UPDATE 1: Whether or not you made it on Saturday, if you want your voice heard -- if you want to speak up in protest at this clampdown on free speech while it's still legal to do so -- then the single best thing you can do is write to every MP who's considering voting for this Bill. This week! That means every MP from United, NZ First, the Greens and Hard Labour. Here's a list of their email addresses, and here their mailing addresses [pdf].
Tell them that free speech is too important to gag one year in three. Tell them that this is not what our soldiers died for. Tell them, if you voted for them, that you did not vote them in to dismantle free speech. Tell them that, as Bernard Darnton says, that just because "Labour seems to have concluded that political speech is so important that no one else should be allowed to have any," that doesn't mean we should all roll over and accept being muzzled. Darnton explains how important this is:
If it became illegal to criticise the government during an election campaign, for this is clearly the aim, surely we could no longer consider New Zealand a free country.UPDATE 2: Labour brown-nose James Sleep says he is sickened - "sickened"! -- at the number of kids "that were pulled into [the] anti-EFB protest... To put it into perspective," he says reflectively, "making all those kids march reminds me of Hitler Youth!" Master Sleep is fifteen, by the way, and still too young to vote. Or to think.
The Clark government is not nibbling at the edges of free speech; they are not proposing legislation with other goals that has an incidental impact on free speech; they are engaged in both direct frontal assault and deliberate flanking attacks on free speech. All governments have a natural tendency to regulate and to censor. To maintain an open society the rules need to be deliberately tilted in favour of free expression. 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 these assaults it may be illegal to resist the next.
4 comments:
Hey PC, is that little boy carrying the placard in the first photo, the youngest Libz to be recruited?
Yeah, that's the new Libz Youth Coordinator. Hasn't he told you? :-)
Maybe Master Sleep needs to take a good hard look at the number of greenies who drag toddlers to demos.
Bloody idiot.
Low blow with the age-jab PC.
You might remember a Mr Howison and myself who first appeared around 15 ;-)
Post a Comment