Free To Speak

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.

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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? podcast@fsu.nz

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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/
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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? podcast@fsu.nz

Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143
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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

podcast@fsu.nz

Promoted by Free Speech Union, PO Box 10423, The Terrace, Wellington 6143
Support the show
https://www.fsu.nz/
https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech
https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/
https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz