Free To Speak

ACT leader David Seymour says sections 61 and 131 of the Human Rights Act "really ought to be gone", and that ACT has "no intention of ever supporting blasphemy laws". In this pre-election interview with Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather, the Deputy Prime Minister commits to legislation stopping professional regulators from punishing lawful speech, and expla...

NZ First leader Winston Peters says National's under-16 social media bill and Labour's digital duty of care won't stop at children: "it'll be 20-year-olds, it'll be 30-year-olds, it'll be all of us." In this pre-election interview with Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather, he confirms NZ First will oppose both. He says opposing any expansion...

Justice and Media Minister Paul Goldsmith rules out any new hate speech legislation: "We've been very clear about that." He tells Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather that the bill abolishing the Broadcasting Standards Authority is drafted and ready, and if National is re-elected, "the BSA will be no more". He explains why his first instinct on professiona...

In 2023, more than 18,000 Free Speech Union supporters told the Government they didn't want a single regulator for online content. The Minister dropped the plan in 2024. Two years on, it's back. Labour is promising a "digital duty of care" enforced by a new online regulator, and National's under-16 social media restrictions would hand new powers to Internal Affairs. Both a...

GP David Smylie tells Dane Giraud how one late-night email to a pharmaceutical sales rep, sent in November 2022, became a Medical Council of New Zealand investigation. He says the complaint was made by the rep's manager. David says he apologised early and offered to meet the rep, but the Council never passed his apology on. He says a committee then told him in writing that he was racist, on t...

Health NZ sacked mental health nurse Cath Simpson on 9 October over posts she made on X in her own time and deleted more than a year ago. The Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal had suspended her for two months and let her keep nursing. In her first public interview, Cath tells Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather how one man's complaint to the Nursing Council became a...

Broadcaster Paul Henry joins Dane Giraud on the art of interviewing and what separates a good journalist from a bad one. Henry argues the best interviewers listen hard and go in ready to be surprised, while the worst arrive with an agenda. Now on the campaign trail, he reflects on the broadcasting skills he has taken into politics and what voters tell you when you are willing to listen. The conver...

Free Speech Union Council Chair Stephen Franks and Tauranga lawyer Kirsten Murfitt compare notes on being investigated by the New Zealand Law Society. Both faced complaints over letters they wrote for clients. Both say the complaints system was turned against them. Stephen's case began with a letter sent for a client to clinics offering gender-affirming care to minors, setting out the legal r...

Karl Mokaraka earned the nickname "the man over the fence" the day he borrowed a wheelchair for height and climbed the fence at a Pakuranga press event. From there he put his questions straight to the politicians inside. In this episode Dane Giraud sits down with the Ōtara-raised activist to talk about the South Auckland he grew up in, a community that once judged you by your street rath...

Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather joins Dane Giraud on Free to Speak to set out the Union's priorities heading into the 2026 general election. Together they work through the three campaigns the FSU is running before election day. The first is opposing the return of blasphemy and religious hate speech laws. Heather argues the state can protect people from threats and harass...

Dame Elizabeth Rata is a sociologist of education at the University of Auckland and a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She joins Dane Giraud to discuss her 40-part YouTube series, The History of New Zealand Education. The series traces how the country built a world-leading school system in the nineteenth century, and why it later declined. Rata argues that free, standardised state...

Mike Grimshaw is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. He joins Dane Giraud to make the free speech case for letting the Irish rap group Kneecap perform here, after Hungary barred them. You do not have to like the band to defend that, he argues. The conversation then widens. Dane and Mike trace the transgressive history of rock and roll and hip-hop, and the long line of...

Corina Shields returns to Free to Speak. As producer of Shubz Says So, she helped build one of the most talked about shows on independent New Zealand radio. Then she walked away from the station that carried it, and tells Dane Giraud why. Shields gives her account of the arrangement behind the show. On her telling, the pay was always going to come from advertising, ownership of a stake in the stat...

Comedian, broadcaster and author Andrew Doyle, creator of the satirical persona Titania McGrath, joins Dane Giraud to unpack how Britain is sliding back towards blasphemy law, not by name, but through the language of "hate," "harm" and "Islamophobia" - and why that should worry New Zealanders with an election on the horizon. Doyle and Giraud trace the case of Hamit Co...

In 1986 Stephen Rainbow marched with HUG, Heterosexuals Unafraid of Gays, while living as a married father who had not yet come out. Forty years after the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed, he joins Dane Giraud to argue that the reform was, above all, a free speech fight. Rainbow describes a country in which living openly was, in his word, inconceivable. Consensual sex between men was a criminal of...

Juliet Moses is a lawyer, President of the New Zealand Jewish Council, and the author of "Biting the Hand", a Quillette essay on what happens when artists insist their work and their politics cannot be separated. Her argument is that when artists say the two are indivisible, the institutions and donors who fund them are increasingly taking them at their word. Dane and Juliet begin with c...

Frances Widdowson is a Canadian political scientist. She was an associate professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary until her dismissal in 2021. For several years she has examined the evidence behind the May 2021 announcement concerning the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. She joins Dane Giraud to set out what she has found. In May 2021 it was announced that the remains of 215 child...

Shubz has been called a kūpapa. The word describes Māori who sided with the Crown in the New Zealand Wars, and it still gets thrown at Māori accused of betraying their own. Shubz gets it for having David Seymour on his show. Shubz hosts "Shubz Says So" on Radio Aotearoa. His method is simple: talk to people you disagree with, in public, without the gotcha. That has meant long conversatio...

In 2018, historian Paul Moon published a book arguing that te reo Māori is on course to disappear as a living language, and that almost everything being done to revive it is failing. The reaction was immediate and hostile. Moon's position is that he is a friend of the language, and that a good friend does not offer false comfort. He argues that compulsory language teaching has failed in Wales...

Elliot Ikilei, former New Conservative leader, key figure in Hobson's Pledge, and now New Zealand First's 2026 candidate for Takanini, joins Dane Giraud for a conversation that moves from common ground to open clash. The two grew up streets apart in Auckland's lower socio-economic suburbs, and they begin by comparing notes: absent fathers, imported gang culture, rage, and the long r...

Erica Stanford says a VPN ban was never on the table. Barrister and Free Speech Union Council Member Douglas Brown isn't convinced. Douglas joins host Dane Giraud for a freewheeling episode on three stories that end in the same place: someone else deciding what you can see online.  The Post reported the Government had been looking at VPN restrictions as part of its under-16 social media ban....

New Zealand banned it. So did France, Australia and South Africa, and every American publisher who saw the manuscript in 1954 turned it down. Brian Boyd, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland and the world's leading Nabokov scholar, joins Dane Giraud to trace the censorship history of the twentieth century's most contested masterpiece.  They cover Nabo...

This winter, Ani O'Brien is taking the Good Faith Yarns Tour around the country: honest, good faith conversations with locals in towns and cities across New Zealand, on the topics we usually just shout about.  She sits down with Dane Giraud to walk through the full lineup, stop by stop, and explain why she wanted conversations rather than combat. No debates, no point scoring. Just a willingne...

ACT MP Laura McClure joins Dane Giraud to talk about her Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill, which passed its first reading unanimously and is now before select committee. The bill amends the Crimes Act 1961 and the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 so that AI-generated sexual images are treated the same in law as non-consensual intimate recordings. McClure explains why she made a d...

Dr Ben Jones, Director of Case Management at the UK Free Speech Union, joins host Dane Giraud to discuss his new book, Island of Strangers, and a question that should trouble anyone who values open debate: how did Britain - the country that gave the world so much of its free-speech tradition - become a place where the police knock on your door over a Facebook post? Jones has spent five years on th...