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.

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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.

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

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"I have always been the big-mouth Māori that says things we're not supposed to say."

Corina Shields — better known online as Aunty Heihei (@AuntyHeihei) — returns to Free to Speak to talk with host Dane Giroud about her move from social-media commentary into the producer's chair at Radio Aotearoa, where she now produces "Shubz Says So" with Shubz Live.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Corina is a wāhine Māori who built a following by saying the things she believes mainstream and Māori media won't. In this wide-ranging conversation, she and Dane dig into why so many New Zealanders no longer trust the legacy press — and why a wave of citizen journalists and independent broadcasters has risen to fill the gap.

They cover her conviction that Te Pāti Māori does not speak for all Māori, the gulf between iwi leadership and the ahikā keeping the home fires burning, and why she argues "racism" has become a lazy label used to shut conversations down rather than have them. Dane brings his own perspective as a Jewish New Zealander on how hate-speech laws can end up silencing the very minorities they claim to protect — by letting the government decide which voices within a community are legitimate.

The conversation also turns to a three-week hīkoi across the North Island to communities that rarely get a microphone, the difference between funded and unfunded media, the role of academics versus the people doing the work on the ground, and why Corina decided her voice is more powerful outside Parliament than inside it.

A frank conversation about media plurality, hard conversations, and the freedom to disagree.

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