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Mike's Minute: Govt has no clue over proposed hate speech laws

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Tue, 29 Jun 2021, 9:39AM

Mike's Minute: Govt has no clue over proposed hate speech laws

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Tue, 29 Jun 2021, 9:39AM

Having read through the potential changes to the hate speech laws, you come up with several summations.

It makes no real sense. Because it makes no real sense you wonder why they're doing it. The public input will mean nothing. You wonder why they have so much time for nonsensical, theoretical stuff and none for, I don’t know, a vaccine rollout, sorting the Ministry of Health out, or building some houses. How long do you want the list to be?

Anyway, they're looking to cover some more groupings, toughen up sentencing, align some civil issues with the new laws, include trans and sexual orientations. It's all the stuff you'd expect omnipresent governments to dabble in.

The reality is we will have no idea what it all means until the public have their say, that part is largely ignored, and they put something into legislation that will actually turn out to be law.

There are a couple of problems at this point. It's so opaque the reality is you'd need to be an absolute moron to trigger any sort of legal action. In other words, the whole idea that free speech is in trouble is not directly true.

But National and ACT are on the money, this isn't really about the nutter looking to incite violence. The nutters will still be out there. The nutter isn't the real outworking, the chilling affect is.

The chilling affect is the overarching idea that we will all start second guessing ourselves. If you don’t know what crosses the line and what doesn’t, you censor yourself, and that, ultimately, is why this is so dangerous.

It's the cancel culture. You fear the Twitter backlash, the petition, the outrage, the upset, and the headlines. So, you zip it.

That's what they're after and that’s why it's wrong.

As for the nutters, the second part of the issue is enforcement. Have all the laws you want, we have laws now, plenty of them, but they are hardly monitored or enforced. Look at social media on any given day it's riddled with hate, bile, and aggression and yet, nothing happens.

So, these new laws tighten up, theoretically, on the crazies. But in reality, on the regular person with little more than a strong opinion.

As I say, we shouldn’t even be dealing with this given the mess this government is currently overseeing. But given we are, the least we can be is cognisant of how dangerous it is, and as a result, how dangerous the agenda really is.

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