOHOL
Tim Chambers, Joseph Boden, Matthew Hobbs, Nicholas Bowden (The Conversation): Why New Zealand must consider restricting alcohol sponsorship of broadcast sports as part of a wider law reform
Herald Editorial: Finding balance on alcohol outlets (paywalled)
Andrew Bevin (Newsroom): Liquor sale law changes may make licensing trusts redundant

ENVIRONMENT, RMA
Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): David Parker Rejects Co-Governance
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): RMA reform bill introduced ‘within weeks’, PM says
RNZ: Leading NGOs sign open letter calling for PM to support mining ban on conservation land
RNZ: Helen Clark: Mining boom could harm environment, communities
Olivia Wannan (Stuff): Climate Minister blames court for inaction on tougher climate pledge
Ian Powell: Should the Prime Minister go to Cop27? ‘Blood, blood, blood’
Matt Skinner (Interest): Department of Internal Affairs report puts a spotlight on NZ communities & councils facing both flood risk and financial hardship
Katie Todd (RNZ): ‘The first thing buyers ask us’ – Flood zones pose hazards for insuring homeowners
Kevin Trenberth (Newsroom): Climate change reparations – who pays?
Oliver Lewis (BusinessDesk): New Zealand gas production about to ‘fall off a cliff’ (paywalled)
Kerry Harvey (Stuff): Documentary series Brave New Zealand World looks at how we can safeguard against global disasters

JUSTICE
Seni Iasona (Newshub): ACT Party, Women’s Refuge disappointed $20 million victim support scheme helps more alleged perpetrators than victims
Frankie Vaughan (Stuff): Being 10 shouldn’t mean being old enough for criminal responsibility
Chris Lynch: What will stop the violent crime wave committed by Children?
Soumya Bhamidipati (RNZ): Bailiffs to wear body cameras in health and safety move
Stuff: European decision boosts case of NZ resident fighting extradition to China

BUY NOW, PAY LATER DEBT
Rob Stock (Stuff): Government to regulate ‘buy now, pay later’ loans by end of year
Gareth Vaughan (Interest): Buy now pay later transactions to be treated as consumer credit contracts as government moves to regulate
Adam Pearse (Herald): Harmful ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ debt traps targeted in new Government checks
Logan Church (1News): New rules on the way for buy now pay later schemes – Govt
Stewart Sowman-Lund (Spinoff): Farewell to the unlimited freedom of buy now, pay later schemes

FARMING
Conor Knell (Stuff): ‘Back farmers like we back All Blacks’: Luxon lends ear to rural frustrations
RNZ: Groundswell aims to distance itself from Voices for Freedom
Gerhard Uys (Stuff): $12,000 fine won’t put Groundswell farmers off agriculture census boycott

FOREIGN AFFAIRS, TRADE
Thomas Manch (Stuff): New Zealand to reopen diplomatic post in junta-ruled Myanmar
Sam Sachdeva and Emanuel Stoakes (Newsroom): ANZ faces further pressure over Myanmar ties
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Latin America trade deal: NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hints at progress
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): UK-NZ trade deal battles on through British turmoil
James Halpin (Stuff): Case against woman raising funds for Russian army could hinge on bank details – expert

TRANSPORT
Bernard Orsman (Herald): Auckland Transport spends $33m to reduce speed limits (paywalled)
RNZ: Cartel behaviour warning for eight freight forwarding companies

EDUCATION
Anna Whyte (Stuff): Critics say Government’s promises to school-leavers fall flat
John Gerritsen (RNZ): Principals expect pandemic’s disruption to learning will take years to make up for
John Gerritsen (RNZ): Test results indicate pandemic set back children’s education by months

CALLAGHAN, INDIGO, MANAAKI
Damien Venuto (Herald): The Front Page: The ‘murky’ controversy embroiling Callaghan Innovation and Manaaki
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Callaghan: no idea about conflicts in We Are Indigo investigation
Peter Griffin (BusinessDesk): What to learn from the We Are Indigo-Callaghan mess (paywalled)

OTHER
Phil Pennington (RNZ): ‘Strong demand’ for identity verification tool despite ministries’ lack of interest
Lucy Thomson (Newshub): Guy Fawkes weekend sparks debate over whether Government should ban sale of fireworks
Lachy Paterson (Newsroom): November 5 fireworks for Parihaka not Westminster
Matthew Scott (Newsroom): Marathon visa waits despite dedicated immigration team
Jody O’Callaghan (Stuff): Māori have the solutions to Aotearoa’s ‘dark past’

A human rights advocate appealed tonight for people in Aotearoa New Zealand to take personal responsibility in the fight against disinformation and to upskill their critical thinking skills.

Anjum Rahman, project lead of the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono, said this meant taking responsibility for verifying the accuracy and source of information before passing it on and not fuelling hate and misunderstanding.

“Our democracy is very fragile,” she warned while delivering the annual David Wakim Memorial Lecture 2022 with the theme “Protecting Democracy in an Online World” at Parnell’s Jubilee Building.

She said communities were facing challenging and rapidly changing times with climate change, conflicts, inflation and the ongoing pandemic.

“If our democracy fails, all those other things fail as well,” she said.

“And for those of us who are more vulnerable it is a matter of life and death.

“Who most stand to lose their freedom if democracy fails? Who will be on the frontline to be exterminated?”

Rahman is co-chair of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network and a member of the Independent Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum for Countering Terrorism.

Argued strongly for diversity
As an advocate, she has argued strongly for many years in support of diversity and inclusion and in 2019 was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

On the third anniversary of the 15 March 2019 mosque massacre, she wrote in a column for The SpinOff that “we don’t need any more empty platitudes of sorrow . . . we need firm action and strong resolve. Across the board.”

The David Wakim Memorial Lecture 2022.                      Video: Billy Hania

The recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry were more critical now than ever, and absolutely urgent, she wrote.

“In a world that feels chaotic, with war, rising prices, anger and hate expressed in protests across the world, our hearts seek a certainty that isn’t there.

“We need more urgency, and in many areas. I’m still disappointed with the Counter-Terrorism legislation passed last year, granting greater powers without evidence of any benefit. Hate speech legislation has been delayed, and we await a full review and overhaul of the national security system.”

A founding member of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, Rahman gave a wide-ranging address tonight on the online challenges for democracy, and answered a host of questions from the audience of about 100.

“I’m really worried about trolls,” said one. “They affect government, they influence voters, they have an impact on all sorts of decision making – what can be done about it?”

Rahman replied that it was very difficult question – “I wish there was a simple answer.”

Removing troll incentives
She said there needed to be more education and greater awareness of the activities of trolls and the sort of social media platforms they operated on.

One problem was that the more attention paid trolls got, it often meant the more money they were getting.

A challenge was to remove the incentive being given to them.

Award-winning cartoonist Malcolm Evans asked Rahman what her response was to the global situation “right now” with the invasion of Ukraine where people were “under intense pressure to vilify the Russians . . . treating them as ‘evil’.”

He added that “we live in a time that is probably the most dangerous that I have experienced in my lifetime … we are facing an Armageddon and I blame the media for that.

“It’s a disgrace.”

This led to a discussion by Pax Christi Aotearoa’s Janfrie Wakim about how Evans lost his job as a cartoonist on The New Zealand Herald in 2003 for “naming Israeli apartheid” over the repression of Palestinians to the loud applause of the audience.

‘Quality journalism’ paywalls
In a discussion about media, Rahman said she was disturbed by the failures of the media business model that meant increasingly “quality journalism” was being placed behind paywalls while the public that could not afford paywalls were being served “poor quality” information.

Introducing Anjum Rahman, Pax Christi’s Susan Healy said how “especially delighted the Wakim whanau were” that she had agreed to give the lecture.

David Wakim was the inaugural president of Pax Christi Aotearoa, an independent section of Pax Christi International, a Catholic organisation founded in France at the end of World War Two committed to working “to transform a world shaken by violence, terrorism, deepening inequalities, and global insecurity”.

Growing up in a Sydney Catholic family, Wakim was an advocate of interfaith dialogue. His travels in Muslim countries strengthened his links with the three faiths of Abraham – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

He helped establish the Council of Christians and Muslims in Auckland, but was especially committed to Palestinian rights.

Wakim died in 2005 and the annual lecture honours his and Pax Christi’s mahi for Tiriti o Waitangi, interfaith dialogue, peace education, human rights and restorative justice.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

We call for a world in which technology is built in service of humanity and where our global public square protects human rights above profits.

Right now, the huge potential of technology to advance our societies has been undermined by the business model and design of the dominant online platforms.

But we remind all those in power that true human progress comes from harnessing technology to advance rights and freedoms for all, not sacrificing them for the wealth and power of a few.

We urge rights-respecting democracies to wake up to the existential threat of information ecosystems being distorted by a Big Tech business model fixated on harvesting people’s data and attention, even as it undermines serious journalism and polarises debate in society and political life.

When facts become optional and trust disappears, we will no longer be able to hold power to account. We need a public sphere where fostering trust with a healthy exchange of ideas is valued more highly than corporate profits and where rigorous journalism can cut through the noise.

Many governments around the world have exploited these platforms’ greed to grab and consolidate power. That is why they also attack and muzzle the free press.

Clearly, these governments cannot be trusted to address this crisis. But nor should we put our rights in the hands of technology companies’ intent on sustaining a broken business model that actively promotes disinformation, hate speech and abuse.

The resulting toxic information ecosystem is not inevitable. Those in power must do their part to build a world that puts human rights, dignity, and security first, including by safeguarding scientific and journalistic methods and tested knowledge. To build that world, we must:

Bring an end to the surveillance-for-profit business model

The invisible “editors” of today’s information ecosystem are the opaque algorithms and recommender systems built by tech companies that track and target us. They amplify misogyny, racism, hate, junk science and disinformation — weaponising every societal fault line with relentless surveillance to maximise “engagement”.

This surveillance-for-profit business model is built on the con of our supposed consent. But forcing us to choose between allowing platforms and data brokers to feast on our personal data or being shut out from the benefits of the modern world is simply no choice at all.

The vast machinery of corporate surveillance not only abuses our right to privacy, but allows our data to be used against us, undermining our freedoms and enabling discrimination.

This unethical business model must be reined in globally, including by bringing an end to surveillance advertising that people never asked for and of which they are often unaware.

Europe has made a start, with the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts. Now these must be enforced in ways that compel platforms to de-risk their design, detox their algorithms and give users real control.

Privacy and data rights, to date largely notional, must also be properly enforced. And advertisers must use their money and influence to protect their customers against a tech industry that is actively harming people.

What an incredible, hopeful time in Oslo! Thank you for the dreams and the laughter, dear friends! #CourageON @NobelPeaceOslo https://t.co/zfvuHwWFxp

— Maria Ressa (@mariaressa) September 4, 2022

End tech discrimination and treat people everywhere equally
Global tech companies afford people unequal rights and protection depending on their status, power, nationality, and language. We have seen the painful and destructive consequences of tech companies’ failure to prioritise the safety of all people everywhere equally.

Companies must be legally required to rigorously assess human rights risks in every country they seek to expand in, ensuring proportionate language and cultural competency. They must also be forced to bring their closed-door decisions on content moderation and algorithm changes into the light and end all special exemptions for those with the most power and reach.

These safety, design, and product choices that affect billions of people cannot be left to corporations to decide. Transparency and accountability rules are an essential first step to reclaiming the internet for the public good.

Rebuild independent journalism as the antidote to tyranny
Big tech platforms have unleashed forces that are devastating independent media by swallowing up online advertising while simultaneously enabling a tech-fueled tsunami of lies and hate that drown out facts.

For facts to stand a chance, we must end the amplification of disinformation by tech platforms. But this alone is not enough. Just 13 percent of the world’s population can currently access a free press.

If we are to hold power to account and protect journalists, we need unparalleled investment in a truly independent media persevering in situ or working in exile that ensures its sustainability while incentivising compliance with ethical norms in journalism.

21st century newsrooms must also forge a new, distinct path, recognising that to advance justice and rights, they must represent the diversity of the communities they serve. Governments must ensure the safety and independence of journalists who are increasingly being attacked, imprisoned, or killed on the frontlines of this war on facts.

We, as Nobel Laureates, from across the world, send a united message: together we can end this corporate and technological assault on our lives and liberties, but we must act now.

It is time to implement the solutions we already have to rebuild journalism and reclaim the technological architecture of global conversation for all humanity.

We call on all rights-respecting democratic governments to:

1. Require tech companies to carry out independent human rights impact assessments that must be made public as well as demand transparency on all aspects of their business — from content moderation to algorithm impacts to data processing to integrity policies.

2. Protect citizens’ right to privacy with robust data protection laws.

3. Publicly condemn abuses against the free press and journalists globally and commit funding and assistance to independent media and journalists under attack.

We call on the EU to:

4. Be ambitious in enforcing the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts so these laws amount to more than just “new paperwork” for the companies and instead force them to make changes to their business model, such as ending algorithmic amplification that threatens fundamental rights and spreads disinformation and hate, including in cases where the risks originate outside EU borders.

5. Urgently propose legislation to ban surveillance advertising, recognizing this practice is fundamentally incompatible with human rights.

6. Properly enforce the EU General Data Protection Regulation so that people’s data rights are finally made reality.

7. Include strong safeguards for journalists’ safety, media sustainability and democratic guarantees in the digital space in the forthcoming European Media Freedom Act.

8. Protect media freedom by cutting off disinformation upstream. This means there should be no special exemptions or carve-outs for any organisation or individual in any new technology or media legislation. With globalised information flows, this would give a blank check to those governments and non-state actors who produce industrial scale disinformation to harm democracies and polarize societies everywhere.

9. Challenge the extraordinary lobbying machinery, the astroturfing campaigns and recruitment revolving door between big tech companies and European government institutions.

We call on the UN to:

10. Create a special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General focused on the Safety of Journalists (SESJ) who would challenge the current status quo and finally raise the cost of crimes against journalists.

Presented by 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov at the Freedom of Expression Conference, Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, Norway, on September 2, 2022. Republished from Rappler with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Journalist and publisher Maria Ressa has called on tech and social media giants to practise “enlightened self-interest” amid a global call for platforms to step up in the fight against disinformation.

“The world that you’ve created has already shown that we must change it. I continue to appeal for enlightened self-interest,” said Ressa, chief executive and founder of Rappler, in an online lecture for the Facebook and the Big Lie series.

Ressa, a veteran journalist and Nobel Peace laureate who will be receiving the award this Friday, has been studying, reporting on, and sounding the alarm against the use of social media platforms as a means to spread lies and hate.

The Rappler boss herself has been the subject of harassment online and of legal cases against her in the Philippines.

Platforms like Facebook, said Ressa, give the same weight on posts, whether it is a lie or a fact, in a bid to increase user engagement.

While it has meant more revenue for the platforms, it also means that posts that spark emotion — whether or not they are based on fact — gain the most traction online.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen had earlier revealed that the algorithm for instances, puts weight on “angry” reactions more than regular likes.

‘Moderate the greed’
“In the Philippines, we say ‘moderate the greed.’ [These platforms] are part of our future, that’s why we’re partners,” she explained.

The stakes are even higher in countries like the Philippines, which will be electing a new president in May 2022.

“Why we must fight disinformation. It weakens, and ultimately subverts, democracy, by undermining the factual basis of reality, by denying the standards of truth.”

— #FightDisinfo

“We cannot not do anything because we in the Philippines have elections on May 9. If we do not have integrity of facts, we won’t have integrity of elections,” warned Ressa.

Platforms, after all, are anything but clueless and helpless.

Facebook, for instance, put more weight on “news ecosystem quality” or NEQ after employees found that election-related information were spreading on the platform in the days following the US elections in 2021.

The NEQ, according to The New York Times, is a “secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.”

The lies asserted that the elections were rigged and that Donald Trump, then US president, was the true winner.

The ‘big lie’ persists
he “big lie,” as it has since been called, persists to this day.

Ressa said she woud be asking Facebook “behind the scenes and in front,” via Rappler’s partnerships, to turn up the NEQ locally.

Increasing the weight of the NEQ, at least in the US, meant that for a while, mainstream media accounts — The New York Times, CNN, and NPR — were more prominent on the Facebook feed than hyperpartisan pages.

“The foundational problem is that facts and lies are treated equally, which is what has poisoned the information ecosystem,” added Ressa.

Duterte, who won the 2016 elections by a wide margin in a plurality, is among the first national candidates to effectively use social media in a Philippine election.

Social media hasn’t just changed how regular citizens act and candidates campaign, it has also changed sitting leaders’ tactics.

“Leaders in the past that would take over, their first challenge is always how to unite people. Now, with social media because of the incentive schemes, we’re seeing leaders awarded if they divide,” said Ressa.

More manipulation tools
“Illiberal governments have gotten more tools to manipulate people,” she added. Rappler investigations later found that pro-Duterte networks used fake accounts to spread lies and disinformation well into his term as president.

Rappler started out as a Facebook page in mid-2011 and has since grown to be among the leading news sites in the Philippines. The news organisation faces at least seven active pending cases before different courts in the Philippines.

These are on top of online attacks over its reporting on the Duterte administration, including its bloody “war on drugs” and allegations of corruption among the President’s allies.

Ressa and a former researcher were convicted in June 2020 for a cyber libel law that hadn’t even been legislated when the article first came out.

Ressa is the first Filipino individual awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize and is the only woman in this year’s roster of laureates.

Ressa won the Peace Prize alongside Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov.

They won the prize “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

Republished from Rappler with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A Filipina journalist who cut her teeth as a young reporter in the Marcos dictatorship years and now heads an investigative digital media outlet and a New Zealand journalist who was on board the bombed Rainbow Warrior environmental campaign ship are keynote speakers at an Asia-Pacific conference opening in Auckland today.

The Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) is hosting the three-day 2021 virtual conference in partnership with Auckland University of Technology with the theme “Change, Adaptation and Culture: Media and Communication in Pandemic Times”.

Glenda Gloria, an award-winning investigative journalist and author of Under The Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao, is co-founder and executive editor of Rappler, which is at the forefront of media freedom struggles in the Philippines.

Her colleague, Maria Ressa, recently jointly won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, for championing a free press and she has been the target of multiple lawsuits in an attempt by the Duterte administration to silence the media.

Gloria will talk about current challenges facing the media in the Philippines and across the Asia Pacific region.

David Robie, founding director of the Pacific Media Centre and recently retired professor of Pacific journalism, is speaking about the media and covid-19 “disinformation and hate speech”.

Dr Robie sailed on board the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior that was bombed by French secret agents in Auckland in 1985 and he has reported on environmental issues, climate issues and independence struggles.

He has been the head of three Pacific university journalism programmes and the author of several media and politics books, including Eyes of Fire and Blood on their Banner.

‘International sharing’
Senior communications lecturer at AUT Khairiah A Rahman, principal organiser of the event, said there was much to be achieved from the conference.

“We will be looking at international sharing, networking, future collaborative projects, and research publications in journals and books,” Rahman said.

The ACMC received more than 60 paper submissions and approved 44 peer-reviewed abstracts for the biannual conference which was established in the Philippines and began in 2008.

Six international ACMC conferences have been hosted by universities in Penang, Malaysia; Bangkok, Thailand; Yogyakarta, Indonesia; Hong Kong; Philippines; Taiwan; and now at AUT in Auckland.

“We had several pre-conference talks which yielded as many as 94 participants. In real — not virtual — ACMC conferences, we welcome 130 to 160 attendees from 22 countries,” Rahman said.

The opening addresses will be made by Professor Felix Tan, associate dean research and acting dean of AUT’s Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies, and professor Azman Azwan Azmawa of Malaysia, president of the ACMC.

Among papers to be presented are topics such Media, Gender, and Intersectionality in the Pandemic Times; Lockdown Love: Computer-mediated Romantic Intimacies among Select Gay Filipino Couples; The Articulation of Papuan Women Ethnic Identity on Facebook; AUT’s Cindy Wang on Anyone can be a Vlogger: Sri Lankan Moviegoers in Covid-19 Pandemic Era.

Critical thinking
AUT’s Rahman and associate professor Petra Theuissen will jointly present a paper titled Concept Maps as Foundations for Critical Thinking in Public Relations Study.

Other papers to be presented include The Weibo Discussion about Taiwanese Legislation of Same-Sex Marriage presented by Massey University’s Fei Xiao.

Also, Rahman will present a timely paper after the New Zealand’s 2019 mosque massacre titled Shifting Dynamics in Popular Culture on Islamophobia Media Narratives.

Among the conference moderators is Jim Marbrook, a filmmaker and an AUT senior lecturer in screen production who in 2020 was co-producer of the documentary Loimata, The Sweetest Tears that won the 2021 FIFO grand jury prize in Tahiti. He will moderate a “media in quarantine” session.

Other moderators include associate professor Camille Nakhid, chair of the Pacific Media Centre which has been in hiatus for a year, Dr Theuissen and Deepti Bhargava, who will moderate a “crisis in communication challenges” session.

The conference begins this afternoon and ends on Saturday.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

October 2021 was a horror month for Facebook as the headlines screamed “Facebook under fire” which started with the social media behemoth suffering an outage for several hours.

Then it had a whistleblower — American data scientist Francis Haugen — who accused the company of:

• prioritising growth over user safety;
• bowing to the will of state censors in some countries;
• allowing hate speech to burgeon in other countries;
• ignoring fake accounts that may influence voters and undermine elections;
• allowing the antivaccine message to proliferate; and
• having algorithms that fuel noxious behaviour online.

Add to that, a major impending problem of capturing a young audience who are flocking elsewhere and turning their backs on the oldest social media platform which was founded in 2004 by Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Even so, its success as the leading platform is undeniable with it announcing a $9 billion quarterly profit in October with a massive 3 billion users.

It was the access to smartphones when they were offered in the Pacific and technology that drove Facebook’s popularity to largely receptive devotees. The uptake of the social media platform in French Polynesia (72.1 percent penetration by 2020), Fiji (68.2 percent, Guam (87.8 percent), Niue (91.7 percent), Samoa (67.2 percent) and Tonga (62.3 percent) made it a no-brainer for Sue Ahearn, founder of the highly credible The Pacific Newsroom page to use the platform.

Measured success
The success of The Pacific Newsroom page can be measured by the site garnering in excess of 40,500 members most of who can participate actively by contributing to the page.

Ahearn is no stranger to the Asia-Pacific region. An Australian journalist for more than 40 years, 25 at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), who originally hails from Martinborough in New Zealand, she was drawn to set up the page primarily because of misinformation that tends to flourish in the Pacific news.

“It came to me about four years ago when the ABC cut back on all of its coverage of the Pacific, and I could see there was a big gap there,” she says.

“The ABC was only providing a small service and there was a lack of interest in most of the Australian media. You could see the technology was changing, how the information was flowing from the region was changing.’’

The apathy for a thirst for Pacific knowledge has had a profound effect on insularity in the media, especially in Australia and New Zealand, although the Public Interest Journalism Fund is attempting to address that in some way in New Zealand.

“I wish I knew, Sean Dorney, Jemima Garrett and all of the Pacific journalists just can’t fathom why is there so little interest in our region among the Australian media,’’ says Ahearn.

“It doesn’t make sense. There tends to be three or four journalists that cover the region and try to convince news outlets to run their stories or send reporters, and that has become very difficult.”

Only Pacific correspondent based in Pacific
Natalie Whiting of the ABC and the recipient of the Dorney-Walkley Foundation grant 2021 is the only journalist from Australasia who is based in the Pacific. She is stationed in the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby.

“In New Zealand, that’s not a problem and New Zealand does good coverage of the Pacific. New Zealand has a much closer relationship with the Pacific,” Ahearn says.

However, Michael Field in Auckland, a page administrator and a veteran of the Pacific who went to journalism school with Ahearn, had qualms about the coverage out of New Zealand.

“The thing that really bugs me is that only Radio New Zealand (RNZ) seems to be doing Pacific news. For example, you’d pick up the (New) Herald and see who’s covering the hurricane out in Fiji only to see it is a re-run of a RNZ story,” says Field.

“It bothers me. The Herald should have had a different angle on the story, RNZ a different angle, The Dominion Post would be different and there would be work for stringers in the Pacific. Now that is not the case because RNZ takes up everybody else’s work and runs it that way,

“I guess that is the reality of it now, but it seems the voice of the Pacific these days is state radio.

“Call me old fashioned, but I’d be too embarrassed to run a story quoting another media organisation, and if you had to do it you’d do it grudgingly. We are starting to fail in the coverage of the region,” he says.

Success stirs amazement
The success and growth of The Pacific Newsroom as an organic, quasi news agency akin to Reuters, Agence France Press (AFP) or Australian Associated Press (AAP) in a tiny way, has caught Ahearn by amazement.

“I am surprised because we have a lot of engagement, some stories get 80,000 or 90,000 engagements so there is a lot of interest in it, and I think it fills a huge niche.

She speaks about the talanoa concept of The Pacific Newsroom.

“It’s like a town square where people can meet, share stories and talk about what is happening. Michael (Field) and I spend an enormous time on this project and we’re basically volunteers, we’re not being paid or making any money from it,” she says.

Nor would she entertain the thought of applying for funding either in New Zealand or Australia, preferring instead to maintain their editorial independence.

“Mike and I have discussed this, and we think one of the main attractions of our site is it is not monetised, that it is a voluntary site, there are no advertisements on it, we try and keep it independent, and we are both at the stage in our lives where we’re not working fulltime in the media,” Ahearn says.

“We’ve got time to spend doing this as a public interest, we really enjoy doing it too, it’s a lot of fun.

Many great stories
“There are so many great stories in the Pacific that need to be amplified to the world.

“Things are happening with technology and it’s giving a much stronger voice to the Pacific whether it’s on climate change or fishing or other important issues and that is why it is going to get stronger and stronger,” Ahearn says.

Among the stories that gained the site momentum was the University of the South Pacific (USP) having its vice-chancellor and president Professor Pal Ahluwalia at the centre of controversy during his first term when Fiji government and educational officials tried to oust him from office in the so-called USP saga, eventually unceremoniously deporting him in a move widely condemned around the Pacific.

“The big story which moved us along was the USP saga last year, for quite political reasons which had to do with the players, we were leaked all the reports and people could see if it got a certain amount of information on Pacific Newsroom that things might happen, and it did,” Field says.

“More recently we’ve had the same with the Samoan elections where a number of players wanted to be interviewed directly; the former Prime Minister (Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi) seemed to have some misinformed view that we are more powerful than we are. We cope with that so it is constantly moving thing.”

Another worrying development were the libel laws in Australia where last month the court ruled publishers to be liable for defamatory comments.

“The libel laws, it’s another tension and another thing we’ve got to watch. We watch it like a hawk (as moderators) and that is not to characterise the particular audience we’ve got,” Field says.

‘Shooting your mouth off’
“Shooting your mouth off seems to be regarded in much of the Pacific as a God-given right — ‘why you trying to stop me from saying this’, we just delete people now. We tried saying to people right at the beginning we didn’t need expletives, swear words and all that stuff, and we were going to take them down.

“It is learning experience, moderating a site like Pacific Newsroom can be hard, depressing work and sometimes there’s a lot of people that sort of feel they have to say something even though it is a complete nonsense, and it is hard yakka that sort of stuff,’’ Field says.

On the flip side of it were the tangible rewards that make it all worthwhile.

“I can remember one particular point where we were tracking a superyacht that was tripping around Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga; there were people from quite remote village areas of these countries that would send us pictures saying, ‘here is a picture of the yacht that has just passed my village ‘. Whereas back in the day you tried to get a shortwave radio operator to tell you what happened three weeks after the event.

“The Pacific is now full of people with smartphones and with good connections so we can cover everything in the Pacific,” Field says.

As for the credibility of the site, Field declined an approach from a major mainstream New Zealand media company that sought copyright and permission to use the material that was published.

Then there was the young journalist from another mainstream media company who asked Field for a contact in relation to a Vanuatu story, telling Field that they all shared their contacts in the newsroom. Needless to say, he went away disappointed and empty-handed.

Ancient settler societies
Just how well The Pacific Newsroom is regarded in the Pacific is summed up eloquently by history associate professor Morgan Tuimaleali’ifano of the USP who tells it with a Pacific panache.

“Apart from Australia, New Zealand, Tokelau, Hawai’i, Guam, American Samoa, West Papua, Rapanui, and the French territories (New Caledonia, Uvea and Futuna, Tahiti), the nature of independent and self-governing Pacific societies is that they are ancient settler societies steeped in conservatism,” Tuimaleali’ifano says.

“While their constitutions have absorbed Western influences, imperial laws, Christianity, fundamental freedoms/rights, monetary capitalism, they remain steeped in ancient systems of governance based largely on hereditary hierarchies.

“Two worlds co-exist with the constitutional democratic model heavily influenced by kinship patterns of thought and behaviour. Within kinship hierarchies, there exists diverse governance structures and no two villages share the exact governing structure,” he says.

“Equally important are the constitutions and parliamentary legislation. These law-making institutions together with the judiciary are constantly evolving as they must with changing circumstances and best practices.

“It is within these social dynamics that journalism provides the Fourth or Fifth Estate to maintain an even keel on the Pacific’s growth as a viable region of nation-states.

“The Pacific Newsroom plays a vital role, of mirroring the changing Pasifika people needs and commenting on sensitive matters that many may find unsavoury difficult and overwhelming to articulate within ultra-conservative societies.

‘Without fear or favour’
“Without fear or favour, The Pacific Newsroom and its sister networks provide a critical service for a multi-faceted Pasifika struggling to reconcile and reshape a new consciousness for Pasifika.

“These include the enduring issues of regional identity and solidarity and unity within the context of relentless ideological and geopolitical power plays.”

As associate professor and head of journalism at USP Shailendra Singh in Suva, who continues to strive to keep his students well abreast in journalism under draconian media laws in Fiji, says:

“It is indeed a success story, due to a large following, because of media restrictions in Fiji. Users from Fiji especially feel more comfortable expressing themselves on this page.

“The page is prudently and professionally moderated, so it is respectable. The page uses information from credible news sources. (Independent sources like Bob Howarth on Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste; former Vanuatu Daily Post publisher Dan McGarry; current Pacific Island Times publisher Mar-Vic Cagurangan; and photojournalist Ben Bohane, until he returned to Australia from Vanuatu; as well as David Robie‘s Asia-Pacific Report which is a huge contributor to the page).

“I promote USP journalism students’ work on Pacific Newsroom. It is exemplary of how Facebook can support democracy.”

A vital source of information in the covid era. You get a cross-section of news and views on one platform. It is definitely the most popular virtual “kava bar” in the Pacific.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When significant voices on the political left start speaking out against Labour’s proposed hate speech laws it’s a sign that they’re in big trouble. With criticisms now coming from across the political spectrum, it’s much more likely that the Government will ditch the botched speech regulation reforms.

The latest leftwing activist to speak out against the proposals is unionist Matt McCarten. He is encouraging the public to make submissions against the proposals (submissions close tomorrow).

McCarten’s leftwing credentials are strong – not only has he been involved in progressive and socialist organising for decades, he was the Labour Party’s Chief of Staff at Parliament for two years from 2014. His opposition will carry a lot weight.

This week he made the following statement: “Free speech is not a left-right political issue. It’s about democratic civil society where everyone has a right to have their say. Sometimes your opinion can make other people uncomfortable and even create conflict. But sharing your views can start a real conversation of ideas that often leads to positive societal change. If we risk free speech then we risk progress. We must not allow that.”

McCarten also gave a lengthy interview with another leftwing activist, Dane Giraud, of the Free Speech Union, on the problems he sees with the proposals, as well as wider criticisms of the contemporary left – see: Interview with legend of the NZ Union movement Matt McCarten.

McCarten’s views in this interview have also been discussed by leftwing blogger Steven Cowan – see: Matt McCarten: The liberal left has abandoned working class politics.

Cowan has also written about his own opposition to what he sees as a clampdown on political activity and expression – see: We need more democracy, not less. He argues the hate speech laws are just a continuation of the growth of a “liberal support for authoritarian identity or woke politics and for cancel culture”. In contrast, he points to historic socialist figures who have battled for free speech.

In this regard, it’s also worth reading Victoria University of Wellington academics Michael Johnston and James Kierstead who explain how free speech has been vital to not just democracy and progress, but for marginal groups liberating themselves – see: Hate speech law a threat to democracy. They say: “The historical record, from the suffragettes to the civil rights movement to gay liberation, makes it clear: free speech has been a vital – perhaps the vital – tool in the struggle of marginalised peoples to defend their rights.”

They have written this week about their opposition to the proposals – see: Why the new ‘hate speech’ legislation should be scrapped. They argue that leftwing governments should be concerned with advancing leftwing policies and dealing with problems faced by those at the bottom, but Ardern’s Government is instead pursuing an illiberal programme on political expression. They say the Government is siding with a more illiberal movement around the world that is concerned with suppressing open debate.

The political commentator who has led the fight against the hate speech laws is Chris Trotter. Last week he reported on the only authoritative public survey that has been carried out on the hate speech proposals, which shows the public is clearly more opposed than supportive – see: Free speech vs hate speech – by numbers.

The survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union shows that 43 per cent are either strongly or somewhat opposed, 31 per cent are somewhat or strongly in favour, and 15 per cent are neutral. The survey shows that Labour and Green voters are much more inclined to support the proposals, and National and Act supports much less so. There are some other interesting demographic skews as well – in terms of gender, ethnicity, income, and geography.

Trotter has written at length about the problems with the hate speech proposals. His latest column on this is a plea to the Prime Minister not to go ahead with the ill-thought-out changes to the law – see: I understand why you want to do it, Jacinda – but don’t.

Trotter explains that the horrors of the Mosque attacks have made this a personal quest for Ardern, but argues it’s a mistaken response that won’t achieve its objective and will have many undemocratic and harmful consequences.

The Government-friendly blogsite The Standard has also published a strong critique of the new law, pointing out that the existence of free speech has allowed radical political organisation to occur, and “we need our existing freedom of expression protected more, not less” – see: Oppose this new hate speech bill. They point out that the Labour Party was able to be founded because of free speech, and “I doubt the Labour Party would have been able to exist today if this proposed control of speech had occurred then.”

Others on the left have also been outspoken. Martyn Bradbury, the editor of the Daily Blog, has written frequently about how the left should be opposing the Government’s reform ideas. In a recent blog post he says: “we are the Left, we should be championing free speech, not repressing it! We can’t allow brittle millennial trigger culture to hand the State powers that history tells us will be used against us!” – see: Kris Faafoi has gone into hiding over Hate Speech law & would Debbie Ngarewa-Packer get prosecuted?.

Also writing on the Daily Blog, John Minto has labelled the proposed hate speech laws “feel good legislation” that “comes with its own awful side effects” – see: Challenging hate speech – yes but let’s adapt our existing legislation.

Minto argues that, although the Government thinks the reforms would protect minorities, it’s possible minorities would be the victims of clamp downs. For example, “I think it will be the Muslim community and progressive voices who are more likely to feel the harsh edge of this law”, and other activist groups such as pro-Palestine movements would easily be labelled hateful and threatened with prosecution.

This last point has also been made by media law scholar Steven Price, who pointed out on TVNZ’s Q+A on Sunday “Hate-speech laws are often used to prosecute the very minorities that they are designed to protect” such as “gay people who are attacking religions who are attacking them”. You can watch this here: Q+A with Jack Tame – Lawyers ‘tearing their hair out’ over proposed hate speech laws.

For an excellent review of the Q+A debate, see Graham Adams’ latest column: The thorny hate-speech debate sorts sheep from goats. He discusses Price’s negative evaluations of the possible law changes – especially his view that it would be difficult to establish what is and isn’t a crime under the Government proposals.

Adams also highlights the appearance on the Q+A panel of former Labour MP Sue Moroney, who grapples with the lack of clarity in the proposals, essentially recommending that people self-censor to avoid prosecution. He quotes Moroney: “Well here’s a tip for middle New Zealand. If you think that what you’re about to do or say or tweet might actually be hate speech or might be captured by the law, don’t do it… and we’ll all be better off… If you’re making that judgement – ‘Could this be illegal?’ – don’t do it!”

Adams also points to a recently published video of police officer warning a street preacher: “There is a difference between preaching and hate speech and you are very close to crossing the line”. On this video, barrister and legal commentator Graeme Edgeler has tweeted to say: “The police officer is recorded saying there’s a fine line between preaching and hate speech. He then explicitly acknowledges they had not crossed that line, and still thinks he has a role in policing what they are saying. That is concerning.”

Edgeler has written frequently about the Government’s new proposals. His concluding blog post is a must-read, as he argues strongly against the hate speech laws in their current form, and he is highly critical of how the Government has gone about the reform process – see: The New New Prohibition.

Edgeler draws parallels with other draconian attempts to outlaw harmful activities such as alcohol and drugs, which have been counterproductive. He says: “We may be facing a similar issue with hate speech.”

Amongst his many problems with the proposals, Edgeler highlights the lack of certainty over what would actually qualify as illegal hate speech in the new rules, which he says would have a chilling impact on public debate: “An important component of the rule of law (perhaps the most important) is certainty. The law should be declared in advance so that people can comply with it. And the biggest problem for people who will try to moderate their behaviour in response to a new criminal law isn’t whether they can recognise a bunch of things that will be covered by it, it’s whether they can recognise what things won’t. Because if it is not clear, then important, protected speech will be chilled.”

Edgeler points to another lawyer’s strong arguments about the problems of enforcement – the idea that even if the legal system ends up absolving an individual of hate speech crimes, the mere fact of having to fight a prosecution will be extremely chilling – see Liam Hehir’s Hate speech and what legal elites sometimes miss about the law.

This roundup column has focused on some of the hate speech law dissenters, most of whom are firmly on the left of the political spectrum. But there are other progressives who have been very favourable to the new rules, and are worth checking out – see Donna Miles’ New hate speech law needs our love, Eddie Clark’s Why ‘inciting violence’ should not be the only threshold for defining hate speech in New Zealand, Joel Maxwell’s Hate speech proposals should have started with Te Tiriti, and Guled Mire’s When we’re afraid to speak, democracy is threatened.

Ultimately it seems likely that Ardern will pragmatically decide to ditch the proposals, given that they have turned out to be such a mess. This will be hard to do, since Ardern has made much of her promise and it’s a Labour Party manifesto commitment. Nonetheless, according to Graham Adams there are signs the Prime Minister is trying to find a way out – see: Is Ardern preparing her escape route from hate speech laws?.

Finally, the Minister of Justice responsible for the hate speech proposals gave a train wreck of an interview about the reforms and then went to ground – or as one commentator recently said is probably “tied up in a basement somewhere by the Prime Minister’s staff and not allowed to do interviews”. But his failure to front on this and other important issues is explained today by Jo Moir – see: What’s eating Kris Faafoi?.