Race Relations Office Has Turned Censor And Must Go. Peters v. DeVoy: 0 - 0.

We owe a debt to new Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy, for finally demonstrating how retrograde that office is, and how it has no place in a free society.

According to Dame Susan:

Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy says she is still formulating her views on racism and has NZ First leader Winston Peters in her sights.

After almost three months since her appointment as commissioner, Dame Susan said she was still "getting a good grasp" on racism and revealed she now deemed controversial cartoons published in South Island papers recently as racist despite previously saying they were not.

She told TVNZ's Q+A programme this morning that she was "starting to formulate my ideas" about racism and said that she would be forced to get involved if Mr Peters continued his "tirade" against the Chinese community.

Where do I start.

Well, for a start my tax money is obviously funding rank amateurism: surely the officer hired to that job has a slightly better grasp of what racism is than this? In fact surely they have an actual grasp of what racism is, period. I pay a teenage apprentice to learn on the job, not a political office at this level.

Though that's just offensive to me, as a member of that bottomless pit known as the taxpayer, and doesn't broach the harm Dame Susan is doing here, in her comments on leader of New Zealand First, Winston Peters.

Winston Peters campaign against the Chinese community is misinformed at best, racist and bigoted at worst, just as is Labour and Green's targeted campaigns against Chinese investment, especially in cognisance of other Euro-centric countries being bigger investors in New Zealand assets. I am particularly well placed to be making the comments in this post, because I have spent some portion of this blog defending Chinese investment against the xenophobia and economic ignorance of our political Left:

Foreign Ownership of Assets I.

Foreign Ownership of Assets II.

But that aside, we classical liberals understand that free speech is the best defence against bigots and racists: such haters must not be silenced by the state, only by reason, as they are given the rope to hang themselves pursuant to the judgement of civilised, informed minds. Being offended is never a crime. Hate speech laws, are freedom hating laws. I don't want Dame Susan using the power of state to censor, and it's appalling her Race Relations primer for Dummies has led her up the garden path of doing so. That garden path merges always with the road to our serfdom. Without free speech, the West becomes the East, circa Cold War.

The Race Relations office must now be disbanded, though while Dame Susan waits in the antechamber, and given she has thrown herself into the childish sand pit of political partisanship, perhaps she could pen a missive to censor and censure both Labour and the Greens for their program of repugnant nationalism ... that is, as far as the Chinese are concerned. Then please someone give Dame Susan a copy of Freedom for Dummies: or as I call it, my blog.

Because finally, the most important question to come from this, is what has happened that our theocrats in the Fortress of Legislation no longer understand that foundation stone of the free society: free speech? No, wait a minute, they're theocrats, I've answered my own question. The solution, of course, is minarchy, and Libertarianz.