When Wellington City councillor Nīkau Wi Neera learnt that a conference featuring Brian Tamaki and other speakers critical of transgender rights was being held at the capital’s new convention centre, he quickly took to social media, writing that the “Unsilenced” summit organised by Inflection Point NZ was “utterly unwelcome”. It would traumatise the trans and queer community, he wrote, and he and his colleagues would do everything to prevent it.
Wi Neera (Ngāti Toarangatira, Kāi Tahu) hoped that a health and safety assessment under way would determine that a protest against last month’s event could pose a risk to convention centre staff, justifying its cancellation.
A few weeks before the conference, a free speech panel at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington was postponed because of protests about the alleged right-wing political views of two of the panellists. An editorial in the student newspaper Salient argued that because the event was to be held in the university’s hub, where people might overhear it while they were moving between classes, the university was placing its students in danger. “If something harmful or hateful is said – even if it’s fact-checked and shut down immediately afterwards – it can’t be unsaid, ever.”
Whether health and safety should be grounds for censorship is
