Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill.

SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon KIRITAPU ALLAN: I move, That the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Justice Committee to consider the bill.

This bill gives effect to a key Government priority to respond to the recommendations of the royal commission of inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain on 15 March 2019. The key change that this bill makes relates to the parts of the Human Rights Act which prohibit speech that excites hostility against or brings into contempt people based on their colour, race, ethnicity, or nationality. We’re expanding these provisions so that they will now also protect groups based on the grounds of religious belief.

This change responds to a part of recommendation 40 of the royal commission. A key part of this recommendation was to add religion to the list of protected characteristics under the law which prohibits speech which incites hatred. The commission considers that religious beliefs should be added for a number of reasons, including, and most significantly, in order to reflect the current realities of Islamophobia and the association between hate speech and terrorism. In addition, the commission noted that the change aligns the incitement provisions with comparable jurisdictions, brings New Zealand into compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and removes the current discrepancy where Jews and Sikhs are protected under provisions as ethnic groups but followers of Islam and Christianity are not.

This work also meets part of the Labour 2020 election manifesto commitment to strengthen protections for groups under the Human Rights Act from speech that is likely to incite others to feel hostility or contempt towards another group. This type of speech is about influencing how people see a population group and causing hateful views about people in that group. Speech that incites hostility or contempt causes significant harm to both those specific groups and to society as a whole, seeking to divide communities and hinder our social inclusion.

At the extreme end, there is evidence of the spread of this type of speech, alongside other circumstances, being a precursor to violence. Victims can experience the loss of their right to feel safe, freedom of movement and expression, and, at the right extreme end of the spectrum, the right to life, if someone is killed as a result of incitement or hostility.

The royal commission found hate speech to be on the same spectrum of harmful behaviour as terrorism and that there is a link between hate speech and hate-motivated crimes. They saw value in seeking to reduce hate speech, not only to prevent the direct harm it causes but also to limit escalation of such speech to hate-motivated crimes. Today’s online world of communications creates particular challenges, adding to the potential harm and highlighting the need for solid laws to protect vulnerable individuals and communities.

Evidence and analysis has shown that faith-based groups are vulnerable to extreme forms of harmful speech, in addition to those groups already covered by these provisions. For example, Netsafe’s 2018 survey on the impact of online harmful speech found that religion was the most frequent perceived reason of being personally targeted with online harmful speech.

The current incitement provisions consist of both civil and criminal provisions—sections 61 and 131 of the Human Rights Act, respectively. The bill adds religious belief to the existing grounds of national and ethnic origins, race, and colour to provide more protections for faith-based communities. Our engagement last year on proposals to strengthen the incitement and discrimination provisions in the Human Rights Act generated extensive public debate. Face-to-face feedback from affected communities largely showed support, including for the protection from incitement on the basis of religious belief.

The Government has carefully considered what next steps should be taken, considering this response as well as the need to respond to the significant harm caused by speech that incites hostility or contempt, and to hate crime. We’ve decided to take a staged approach to tackling hate-motivated offending. This bill is the first part of this approach and will immediately provide better protections from speech that incites hostility towards groups based on their religious belief.

The second part of our approach is to have the Law Commission carry out a comprehensive review of incitement, discrimination, and hate crime laws. Other proposals in last year’s discussion document on incitement laws such as harsher penalties and different thresholds, and for explicit protections against discrimination for other communities, will be also considered by the Law Commission.

By taking action on our incitement laws, the Government intends to enhance the ability of all New Zealanders to enjoy their rights and freedoms free from harm. The Government remains committed to implementing the recommendations of the royal commission as a key priority. This change will implement an important part of recommendation 40 of the commission. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill. It’s an important proposal that’s been made by the Government and we should place it in the context of the work that they say they’re doing in relation to the matter more generally.

I do want to comment on the way that this particular piece of legislation interacts with the Human Rights Act as a whole, and other aspects of our statutory regime. So, within my time share, I’d like to concentrate on that, under the heading of “regime”; also another “R”, “religious belief”, and the particular reasons that it’s actually quite dangerous, I think, for us as a Parliament to seek to legislate, certainly in a criminal way, against freedom of expression in relation to religious beliefs; and the other “R” is “response”, the response that we should instinctively look towards in answering the question: how do we as a Parliament and as a society and as a democracy want to respond to language that we might regard as untrue, unfair, or unreasonable?

So, first of all, in relation to the regime—actually, I should start, in case it’s not been obvious from my introductory remarks, by stating National’s position on this. We have made it clear through public comments, but I state for the record now clearly that we don’t support this bill. We think that while it may be well motivated in the sense of looking to protect certain sections of society, we don’t think it will be effective to do that, and, at the same time, it will also risk major unintended consequences in terms of the chilling effects on free speech and all that that implies for our democratic and, largely, free society.

So taking the first of those “Rs”: the regime. I want to talk about the fact that the Human Rights Act already prohibits discrimination on certain grounds—essentially, protecting, therefore, certain groups, under section 21. Of those, some, but not all, are currently protected against what has loosely been described as an incitement provision. With all due respect, we need to examine what the provision actually says, because it’s quite loose merely to talk about incitement, as though that were something along the lines of inciting violence.

But if we look at those various groups in section 21, and we say, “Well, it’s anomalist that they’re not all included.”—at the moment, we’ve got, I think, colour, race, and ethnic or national origins. So that’s not the full list. So why don’t we have the full list? Well, that’s a good question. We could add, as has been proposed here, religious belief. But why then will we not add the other grounds in section 21? Why don’t we add other basis for communities forming together, having a shared identity? These are questions being asked by those who would say that the Government should go further. So they’re pleasing no one. I don’t think it’s one of those situations in which political analysts can say, “Well, there’s dissatisfaction in one direction and also the other.”—let’s say right, left, or liberal or conservative, or whatever, and say, “Well, they’ve probably got it about right in the middle.” In fact, they will please no one, because this is an incoherent approach to lawmaking. They haven’t added all the rest of the section 21 grounds. They haven’t even said, in more general terms—as probably they should, if they’ve determined to restrict speech in this way—that any group defined by its identity should be captured by whatever we decide the offence is and whatever those elements are. So that’s the first thing, is to say, “Well, who’s actually going to be protected or captured by this kind of a law?”

Then we ask where the line is drawn. So we can say, on the one hand, inciting violence against such people should be illegal—the good news: it already is—on the other hand, we could say that merely speaking ill of a group or offending their sensibilities would be the other option. Somewhere in between, you could have, for example, doing or saying a thing that could lead another person to discriminate against or harm, or whatever. So we have a choice on where we draw the line.

Where the line is currently drawn in section 131, which the Government is looking to introduce in relation to religious belief, as well, is the publication or distribution of words that are threatening, abusive, or insulting. There’s a huge range there. I mean, to threaten someone is a very serious thing, but merely to insult them, I would say is very much different. Then, we have the result being either to excite hostility or ill will against or bring into contempt or ridicule. Well, again, these are quite different things.

So while those who proposed this bill might say that it’s important that we don’t allow the incitement of violence—again, to which we say, “We agree.”, and which is already on the statute book—but if you take the low watermark of those elements and we say that it should be a criminal offence merely to insult in a way that would incite ill will or bring into ridicule, we have a very dangerous position in which we have not only an incoherent law but one that is taking us down a very dangerous path in restricting freedom of expression, particularly when we then ask the question of who gets to decide this and how this thing is decided.

Of course, it’s the lack of clarity in such laws that we should always be very wary of because the person or persons, whether it’s the judges or the Attorney-General who’s asked to provide consent to prosecution, naturally have their own prejudices, their own perspectives—and I say that not to cast any dispersions on any such decision makers or any of those who would aspire to those roles; it is human nature and the fact of the matter that we all have either a religious belief or a lack of a religious belief or, in many cases, people have some sort of combination of ethical or moral or religious perspective. These things are complicated and they can’t be distilled easily into a provision in a piece of law in a way that would be proposed or suggested to be black and white and provide protection. So, so much for the regime.

My next “R” was “religious belief”. It’s my submission that, in the 21st century, it’s inappropriate for this Parliament to be making laws that protect merely the sensibilities of those who have a religious belief or, again, a lack of religious belief. It wasn’t that long ago—in fact, it was the previous term of Parliament—in which this institution repealed the crime—yes, the crime—of blasphemous liable. We said, at that time, collectively and, I think, unanimously, that it wasn’t appropriate merely to protect the feelings, in essence, of those who have particular views or beliefs, given that we live in a pluralistic society and, also, I would say, at least as importantly, because the free exchange of expression of ideas is such that when a thing is proposed, a thing can be opposed, and it’s, of course, in that market place of ideas, that to and fro, that we have the best opportunity as a society, as a democracy, of arriving at the truth.

It’s also the case that, when it comes to political or policy debates and discussions among us more generally as human beings, those who have a religious belief might put forward a certain perspective—that’s their right, even their responsibility. Well, that’s fine and that’s good and that’s as it should be, but to allow such people the protection against criticism back the other way—or a counter-proposal, in policy terms—would seem to privilege one group against another. Therefore, I don’t think it would be helpful to them or the cause of democracy, freedom, and the pursuit of truth more generally.

Of course, it’s in the nature of faith or belief of a religious nature that these things can’t be proved or disproved—that’s almost by definition. So if we say that certain beliefs are beyond challenge in a way that might risk bringing into contempt or ridicule, then we are in a very dangerous situation again, as I would suggest.

The third and final “R”, having covered the regime and the nature of religious belief, is the response. So what is our response more generally to the idea that things can be said that might be untrue or unfair or unreasonable? The answer, of course, should be that things that are true, fair, and reasonable, respectively, are the best counters to those. This is obviously not a new idea—it’s certainly not original to me or this discussion or this debate—but I think it’s an idea that’s worth recanvasing.

If we consider ourselves an enlightened society—and I use that term in the context of having gone through an enlightenment and believing that there is such a thing as an ideal of a pursuit of truth that can be gained in a democratic—as opposed to a theocratic or an autocratic—way, then we should be very careful, indeed, about the possibility of restricting that flow, that exchange of information and ideas.

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act discussion on the matter, which was provided by the advisers, as opposed to the Attorney-General himself, concluded, actually, after a really good discussion about the importance of freedom of expression, the breadth of that right and the possibility of chilling effect of such legislation, we heard ultimately that this was a justifiable limitation. I respectively cannot come close to agreeing with that.

So, for all these reasons, National says, with all due respect and understanding the good motivations that might underlie the introduction of such legislation, we cannot support it. It is a dangerous place for our democracy to head to.

Kia ora. Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a brief call on the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill. Currently, under the Human Rights Act 1993, it is illegal to publish or distribute threatening, abusive, or insulting words likely to excite hostility against or bring into contempt any group on the grounds of race, colour, ethnic, or national origins. Those grounds, under this legislation, will now be extended in both the civil and the criminal provisions to cover religious belief. The changes being undertaken are part of this Government’s response to the recommendations of the royal commission of inquiry into the terrorist attack in Christchurch on March 15th. This change will protect more groups from harm and strengthen social cohesion in Aotearoa.

The Government has carefully taken consideration in this space as to what next steps should be taken. We’ve decided to take a staged approach to tackle hate-motivated offending. This bill is the first part of an approach that will immediately provide better protections for people from speech that incites hostility towards groups based on their religious belief. The second part of our approach is to have the Law Commission carry out a comprehensive review of incitement, discrimination, and hate laws.

This is a good piece of legislation. I look forward to the select committee process and receiving submissions from across New Zealand on how we can strengthen our laws in this space. I commend it to the House.

You wouldn’t believe that 2½ years ago, this Parliament reversed blasphemy laws in New Zealand. Now, I better be clear: that in itself was not unbelievable. I personally think reversing our blasphemy laws at that time was a good and appropriate activity. As some with wit put to me, the big guy upstairs isn’t easily offended and nor is he going to turn up in the court room.

But what is unbelievable is that 2½ years later, the left wing and the Labour Party are reintroducing, in effect, a blasphemy law into New Zealand. It is here to entrench a very particular view on hate speech. And let’s be very clear, as I have been in the House before: this piece of legislation has very little, if anything, to do with hateful speech, but speech which the left, in particular, hate. It’s a very, very dangerous bill. There is no need for it in general, and there is absolutely no need for it around this ground of religious belief, and I want to tease a little bit of that out.

First and foremost, this is another attack, another affront, on one of the most core and basic elements of a democracy: free speech. It is being eroded. It’s already been eroded. This Government has form when it comes to undermining and dividing this country. It doesn’t matter if it’s the notion of co-governance, which, as I’ve written recently, is absolutely mutually exclusive to democracy. We’ve had a Government that’s passed laws which restrict where people can stand and protest. They’ve passed laws which even restrict the speech that parents and professionals can have with their children and other people. This is a Government that already has form when it comes to eroding and undermining our democratic principles. And here we are today, on this morning, debating how, from the left, they can undermine freedom of speech.

We must, as a House, push back against this. There is no need for it. Free speech is what enables us to get along, and the irony in free speech, at times, is that those conversations, those speeches freely had, can be confronting, challenging, critical—you name it. That’s the very nature of democracy. What is being suggested here is the social cohesion theory, which is bouncing around at the moment, that, somehow, as human beings, we can all just be wonderful and civilised, and we’re just all going to agree, and it’s all going to be nice. Well, that’s not how it works. The only regimes in history where everyone agrees are called totalitarians regime, and everyone is monological.

Now, let’s be really clear: I don’t like argument, as such. I don’t like angry, aggressive, nasty, critical speech. However, we’re human beings; we have different views, different viewpoints, different things we are passionate about, different moral views, different ethical views—this cuts and undermines the heart of it.

And we already see—we already see—those barrelling in behind this law, who think it’s a wonderful law. These are the people, already, who tried to exercise the thug’s veto across the society. They’re the very people who stopped women talking about women’s rights at the Auckland University of Technology earlier this year. They are the same people who tried to ban others turning up to university to talk about such topics as, I don’t know, the Treaty of Waitangi. These are people who protest the ability of others to speak a different viewpoint. They’re the ones who have all the isms and all the phobias that are thrown about in labelling people to condemn and stop them. They are the ones enthusiastically behind this bill, because, as I said at the start, their interest is not really around hate speech—what even that is, by the way?

The media and others throw the word “hate” around like lollies these days. What does it even mean? How is it even defined? Who gets to define it? My previous speaker and colleague Chris Penk put it forward: how does one define “harm” and “hate”? Do I get to define it or does someone else get to define it? It’s indefinable, and that is quite deliberate here, because this is ultimately about power and control, which is what this left-wing Government is wanting to exercise.

And be under no illusion, this is a stalking-horse piece of legislation. The Minister confirmed it at the start—this is just the first tranche. They think this is an easy win, to bring in religious belief as a grounds to limit speech. Be under no illusion: those who suffer from PVS—or what I call “perpetual victim syndrome”—are already lining up to add themselves in here, that they must be protected. Their views on life are so fragile—so fragile—they need laws to protect them from, as they would call it, harm. We do not need this legislation. We actually do not need to protect many, if any, groups for hate speech, per se. We should all be free to critique and challenge, and this is deeply, deeply inappropriate.

I want to turn to the religious side. There is, as I say, no need for this, for at least two reasons. First and foremost, I am proudly a religious man, unapologetically Roman Catholic. I do not want this. I don’t need protection. I get challenged every day for my views. If I wanted to use this piece of law, I could say it’s all hateful and harmful to me. “Someone challenged my belief system.” Well, la-di-da, I can accept it. That’s the nature of religion. Religion, by its definition, is arrogant. It really is, and I say that as someone who’s well theologically trained. The thing about religion is it makes massive moral claims. I’m Catholic because I don’t agree with views on other religions, and other religions are not Catholic because they don’t agree with me.

I don’t need a piece of law to stop those people having conversations. What we do is we talk more. We talk, we challenge. It’s called ecumenism. You talk. This attempt at law is to shut that down. It says that if you say something that might insult my religion, ridicule my religion, insult or be contemptuous, it could now be hate speech. That is going to shut down discussion in something which is, by its nature—by its very nature; religion, as I say, is bold, it’s beautiful, but there is an arrogance to it. It believes it’s right—it believes it’s right—and that’s going to be stopped, effectively, by this law. And I say again, as someone with a religious belief, there is absolutely no need for this. In fact, if we’re going to confront the challenges, if you will, within religious belief, we need more conversation, not shutting it down.

I mean, what on earth is this going to look like where different groups and religious groups say, “Well, I don’t like you challenging my belief about the big guy in the sky. You’ve insulted me.” What’s this going to mean for various cultish groups in society who claim that now they are being incited on the grounds of their religious belief? The Minister mentioned Islam, predictably. That’s fine. We’ve got Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Pastafarianism—where’s it going to end?

Hon Member: Jedis.

SIMON O’CONNOR: Jedis, of course. God help us if anyone decides to say, you know, Star Trek’s better than Star Wars—that’s probably ridiculing. This is all about belief and this is why it is such a dangerous piece of legislation. There is absolutely no need for it. And I want to put on the record again, as someone who supported the removal of blasphemy laws and unapologetically has religious belief: we do not need this.

And I want to finish by suggesting to people who are listening at home of what to do, and it’s twofold. First and foremost, submit to the select committee. Say that you believe in democracy, that you believe in free speech, and that you are against this increasingly left-wing Government which is attacking and undermining the core foundations of our democracy. Explain your reasons why you believe free speech matters, why it so critically matters.

And, as I said at the start, those supporting this bill are already the ones who try to exercise the thug’s veto. They write copiously into media that everything that, you know, affects their argument harms them. They’re the people who throw around those isms and phobias. These are the people who never—well, actually, anything they disagree with now is disinformation or misinformation. Of course, often it’s not the case; it’s just, simply, that which is misinformation is what’s put forward by someone who’s not left wing.

And the last point—the last point—and it’s somewhat tongue in cheek, but if this law, unfortunately, passes in the House, it’s certainly my encouragement to New Zealanders: use it. Overwhelm the system. Any time a person feels that their religious belief has been attacked, write and call the Human Rights Commission, call the police, go to the courts. In recent weeks, we’ve had people attacking the likes of Bethlehem College, that they have a certain view on marriage and on religion. Well, this is going to be great for them, because you know what? That’s now an incitement on the ground of religious belief. Take those people to the Human Rights Commission. Drag them before the courts. Overwhelm the system and show the absolute absurdity of this law.

Now, let me be really, really clear in my final seconds: I actually don’t want this bill. I don’t want this to be happening, but if this Government’s going to pass such a stupid law, show them how absurd it is and overwhelm the system any time your belief is challenged, and show up those activists and others what this really means, and just how dangerous this is for democracy.

I’m pleased to stand and take a call on the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill. I hope that what happened in Christchurch masjidain in 2019 never ever, ever happens again in Aotearoa. Regardless of what your religious beliefs are, to do nothing is not an option.

Section 21 does not cut it. I’m pleased to see these extensions in both the civil section 61 and criminal section 131 provisions in this amendment bill. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to begin by acknowledging the shuhada of the masjidain terror attack on March 15th, 2019, when our collective hearts were broken. As the shockwaves of that attack rippled through our nation, we heard from Aotearoa that we had never thought something like that could happen here. We heard that we stand for inclusion, we stand for equality. But the other thing that we did hear—and it’s important to acknowledge that—is that we heard from our most marginalised communities about all the ways that that hate, that extremism, that, to some extent, formed our experience, was known. We heard from Māori who lifted the voices of the Muslim community. We can’t shed our skin or our disabilities or change who we love. One of the heartbreaking lessons of March 15th was that the Muslim community had been reporting an absolute increase in incitement, in threats of violence, in hate against their communities. They had travelled around New Zealand to meet with different police chiefs in different police stations, and our systems and our institutions had no way of recording or responding to what that community was trying to alert us of.

So when the Opposition says that this law is about banning debate, I want them to also answer this question: how, then—how—can we change our systems and our laws to become responsive to incitement, that those marginalised communities are experiencing and, in many cases, are reporting? How do we prevent the next real-life act of atrocity from happening? I want to say, as someone who has spent years of my life working in atrocity crime courts and having to read thousands of pages of witness evidence and looking at the history of those atrocities, that they begin with hate. They begin with dehumanising a particular group based on its inherent characteristics. Those groups are race groups, they are gender minorities, they are the rainbow community, disabilities groups, and they are faith communities.

So we know that the faith communities do need those protections. In that respect, this is a good change. It is one that is overdue by many years. We know that this work began with a comprehensive review conducted by the Human Rights Commission in 2016, and that that review more or less shadows what we found in the royal commission report on Christchurch, that our hate speech laws and our hate crime laws are not fit for purpose. They don’t reflect what modern extremism looks like.

Now, it’s important to hold that we do limit speech in many, many ways already in our laws to protect individuals. We do outlaw incitement. We even outlaw defamation, which is damaging someone’s reputation. But all the ways that we recognise that harm through speech is possible and not acceptable in our laws only apply to protect individuals, never groups.

But we know, and we have learnt first-hand in, now, modern memory, that atrocities are begotten of harmful speech—not debate; incitement, harm. All modern human rights - based democracies recognise this and acknowledge it with strong hate speech laws, so it’s well defined and it exists among jurisdictions that we normally compare ourselves to. It exists even in the United States, that bastion of free speech; in the European Union; in Canada; and the UK. They recognise that hate speech is harmful, that it leads to real-life violence, but also that it is, in fact, a threat to free speech itself, that it silences groups, silences marginalised communities from debate, from public life. Every woman in this House knows a little bit of that.

The Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation, the Islamic Women’s Council, and the Human Rights Commission support this law change. To write all of those groups off as woke or leftist is absurd. What we owe and what this Government owes is to listen. One of the responses to the recommendations of the royal commission report that came quickly—and this one did not come quickly, so this law is still overdue, and I hate that we’ll be debating it in an election year where we will hear from all of the traditional groups that have something to gain from marginalising groups further. But one of the things that the Government did respond to quickly was to commit to holding annual hui on extremism nationwide, to include all the groups that are affected by extremism, by hate, by terror, and bring them together with experts, with Government agencies, and talk about what the threat looks like now, to be forward-looking. That’s what the royal commission recommended.

This year, I sat through every session of that hui, and, in Auckland, we heard over and over again on what threats are on the rise. We saw the charts. Yes, faith communities are still at risk, race communities are still at risk. But the one that everyone was screaming about in terms of their research and experience was violent misogyny.

So I want to talk about what this bill does not include and the U-turn that the Government did from its initial released draft. It does not include gender, the disabilities community, or our rainbow communities; that is a failure. From a month or so ago when this bill was first announced, we heard from the communities that are being left out. They were forced to campaign, to make themselves visible to those traditional threateners of their peace, of their safety, in order to campaign for inclusion. While we have a Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, an annual hui being held as a response to a royal commission report that has told us that violent misogyny, that the threat against rainbow communities, and, in the wake of COVID, the threat against disabilities communities is what is, in fact, on the rise in New Zealand. It breaks my heart that those communities now have to make themselves visible and vulnerable in order to retell their trauma, to reprove their vulnerability, for lack of a better word. They are strong, but they are also vulnerable, in order for us to act.

So this bill, whilst it does a little bit of what we need in order to make our nation truly inclusive, truly equal, is also a failure in courage for standing with the communities and responding to what real extremism looks like in Aotearoa today.

I want to go back to those days following the Christchurch terror attack. I want to remember that our nation came together with courage and with love, that we gathered together across this beautiful country in all our public places. We wrapped our arms around our Muslim community. We held our little ones a little bit tighter as we cried, and we committed to making that safe, inclusive, equal place a reality. The city of Dunedin ran out of flowers because they were all at the mosque. Those people out there are watching. They expect us to show courage. They expect us to shine a light in all of the dark little places where hate, where extremism, where those threats do exist among our otherwise loving society.

So we, the Green Party, will continue to fight. We will continue to stand in solidarity with the communities that are now being exposed, having to publicly campaign again for a responsive, progressive, human rights - based law change. We will stand with you and we will ensure that you are protected. Come to select committee, tell your stories, and we will stand with you and lift your voices.

Kia hora te marino

Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana

Aroha atu, aroha mai

Tātou i a tātou katoa

[May peace be widespread

May the ocean become like pounamu

Give well, receive well

Let us show respect for one another]

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to this Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill, this narrowed-down hate speech law Labour has finally brought to the House. And I start by saying what a back-down, what a massive back-down by this Government, and what an enormous victory for free speech in New Zealand. To put this in perspective, here’s the letter that I received from Kris Faafoi, the Minister’s predecessor, on 9 December 2020. And the proposal was to redefine the criminal offence, shifting the criminal offence from the Human Rights Act into the Crimes Act, increasing the penalty for the criminal offence, extending incitement provisions to protect all groups listed under the “Prohibited grounds of discrimination” section in the Human Rights Act, and extending the civil provisions in line with international obligations by including prohibition of incitement to discrimination against a group and amending the prohibited grounds of discrimination to explicitly protect transgender, diverse, and intersex people. That’s what Kris Faafoi was promising on 9 December, two years and one week ago.

And, today, we have the Minister coming to the House with this enormous back-down bill, where they are going to add one grounds of discrimination—with the same penalties—to the existing bill, staying in the Human Rights Act. And, people might ask why the Government has backed down so much. Well, actually, we could have told them. They could have found out for themselves if they’d just taken the time to read the royal commission report that they say they’re following the recommendations from. It says, “The difference between legitimately criminalised hate speech and a vigorous exercise of the right to express opinions is not easy to capture—at least with any precision—in legislative language.” Well, that’s what the Government’s found. It goes on to say as well, “The more far reaching law creating hate speech offences, the greater the potential for inconsistency with the right to freedom of expression.” That’s what the Labour Party’s discovered in the last two years.

And so what have they done? Well, they’ve backed down in a victory for free speech. And it’s a victory, for example, for the over 40,000 people who signed ACT’s free speech petition over those two years—those people who value the liberal traditions of this country and the right to freedom of expression enshrined in our Bill of Rights Act. And what this back-down bill really says is that they are going to extend a law that the Minister openly admits will never lead to a prosecution. That’s why, previously, they wanted to change the nature of the criminal offence. They’ve dropped that. And I asked the Prime Minister in the House yesterday: is she saying that this law is going to do nothing, or is she saying that people are going to be prosecuted for criticising religion? She can’t have it both ways, and she couldn’t say which one it was either. And that seemed to frustrate her, leading to some hate speech of her own, but we won’t go into that now.

What we’ve got is a victory for free speech, but the remnants of this particular law are still wrong. This law still chills and curtails free speech on the most unusual candidate there could possibly be, and that is religion. You see, I can understand wanting to protect people against being attacked for unchangeable aspects of their identity—particularly your ethnic identity—but I can never understand why, if the Labour Government was going to ban debate about any issue, it would be religion, because the only way that movements like the labour movement, a liberal-left movement that has done a lot of good in its time, were possible was because of an enlightenment where people who insisted that you could not have valid views unless they were with the current church of the time were challenged, and it was made possible for people to express their views regardless.

And then we come back to what the Human Rights Commission said about it being difficult to capture the nature of hate speech, in legislation, with any precision. Well, that’s the other big problem. Apart from the fact that the law probably won’t do anything, apart from the fact that religion is a very odd thing to ban debate on or to try and restrict debate on, there’s also this fundamental problem of consistency with the rule of law, and it goes back 800 years to Magna Carta—the simple idea that I live in a free society and I can’t be imprisoned or in any way sanctioned by the State without the right to defend myself against objective laws that apply the same to anyone. But the great difficulty with this law is that it’s so subjective. You take something like burglary set out in the Crimes Act: did you enter the premises? Were you legally allowed to enter the premise? Did you commit another crime like theft? Someone accused of burglary can go to court and defend themselves based on facts and evidence, defend their rights against the Crown—something that we have fought long and hard to win and maintain in our liberal society. But hate speech laws—to the extent that they do anything—take away that certainty and our basic liberal right. What they do is they mean you don’t know if you’re guilty to the point of prosecution, because, as the Human Rights Commission has said, the difference between legitimately criminalised hate speech and vigorous exercise of the right to express opinions is not easy to capture.

And I should correct myself; that was the royal commission on Christchurch—we don’t hear such wise things from the Human Rights Commission, which should be gone. We are not only abandoning free speech; we are abandoning the rule of law for something that will not actually deliver any benefit, and, if it did, it would be restricting the ability to debate religion, which is what brought about the Reformation and the Enlightenment that made a Parliament like this in a democracy like New Zealand possible. That’s how stupid this law is.

But let me also give you a glimpse into what this means for our future. You see, I heard from somebody recently about the climate of debate and discussion in Western societies at the moment, and they said something that has really resonated with me. They said, “This is supposed to be an age of enlightenment, but you have to walk on eggshells with everything you say.” A lot of people feel like that. They feel that if they say the wrong thing, they’ll be cancelled, possibly face consequences at work, be beaten up or piled on or doxed, or any other number of modern social media phenomena. This is a time when we need to be encouraging free and open debate, not siding with the thugs and bullies who thought the only response to Salman Rushdie was to stab him in the neck because they didn’t like his opinion. We should be standing up for freedom of expression and making it easier to share your views.

But let’s give a glimpse into the future. We just heard from a Green member. This is the University of Auckland Greens on Campus on 10 October: “The University of Auckland Greens have chosen to abstain”—that’s a big word for 17-year-olds—“from attending this year’s baby back-benchers debates and any future debates.” And then they give a list of seven demands: one of them is that at this debate, they want the instituting of trained equity officers for the event, who are responsible for maintaining safety provisions and enforcement protocols; anyone in breach of the rules should be immediately removed. This is my alma mater. This is the University of Auckland, a top 100 university in the world, where young people who engage in politics boycott a debate until enforcers are installed at the debate to immediately remove people if they don’t like what they say or if they think that something being said makes them feel unsafe.

This is a culture in a climate where the right to free expression—hard fought, hard won, and hard maintained over centuries in our society—is endangered in a very real way. And one thing that doesn’t help—even though it’s a massive back-down; even though it probably won’t do anything—is this House and this Government introducing more laws to chill freedom of expression. Well, I could tell you, one party in this Parliament is always committed to upholding our traditions of free speech, and that is the ACT Party, and I can tell you that if you want to uphold free speech and have this law and other chilling hate speech laws reversed, then the best bet to achieve it is a party vote for ACT. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, thank you. This will be a very brief call. This is to remind everybody in the House that the introduction of this piece of law is in response to the royal commission’s recommendations after the Christchurch terrorist attack. This is our new normal, and this is our response to that.

It is important to understand for those that are listening today that this is a two-stage process, as the Minister has said in her introductory remarks. The first is this piece of legislation, and, second, the Law Commission will carry out a comprehensive review of incitement discrimination and hate crime law.

As a member of the Justice Committee, I look forward to receiving submissions on this bill and to carefully considering them. I commend this bill to the House.

Oh, look, Madam Speaker, I’ve just, I think, got a split call on this, the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill. As has been made clear, the National Party is going to oppose this bill, but it’s not because we don’t agree with the intent—in fact, the intent is laudable—but, as is so typical of this Government, this proposed legislation demonstrates a real lack of intelligent academic scrutiny. It is a complex and convoluted area, and I do think that we do need to start from the beginning.

As a previous speaker has alluded to, this has come about why way of one of the recommendations of the royal commission on the Christchurch terrorist attacks, which the National Party does take very seriously. Nobody in this room, or, indeed, in this country, would condone the acts of atrocity that took place on 15 March 2019. I myself see the ramifications almost daily in my own electorate, I have a number of widows and families impacted by that attack living in region. However, this proposed amendment bill is not going to impact the very crux of the issue that caused that attack to come about. I think Golriz Ghahraman, when she made comments about how atrocities begin with hateful speech—that is true. It’s true. I agree with her. But it the societal condemnation of that hateful speech that is the solution; it’s not passing once-over-lightly bills like this.

The legislation proposes, as has been discussed, that it will be a crime to bring into contempt or ridicule upon any group due to their “religious belief”, which risks criminalising speech that is a part and parcel of public discourse. We ask, on this side of the House: how on earth will that be policed and how will it be enacted, let alone how will it be proven?

National firmly supports building greater social cohesion and inclusion, and we value diversity above many, many other aspects of society, but to achieve this safety for these kinds of groups, we need to be able to ask questions, we need to be able to discuss, and we need to be able to debate. For example, I think a right-thinking society should be able to challenge a fundamentalist organisation that murders homosexual people on the grounds of its own religion; we should be able to call them persecutors and terrorists.

I’d like to ask the question: will there be impacts on the survivors and critics of religious communities like Gloriavale? We’ve seen many, many examples of evidence go in front of the courts recently, where girls and women are sexually assaulted, where they are raped, and where they are forced into marriages on the grounds of religion. Surely, we as a society have a place and, indeed, have a right to criticise that. That, by the definition of this bill, will make us in breach of this law.

We do not support adding religious belief to criminal hate speech laws, it is going to significantly narrow the scope of free speech and expression in this country. Many people may not enjoy having their religious beliefs insulted, ridiculed, held in contempt, or questioned, but, as many speakers in this Chamber this morning have discussed, that is a fundamental right of the freedom of expression and speech in our society. This is a Draconian bill with a Draconian penalty regime that is only going to impact one of the fundamental tenants of a liberal democratic country. More speech, not less speech, and more debate, not less debate, is the best response to speech that people disagree with—not bans and police investigations. We oppose this bill. Thank you.

I call on Naisi Chen for five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I’ve listened very carefully to the debate going around in this House, I do think that, often, including some of the speakers that have participated in this speech—have lacked the views of a migrant. And when we talk about religion, obviously, a lot of times it does come in together with different ethnicities as well, and often these groups are not able to defend themselves in these spaces of public debate. And so that’s why this bill will fundamentally help them in protecting their human rights. And so that’s why I commend this bill to the House.

Mālō e lelei, Madam Speaker. As previous speakers have said, the Government has given very careful consideration about how to respond to the inquiry conducted by the royal commission, and that’s the reason why I support this bill. Members have also referred to the fact that it is a staged approach, and while this is step one, it will seek to tackle hate-motivated offending and to tackle that offending head-on. This will go to select committee, and no doubt the members of the Justice Committee will hear from submitters, and I’m sure that many people will have much to say. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Well, I consider Kris Faafoi a friend, but it is fair to say that he left a series of landmines across Government that have now blown up in the Government’s face, whether it’s immigration; the justice portfolio more generally; or the TVNZ-RNZ merger, which seems to be coming apart at the seams; and then, of course, we get to hate speech, which poor old Kiri Allan—again, someone I consider a mate—has inherited from Kris Faafoi and has been asked by the Prime Minister to fix. But in the process of doing so, in the introduction of this bill, it has managed to please absolutely nobody, because this bill is being attacked from the right by the National Party and the ACT Party, and, of course, it’s being attacked by the left as well. So we’re in this bizarre position, or the Minister is in an invidious position, where nobody—nobody—basically, likes what she is proposing.

Frankly, this bill should be consigned to the dustbin of political history, and it shows, I think, a Government all at sea with its priorities in justice, because I do not believe and the National Party does not believe that this is the priority in the justice portfolio.

In response to Tangi Utikere’s point before about how this is the Government’s considered response to the royal commission, there is nothing considered about this process. The royal commission reported three years ago and the Government said that they would do a bunch of things, and this bill is about the most minute response ever and everything else has been kicked off to the Law Commission, again. So it’s the Government kicking this issue off into the long grass, and, no doubt, the Law Commission will do its very important work, it will come back in the life of the next Parliament, and we may well go round again.

But I want to make the point and defend free speech, because I don’t think the Government has made the case for why this is a justified limit—the addition of religious belief—to the Human Rights Act, or why this bill is a justified limit on section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, because, fundamentally, that’s what this issue is all about. Section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act protects freedom of speech in all its forms, and freedom of expression in all its forms—all communication. That’s the starting point, and that’s a quasi-constitutional statute. It’s of fundamental importance, and I don’t think the Government has made the case for why this is a justified limit.

I want to make the case in my speech for free speech, because, as the Chief Justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, has said, free speech is “the indispensable condition of nearly every other freedom”. It is of paramount importance in a free and democratic society, and I think that it is a right worth guarding jealously and protecting fiercely. Millions of people have died for free speech, and I worry that we betray their legacy too much.

Now, as David Seymour points out, free speech is a fundamental Enlightenment value, and the left used to be the party of the Enlightenment. The left used to be the party that protected Enlightenment values, and how things have changed. Now, the left tries to shut down speech that they don’t like. We’ve got the rise of cancel culture on universities. There was that absurd debacle four years ago, when the vice-chancellor of the University of Massey banned the mild-mannered Don Brash from speaking on campus in case some people were offended by what Don Brash said about whatever he was going to talk about.

But I want to start with the simple proposition that free speech is integral to what makes us human. Free speech is important in and of itself. It allows individuals to articulate their own conception of the good life and to develop and realise their potential, and it protects everything—that’s the point about free speech. It protects the offensive T-shirts people wear, provocative art, challenging novels, the speech in this place, the finest parliamentary oration—this is not a fine parliamentary oration, but I’m sure we can all think of speeches in the past—and the most boring Civil Service documents that we all consider on a daily basis. It undergirds our liberal, democratic society.

You can’t separate our democracy from free speech, and there’s a reason why authoritarians from time immemorial have sought to control the press and not allow the free and democratic expression of the polity in the public domain. A Government that can hear its citizens and their demands is responsive to them. Freedom of speech protects good governance, and, of course, the classical liberal conception of free speech, I think, is important—the market place of ideas. Unrestricted public debate allows the truth to prevail. The best ideas win out over the bad ones.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in the Supreme Court in Abrams v United States, “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market”. Think about the best changes of the last 40 years: the market economy; the destruction of “Fortress New Zealand”; homosexual law reform; marriage equality; gay conversion therapy, in the last two or three years; or the Treaty of Waitangi settlements process, to take another example. Those big public policy debates that we’ve had in the Parliament and in wider society over the last 30 or 40 years, all of them—all of those debates—have depended upon free speech.

The ability for people of good faith and conscience to make the case for or against made those changes sustainable and endurable in the long term, and, of course, free speech is a social safety valve. Speech that is suppressed doesn’t cease to exist. Shutting down the mocking of religion, as this bill seeks to do, doesn’t make those thoughts or make the speech go away. It just makes it more difficult to criticise in the market place of ideas, and it means that conspiracy rather than truth is likely to triumph. So I’d rather have dumb, offensive ideas out there in the public domain for the debate and for mocking, rather than have them suppressed.

The whole point is that freedom of speech protects everyone and everything. It protects speech that’s crazy, it protects speech that’s rational, it protects speech that’s unpopular at any given moment, and it protects offensive speech, humorous speech, and even ridiculous speech. As Chomsky said a few years ago, “Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views that he liked. So was Stalin.” If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views that you despise. Otherwise, you’re not really in favour of free speech, and, of course, this bill is an impingement on free speech.

It sounds mild—“Oh, I’d just add religious belief. Who could be opposed to that?” But, of course, religion is a choice. It’s not like ethnicity or race. You can’t choose how you were born, but you can choose what religion you are.

So of course this bill raises significant concerns, because we want, in a free and democratic society, to be able to mock and excite hostility and condemn and criticise religion. Of course we want to be able to do that, and I have every respect for people of faith—of all different faiths—but the simple reality is that this bill will have an impact on people who want to criticise religious communities like Gloriavale. The Book of Mormon musical, for example, which is artistic expression, will raise serious concerns under this bill, and, of course, there is religious opposition to things like vaccination, for example. I, for one, think that those views are wrong, and I don’t want to get in trouble for standing up and saying that.

Actually, I have freedom of speech in this Parliament, but that right should be extended beyond that, and, of course, we should be able to mock a quasi-religion like Scientology. They believe in absurd things. Not everyone would say that, but I, for one, think that. So the ability to be able to mock and ridicule and excite hostility towards a religion like Scientology, Heaven’s Gate, or any other religion that someone might choose to talk about is important.

So this bill looks mild, but it isn’t, because it ties into this culture of shutting down speech that we don’t like, and it is reflective of a Government with the wrong priorities in justice. We oppose it.

This bill is pretty mild. It’s a simple change that people can understand and appreciate, that makes speech that is likely to incite hostility unlawful. It should be read as part of the Government’s staged approach to the royal commission of inquiry into the terrorist attack in Christchurch in March in 2019 that recommended these changes and others which the Government is making. This is a sensible bill. I look forward to interrogating it in select committee and having these fun debates that Chris Bishop enjoys, and I hope he comes along. I commend it to the House.

The question is, That the Human Rights (Incitement on Ground of Religious Belief) Amendment Bill be considered by the Justice Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Justice Committee.

Instruction to Justice Committee