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Lindsay Perigo
The Fascists of the Left (FOTLs, pronounced “Fottles”) have won. Free speech in New Zealand is dead. It has been throttled by Fottles. The Fottles have been frenetic. One, Mullah Marvelly, issued a Fatwa via Twit-Witter. Then a second Fatwa was launched in the form of a petition…
Apocryphally, in 1770, the French writer and provocateur François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) wrote to a French priest, “Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."
This is the speech I delivered almost in its entirety in my capacity as special commentator, along with Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy, at Monday night's semi-final in the intra-university Next Generation Debates series at Auckland University.
In 1996, the Adult Literacy in New Zealand survey of adults aged 16-65 found 66% of Maori and 41% of non-Maori were below the minimum level of literacy required to “meet the complex demands of everyday life and work.” A 2006 survey's results were no better: it found 43 per cent of adults with some sort of literacy issue, and half the population with numeracy difficulties.
What is freedom of expression? Without freedom to offend, it ceases to exist, wrote Salman Rushdie.
I can't be sure, but it may well have been me who introduced the term Nanny State into the New Zealand vernacular, on my Politically Incorrect Show on Radio Pacific. Certainly I used it regularly there, and observed it creep into common usage thereafter, as did the related term, Helengrad. In any event, the expression is well and truly out there now, and that's as good a thing as its referent is bad. Nanny State is vicious, anti-human … and, as we speak, relentlessly advancing.
