Legal Beagle: Steelmanning hate speech reform
3 Responses
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It’s not too late to have your say on the Government’s hate speech proposals, which you can do here. Public comment is being accepted until early August.
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People who live in a place like New Zealand should not be made to feel that they do not belong
I wish there were more MPs who actually believed this. I'm thinking, for example, of Willie Jackson's "Dan Bidois—he needs to go back to Italy", or some National Party thing I can't find now (maybe from Simon Bridges's time?) contrasting Labour's policy of giving criminals the vote with National's policy of deporting them (as if all criminals were immigrants; actually, I believe there's evidence that disporportionately few of our criminals are immigrants).
And then there's Kris Faafoi's use of his ministerial position not merely to incite discrimination on the basis of nationality but to actually intensify the government's own discrimination on that basis. Answers like this encourage people to think of migrants not as people but as units of labour supply; if they were people, they'd need food to eat, clothes to wear, teachers for their children, and so on, thus increasing demand for labour, as well as its supply. And his treatment of automation as a substitute for labour, rather than a complementary good, reveals that he would prefer that New Zealanders be displaced from employment by machines, rather than that they be displaced from employment by migrants; thus he's treating migrants as if they're morally inferior to machines.
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I've made my submission. One area that definitely needs looking at is dark money, and the astroturfers and concentrated media monopolies that it sponsors. I've read that such monopolies are just as detrimental to freedom of speech as the Great Firewall of China or the Putin regime in Russia.
https://theconversation.com/is-australias-media-market-one-of-the-worlds-most-concentrated-68437
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