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Free To Speak
Free To Speak episodes
- Karl Mokaraka: The Man Over the Fence on South Auckland
Karl Mokaraka earned the nickname "the man over the fence" the day he borrowed a wheelchair for height and climbed the fence at a Pakuranga press event. From there he put his questions straight to the politicians inside.
In this episode Dane Giraud sits down with the Ōtara-raised activist to talk about the South Auckland he grew up in, a community that once judged you by your street rather than your race. They trace what changed as the freezing works and factories closed, the shared spaces vanished and the humour that held people together went with them.
Mokaraka argues the real divide is about money and class rather than race, and that the common thread behind much of the hardship is the absent father. He makes the case that South Auckland's stories rarely reach the rest of the country, and asks who actually speaks for the families being left behind.
Join the Free Speech Union: https://www.fsu.nz/join
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
[email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz48 min - Jillaine Heather: The Free Speech Union's election priorities
Free Speech Union Executive Director Jillaine Heather joins Dane Giraud on Free to Speak to set out the Union's priorities heading into the 2026 general election. Together they work through the three campaigns the FSU is running before election day.
The first is opposing the return of blasphemy and religious hate speech laws. Heather argues the state can protect people from threats and harassment, but it cannot wall off beliefs and faiths from criticism.
The second is professional regulation. She argues licensing bodies are straying beyond consumer safety into people's lawful private views. A mandatory course becomes compelled belief, she says, when someone has to give the approved answers to keep their licence.
The third is the Government's new Online Safety Bill, introduced in August 2026, which would establish a regulator inside the Department of Internal Affairs. Heather's concern reaches past the under-16 age limit. She argues the real question is whether a government body should sit between adults and their access to lawful online communication. The Union is planning a symposium on the online space for early 2027.
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz49 min - Dame Elizabeth Rata: how New Zealand built a world-leading education system
Dame Elizabeth Rata is a sociologist of education at the University of Auckland and a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She joins Dane Giraud to discuss her 40-part YouTube series, The History of New Zealand Education. The series traces how the country built a world-leading school system in the nineteenth century, and why it later declined.
Rata argues that free, standardised state schooling did more than teach children. It built a nation and produced knowledgeable citizens who could hold Parliament to account. She draws on primary sources such as inspectors' reports and the legislation itself. She covers the 1852 Constitution Act, the expansion of the vote, and the shared work of Māori and European New Zealanders.
She also makes the case that a sound knowledge of history is a defence against being misled. Without shared, verifiable reference points, she argues, language and history can be bent to fit whatever a given moment wants them to mean. The conversation closes on the new knowledge-rich history curriculum, due to be taught from 2027.
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz47 min - Mike Grimshaw: Kneecap, free speech and the transgressive power of music
Mike Grimshaw is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. He joins Dane Giraud to make the free speech case for letting the Irish rap group Kneecap perform here, after Hungary barred them. You do not have to like the band to defend that, he argues.
The conversation then widens. Dane and Mike trace the transgressive history of rock and roll and hip-hop, and the long line of attempts to tame popular music. They start with the fear in the United States that the new music would bring young Black and white audiences together.
Grimshaw argues that earpods and algorithms have stripped music of its public power, and that subculture has faded. The manosphere, he says, has moved into the gap those subcultures left.
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz44 min - Corina Shields: Independent Media and the Stories Nobody Covers
Corina Shields returns to Free to Speak. As producer of Shubz Says So, she helped build one of the most talked about shows on independent New Zealand radio. Then she walked away from the station that carried it, and tells Dane Giraud why.
Shields gives her account of the arrangement behind the show. On her telling, the pay was always going to come from advertising, ownership of a stake in the station was discussed from the first meeting, and neither materialised. Radio Aotearoa owner George Ngatai has said publicly that she and Wikeepa were volunteers. Shields rejects that, and answers his claim that the release of private messages amounted to extortion. Those messages showed Ngatai approaching other parties while seeking New Zealand First selection. He acknowledged the contact and stood down as a candidate in August.
The wider argument is about who gets covered. Shields makes the case that mainstream outlets have no interest in disputes like hers, and that independent voices are the only ones telling those stories. She also talks about the pushback she gets from within Māori media and politics, and what three years of having a public voice has taught her.
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz46 min - Andrew Doyle: How Blasphemy Laws Are Returning as 'Harm' and 'Islamophobia' | Free to Speak
Comedian, broadcaster and author Andrew Doyle, creator of the satirical persona Titania McGrath, joins Dane Giraud to unpack how Britain is sliding back towards blasphemy law, not by name, but through the language of "hate," "harm" and "Islamophobia" - and why that should worry New Zealanders with an election on the horizon.
Doyle and Giraud trace the case of Hamit Coskun, convicted after burning his own Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London in protest at Erdogan, whose attackers were treated by the original judge as evidence his own protest had incited hatred. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and then the Crown Prosecution Service tried to have that appeal quashed. They cover the recent threats made against Doyle's friend John Cleese over his UK tour dates, why "Islamophobia" functions as a word designed to ring-fence a belief system from criticism, and why hate speech laws historically did more to help the Nazis than hinder them. The conversation ranges across antisemitism inside supposedly anti-racist movements, the authoritarian instinct behind censorship, and why Doyle, who says he isn't anti-migration, thinks the real failure has been demanding assimilation to core liberal values.
Andrew is in New Zealand from 12-16 September for the No Offence Taken Tour, starting with the Free Speech Union's AGM in Auckland, where a panel on blasphemy laws follows his keynote. Tickets: https://fsu.nz/events/andrew-doyle
We're fighting to keep blasphemy law from returning by the back door before the election. Chip in: https://fsu.nz/donate/no-blasphemy-laws/
Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnzPromoted by Free Speech Union New Zealand Inc, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143.
Support the show
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https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz48 min - Stephen Rainbow: Homosexual Law Reform, Free Speech and 1986
In 1986 Stephen Rainbow marched with HUG, Heterosexuals Unafraid of Gays, while living as a married father who had not yet come out. Forty years after the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed, he joins Dane Giraud to argue that the reform was, above all, a free speech fight.
Rainbow describes a country in which living openly was, in his word, inconceivable. Consensual sex between men was a criminal offence. Men left for Sydney, San Francisco and London to find a life they could not have here. He recounts the campaign led by Dame Fran Wilde, and the 18 months of hate mail and threats she absorbed. Opposition came from social conservatives in both major parties of the day.
The conversation keeps returning to speech. Rainbow argues that democracy is what lets silenced groups be heard, and that the reform succeeded because people were willing to say in public what had been unsayable. Giraud puts the harder question back to him: whether today's speech restrictions, including those sought by minority communities themselves, risk silencing the dissenters within those same communities.
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz49 min - Juliet Moses: Artists, Donors and Who Owns the Stage | Free to Speak
Juliet Moses is a lawyer, President of the New Zealand Jewish Council, and the author of "Biting the Hand", a Quillette essay on what happens when artists insist their work and their politics cannot be separated. Her argument is that when artists say the two are indivisible, the institutions and donors who fund them are increasingly taking them at their word.
Dane and Juliet begin with concert pianist Jayson Gillham, who used a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra recital in August 2024 to condemn Israel over the killing of journalists in Gaza, had his next performance cancelled, and lost his case in the Federal Court of Australia in July. They move to the Sydney Theatre Company keffiyeh curtain call, estimated to have cost the company $1.5 million in refunded tickets and withdrawn donations, and ask whether a performer has an unfettered right to turn a stage into a political platform, or whether an institution is entitled to protect its audience, its donors and its reputation.
They then turn the question around, to donors who are themselves the problem. The Sackler family and the use of arts philanthropy to launder a reputation built on OxyContin. Nan Goldin's de-naming campaign, and why Harvard broke ranks and kept the Arthur M. Sackler name. Epstein's money at MIT, accepted while he sat on the institution's own disqualified donor list. Dane's first ever funding, a $350 cheque from James Wallace, written years before Wallace's convictions and the transfer of his art collection to a trust bearing no trace of his name.
The conversation closes on whether actors need to hold some public neutrality to stay convincing on screen, and on this year's Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, where a fiction finalist used his reading slot to condemn the Government over Gaza and the awards' co-founder binned his prepared speech to answer him. Juliet's argument is not that donors should get their way. It is that campaigns without clear principles collapse into purity tests, and that declining to fund, to platform or to buy a work is not the same thing as censorship. Views expressed are the guest's own.
Read Juliet's essay in Quillette: https://quillette.com/2026/07/31/arts-funding-and-the-new-politics-of-patronage/
Note: this episode includes discussion of sexual offending in the context of a convicted arts patron.
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: https://www.fsu.nz/join
Donate: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
[email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz49 min - Frances Widdowson: Kamloops, unmarked graves and academic freedom
Frances Widdowson is a Canadian political scientist. She was an associate professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary until her dismissal in 2021. For several years she has examined the evidence behind the May 2021 announcement concerning the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. She joins Dane Giraud to set out what she has found.
In May 2021 it was announced that the remains of 215 children had been confirmed at the site. Widdowson gives her account of what followed. She describes a ground-penetrating radar survey of an apple orchard, and a July 2021 presentation in which the figure was put at 200 targets of interest rather than confirmed remains. She explains what ground radar can detect and what it cannot, and why she argues that only excavation can settle the question. She also covers the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission volume on missing children and burials, and the difference between an unmarked grave and a clandestine one.
The wider argument is about open inquiry. Widdowson says the subject has become very difficult to research in Canada, and that questioning the claim invites the label of residential school denier. Mount Royal University dismissed her in 2021. She links that dismissal to her positions on this and other contested issues, and the matter remains before the Alberta Labour Relations Board.
Her claims in this episode are her own. We publish them because the question of who is permitted to ask them is a free speech question. An argument that cannot be tested in public is not an argument at all.
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]
Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz50 min - Shubz: Called a Kūpapa for Talking to the Wrong People
Shubz has been called a kūpapa. The word describes Māori who sided with the Crown in the New Zealand Wars, and it still gets thrown at Māori accused of betraying their own. Shubz gets it for having David Seymour on his show.
Shubz hosts "Shubz Says So" on Radio Aotearoa. His method is simple: talk to people you disagree with, in public, without the gotcha. That has meant long conversations with David Seymour, Brian Tamaki, Don Brash and others, and it has cost him standing in parts of his own community.
He sits down here with Dane Giraud, host of Free to Speak and a Council member of the Free Speech Union, who knows the same pressure from inside the Jewish community, where the equivalent word is Kapo. Both men arrive at the same question from different directions: what happens to free speech when the heaviest penalty for dissent comes not from the state but from your own people?
They cover the gap between kaupapa and kūpapa, why Shubz argues Te Pāti Māori does not speak for all Māori, blood quantum and who gets to decide who counts, how little either side of the Treaty debate often knows about the history, and his argument that funding and self-preservation explain more about who polices the line than culture does.
It also goes somewhere harder. Shubz is an advocate against sexual abuse, and he asks why a movement that filled the streets over the Treaty could not turn out for Sam Troth's hīkoi for survivors. He talks about what people brought to him on his own journey around Te Ika-a-Māui, and about being offered money to stop talking.
Dane pushes back, particularly on whether a small community is ever right to keep its disagreements in-house. Neither man lands quite where you would expect.
Content note: this episode includes discussion of child sexual abuse, including a survivor's account, and strong language throughout. Support is available. Safe to Talk: 0800 044 334 or text 4334. Male Survivors Aotearoa: malesurvivors.nz. Victim Support: 0800 842 846.
Mentioned in this episode:
Shubz Says So on Radio Aotearoa: https://shubzlive.com
The Road to Healing Aotearoa (Sam Troth): https://www.theroadtohealing.co.nz
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
Support our work: https://www.fsu.nz/donate
Newsletter: https://www.fsu.nz/subscribe
Website: https://www.fsu.nz
Got feedback or a guest suggestion? [email protected]Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz48 min
About Free To Speak
From the publisher's feed
Free to Speak is the New Zealand podcast that goes beyond headlines to explore the principles behind our most contentious debates.
Produced by the New Zealand Free Speech Union, it examines…
freedom of expression and why it matters to a free and democratic society.
Expect interviews with guests from New Zealand and around the world, plus deep dives with our Council into the cases and policy work shaping free speech today.
Expect interviews with guests from New Zealand and around the world, plus deep dives with our Council into the cases and policy work shaping free speech today.
Any questions, queries or feedback? Email: [email protected]
www.fsu.nz