"Traitor!" they yelled while dressed in the uniform of the Junior Spies, "Thought-criminal!"

A mere nine and seven years old, they adored the Party, and would do anything for it—including turning their own parents into the Thought Police.

They were just playing, but Winston described it as feeling like he was surrounded by tiger cubs, who will one day grow up with a bite to match their roar.

A young girl, without realising it, expressing allegiance to the Government over her own parents.

I was reminded of the Junior Spies when the Prime Minister proudly shared a letter she'd received from a young girl.

"My dad is not washing his hands properly," the girl scrawled in red writing on the back of a postcard addressed simply to "Jacinda," "he is not putting soap on his hands and rubbing for twenty seconds."

"I will work on this with him," she reassured Ardern, who responded: "love the offer of support right at the end there."

This made the news mostly as a feel-good story. It's fair enough to say this is all a bit of a light-hearted amusement: a junior member of the Team of 5 Million getting one-up on her buffoon-like father. Just playing.

But for me at least, there is also something unsettling here.

A young girl, without realising it, expressing allegiance to the Government over her own parents.

To be clear, this Government isn't training Junior Spies like that in Orwell's world.

Ardern isn't sending out Thought Police to force errant fathers to wash their hands. But by using the "Team of 5 Million" language and promoting informing on our neighbours who are "letting the team down," there is a powerful, shifting cultural narrative at play that promotes a democratically unhealthy intimacy in the relationship between individuals and the Government.

There is a powerful, shifting cultural narrative at play that promotes a democratically unhealthy intimacy in the relationship between individuals and the Government.

It's effective too, with over 63,000 New Zealanders reporting rules breaches of the COVID-19 Act last year.

Surveys by IGPS showed that the "trust in our neighbours to make informed choices about the future" dropped by about 4 percent in the past 4 years, while "trust in the government to do what is right for New Zealand" rose by 14 percent.

We now trust our neighbours similarly to our Government.

The letter and these statistics are symbolic of a deep—yet subtle—sense of over-familiarity that serves to erase our awareness of the massive power imbalance between Government and individual citizens.

Just ask the noted South Auckland KFC worker how it feels when the warmth disappears.

At a time where "lockdowns impose the most extensive restrictions on New Zealanders' lives seen for at least 70 years; perhaps ever," as Professors Andrew Geddis and Claudia Geiringer said, we must not forget that the State, albeit a "nice" one, is still the state—not our family or friends.

We're fortunate that our Prime Minister isn't in any danger of becoming Big Brother, and New Zealand isn't a dystopia.

But to maintain our civil democracy in these extraordinary times, we must balance our over-familiarity with a healthy emotional distance.

• Kieran Madden came to the Maxim Institute after completing a Master's in Public Policy from the Crawford School of Economics and Government at ANU, he is now working on a multi-year, multi-level research project on poverty in New Zealand.
• First published by the Maxim Group. Reproduced with permission.

Little wants the review to focus on "whether our laws properly balance the issues of freedom of speech and hate speech".

He seems to want a bob each way on this question.

On the one hand, he has defended free speech - the right, within very broad limits, to say whatever we wish - as being a fundamental principle of free society.

On the other, he has claimed "current law specific to hate speech offences [is] very narrow".

In particular, he has asked whether it is right "that we have sanctions against incitement of disharmony on racial grounds but not, for example, on grounds of religious faith".

There is an obvious point of difference between ethnicity and religion in respect of Little's question.

Ethnicity is an element of personal identity; it is something one is, rather than something one believes.

Religions, on the other hand, like political doctrines, are ideologies.

It would be especially dangerous to go down the road of protecting ideological beliefs from criticism on the grounds that those holding them might be offended.

Israel Folau recently lost his lucrative rugby career over comments that homosexuals are condemned to hell when they die.

Predictably enough, his comments were labelled hate speech. But those comments were made on religious grounds and while, no doubt, most modern Christians are accepting of homosexuality, the Bible condemns it as a sin in both the old and new testaments.

It's easy to see from this example how hate speech legislation protecting both sexuality and religious beliefs could end in a quagmire of legal absurdity: Folau might have been prosecuted for hate speech against homosexuality, while simultaneously claiming those criticising him were themselves guilty of hate speech against his religion.

More broadly, is the question of what should be protected as free speech, and what should be condemned as hate speech, really one of balance, as Little has asserted?

I argue it is not. Continue reading

• Dr Michael Johnston is Associate Dean (Academic) in the School of Education at Victoria University of Wellington.
• Image: Stuff