"The 'Battle of Albert Park' has just crystallised something that's been happening for a long time. The reason we're getting so much street activity is that politicians have opted out."

"We've had 100 years of relative civil peace and ... bipartisan support for freedom of speech, and it's all just dissolved in the space of three or four years....
    "Unless someone's inciting violence, I'm all for free speech it doesn't matter what they're saying. I want to hear from people I detest....
    "[The 'Battle of Albert Park'] has just crystallised something that's been happening for a long time.... Part of the reason we're getting so much street activity is that politicians have opted out. There's a whole set of debates where ordinary New Zealanders are simply not seeing their views represented in politics....

    "Free speech definitions have been honed for several hundred years and, if someone is expressing their distaste for you and your way of life [or] claiming that you're lying or claiming that men can't become women, that's all well within the bounds of free speech as long as they are not inciting violence against you. There's never been a question about that. So I regard that [i.e., the idea that someone's speech can be a threat to someone else] as the flakiness of people who desperately want to stay within their tribe -- the liberal politically-elite tribe.. 
   "['Culture wars'] are people tribalising, finding reasons to detest each other and to dismiss each other ... [it] has become very dominant: a whole lot of language you are not allowed to use, words that put you on the wrong side of a boundary, and once you're on the wrong side anything goes in terms of the punishment that can be inflicted upon you ... tolerance doesn't have to be applied once you're in the 'wrong' culture...."

~ Stephen Franks, from his interview on RNZ's The Detail