Louisa Wall Is Appalled

We Are the Borg, And We Have Your Interests at Heart

NZ Member of Parliament, Louisa Wall (Labour) has taken a complaint to the Human Rights Commission.  The case concerns a cartoon by a newspaper which, according to Stuff,

depicted people taking advantage of the Government's breakfast-in-schools programme to spend money on their vices.

But, it's not that Wall lacks a sense of humour.  It's that some of the figures in the cartoon expending money on their vices were Maori and Pacific Island folk.  To Wall, the cartoon amounted to speaking about these racial groups with contempt, which the law forbids.  The Human Rights Commission disagreed.

In response, Wall has animadverted that there is something systemically wrong with either the law or the Human Rights Commission or both.

MP Louisa Wall says it is "appalling" that the Human Rights Commission has not upheld a single complaint under its race relations section despite receiving more than 2000 complaints since 1993.

Two thousand complaints, and not one upheld.  Why?
  Well the Commission (and the lawyers for the newspaper) argued that the law requires not just that speech be offensive to some but that the Commission be engaged only at the serious end of the spectrum.  Wall wants it involved right across the spectrum.

Lawyer Robert Stewart said if Wall's approach was taken to its logical conclusion, any material that was "disrespectful, belittling, or that mocks a group on the ground of their colour, race or ethnicity" could be restricted by section 61.

Stewart said 61 should be interpreted "restrictively" to the serious end of the spectrum with​ "insulting" to mean "scornfully abusive", and "bring into contempt" to mean "regarding with deep despise, detestation or vilification".  Stewart said it was clear the editors "were aware of the possibility for the cartoons to cause offence".  However, "the right to freedom of expression is also a right to shock, offend, and disturb any sector of the population".

"Of course, freedom of expression also allows those who are shocked, offended or disturbed to say so and why. Through this exchange or marketplace of ideas society is better informed."

Wall represents a view gaining more and more credence.  It is the idea that speech ought to be free until someone claims to be offended, either for themselves or (as in Wall's complaint) on behalf of someone else.  Take a straightforward case:  Christians, believing the authority of the Word of God, have asserted that unrepentant sinners will not enter the Kingdom of God.  A sinner is defined as someone who breaks the law of God, and includes thieves, murderers, the covetous, the slanderer and the sexually immoral.  All such are excluded whilst they continue to live in their sins, without repentance.  People are bound to get offended at that message.  They have for thousands of years.  Demands that Christians be proscribed from speaking the truth of the Gospel will inevitably be made on the grounds that people are offended at their speech. 

Here is another example: gender identity propaganda asserts that all gender identities are equal, and none must be condemned or rejected (or criticised or vilified).  Homosexuality is one such gender identity.  To declare that homosexuals are sinners by virtue of their attachment to homosexuality is seen by Wall and her cohort as offensive, insulting to, and contemptuous of, homosexuals.  Therefore, such speech--and the religious beliefs it represents--must be banned. 

Wall and her cohort represent a large and growing number of folk.  What they make more and more evident by the day is an authoritarian demand that the world must be made in their image, to their tastes, by compulsion if needed.  Freedom is a privilege granted by the cohort, not a human right. Freedom is bestowed only upon those the emerging authoritarians sanction and approve.   

The benign state is always at risk of becoming increasingly despotic and authoritarian.  Wall and her colleagues want to push it more and more in that direction.  If Wall loses her case, we have no doubt that she and her colleagues will campaign vigorously for a change in the law more perfectly to reflect Wallian doctrines of authoritarian compulsion.