Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. Members may recall a couple of years ago that two Canadian provocateurs who had very strong views about the correlation between race and IQ were denied access to public facilities in Auckland in order to hold public meetings and that caused quite a furore. Now I raise that point because at the same time as that was going on in New Zealand in Dunedin at the University of Otago was one of the world's leading researchers the late Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn who wrote extensively on race and IQ and gender and IQ and would have had a hundred arguments to refute Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux the two Canadians who couldn't come. We had a choice as a country to say: do we allow them to hold their views and express them however offensive they may be and then kick them out of the park or do we shut them down and prevent them from doing so on the basis that their offence could be harmful? The irony of that is that Professor Flynn a radical leftist who stood in the old Dunedin North electorate for the Alliance and New Labour a very left-wing academic was nevertheless one of this country's strongest proponents of free speech. In 2019 he wrote a book called In Defence of Free Speech which his publisher refused to publish because it was going to be considered incendiary. He eventually got it published and the new title was A Book Too Risky to Publish. And the sad thing about that is that Professor Flynn in the cradle of the place where people should be able to freely express differing views could see what we're debating tonight and that is that our universities—despite what Angela Roberts has said about this being unnecessary who then went on to say that universities should be safe. Professor Flynn and I agreed on this: universities should be anything but safe. They should be places to take risks to challenge to identify and—if necessary or if it happens—to offend. I've been on the campus enough to have been accused of being a white supremacist a transphobe a homophobe a religious fundamentalist. Some of that was offensive to which I say: I get over it I debate it I defeat it I refute it. But I don't go and hide in a corner and find my safe space as Jo Luxton would have me do because the universities are the very place where people need to be put at risk. I appreciate what Shanan Halbert said. I consider him to be one of the more thoughtful members of the 2020 intake and I understand his concern. But he interjected on Dr McDowall to say Freedom of speech means freedom to be transphobic." Well firstly the definition of transphobic will be different just about in every single person's mind in this place. Who decides what their definition is and who was going to take offence to it? The answer to that question of who decides is not so much "who decides" but how we decide. We decide by dialogue a two-way transaction of ideas. And the very place to actually consider that are our universities amongst our young who go out into the world having often left home particularly at Otago to think to be provoked to argue to learn not to be safe. I think if anybody goes to university to be safe they are in the wrong place. Despite what Jo Luxton said and Angela Roberts said the opposition to this bill—which I believe is necessary for the very reasons of the trend that we are seeing away from free speech even though it could be harmful and offensive—is the very reason we need it. I don't want people to be offended but if they are: argue. Argue against it. Counter the argument refute the argument defeat the argument but don't hide the argument."