Articles by Free Speech Union

The Free Speech Union is calling on the Queenstown Lakes District Council to reverse its decision to blacklist Crux Media editor Peter Newport from council media access, warning that the move sets a dangerous precedent for press freedom in New Zealand. Mr Newport has spent a year investigating the sewage discharged from Queenstown's wastewater plant into the Shotover River. Three days before RNZ confirmed E. coli levels almost four times the…

You may have seen the Herald piece this week reporting that the Legal Complaints Review Officer has quashed the disciplinary finding against me and my firm. · !Herald headline · Source: Free Speech Union · I'm not writing to celebrate. · I'm writing because what happened to me is what is now happening, regularly and quietly, to people across New Zealand who don't have the resources to fight back. · A lawyer's letter, fifty years of practice,…

On Sunday's Q+A, Education Minister Erica Stanford confirmed what the Free Speech Union has been warning about for months: universal age verification is coming to New Zealand. That is the only detail the public has been given The Department of Internal Affairs is already recruiting a Programme Implementation Director. Procurement is underway. A July 2027 implementation date has been pencilled in. None of this has been before Parliament. None of…

The Free Speech Union is today writing to Police asking why an Auckland woman was telephoned at home, with Police calling her mother first, and then called into a station to be told a Facebook post was "unkind" and "unwelcoming to the Indian community". No offence has been alleged. No threat of violence has been alleged. According to public reporting over the past 48 hours, Renee-Rose Schwenke posted a photo captioned "Welcome to New India…

Up to 200,000 women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army between 1932 and 1945. Last night, a six-member Auckland local board had to decide whether their memory could be marked in a Takapuna park, with the Japanese Embassy’s formal opposition sitting on the table in front of them. The Devonport-Takapuna Local Board voted 4-2 to refuse a bronze statue offered to the Korean community for their own cultural…

Source: Free Speech Union · The Free Speech Union is raising serious concerns about the Department of Internal Affairs beginning to recruit staff to implement and enforce the proposed under-16 social media ban despite the legislation not yet being written, let alone debated. · A newly advertised senior role confirms officials are already building the enforcement architecture for the policy, including “the establishment of the Phase One…

A Growing Public Response · Late on Friday afternoon, the Broadcasting Standards Authority moved on three complaints against The Platform, requesting recordings of broadcasts that were never aired on traditional channels. Each of the programmes in question was published online. · That decision has triggered a significant public response. · Around 12,000 New Zealanders have now written to the Broadcasting Minister through the Free Speech…

The Free Speech Union commends Minister Goldsmith’s instinct to scrap the Broadcasting Standards Authority and says a proposal by former District Court Judge David Harvey for a unified regulator covering media standards and online harm deserves serious consideration. Goldsmith told the Ryan Bridge Today show he is “tempted to scrap” the 37-year-old BSA, with both NZ First and ACT supporting abolition. Harvey’s proposal goes further, replacing…

The Courts of New Zealand had 6,200 followers on X. They walked away and set up on Bluesky, where they now have 113. That is a 98% drop in audience for official court information, and no one has explained why. They are not alone. A growing number of government agencies have quietly abandoned X, one of New Zealand’s most widely used platforms with approximately 716,000 users, without publishing a rationale, conducting a cost-benefit analysis, or…

The Free Speech Union is calling on the Government to do the work that the Education and Workforce Committee did not: define the specific harms, identify the gaps in existing law, and develop targeted solutions, rather than reaching for a blanket social media ban that even UK child safety charities say will not work. · On 5 March, the Education and Workforce Committee released its final report after a nine-month inquiry into online harms facing…