Free To Speak

Eli discusses the rush to ban social media for under-16s and examines stronger evidence that school structures and heavy homework drive youth distress. Eli Stark Elster makes the case for autonomy, free play, and targeted fixes over blanket bans and digital IDs. • correlation versus causation in mental health research • consistent seasonal suicide patterns tied to school terms • shortcomings of screen‑time metrics and “true‑ish” narratives • Haidt’s claims, wins on free play, and policy cont...

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 musi...

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 ...

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...

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...