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Free-Speaking in the Stone Age
The Opinions Imparted by “Richard”, and Banks’s Responses to Them, Would Appear to Fall Well within the Parameters of the Act.
PERHAPS THE SADDEST thing about Magic Talk’s cancellation of John Banks is the victim’s mild-mannered acceptance of his fate. Banks’s fulsome apology for his behaviour on air – most particularly, his failure to reject with appropriate fury the statements of his caller, “Richard” – would not have been the response of the “Banksy” of old. That John Banks, the firebrand National Party MP for Whangarei, would have energetically defended his right to criticise Maori – rightly reminding his critics that if freedom of expression is to mean anything at all, then it must include the freedom to offend.
Offence was certainly taken at Banks’s failure to repudiate the claim that Maori are a “stone age people” with “stone age values”. Not only by all the usual left-wing suspects on Twitter and Facebook but by some pretty hefty corporate advertisers – Vodafone, Kiwibank, Spark, TradeMe and New Zealand Cricket – as well.
Resisting this sort of economic pressure is close to impossible in the precarious financial circumstances currently encompassing the mainstream media. So Banks had to go and – bless him – he went quietly. That the determination of what is acceptable and unacceptable speech on air has suddenly become the prerogative of big corporations went unnoticed by the woke mob baying for Banks’s blood.
A government committed to preserving, protecting and defending the rights and freedoms of its citizens – as enumerated in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act – would have had something to say about this. Though our Attorney-General, David Parker, almost certainly deplored the racist exchange on Magic Talk (and let’s be clear it was deplorable) he has a duty to be equally appalled at the consequences visited upon the protagonists.
Section 13 of the Bill of Rights Act 1990 does, after all, guarantee to all New Zealanders freedom of thought: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference.” Just as Section 14 guarantees them freedom of expression: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.”
The opinions imparted by “Richard”, and Banks’s responses to them, would appear to fall well within the parameters of the Act. It should, therefore, be a matter of some importance to the Attorney-General that the rights of a fellow citizen have been assailed and curtailed so peremptorily. His failure (to date) to respond to the incident and its consequences raises some disturbing questions.
An Attorney-General who has nothing to say about the very public silencing of a former Member of Parliament and party leader is at risk of contributing to the impression that there are some opinions so unpopular that the Bill of Rights Act is no longer able to offer its protection to those who hold them. This would, of course, fly in the face of the plain wording of the Act which protects without equivocation the imparting of information and opinions “of any kind in any form”.
The notion of there being opinions no citizen has the right to hold is given further credence by the Human Rights Commission’s refusal to defend Banks’s freedom of expression. This statutory watchdog is fast becoming notorious for its failure to defend speech with which its commissioners disagree. Rather than uphold the unqualified right of some citizens to affront the sensibilities, and even hurt the feelings, of other citizens, there are worrying signs that the Commission is preparing to throw its weight behind the present Government’s plans to curtail that right. If legislation to this effect is introduced, then it will be very interesting to see with what degree of disquiet the Attorney-General and the Human Rights Commission inform Parliament of its fundamental inconsistency with the Bill of Rights Act. On their present form, it would be a pretty safe bet that both watchdogs will be intensely relaxed at the prospect of whole new categories of speech being declared illegal.
“How many more racist outbursts do you need to hear before something is done?” demands Shilo Kino in her Newsroom essay on Banks’s indiscretions. “How many more articles do you need to read before there is change?” Ironically, the final line of Kino’s article reads: “This isn’t a matter of opinion. This is about human rights.” That the right to hold and express unpopular opinions might be the greatest human right of all, had clearly not occurred to her!
The other question which arises from “Richard’s” stone-age views, and Banks’s apparent acceptance of them, is the degree to which the use of anthropological and historical terms to denigrate and criticise one’s fellow citizens can be ruled impermissible. That the term “stone age” was used derogatively does not invalidate the condition it describes. In every respect, the Polynesian culture which came into contact with Europeans in 1769 conformed to the internationally accepted definition of “Neolithic”. Maori were, indeed, a “stone age” people.
Stripped of all its white supremacist baggage, however, “stone age” simply denotes a society whose members’ tools are constructed from wood, bone, sinew and stone – rather than being fashioned from processed minerals such as tin, copper, iron, lead, silver and gold. Such a banal technological distinction says nothing about the complexity and richness of Neolithic cultures. One of the planet’s most splendid civilisations, the Mayan, was built by human beings who had not mastered the technology of metallurgy – or even the wheel! This absence of metal tools certainly didn’t prevent them from developing complex systems of written communication, astronomy and mathematics.
When someone like “Richard” uses the term “stone age people” the intention is indisputably racist. He is trying to establish the genetic inferiority of “races” who failed to make the sort of technological breakthroughs that allowed Europeans to traverse the planet at will, subjugating or exterminating all those “lesser breeds” who dared to stand in their way. Quite why the historical record of European imperialism should be taken as evidence of genetic superiority is puzzling. Given the enormous harm it has inflicted on countless human beings – not to mention the planet itself – there is a very strong prima facie case for the opposite being true!
The truth of the matter is that “stone age” cultures constitute the default setting of the human species. For all but 8,000 of the 200,000 years homo sapiens have walked upon the earth, we were content to fashion the means of our survival from trees, grasses, flint and stone, along with the shells, bones, hides and sinews of our prey. For all that time our “ecological footprint” was barely discernible. For nearly 200 millennia we have trod upon the body of our Mother, the Earth, no more heavily than any of her other children.
Throughout that vast stretch of human pre-history, one thing and one thing alone has kept us from joining the countless other species that have come and gone from Evolution’s grand parade: speech. Homo sapiens aren’t just the creatures who know, they are the creatures who speak. This unique ability to pass on knowledge, experiences, abstract ideas and concepts from one generation to the next is what keeps humanity going – and growing.
We could lose our guns and factories. We could make do without cars and cellphones. But, as a species, we could not survive the loss of our precious and irreplaceable ability to communicate with one another.
If you want to kill what makes – and keeps – us human: kill free speech.
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