What should we do about Brian Tamaki?

I debated free speech and hate speech this week, in the shadow of Brian Tamaki’s racist incitement to violence

What an arsehole. But I guess one thing you can say about Brian Tamaki is that he reminds us that free speech is not an abstract, high-principled thing. Words can be dangerous. People can get hurt.

The free-speech debate got a good airing on Thursday night, when two teams squared off in the second annual Keith Locke Memorial Debate. The moot: “That hate speech laws threaten free speech.”.

Arguing the affirmative were Bradbury Group podcaster and political commentator Martyn Bomber Bradbury, Stuff columnist and Substacker Verity Johnson, and Thomas Beagle from the Council for Civil Liberties.

I was on the negative team, along with human-rights activist Anjum Rahman and Yasmine Serhan, a Green Party candidate who has been active in Te Tiriti o Waitangi Justice and Palestinian Liberation.

Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to give a simple yes/no answer to the question. Hate speech is a serious problem with no obvious solution. I think the other speakers felt the same. But it doesn’t follow we should do nothing.

On both sides, we did our best to clarify the issues as we saw them. It was notable that both were highly critical of the Free Speech Union and both claimed that Tamaki’s racist incitements revealed the rightness of their arguments.

In a way, we should have all thrown out our speaking notes and instead debated the question that’s very real and in front of us right now: What should we, Aotearoa New Zealand, do about Brian Tamaki?

In recent years, the Christchurch mosque murders have framed our debate on hate speech and free speech. We have also to contend with our long specific history of hate speech against Māori. But last weekend Tamaki upped the ante, calling for the expulsion of entire immigrant communities and the burning of places of worship.

Should he be ignored? Locked up? Or something inbetween?

Legally, you would think there was a straightforward case for him to answer: he incited violence and that’s illegal. Dave Dobbyn was arrested for inciting a riot during a concert in Aotea Square in 1984, although he didn’t, and was completely exonerated in court. Tame Iti was arrested for planning violence in 2007, in an illegal police raid, and he was also exonerated. But Tamaki has avoided arrest. What the hell?

Is the law not strong enough for the police to believe he’d be convicted? If so, that’s an argument it should be stronger. Or have the police decided it’s all too hard? Is Brian Tamaki Exhibit A for the prosecution, that we need a hate speech law, or is he Exhibit A for the defence, that such a law undermines too many other civil liberties?

Brian Tamaki would turn himself into a martyr if he was arrested, and perhaps that’s what he wants, but that’s no reason not to arrest him.

He’d turn himself into a martyr if he was arrested, and perhaps that’s what he wants, but that’s no reason not to arrest him. The Christchurch mosque murderer wanted to be a martyr too, but it’s utterly right he’s behind bars. What will Tamaki and his followers learn from the relative lack of consequences he currently faces for his actions?

We referred to all this in our debate this week, although we didn’t get to the bottom of it. You can watch the whole thing here.

Debaters, from left, Yasmine Serhan, Anjum Rahman and me.

By the way, we won. The audience in the room and online voted at the start on which side of the moot they supported, and that showed a small advantage to our team, the negative. They were then polled again at the end, to see which side had succeeded in swaying more votes. That revealed our majority had increased. But as I say, nobody on the platform thought the issue was straightforward.

Here’s my opening speech (trigger warning: contains references to Donald Trump) …

Why are we talking about free speech?

The thing about free speech is that everyone thinks of it like the setting this evening: A rational discussion among decent civilised people – and Martyn Bradbury – just like in the days of Plato. But that’s not it. Even Plato wasn’t all that Platonic. The laws the Athenian Assembly had around freedom of speech weren’t hate laws, as such. They were just the natural order of things. Slaves couldn’t speak there, nor could women, or conscientious objectors, which will be relevant to one or two people here tonight.

Free speech is an extremely valuable construct. But that’s what it is. A construct, like democracy itself. Something made by a group of humans to serve their interests.

As for Plato himself, he didn’t like democracy, because the construct could be too easily manipulated. The Assembly voted for his hallowed mentor Socrates to be put to death. The tyranny of the righteous is something our team will return to.

The construct of free speech is not absolute. It’s great that Bomber knows he is not allowed to call fire in a crowded cinema, unless there is a fire. So the question is, where and how do we draw the line. My colleagues this evening will be exploring that in detail.

They have pedigree in this. Anjum Rahman, whom I feel very humble to be sharing a platform with, has possibly had to endure more hate speech that anyone else in this room.

Yasmine Serhan cops a fair bit too. She’s ranked 18^th on the Green Party list, so if the Greens get 15% of the party vote, she’ll become an MP.

Anjum is going to talk, among other things, about the Christchurch mosque murders, because this debate makes no sense unless someone does that. She’ll tell us how the terrorist was radicalised and why he did what he did.

Yasmine will also talk about what hate speech is and the harm it does, and she, also, has some personal experience to share. Both Anjum and Yasmine will talk about free speech and the treatment of Māori, because that is also central to this debate.

All of which leads to the question of why we need hate speech law. They’ll explain how human rights laws work, and what good law about the right to speak looks like.

As for me, I’m going to talk about the Enlightenment. And the Free Speech movement, which is the reason we are even having this debate. What it represents, and the menace it has become.

I’m going to talk about the Free Speech movement, which is the reason we are even having this debate. What it represents, and the menace it has become.

I loved that Bomber criticised the Free Speech Union in his speech, but let’s remember that this evening they’d be on his side.

The free-speech debate comes from America, land of the free and the brave and more guns than there are people to shoot them. America has 4% of the world’s population and 46% of the world’s privately owned guns.

In 2023, a famous American said: “I think it’s worth it to have … some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Charlie Kirk. Two years later he was murdered.

Charlie Kirk.

It’s pertinent to this debate that Kirk’s precious Second Amendment protects the “right” to bear arms, in a country where he complained endlessly about cancel culture. You know what cancel culture looks like? An angry young man with a semi-automatic weapon. Gun culture is the threat to “freedom” Americans should be worried about.

Charlie Kirk’s death was framed as a free-speech issue. Why? The assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King weren’t seen like that. They were attacks on the substance of what the murdered leaders stood for. Civil rights. Black civil rights, especially. Free speech was just one part of it.

Making free speech the supposedly fundamental issue today corrodes the history of the civil-rights movement, because it denies that structural inequality and the subjugation of people of colour should be integral to the debate about human rights. That is, it whitewashes racism.

I wrote about the murder of Charlie Kirk in the Herald last year. I said it was nonsense to suggest, as the Free Speech Union does, that free speech is a “safety valve”. Often, the exact opposite is true. When that happens, free speech stirs hatred, as every tyrant in history, including the tin-pot ones, has demonstrated.

Donald Trump did it ahead of the January 6 insurrection. Brian Tamaki did it last weekend, calling for ethnic communities to be expelled and their places of worship to be burned down. He hasn’t been arrested. That looks like a good reason we need tougher laws.

Free speech is precious. Not because of the fatuous reasoning that it’s a “safety valve”, but because the clash of ideas is an invaluable dynamic of humanity and progress.

But let’s be clear: if we wish to claim the right of free speech for ourselves, we must allow that it should not be weaponised. That it should not become the means to erode the freedoms of others.

That requires society to make space for those who are intimidated, harassed and attacked by people insisting on their right to say whatever the hell they like.

This is a fundamental challenge to what Plato’s mates thought of as the natural order. Now that everyone has the right to be heard, we have a new “natural order”. It requires the free-speech construct to evolve, to recognise that important freedoms are lost if free speech is used to bully people into silence and cause them to live in fear of the hatred around them.

Charlie Kirk didn’t agree with free speech for everyone. He campaigned for academics whose views he didn’t like to lose their jobs.

At the Herald, after I published, there were vexatious and extremely time-consuming attempts made by some readers to restrict my freedom of speech. This is a tactic often used by followers of the Free Speech Union, and of their compatriots gathered around Hobson’s Pledge and the Taxpayers Union – there’s another so-called “union” that is not a union at all. Using their free speech to tell porkies about who they are.

All of them, of course, are part of a hard-right network that includes the Atlas Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Enterprise Institute and an outfit called the Claremont Institute, whose alumni, known as Claremonsters – I’m not making this up – can be found throughout the Trump administration.

These are the people insisting “free speech” is under terrible threat. Even while they steer American democracy off a cliff.

It’s not widely known that newsrooms struggle to deal with vexatious complaints and legal threats, so some stories just never happen. I once wrote a column about NZ billionaires’ contribution to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a floating island of plastic and other waste in the Pacific. It’s three times the size of France. I couldn’t get it into print, not because I was wrong, but because the superwealthy people in question were judged to be too litigious.

You want to talk about threats to free speech? That’s a real one. Our restrictive defamation laws, which inhibit media.

The Free Speech Union acknowledges this, but seems much more interested in distracting us with the horrors of so-called “cancel culture”.

Why has the important value of free speech been hijacked? Is it because the great rights movements of the 20^th century – anti-fascism, civil rights, feminism, the queer campaigns, anti-colonialism – all waged their struggles against white male supremacy and for many of them the enemy was also corporate greed?

Those forces are not the enemy identified by the Free Speech Union and its fellow travellers. Some of them, especially in Hobson’s Pledge, are white supremacists themselves. They’re part of the global “freedom” movement, celebrated recently by Donald Trump with as bloated an example of the supremacist instinct as you could imagine. Freedom 250: cage fighting on the White House lawn.

Which brings us to the Enlightenment. The Free Speech Union hates it when anyone attacks the Enlightenment. That great flowering of ideas, commerce and culture. All true. But it was built on slavery, imperial conquest, genocide, the near-obliteration of indigenous cultures and a concept called “free trade” that destroyed entire economies.

And, as the Industrial Revolution grew from the Enlightenment and led to the runaway capitalism of today, we now understand these forces threaten the ruin of the whole planetary ecosystem.

This is the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment, in which the techbros and fossil-fuel oligarchs become bloated with unimaginable wealth, safe in the belief they will be immune to the damage they are doing. In a Queenstown bunker, perhaps, or, more probably, on the Moon.

They are the threat to democracy and human rights we should be talking about. Especially because we have never enjoyed more freedom of speech. Social media empowers us all, even as it eats away at us.

A wee irony for the fretful folks in the other team.

Why are we supposed to worry about free speech? Because it’s a distraction. Martin Luther King, and Te Whiti at Parihaka, and Rachel Carson, and everyone who waged a real struggle against a real enemy: if they knew we had become so distracted, if they knew we had let the hard right corrupt the cause of genuine freedom to shore up the interests of the rich and powerful, they would be horrified.

From left: Yasmine Serhan, Anjum Rahman, me, Martyn Bradbury, Thomas Beagle and Verity Johnson.

Free speech isn’t in danger: My speech in reply

And here’s my speech (reconstructed from notes) to finish the debate.

Here’s one way to put it. It’s perfectly legal to whitewash racism out of the rights debate. But woe betide anyone affected by that who complains: they’re accused of wanting to trample on freedom of speech.

The lesson, as always, is that them with the power makes the rules.

One simple takeout from this debate is that hate speech, protected in the name of “free speech”, allows racists, misogynists and others to insult people with impunity. This reinforces their hatred because it establishes public tolerance for it. And that isn’t dissolved by sunlight. It just keeps getting worse. Anjum has described the wealth of evidence we now have in this country, showing that hate speech leads to violence.

Yasmine has reminded us that freedom of speech should never equate to freedom from consequences. Just as defamation laws have a place, and we have censorship laws and many other laws that restrict freedom of speech, so to do we need hate speech law that performs the same function.

But there is more to the argument.

Rights are nowhere expressed absolutely, and when people try, it is a lie. Rights always exist in a qualified form. Democracy itself is qualified: even the equal status of our votes is never the rule, except in a small group.

Sometimes, as with the British House of Lords and the American Electoral College, the qualification is done for bad reasons. But it can and should be done for good reasons. If and when a right is qualified, it should be done principally to safeguard the interests of vulnerable groups: to avoid the tyranny of the majority, to ensure space and opportunity are given to the persecuted, the marginalised, the voiceless, those without power. The debate is, or should be, about how we do that. Not whether we do it at all.

And if it’s established, as my colleagues have done so movingly, that there are vulnerable, minority, less powerful groups whose rights are undermined, it is not acceptable that the powerful and their lackeys and propagandists should be the only ones who decide the rules, or that they can simply dismiss the dissent.

The powerful have always dominated public discourse, but it does not lead to justice.

Especially when it is done sanctimoniously, in the name of “rights” and “freedoms”. That is no more than a Declaration of the Rights of Man that does not recognise women or slaves.

Related to this: while democratic rights of all kinds are invariably established in noble language, they are often instruments to reinforce existing power. A legal system that is too expensive for most people to use, and incomprehensible to many, does not dispense even-handed justice. We all enjoy the right to go out in public and mind our own business, but that is what rough sleepers do, and if this government gets its way, their rights to do that will be removed. In an inequitable society, “rights” are not abstract levellers.

All of which is a way of saying: When free speech becomes a weapon, the target is usually those least able to defend themselves.

And it has consequences. We used to think we were immune to that in this country. March 15, 2019 disabused us of that idea. But actually, we should have known it from long before. The newspaper I used to work for was founded in the 1860s with the express purpose of promoting hatred of Māori, in order to build support for Governor George Grey’s assault on the Waikato.

The battle of Gate Pa: Pukehinahina, 1864.

The truth about free speech is that it can be weaponised, and this has violent consequences. Hate speech is the very definition of that weaponisation. So it needs limits. Those limits should be well-written laws.

The arguments of the other team have been abstract and absolutist: they’re about the principle. But as explained, we already accept the need to constrain absolute freedoms. Thomas Beagle told us that “we can agree that incitement of violence goes too far”: so the debate is really over how we legislate for socially valuable limits to free speech.

He told us this is “tricky”, but that’s not a reason not to do it, as Yasmine explained.

And Verity told us the law moves too slowly, while speech, especially in a social-media world, moves far too fast to be constrained by cumbersome laws. It’s true, but a hate speech law would be just one part of a package of responses.

And yes, social media companies are a big part of the problem. This goes to one of our main arguments. We need a global movement to rescue humanity and the planet from the billionaire class. What we have instead is deliberately manufactured culture war.

We’re surrounded by bots and trolls and AI, vast amounts of it state-sponsored. “Freedom of speech”? We should be talking about how we safeguard fundamental democratic rights and how we shore up the psychological, emotional and material security and wellbeing of people in a world where those things are being driven from us.

But it isn’t happening. Instead: culture war.

We should be building a movement to end the climate crisis, overturn neocolonialism, shut down the oligarchs and stand up to hatred. Free speech isn’t in danger. But a whole lot of other things are.

Again, here’s the whole debate.