Last Friday the Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti announced yet another review of laws to “keep us safe from harmful or illegal content”. Ms Tinetti is “designing a new modern, flexible and coherent regulatory framework; to minimise the likelihood of unintentionally coming across harmful or illegal content regardless of the way that content is delivered.”

Is there anyone who doesn’t know this will just be another in a long line of attacks on free speech by the Ardern govt? The Minister described the proposed new regulations thus-

New Zealanders will be better protected from harmful or illegal content as a result of work to design a modern, flexible and coherent regulatory framework.

Reviewing our content regulatory arrangements is one part of the Government’s work to keep New Zealanders safer online – which includes the Christchurch Call, the amendments to the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act, and the Keep It Real Online campaign and resources.

The regulatory framework will balance harm-reduction with protecting democratic freedoms – including freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. I do not intend to change the threshold for limitations on freedom of expression, and it will remain appropriately high.

MS Tinetti is 53 years old and has a master’s degree in Education. Before entering parliament as a list member, she worked as a teacher and a union delegate, and has also been a member of the national executive of the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI). In other words, Jan has been pretty active in destroying New Zealand’s education system over the last few decades.

Now we are expected to trust her with protecting our freedom of speech. Not a chance. A hard left Labourite, a teacher’s union member, and a member of the NZIE are qualifications that means she should really be kept light years away from any part of our govt, let alone meddling with free speech.

She stood for election in Tauranga twice and failed, which means she did not impress when standing in front of the people. Now as a list MP she has control of some of the most important aspects of NZ’s govt.

Her work to “construct a new regulatory framework will balance harm-reduction with protecting democratic freedoms” is something every NZer should be worried about. There will be no balance. Labour will shut down our free speech under the pretence of “protecting us from harm”, when really they are just trying to protect themselves from the truth we will write and speak about them.

We don’t have the Stasi in New Zealand yet, because we’re still a democracy, but if we ever were to fall into the ways of communist states like East Germany, you know people like Jan Tinetti would be an ideal fit to manage some faceless bureaucracy that spied on and imprisoned us for wrong think, wrong speak and wrong write. As a leftist from NZ’s education sector, it in her DNA.