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Free Speech Union tours News Zealand and Australia

Frederick Attenborough

1 July 2024

FSU General Secretary Toby Young is currently Down Under on a speaking tour organised by the Free Speech Unions of New Zealand and Australia.

In New Zealand, online free speech has recently been given a reprieve following the coalition government’s decision to scrap the Safer Online Services and Media Platforms project.

As with the initial version of the UK’s Online Safety Bill, the plan was to establish an online regulator with the power to censor perfectly legal content that it decided was “harmful” or detrimental to the “emotional wellbeing” of New Zealanders. Thanks to the efforts of the Kiwi FSU, that plan has been shelved.

Meanwhile, the FSU of Australia has been spearheading the fight against Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner who’s been over-reaching in her attempts to censor social media, not just in Australia, but throughout the world.

Thanks to an online tool created by the FSU down here, her office has been deluged with FOI requests from people wanting to know whether their social media activity has been monitored by the woman known as “the eKaren”.

https://twitter.com/NZFreeSpeech/status/1805377944103403766

Toby has just completed his tour of New Zealand. Along the way he was invited on to various TV and radio shows, and took the opportunity to get the word out about the perilous state of free speech globally, the rapid creep of worryingly vague and subjective hate speech laws across the West, and the work that the FSU and its sister organisations in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have been doing to stand up for free speech.

You can listen to him speaking on Radio NZ here, on Reality Check Radio here, on Rhema here, and on the Different Matters podcast here. He was also interviewed for Christchurch News here, for Stuff here, and for Sean Plunkett’s The Platform NZ show here.

https://twitter.com/FSUofAustralia/status/1806816015277490633

Toby recently touched down in Australia for the second-leg of his Antipodean tour, so if any FSU members in the country want to come and see him, he’ll be speaking in Melbourne on July 4th, Sydney on the 10th and Perth on the 14th.

You can find out more details about the venues and book tickets here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHvdJZqnpOg