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.

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

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Website: https://www.fsu.nz

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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Is it now a criminal offence to pray for someone struggling with gender confusion? Could a parent face prosecution for affirming their child's biological sex?

Bob McCoskrie of Family First joins Dane to unpack the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act 2022 — and why he believes it should be repealed immediately.

Bob explains how the law's vague definitions, the removal of consent as a legal defence, and its deliberate one-directional design have created a chilling effect on counsellors, parents, and religious communities alike.

He makes a striking argument: now that the government has banned puberty blockers, the conversion therapy law is actively fighting itself — criminalising the very parental behaviour the government now endorses.

The conversation also covers the under-16 social media ban debate (Bob's answer is more nuanced than you'd expect), the lessons from the 2020 cannabis referendum, and why shutting down debate always backfires.

CHAPTERS

0:00 – Introduction & South Auckland memories

4:35 – What is the Conversion Practices Act and why does it exist?

9:40 – Vague definitions and the consent trap

19:15 – Prayer, parenting, and the chilling effect

25:33 – Detransition stories and the clinical pushback

30:28 – The under-16 social media ban debate

38:52 – Holding big tech accountable

48:10 – The puberty blockers ban creates a legal contradiction

52:00 – Cannabis referendum: how Bob beat Chloe Swarbrick

57:30 – Media silence, labels, and free speech

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Young men drifting to the Right is the half of the story everyone is reporting. The other half — young women radicalising Left at an even faster rate — is barely discussed. And when politics becomes completely gendered, Michael Johnston warns, it spells disaster. In this episode of Free to Speak, Dane Giroud sits down with Michael Johnston — Senior Fellow at The New Zealand Initiative and leader of its work on education — to take apart what's really driving youth radicalisation on both sides.

They get into what "left" and "right" even mean to today's young people (and why, by one definition, Te Pāti Māori is the most right-wing party in Parliament), the housing market as the single biggest threat to liberal democracy, why universalism matters, and the case for free speech as the weapon of the powerless. The conversation then turns to Michael's home turf: education.

How did a 19th century NZ schooling system that was, by the standards of the time, remarkably liberal and knowledge-focused end up where it is now? What did Tomorrow's Schools and the 2007 curriculum actually do? And why — beyond economics — do boys in particular need male mentors and male-only spaces to find out who they are? Dane shares the story of how Raymond Hawthorne opened up Shakespeare for a kid from South Auckland who never expected to read it. 🎙️ Recorded for the Free to Speak podcast — the official podcast of the New Zealand Free Speech Union.

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Pulotu Tupe Solomon-Tanoa'I served four years on the Broadcasting Standards Authority. With the BSA now set to be abolished by the Coalition Government following the Sean Plunket / The Platform jurisdictional decision, she sits down with FSU Council member Dane Giraud for an open exchange on what the BSA actually does, where free speech and protection from harm collide, and whether scrapping the body off the back of a single controversial ruling was good process.

It's a genuinely civil disagreement — and one of the more substantive conversations on broadcasting regulation you'll find in New Zealand right now.

They cover:
- How BSA complaints actually work — and why only ~8% are upheld
- The elasticity of "harm" and who gets to define it
- The Heather du Plessis-Allan ruling and whether counter-speech would have done more
- The Plunket / Platform jurisdictional decision and the cost-of-appeal problem
- Why years of reform consultation were shelved before the BSA was scrapped
- Online pile-ons, platform accountability, and the Mikey Sherman case
- David Harvey's voluntary-standards model — and its gaps
- Vexatious complaints, and the BSA's 2020 decision not to hear complaints about te reo Māori

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"There is a crisis of honesty — and we're seeing the consequences in every sphere of life."

American philosopher Peter Boghossian — author of How to Have Impossible Conversations and the mind behind Spectrum Street Epistemology — joins host Dane Giraud for a wide-ranging conversation on free speech, polarisation, religion, antisemitism, the trans medicalisation scandal, the breakdown of moral consensus, and why honest disagreement has become so rare.

🎟️ SEE PETER LIVE IN AUCKLAND — SATURDAY 16 MAY Peter's final New Zealand appearance. Ellen Melville Centre, Auckland CBD. Doors 4:45pm | Starts 5:30pm | Tickets $10.

Book: https://www.fsu.nz/events/free-speech-union-peter-boghossian-free-speech-hard-conversations-and-whats-at-risk

IN THIS EPISODE

— What Spectrum Street Epistemology actually is, and why Peter uses it with school students

— Why "online is a cesspool" and what in-person disagreement teaches that comments never will

— The atheists who are more religious than the religious

— The breakdown of the dominant moral order and the necessary backlash that follows

— Sacred cows: the topics institutions still refuse to discuss honestly

— The trans medicalisation scandal and the cost of suppressing dissent

— Rising antisemitism in the UK and the institutional unwillingness to name what's happening

— Dane's own recent experience of an antisemitic smear

— and how to respond

— Why the Israel–Palestine conversation collapses, even between people willing to talk

— Reading scripture as literature, and the value of radical self-knowledge

— Why fighting, jiu-jitsu and stand-up comedy share something the cognitive world has lost: a corrective mechanism

— The crisis of honesty

— and why everything downstream of it is breaking

CHAPTERS

(00:00) Welcome & guest introduction

(01:55) Why Peter keeps coming back to New Zealand

(03:48) How Spectrum Street Epistemology works

(05:48) Why online conversation turns toxic

(08:16) Making evidence and doubt fun

(10:02) Religion, identity, and moral certainty

(16:18) When moral orders break down

(22:34) Echo chambers and institutional capture

(27:04) Sacred cows and policy taboo topics

(42:46) A personal smear story unpacked

(46:02) Why some conflicts resist dialogue

(51:42) Reading scripture as self-knowledge

(56:52) Fighting, reality checks, and integrity

(1:00:02) The crisis of honesty

(1:09:12) Final thanks

ABOUT PETER BOGHOSSIAN

American philosopher, author of How to Have Impossible Conversations (with James Lindsay), and founder of the Spectrum Street Epistemology project. Formerly faculty at Portland State University. His work focuses on belief revision, civil discourse, and how people change their minds.

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We weigh the push for an under-16 social media ban against what it would take to enforce it and what it would cost in privacy, anonymity, and open debate. We use Australia and the UK as cautionary examples and argue that empowering parents and teaching digital literacy beats outsourcing speech rules to the state.
• Australia’s ban in practice, including high rates of circumvention and account shutdowns
• unintended shift of young people towards riskier platforms and unfiltered browsing
• why age verification undermines anonymous speech and creates data breach exposure
• the case for anonymity, from historical pamphleteers to modern whistleblowers
• parental responsibility, practical tools, and education as alternatives to blanket bans
• moral panic patterns and why correlation is not causation in harms research
• how “design not content” arguments can mask censorship incentives
• why government-defined “harmful speech” becomes political and inconsistent
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