It was worth a try, but the Advertising Standards Authority has rejected our appealon the ruling against our "controversial" front page advertisement regarding the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) (Customary Marine Title) Amendment Bill.
Given the ideological capture of institutions in New Zealand, it is hardly surprising that the appeal board of the ASA came to almost the same conclusions as the initial ruling. In these institutions there is visceral hatred, revulsion, and fear of anything that disrupts the current narrative around the Treaty and Māori special rights.
Our front page advertisement definitely disrupted the narrative. It showed New Zealanders just how much of the New Zealand coast is under current application by iwi. In case you don't remember, it is virtually the entire coast.
We maintain that our advertisement was factual and did not breach standards.
This ASA decision tells the media decision-makers who want to refuse to run our advertisements that they are entitled to block ordinary people seeing reflections of their own concerns and reasoning in the media.
The class now ruling the mainstream media find ways to stretch and manipulate any rules. Or they just make them up, or ignore the inconvenient ones, including rights to freedom of speech and non-discrimination on the grounds of political belief, or race.
Anything that conflicts with the dogma of the professional-managerial-academic-political-entertainment elite is likely to be blocked, ridiculed, or accused of misinformation. These elites feel virtuous censoring out anything they feel or think the masses should not believe.
We’ll never get good faith engagement from our opponents, and we accept this sad reality. Totally spurious reasoning is par for the course in decisions from the lanyard-wearing class.
What we don't accept is that we should be content to allow this unfairness to continue unopposed.
It is long past time for a law change to extend the Commerce Act, so that the powerful who control dominant media will be liable, just as cartel conspirators are, if they use their dominance to suppress competition in the marketplace of ideas.
We’d be glad to debate the truth and fairness of our communications with anyone, but that is not what the ASA want to allow. They want to silence us. They want to suppress our views and by extension yours.
The ASA grounded their decisions - the first and the appeal - in opinion rather than objective fact. Facts are still facts, even when they are inconvenient to the beliefs of the members of the ASA.
The tendency for amateur authoritarians to paint those whom they disagree with as ‘evil’ rather than just holding a differing viewpoint has been cancerous to our ability to debate important and difficult subjects.
We fight these battles not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because we know that once emboldened, our opponents will go after the next organisation or group. Today it’s mainstream media deliberately ignoring what may happen if iwi control large swathes of our coastline. Tomorrow it'll be our democratic rights.