"Probably among the worst toxins you can inject into the democratic constitution of a trusting people ... "

 

Cartoon by Nick Kim

"'NEWSTALK ZB, Opinion: Constitutional law expert and former Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer takes a deep, concerned look at the risks this Government is taking with hasty law changes.'

"Pretty rich coming from the man [right] responsible for s9 of the State Owned Enterprises Act, with its stupid reliance on undefined ‘principles.' It launched the courts into inventing their partnership metaphor for the Treaty. Lange raged to me in 1994 that Sir Geoffrey had assured him s9 was just ‘comfort’ to settle down iwi leaders. ‘It doesn’t have real legal effect’. 

"I’m not aware of any apology from Sir Geoffrey for this grotesque error. Or even hindsight repudiation to limit the damage. 

"Probably among the worst toxins you can inject into the democratic constitution of a trusting people in a trust-based egalitarian law-abiding society, with an extraordinary level of intermarriage and other evidence of respectful race relations. 

"Setting lawyers free to make law instead of applying it. Enabling corrupt bullies to trash property rights (incidentally negating Article 2). And empowering courts and bureaucrats to exploit undefined (therefore unlimited) race privilege to trump equality before the law."

~ Stephen Franks on Twitter

"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