The free speech debate is here again, I guess? Even though the name of the blog is a joke riffing on the subject, I can’t get exercised about it. In all things we need a sense of proportion about the fact that New Zealand is relatively an extremely fortunate and well-off country by the standards of both history and the world today. That doesn’t make all issues into non-issues - deprivation is still real here even though kids in Suriname have it a lot worse - but it makes some issues into non-issues more than others.
When the bar in New Zealand is "I can say pretty much anything, anytime, so long as I’m not passing the bars of inciting violence or defamation, and enjoy freedom from legal persecution”, whereas the bar in Egypt is “criticise the government and go to jail, and good luck enjoying legal protections in there, never mind anybody ever finding out what happens to you”, free speech is fine and safe here, and under no threat of retreating any time soon.
I could go stand outside Parliament and yell “Christopher Luxon is a fascist communist Nazi WHO puppet Papal stooge Biden loving Drake listening Jack the Ripper serial killer” in my best Amelia Kuttner cosplay, and at most I’ll eventually get a stern talking to from security or the police that can be solved simply by keeping my voice down and mumbling under my breath. We enjoy the full value of free criticism across our society: most societies ever have not, and have paid the price for their leaders getting away with whatever they want without scrutiny. I’m sure I’m forgetting some specific and concerning instances where free speech rights have been violated in recent memory, I’m guessing sometimes police are too harsh on protestors, but it’s clear as day that these are exceedingly unlikely to happen to the politically engaged minority, let alone the rest of the public.
Free speech arguments tend instead to devolve from their purest form (there’s an actual legal threat to speech, e.g hate speech laws) to far more nebulous arguments about what should be socially tolerated, or what reactions are reasonable from people for speech they object to. This tends to split into three categories, which I'm going to call "cancel culture", "debate" and "academic freedom".
Cancel culture is kind of bizarre as a serious social discourse because it almost always concerns celebrities or other personalities who aren't exactly a key public interest. They instead tend to be a way to virtue signal what is and isn't right in everyday conversation, even though there isn't really an analogous cancel culture in place - just the normal reality of society that people don't get along with people they don't like listening to.
The obvious reason the cancel culture debate feels weird is because it feels like people projecting their own guilt or insecurities about things they've said, which is never a fun time - as I've said before, I don't like topics that feel like they can descend into an endless cycle of self-recriminations and projecting. I do think, for what it’s worth, I should lay down a couple paragraphs here about where I’m coming from.
While I’m quite orthodox, a place where I do stand significantly apart from society’s values is I’m much more comfortable with the idea of being heavily judged or a subject of suspicion. It comes from a few places:
I’m a white Zimbabwean and carry the lessons to be learnt there, or what others might describe as “war guilt”, somewhat akin to Germans after WWII who understood they had to change or else risk inflicting harm again. As I allude to occasionally, New Zealanders seem almost entirely oblivious to Rhodesia, which isn't surprising as a footnote in history, but I'm well aware of enjoying a reputation comparable to the Confederates amongst those in the know.
I was a bit of a mess as a kid who lashed out and hurt people and that came through occasionally again well into my teenage years - this isn't a page for personal therapy, but I think it never hurts to shout out in arguments about why people behave the way that they do that not everybody had a squeaky-clean interpersonal foundation from the start and already come with a feeling of being prejudged.
From that, I learnt one of life's most important lessons, which is that there's no sense in being your own lawyer in every possible occasion - you'll go further and be happier if you can fess up to things being your fault and try your best to fix what you can. You can do a whole lot better than that if you’re open to feedback from outside, not only criticism from within.
This is not a complete vindication of my eminent brilliance: there are ways to screw this up and such attitudes have an awkward relationship themselves with anxiety and insecurity. Nonetheless, you can see how other people who feel pre-judged usually resort to defensiveness, and egos and the sunk cost fallacy get in the way of reasonable self-assessment. Correspondingly, then, I can see that as a society where most people usually assume others will treat them as good faith actors at first, reading into the worst from people's potentially offensive statements without the surrounding context usually leads to a polarisation death spiral.
Those who wanna see the good in the “accused” assume the hypocritical and mean-spirited liberals are coming for them next. Those who see the bad assume it reflects a wider pattern of behaviour and an inability to trust again, not to mention their defenders covering up their own harmful behaviour. Cancel culture can often feel like a blunt tool in place of persuasion - useful to reduce public incidences of slurs and other discomfiting acts, but leaving people bitterly commiserating and reinforcing each others’ dislikes in their own time, rather than enlisting all people in good-spirited, mutual striving towards better understanding. This is all a bit mealy-mouthed and a lot of that is because I just can't be bothered getting into examples. As I say, the stakes are so incredibly low I only discuss this in the spirit of making the case to NOT get invested in the debate and just try to be nice and polite within and without.
However, the less obvious but far more salient reason this debate is so strange is that it feels like those against cancel culture are basically arguing that people they don't even like, due to the differences in shared values, senses of comedy etc., should laugh at their jokes or otherwise mask their dislike, which is clearly a farcically insecure and unsustainable basis for any relationship save those strictly necessary like between coworkers.
There are real shades of "parents whose kids won't talk to them anymore" with this one, and it's one of my best examples for how I think too many young people have been suckered by our own insecurities, and acute fears of social isolation and peer pressure, into picking up a cause that is basically by and for old conservatives. This isn't to say that remarkably reactionary social views don't persist - a key reason those insecurities have such purchase is how casually many young people use slurs - just that the vast majority of young people aren't invested in going back to the good old days, and, thus, there's no use in us carrying water for those who would like to.
Two is "debate", which is typically between politicians or other actors and the most blatant case of this whole argument not really mattering. It’s basically just a rhetorical device for politicians to try to shift the conversation in the media towards what ground is more advantageous for them to talk about: this is an always ongoing battle, and it usually doesn’t work because voters’ top few priorities plus salient stories arising in their own right tend to end up forming the current debate. Does anybody think free speech in New Zealand was gravely wounded because Judith Collins didn’t get the debate she demanded over He Puapua? No? Moving on.
Finally, academic freedom is probably the most justified of these arguments - it stands intuitively to reason that highly educated spaces lean strongly to the left socially and, accordingly, that a certain value set will predominate to the exclusion of others. As shown in the article, attacks on this problem are typically clumsy jabs from right-wingers who a) simply don't like what they believe in or b) have the whole weird "most people at uni didn't like me" resentment waiting to be unpacked.
However, I do think there are merits here to the idea that academia should open up more. This is not in the spirit of trying to open themselves up to give equal time to unpersuasive and unsubstantiated arguments, and, as mentioned earlier, I don't think there's a clear social value or a plausible outcome where you get lots of strident left-wingers, particularly from marginalised backgrounds, to sit quietly and listen to hate speech even if theoretically some learning could come out of it.
Instead, just as we benefit so much from being able to critique traditional ways of thinking and avoid giving in to normativity, we must recognise that in many ways we are the traditional thinking and the normative thinking of the future. Not only must we be open to the idea that not all our calls will be right at this point in time, but we shouldn't try to enforce on ourselves the pressure to introduce value judgement into investigations of the facts and presentation of information.
There are value judgements involved in how we choose to conduct research, what we prioritise in how we repackage that information, and of course most overtly in the essays and arguments we put forwards - but, as much as possible, we have to recognise that striving for better is not the same thing as knowing there is one orthodox finality to adhere to. Sand off rough edges, but don't set what's left in stone. Otherwise, we miss counterintuitive but important truths, and introduce our own biases - as, remember, a relatively well-off, predominantly white educated caste - into the knowledge we keep handing down.
To conclude, then, while I'm glad I got the thoughts out - it's impossible not to come up with opinions on subjects that come up time and again - they're basically "I don't care I don't care this doesn't matter". We are very fortunate to enjoy such freedoms and it's not one of those fortunes we have to be vigilant about protecting. In the face of that, a social debate largely steered by resentment around ostracisation instead of any coherent social benefit derived from reverting progress on our values is near pointless.
All I can say is that we proponents of a critical culture and the unacceptability of certain behaviour should start our criticism with ourselves: better to be hypocritical critics of others than stay silent on awfulness, but we should strive towards consistency. Through all of that, the goal is to improve how comfortable and able to express themselves all different kinds of people feel - not to burnish our own egos as the best at being good.
Good intentions, compassion, empathy, listening first and speaking second - I have always found with all kinds of people that these do more for the happiness, comfort, and confidence of those around them than any belief system. Or, put another way, some beliefs are disqualifying or at least strong predictors against good treatment of others, but not having those beliefs is not a guarantee that you treat other people well. The only way you can make that likelier is...trying to be nice to other people, recognising there are times when you'll hurt other people instead, and knowing you'll have to learn and accept your own faults in order to mend them and be better to others. And that’s my interpersonal philosophy class done for the week.
I don’t have many thoughts on the contents of the budget itself. The media has done well covering the economic policies of this government so far, and uni-educated young voters are unusually well attuned to them, so I don’t have much to add except three things. One, Nicola Willis mentioning flattening taxes as a topic for the future was intriguing. Two, Seymour laid out a list of sequential targets for the Ministry of Regulation, starting with Early Childhood Care.
Three, National were stupid to make that cancer drugs promise and I don't know how they're planning to meet it. The reason why National created Pharmac, as I laid out in my Todd Stephenson article, is that the experts choose the most efficient healthcare options with the budget that they are provided, instead of politicians leaving more of those most in need out to dry to buy votes with the drugs with the best PR. This is exactly what the cancer drugs promise was.
My heart goes out to every single person enormously in need of that help and I hope they can get it through an expansion of Pharmac's budget, but there is nothing to suggest that politicians taking money away from other drugs that may be able to do more for more people in critical need will be a net plus for NZ healthcare. Barbara Edmonds looks set to ram home the point and more power to her for it: desperate sufferers and families shouldn't be condescended to by politicians and lured into believing things that simply aren't so. Giving false hope to cancer patients is disgraceful.
The government have escaped peril and I subjectively like the choice of stripping out the frills and presenting the budget very blandly. I did put on the budget speeches in the background while I was working. The style of parliamentary speeches and heckling is awfully annoying, but it’s good to get a temperature check on the performances of party leaders when I haven’t listened to them speak in half a year.
Chris Hipkins was clearly the worst - terribly frantic, needed to pop a strepsil and prepare a proper speech. David Seymour was the best. When he’s on form, he portrays a sort of sunny “don’t you worry, we’re going to get on and fix all these things to make the country better” in a way the austere rhetoric of National hasn’t really tapped into. In terms of who achieved the most this day, it’s clearly TPM. Pre-protesting a budget where nobody could name what specific policy they supported or opposed, on account of the budget not having been released yet, was a bit disingenuous. However, the battle lines have already been well drawn and TPM continues to prove that they can draw remarkably huge crowds on short notice for a political party, let alone a minor one. They can hijack the headlines when they need, and that’s exactly what they want.
Luxon at one point messed up the convention of bashing the table to emphasise a point, hitting the desk again and again in awkward silence like Holland March pointing. Winston Peters got into an argument with his own caucus mid-speech about whether Shaggy is a rapper or does country music. The worst part is that he was, miraculously, somehow on the right side of the argument. Introduce NZFirst to Lil Nas X at your peril.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke beamed about how she had “triggered” Winston Peters, then progressed to talking about how she had never been more triggered or traumatised by the government’s attempts to create another stolen generation, which feels like a bit of an odd one-two pairing. I haven’t seen her speak before and she is incredible, absolute top of what a speaker of her age can command.
I still slot her below Seymour because I can’t credit a Budget Day speech focused on themes of identity and protest rather than specifically criticising or praising budgetary choices - even if Waititi is going to handle the bulk of it, surely at least put a couple nods in there? From the start, you want to be getting the reps in on demonstrating substance alongside your style to forestall the potential turn from Māori media years down the line when the glamour wears off and they begin to ask what you’re getting done. I don’t want to see another party go the way of Ardern’s Labour.
Highlight was Rawiri Waititi hitting Matt Doocey with the “You liked that one, didn’t you”, followed by saying “You have the cheek? The absolute cheek?” in the exact same tone of voice as “Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?”
In a kinda-historic moment, the ANC have lost their majority in South Africa for the first time since the first free and fair election! I came in expecting the ANC to clock in around 52-55%, the DA around 20-23%, MK around 13-15% and the EFF around 10-12%. (I have a bit of a problem with not eyeballing that numbers add up too high.) Compared to this, then, it’s been quite the shock seeing the ANC at 40%, alongside the DA on 22%, and…earlier in the election it looked like both the EFF and MK would clock in just under 10%, and while the former did the latter approached 15%! The ANC are still by far the most popular party in the country - the ANC-DA head to head is equivalent to National’s 2017 performance versus Labour’s 2023 performance - but given the context of ANC dominance, it’s a startling slide.
While I continue to lack much reliable sourcing on South Africa, it’s fairly easy to posit what happened here. After years of back and forth litigation against former President Jacob Zuma for massive corruption, his rupture with President Cyril Ramaphosa, a fellow colleague from the freedom fighting days and his successor atop the ANC government, came to a head with Zuma’s founding of uMkhonto weSizwe (the MK Party), cheekily snatching the title of the ANC’s defunct military wing from back in those days.
Zuma, like Trump with his recent sentence in the USA (which I truly have nothing to say about other than that Trump is a bad client to have as a lawyer), was able to gain traction by painting himself to sympathetic supporters as an innocent victim of lawfare. He paired that with his popularity running especially strong in his home region of KwaZulu-Natal, particularly with many Zulu voters, and capitalised on the general mood of dissatisfaction with the country under the ANC - terribly high unemployment especially amongst youth, high crime, the failure of government services epitomised by the meme status of load shedding, and the persistence of poverty in both urban and rural areas.
The ANC fell from 57.5% to 40% of the vote, the EFF and DA stayed essentially static and MK got 14.5%. This isn’t rocket science: while the presence of many other small parties in the South African political systems makes the reality a little more complicated than this, in a nutshell, one third of voters who chose the ANC in 2019 wanted change this time and broke away with Zuma, while lower turnout (contra anecdotal reporting on the day) suggests another few % just stayed home. That suggests that the political order of the post-apartheid era remains strong - MK’s “ANC if it was good” message was more appealing to most of these voters looking for a change than the DA, who continue to face the taint amongst many voters of continuing to protect the interests of rich whites.
When you're, say, the National Party in New Zealand, you can live with poor people and some ethnic minorities thinking that of you. When you’re in the rainbow nation a mere three decades after legal apartheid collapsed, you cannot afford that and expect to win. This is my key frustration with the South African political order: not with the myriad failures of the ANC government to look after most people, those are well documented enough, but that the DA apparently expect to keep trying the same thing and achieving a different result. This wasn’t their victory - this election was just something having to give.
The ANC now face three choices. MK won't enter a coalition with Ramaphosa. The government could cobble together a hodgepodge of minor parties, like John Key did with ACT+UF+TPM, but that always comes with the risk of the tail wagging the dog. That’s particularly important in a context where many smaller parties like the IFP are often perceived as existing only for certain ethnic groups. That works okay with TPM in New Zealand, but, again, the rainbow nation requires a more united approach to avoid disunity.
Of the other minor parties >1%, Action SA and the PA are both associated with xenophobia towards economic migrants from Zimbabwe, and the VF Plus are a far right Afrikaner party most certainly not making it into any government. This isn’t to say that the ANC wouldn’t stoop to scapegoating migrants - just that aligning yourself with that cause is a dangerous choice, not only for the good of the country but also for the headlines accusing you of inciting anti-immigrant riots and violence.
The second and third choices are clearly binary: they could go left into coalition with the EFF, which'll be a real test of how deep the ANC's loyalties run to assuring existing economic interests, or hop right with the DA. Think of these choices as like Labour+Greens versus Labour+National. The latter may seem unlikely, but left-wing critics of the ANC would argue that they have already shown themselves all too willing to cosy up with economic elites. The much smaller EFF would also provide an extremely thin majority for the government, assuming they even have the numbers for a coalition at all; the DA’s size would, on the other hand, guarantee the coalition a stable five years.
Either way, some voters thirsty for change are going to learn to be careful what you wish for: either the EFF’s intransigence has delivered the country into a DA-ANC collusion, their nightmare, or the DA’s insistence on clawing the country back has seen the ANC run even further away from the old ways with the EFF. What’s more, whoever joins the government is probably drinking from a poisoned chalice and likely to lose votes in 2029, as nothing suggests to me that South Africa’s key issues are going to see progress any time soon. The EFF and DA will each be desperate for power after so long waiting for it, but whoever doesn’t get it now will probably be counting their lucky stars for that fact in a few years’ time.
The last thing to note is that Cyril Ramaphosa has presided over all of this, and even though Jacob Zuma is clearly the single figure most to blame for the ANC's failures both as a government and an electoral force, Ramaphosa comes in second for failing to reverse decline. After all, the vote didn't collapse on Zuma's watch. Faced with a more potent political force in MK, internal dissidence may threaten to remove and replace him - particularly as that's MK's condition for being willing to enter any coalition with the ANC, potentially a pathway towards reabsorbing them in the future. I have no idea how likely any of this is, but I’m thoroughly intrigued by all this intrigue. I’ll be keeping a very curious eye on proceedings.
For the weekly media recommendation, I have to shout out Smiling Friends. I knew barely anything about this animated adult comedy (hell, I thought it’d be somewhat BoJackesque in taking on serious plotlines with inter-episode continuity - nothing of the sort) and assumed it would combine the elements I dislike which dominate that subgenre. It absolutely retains the absurd, surreal and often uncanny elements I dislike in everything from The Big Lez Show to Rick and Morty, but I was so pleased to find it had none of the latter’s sour negativity.
In particular, I can’t remember the last time I fell utterly in love with a character in just a few episodes the way I have with Pim Pimling, the pink-faced pipsqueak co-lead. He is the perfect ambassador for what I have been cheering for from fiction for years: that you can tell stories with all kinds of range, even weird adult animated comedy, and still insert characters who are utterly chuffed to be there and sweet to those around them without feeling the need to pull the rug out from under them.
It’s a testimony to the confidence of the creators of this low-budget, ten minutes a pop Adult Swim series that they can happily show off that earnestness without retreating into cynicism in a way that even the infinitely better resourced and established Rick and Morty has failed to time and again. Of course, I myself don’t wish to fall prey to negativity, so I’ll just say that Michael Cusack’s vocal performance is utterly wonderful, Pim is a perfect main character given the entire premise of the show, and I appreciate the word of mouth Season 2’s recent arrival has generated to get me into this bit of fun!
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