Free Speech Union Council Chair Stephen Franks and Tauranga lawyer Kirsten Murfitt compare notes on being investigated by the New Zealand Law Society. Both faced complaints over letters they wrote for clients. Both say the complaints system was turned against them.

Stephen's case began with a letter sent for a client to clinics offering gender-affirming care to minors, setting out the legal risks after the Cass Review. A Standards Committee censured and fined him. The Legal Complaints Review Officer reversed that finding. Kirsten's case followed an open letter she published for her client, Lobby for Good, seeking information about a Tauranga City Council property purchase.

They cover the cost of defending a complaint, rules that treat causing distress as misconduct, and what that means for clients who need a lawyer to speak for them. Professional regulators are an election campaign issue for the Free Speech Union. This special episode looks at the public and private cost of processes that seem more interested in groupthink than in protecting consumers.

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.

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Karl Mokaraka earned the nickname "the man over the fence" the day he borrowed a wheelchair for height and climbed the fence at a Pakuranga press event. From there he put his questions straight to the politicians inside.

In this episode Dane Giraud sits down with the Ōtara-raised activist to talk about the South Auckland he grew up in, a community that once judged you by your street rather than your race. They trace what changed as the freezing works and factories closed, the shared spaces vanished and the humour that held people together went with them.

Mokaraka argues the real divide is about money and class rather than race, and that the common thread behind much of the hardship is the absent father. He makes the case that South Auckland's stories rarely reach the rest of the country, and asks who actually speaks for the families being left behind.

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Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather joins Dane Giraud on Free to Speak to set out the Union's priorities heading into the 2026 general election. Together they work through the three campaigns the FSU is running before election day.

The first is opposing the return of blasphemy and religious hate speech laws. Heather argues the state can protect people from threats and harassment, but it cannot wall off beliefs and faiths from criticism.

The second is professional regulation. She argues licensing bodies are straying beyond consumer safety into people's lawful private views. A mandatory course becomes compelled belief, she says, when someone has to give the approved answers to keep their licence.

The third is the Government's new Online Safety Bill, introduced in August 2026, which would establish a regulator inside the Department of Internal Affairs. Heather's concern reaches past the under-16 age limit. She argues the real question is whether a government body should sit between adults and their access to lawful online communication. The Union is planning a symposium on the online space for early 2027.

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.

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Mike Grimshaw is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. He joins Dane Giraud to make the free speech case for letting the Irish rap group Kneecap perform here, after Hungary barred them. You do not have to like the band to defend that, he argues.

The conversation then widens. Dane and Mike trace the transgressive history of rock and roll and hip-hop, and the long line of attempts to tame popular music. They start with the fear in the United States that the new music would bring young Black and white audiences together.

Grimshaw argues that earpods and algorithms have stripped music of its public power, and that subculture has faded. The manosphere, he says, has moved into the gap those subcultures left.

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
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Corina Shields returns to Free to Speak. As producer of Shubz Says So, she helped build one of the most talked about shows on independent New Zealand radio. Then she walked away from the station that carried it, and tells Dane Giraud why.

Shields gives her account of the arrangement behind the show. On her telling, the pay was always going to come from advertising, ownership of a stake in the station was discussed from the first meeting, and neither materialised. Radio Aotearoa owner George Ngatai has said publicly that she and Wikeepa were volunteers. Shields rejects that, and answers his claim that the release of private messages amounted to extortion. Those messages showed Ngatai approaching other parties while seeking New Zealand First selection. He acknowledged the contact and stood down as a candidate in August.

The wider argument is about who gets covered. Shields makes the case that mainstream outlets have no interest in disputes like hers, and that independent voices are the only ones telling those stories. She also talks about the pushback she gets from within Māori media and politics, and what three years of having a public voice has taught her.

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.

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Comedian, broadcaster and author Andrew Doyle, creator of the satirical persona Titania McGrath, joins Dane Giraud to unpack how Britain is sliding back towards blasphemy law, not by name, but through the language of "hate," "harm" and "Islamophobia" - and why that should worry New Zealanders with an election on the horizon.

Doyle and Giraud trace the case of Hamit Coskun, convicted after burning his own Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London in protest at Erdogan, whose attackers were treated by the original judge as evidence his own protest had incited hatred. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and then the Crown Prosecution Service tried to have that appeal quashed. They cover the recent threats made against Doyle's friend John Cleese over his UK tour dates, why "Islamophobia" functions as a word designed to ring-fence a belief system from criticism, and why hate speech laws historically did more to help the Nazis than hinder them. The conversation ranges across antisemitism inside supposedly anti-racist movements, the authoritarian instinct behind censorship, and why Doyle, who says he isn't anti-migration, thinks the real failure has been demanding assimilation to core liberal values.

Andrew is in New Zealand from 12-16 September for the No Offence Taken Tour, starting with the Free Speech Union's AGM in Auckland, where a panel on blasphemy laws follows his keynote. Tickets: https://fsu.nz/events/andrew-doyle

We're fighting to keep blasphemy law from returning by the back door before the election. Chip in: https://fsu.nz/donate/no-blasphemy-laws/

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In 1986 Stephen Rainbow marched with HUG, Heterosexuals Unafraid of Gays, while living as a married father who had not yet come out. Forty years after the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed, he joins Dane Giraud to argue that the reform was, above all, a free speech fight.

Rainbow describes a country in which living openly was, in his word, inconceivable. Consensual sex between men was a criminal offence. Men left for Sydney, San Francisco and London to find a life they could not have here. He recounts the campaign led by Dame Fran Wilde, and the 18 months of hate mail and threats she absorbed. Opposition came from social conservatives in both major parties of the day.

The conversation keeps returning to speech. Rainbow argues that democracy is what lets silenced groups be heard, and that the reform succeeded because people were willing to say in public what had been unsayable. Giraud puts the harder question back to him: whether today's speech restrictions, including those sought by minority communities themselves, risk silencing the dissenters within those same communities.

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

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