Free Kiwis!

In their latest dialogue, Michael and James discuss whether an email sent by Grant Robertson in his capacity as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Otago breached the institutional neutrality provision introduced into the Education and Training Act just last year. Michael also asks James about the second rounds of the Peruvian and Colombian presidential elections, as well as both countries' troubled political pasts. Mario Vargas Llosa: Una Vida en Palabras: https://youtu.be/WiHzTF4W_SY?si=5E...

Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He was the Communications Director at Heterodox Academy from 2016 to 2020. I talked to Musa about growing up in a military family, being cancelled by Fox News, who 'symbolic capitalists' are, the extent to which Donald Trump is comparable to an alligator, and what the future holds for universities. Musa's book: https://www.thenile.co.nz/books/musa-al-gharbi/we-have-never-been-...

In this episode we are once again joined by our regular correspondent from the Free Speech Union (and the New Zealand Initiative), Steph Martin. We debrief about the FSU's panel events in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch on institutional neutrality and the draft academic freedom legislation. We also talk about that legislation (part of the Education and Training Amendment Bill No. 2), and more particularly about the response to it in Parliament by two opposition politicians.

Brandon McMurtrie is a PhD student in psychology at Massey University, where he studies political polarization. He is also a keen Substacker, X-user, and hunter. We talked to him about polarization; whether the way we're currently talking about mental health might have some downsides; psychological research on left- (and right-) wing authoritarianism; and why he goes hunting. Pew Research on polarization in the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/... Costello et al. on the traditional ...

Damien Grant is a Stuff columnist and the Principal of Waterstone Insolvency. We talked to him about occupational licensing, free speech, Trump's likely impact on the Anglosphere, and New Zealand's COVID response. Damien's column about Janet Dickson: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360573233/damien-grant-how-real-estate-agent-lost-her-career-over-90-minute-course about COVID: https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360513485/damien-grant-new-zealand-ashamed-about-what-happened-covid-years and about...

The Law Commission recently put out a consultation paper on whether the law relating to 'hate crime' should be changed, and if so how. The Commission considers whether the current 'sentence aggravation' model (in which hatred may be factored into sentencing as an aggravating factor) should be replaced by a new, specific offence of 'hate crime.' But how should 'hate' (of various sorts) factor into how we think about different offences? How broad should our scope be when considering whether a p...

Alan Davison is Academic Lead at the Governance and Public Affairs Centre at the Australian Catholic University, and was until recently Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. He co-founded the Permission to Think series on Josh Szeps' Uncomfortable Conversations podcast. He is also President of the Australian Free Speech Union. We talked to Alan about post-modernism, the evolution of (bad) ideas, and what to do about our universities. Alan's paper 'A Darwinia...

Nigel Biggar is an emeritus professor at Oxford University, where he was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology. He is also an Anglican priest. His most recent book is Colonialism. A Moral Reckoning (2023). We talked to Prof. Biggar about the how to assess the British Empire and about the roots of our universities' ongoing travails. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Colonialism-Moral-Reckoning-Nigel-Biggar/dp/0008511632