July 2007

StephenFranks.co.nz » Blog Archive » Free speech dur­ing elections

Stephen Franks has writ­ten an eru­dite piece on the trav­esty that is the Elec­toral Finance Bill. This Bill must be opposed at all lev­els and he draws atten­tion that the worst offend­ers after the gov­ern­ment in psuhing this bill are the MSM by not report­ing the trav­esty it is.
[quote]The politi­cians respon­si­ble for this are sup­press­ing chal­lenges by pesky inde­pen­dent groups. Groups like Sen­si­ble Sen­tenc­ing, Green­peace, Fed­er­ated Farm­ers, For­est and Bird, Man­u­fac­tur­ers Fed­er­a­tion, the teacher unions, doc­tor organ­i­sa­tions, the RSA must be stopped from devel­op­ing pol­icy and urg­ing par­ties to endorse it, then urg­ing vot­ers to sup­port or oppose par­ties accord­ingly. Under the cor­rupt gang now draft­ing our law all those groups will be gagged at elec­tion time.

“But they are still free to speak” say the cen­sors. ” It is only unau­tho­rised leaflet­ting and paid adver­tis­ing they can’t do. They can be reported by the media”. And so we get to the nub of it. The media, so quick to trum­pet their com­mitt­ment to free­dom to report as they like from the House, have been sus­pi­ciously quiet on elec­tion spending.

Because when the peo­ple are not allowed to com­mu­ni­cate in their own words, directly to their fel­low cit­i­zens, they can only com­mu­ni­cate through the media fil­ter. And so the jour­nal­ists decide what the elec­tion is fought on. They con­trol how things are reported. The news edi­tors of TV 1 and TV3 decide whether the elec­tion issues will be smack­ing, or GM corn, or Iraq or politi­ci­sa­tion of the pub­lic service.

The cur­rent left wing thinks it will not mat­ter that its allies are nom­i­nally muz­zled. They are con­fi­dent that the con­scious or sub­con­scious bias of their polit­i­cally cor­rect media ”co-religionists” will con­trol the agenda anyway.[/quote]

This bill must be fought. It gives the gov­ern­ment of the day the licence to make laws with­out dis­sent in Elec­tion year. If the Sec­tion 59 bill had been pre­sented and debated in elec­tion year then all the efforts of the lobby groups against it would have been banned or cur­tailed and the sub­se­quent dam­age as the gov­ern­ment rode roughshod over the wishes of the pop­u­lace would have been min­imised when the only voice able to speak was the governments.

Where are the lib­er­tar­i­ans, where is ACT and where is the media on this issue?

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