Leary Ingrid; McKelvie IanINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): I stand against this bill for three reasons. It's recognised in law and in ethics that freedom of speech is not absolute. Secondly it's incredibly ironic and hypocritical for ACT to suggest that what they are doing is anything except limiting the self-determination of academic institutions; itself a lasso on free speech. And thirdly as seductive as it is to look at universities as a group of institutions in their own right actually the focus around free speech needs to be on content not on place. So it's a red herring and can lead to all sorts of other questions about where we might want to make freedom of speech absolute and not look at the harm that is caused.But I do thank the member Dr James McDowall for getting his ballot drawn because it has raised a really important debate. I don't think that free speech has ever before been as critical as it is now when we weigh it against misinformation hate speech and some of the things we see that are going on in the world. I'll call to mind even the misinformation we've seen in the New Zealand context this week with Business New Zealand and its active misinformation campaign against fair pay agreements where the manipulation of a headline was done to make something look like a fait accompli and to hoodwink the public. So we all do need to be vigilant about our right to free speech but also our right to be free from misinformation.There are the needs for limits on unfettered free speech. Penny Simmonds raised health and safety as being incidental; if there was ever a reason for there to be a limit it would be for reasons of health and safety. What could be more important than that?It's also hypocritical for the Opposition to suggest that an institution doesn't have rangatiratanga around its own free speech. If I look at how they're doing that the bill cuts across institutional autonomy provisions in the Education and Training Act. It narrows the choices that institutions can make about how they operate. It provides for regulations about free speech. It requires a code of practice on free speech. These are all anathema to free speech and to freedom of choice. But also the safety impacts are around students and students' decisions to learn and that goes to the question of harm.The other element that I find really interesting is ACT's requirement to tag this bill to funding—what a transactional way to look at the world. It doesn't surprise me but it's really interesting that something as fundamental as academic freedom and issues around free speech would be tagged to something around funding. It's very transactional and it's very short-sighted.Simon O'Connor talked about hurt feelings and saying that it's about crying in the corner—it's not; it's about the balancing of rights. If we look at the March 15 attacks if we look at the harm that can be done to people who are visibly different even in my own electorate recently with the case of a young woman at school who had her hijab pulled off in what was a racially motivated attack and a religious attack that is different from being a Catholic. Catholics can't be determined from how they look but people who look different who seem different are subject to these. When I look at the diversity on the Opposition benches it's easy to see why they may not have any empathy with that argument because they've probably never been in that situation themselves.So in summary nobody has a monopoly on the truth and as we grapple with these issues that relate to individual freedom to speech we have to ask: where is the freedom to denigrate where is the freedom to incite violence where is the freedom to incite anarchy where is that line and where is the place for human dignity? These are important questions.In going forward we will need to debate them because we live in a context of populism of misinformation and of overseas funding coming into our institutions and into our society in a way where it's really difficult for people to navigate their way forward according to their values and according to what they know to be the truth. So I welcome the debate. I hope that we can take the debate to a more thoughtful level than what has been offered tonight. But these are very strong reasons why I won't be supporting this bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): I call Dr James McDowall—five minutes in reply.