This winter, Ani O'Brien is taking the Good Faith Yarns Tour around the country: honest, good faith conversations with locals in towns and cities across New Zealand, on the topics we usually just shout about.

She sits down with Dane Giraud to walk through the full lineup, stop by stop, and explain why she wanted conversations rather than combat. No debates, no point scoring. Just a willingness to disagree well, listen properly, and stay in the room afterwards for a drink and a yarn.

Tickets are $10. All dates, venues and booking:

https://www.fsu.nz/events

TOUR DATES

Queenstown, Tue 21 July: Mayor John Glover and Mike Casey (Rewiring Aotearoa) on growth, infrastructure and energy.

Christchurch, Wed 22 July: Professor Te Maire Tau (Ngāi Tahu) on the Treaty and partnership after the Treaty Principles Bill.

Dunedin, Thu 23 July: Sir Ian Taylor on technology, AI, ethics and identity.

Whangārei, Mon 27 July: Far North councillor Davina Smolders on co-governance and local democracy.

Hamilton, Tue 28 July: Duncan Garner on the press gallery and the state of the media.

Auckland, Wed 29 July: Rob Campbell on public service neutrality and where the line sits.

Tauranga, Thu 30 July: Dr Alistair Reese and Professor Paul Moon on faith, spirituality and the Treaty in history.

Palmerston North, Tue 4 August: Liam Hehir on politics and media beyond the Wellington bubble.

Wellington, Wed 5 August: Todd Stephenson and Simon O'Connor debate assisted dying.

More stops to be announced.

ABOUT FREE TO SPEAK

Free to Speak is the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union, uncensored conversations on free speech, civil liberties, and the people defending them. Hosted by Dane Giraud.

Join: https://www.fsu.nz/join

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ACT MP Laura McClure joins Dane Giraud to talk about her Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill, which passed its first reading unanimously and is now before select committee. The bill amends the Crimes Act 1961 and the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 so that AI-generated sexual images are treated the same in law as non-consensual intimate recordings. McClure explains why she made a deepfake of herself, why she held the blurred image up in Parliament, and the gap in the law the bill is designed to close. She and Dane work through the questions that matter most for free expression: where satire and parody end and abuse begins, how you define what is sexually explicit without capturing comedy or art, and why she targets the behaviour of creating and sharing this content rather than the technology itself. Along the way they get into charter schools, the limits of AI, and why so few people are honest about how much they already use it. Free to Speak is the podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union. Hosted by Dane Giraud.

Support the show

https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz

Dr Ben Jones, Director of Case Management at the UK Free Speech Union, joins host Dane Giraud to discuss his new book, Island of Strangers, and a question that should trouble anyone who values open debate: how did Britain - the country that gave the world so much of its free-speech tradition - become a place where the police knock on your door over a Facebook post?

Jones has spent five years on the front line of Britain's free-speech wars, and his union now fields around fifty requests for help every week. Since the election of Keir Starmer's Labour government in 2024, he argues, the problem has shifted from cancellation to criminalisation - ordinary people arrested, interviewed and in some cases jailed for things they have said online. Taking Starmer's own "island of strangers" line as its starting point, the book argues that mass migration and the decline of Christianity have left Britain without the shared identity and common rituals that once held it together - and that a state trying to manage this "hyper-diversity" increasingly does so by suppressing speech, through two-tier policing and the quiet return of blasphemy law.

Jones and Dane test the thesis hard: is the fault really with migration, or with the politicians who built the system? Does America's First Amendment prove a diverse society can stay free? And why does free speech look like a fragile, culturally specific inheritance rather than a universal default? The conversation ranges across the Roman Empire and the limits of assimilation, Aristotle and Durkheim on what actually makes a society, cancel culture and the "no debate" tactic, positive versus negative identity politics, the class dimension of censorship from the Lady Chatterley trial to today, and what all of this means for New Zealand and Australia - including NSW Premier Chris Minns' striking admission that free speech and multiculturalism may not mix.

Island of Strangers is available now on Amazon in hardback, Kindle and audiobook. Free to Speak is the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union - uncensored conversations on free speech, civil liberties, and the people defending them.

Hosted by Dane Giraud.

Join the Free Speech Union: https://www.fsu.nz/join

Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate

Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe

Website: https://www.fsu.nz

Got feedback or a guest suggestion? podcast@fsu.nz

Support the show

https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz