There is no free speech under a tyrant

If it moves, they've taxed it. If it keeps moving, they've regulated it. When it stops moving, they've subsidised it. If they don't like it they've banned it, and if they do like it, they've made it compulsory.

They've taxed you to hell, regulated you into the ground, and turned nearly two-thirds of New Zealanders into welfare beneficiaries. And they've lied to you about it all.

In times of tyranny the only relief from dictatorship is through free and fair elections -- the right retained by the people to throw the buggers out -- and the right -- the right! -- to raise your voice in protest.

Both forms of pressure release are now being taken away.

Elections are now being fixed to favour the ruling party -- and the so called opposition is so spineless in any case as to be no real alternative -- and for one year in three political protest is being muzzled, requiring registration with a censor's office.

To raise your voice in protest you'll have to ask permission first.

It's the last straw.

There is no free speech under a tyrant.

As long as it's possible to exercise your right to free speech, you may resist your government peacefully; once that right is taken away, anything goes. After all, if you can't use reason or persuasion to make your voice heard, then what course of action is left?

That's how important this is.

This government has declared war on the liberties of New Zealand's free men and women, and today is our last chance is to raise our voices in protest against the obscenity -- but we must be under no illusion about the situation we face.

This is not, as Helen Clark claimed on Monday, just a party political issue, and it sure as hell isn't politics as usual. Says Lindsay Perigo this morning,

"In its stated intent to persevere with the iniquitous Electoral Finance Bill, the Clark-Cullen government has lost all claim to legitimacy and may now be overthrown with impunity."

Read on here, and take copies with you this afternoon when you take your last chance to protest the onset of tyranny.

Assemble in Helengrad's Civic Square today at 12:00, and head to Parliament to make your voice heard and your protest count. The fact is that the tired and corrupt Clark regime is no longer fit to govern, and they want to make it illegal to tell that truth. Tell them that today. As Bernard Darnton said in a recent issue of The Free Radical:

Labour seems to have concluded that political speech is so important that no one else should be allowed to have any... The Clark Government is not just nibbling at the edges of free speech, they are engaged in both direct frontal assaul and deliberate flanking attacks on free speech [and democracy].

... Political speech must be especially protected because it is in the political arena that all other freedoms must be protected. The Clark Government's assaults on free political expression must be resisted because if we fail to withstand this latest round of assaults, it will be illegal to resist the next.

KILL THIS BILL NOW, before it kills liberty in New Zealand stone dead.

Protest against it now, before protest itself is made illegal.

Name: PC
Address: MYOB
Declaration: I declare that I am a free man. I declare that I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. I declare that my life is my own.

UPDATE 1: Annette King, the minister now responsible for pushing through this obscenity, refutes every claim to the bill suffocating free speech by saying the "law of common sense" will apply. She was well fisked in parliament yesterday by Heather Roy and Bill English, who on this issue at least has begun to find a spine. English concluded his fisking thus:

Can the Minister tell the public and the House what will happen when a well-meaning member of the public or community group looks up the Electoral Finance Bill and reads the Draconian provisions that mean that any person expressing a point of view in any form at all about whom to vote for is covered by the Act and has to comply with its regulations; and whom does that person approach to find out which rules now no longer apply because of common sense, and which rules will continue to apply because Labour wants to clamp down on public opinion?

A law with draconian provisions that aren't intended to be applied is bad law. A politician who introduces such a law and who argues that they won't be applied is either a fool or a liar -- and in either case they're a tyrant.

UPDATE 2: Stephen Franks is in no doubt: "She was lying."

"To mislead Parliament yesterday she used reasoning like [Steven Price's] RNZ weaseling."

Meanwhile, Steven Price from the misnamed Coalition for Open Government -- the only non-Labour front supporting this Bill -- weasels one further time over at Public Address.

UPDATE 3: Tyranny? I've been told using that word "smacks of hyperbole." Really? Here's John Locke, the inspiration for Jefferson's Declaration of Independence:

TYRANNY: AS usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage...

Any questions?