Section 14

Metiria Turei has made her opinion clear in a FrogBlog article (”Fashion laws to combat violence“) on Chester Borrows proposed gang patch ban.

Borrows said that a ban on patches and insignia will mean that people walking the street won’t be scared. But looking scary is entirely subjective and shouldn’t be a crime.

The proposed ban will simply turn our cops into real Fashion Police, but wont stop the majority of ‘gang’ violence that happens in our towns.

The Greens reported on Friday that Falun Gong had been kicked out of the Cuba Carnival and Chinese New Year celebrations in Wellington.

[Green Party Wellington City spokesperson Iona] Pannett said “this issue once again raises serious questions about the Council’s commitment to freedom of speech in the city. This decision infringes on Falun Gong’s right to free speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and to any other group or individual who wants to speak on issues that the Council does not agree with.”

Greens co-leader Russel Norman, writing on FrogBlog, says

The word is that the Council told them that the Chinese Embassy had paid for the big Chinese New Year celebration and the Chinese Embassy did not want Falun Gong in the parade, so they had to go.

“The word” presumably comes from Falun Gong. Wellington City Council would deny any connection.

Norman rightly continues:

If the story is accurate then the City Council is bending to the will of a foreign government to suppress freedom of expression in return for money.

Regular Section 14 readers will remember that Falun Gong were also excluded from Wellington’s Christmas parade.

One of the biggest upsides of globalisation is that as well as Coca-Cola and Versace, people in dictatorships like China also get a taste for other Western goods like freedom of expression. It would be a travesty if the reverse were to occur and we imported this dictatorship’s repressive policies into New Zealand.

I’ve received a reply from Reporters Sans Frontières about why New Zealand’s press freedom index rank slipped this year.

RSF preface their comments by saying that in the past New Zealand’s ratings have been “especially good, even perfect”. The two reasons given for our drop are

1. tensions and pressure around the Mohammed cartoons [when Helen Clark attacked the Dominion Post and The Press for printing the cartoons, saying the issue “is not one of freedom of the press but of taste and judgement and the cartoons will do nothing to bring communities together”], and
2. TVNZ’s Board being hauled before Parliament’s Privileges Committee during the Ian Fraser affair.

RSF gave New Zealand black marks for having Parliament interfering in the running of TVNZ (interference from the politically appointed Board was Fraser’s original reason for resigning) and then, when the TVNZ Board punished Fraser for what he’d said to the Select Committee, the Greens defended Parliament’s punishment of TVNZ’s Board on freedom of speech grounds.

Both of these comments are about government meddling in the media. The temptation to meddle will always be there for politicians who think they know best, but clearly the meddling is more effective when the medium in question is state-owned.