 This is Counterculture with Marie Buske, Wednesdays at 10am on Reality Check Radio. You're with Reality Check Radio and I am Marie, your host for Counterculture. And this morning, my guest really doesn't need much introduction. You hear him on the political panel on Fridays. It is Cam Slater. Good morning. Good morning. How are you, Marie? I'm very good. Thank you. I wanted to talk to you this morning about firearms, because it is something that got brought up in the interview I did with Naomi Wolfe. And I think it's one of those elements of New Zealand life that doesn't get talked about. And I think we do need to talk about it. Gun ownership in New Zealand. Give us a rundown of perception versus reality. Okay, there's a perception that we've got really, really strict gun laws in New Zealand. And to a certain extent, that's true, but it's also not true. Up until the Christchurch massacre, we had a licensing regime that focused on allowing people to have firearms if they met a fit and proper person test. Now, I say that it's a test, but it's not actually a test. This is the whole thing about firearms law in New Zealand. It's almost like it's asked backwards. So they say that you can only get a firearms license if you are a fit and proper person. And if you look at the Arms Act 1983 and all of the amendments that have been done to that since, there's no test on what a fit and proper person is. There's only a list of what a fit and proper person isn't. And so, exactly. So if you go through the Arms Act and have a look at it, it says you can't be a fit and proper person if these things are true. If even one of these things is true. And there are a little bit of morphists as well. Like one of them is if you don't follow regulations. Now, this is fraught with danger because regulations, though technically a law, they're actually not in the law. They've been passed by an Order and Chancellor by Cabinet and haven't yet had Parliament agree to them being a law and put into the Arms Act. And the chances of you finding what those regulations are as a layperson are very slim. And there's all sorts of regulations that have been passed, especially recently. Now, and we had Stuart Nash as the police minister. And he was in the 2017 election saying that he wanted to end this arms regulation via the Order and Councils and to put it through the Parliament, which is what should happen. But then he absolutely just went with gay abandon passing regulations that the police would come to him with. And he never questioned them. He just took them straight to Cabinet and had them approved. And a good example of this is the rules. I call them rules. The rules and regulations around transportation of firearms have been changed substantially. So if you were going hunting, you'd have a gun in a gun bag or a case. You'd chuck it in the back of the Ute with all your gear. You'd drive off to where you're going hunting. Park your car, get out, go hunting, come back. Well, now you have to have that firearm secured within the vehicle. And the suggestions from the police are that you have a chain somehow securing it to the chassis of the car. And it's nonsensical because if you've got, say, four people going hunting and I often do go hunting with four or more people. We may have some 22s for shooting possums, some shotguns for, you know, a little bit of pest control on some hairs or rabbits that jump out from underneath you. And then we may have our hunting rifles for shooting deer. And we could end up with four people having something like 20 guns on board the Ute. Well, you can't chain all of those to the chassis. You can't lock all of those up. So what is the purpose? So whoever suggested this, what is the purpose of that? Is it because they're wanting, if the vehicle was breached in, say, a robbery, that those guns would not be able to remove? Is that what the goal of the regulation is? Well, that's the thought process. But you can see that a single-minded person has come up with this thought process. What we've got is this new firearms authority, which is essentially a business unit of the police. And it's key to know that it's a business unit. It has a profit incentive. And that's why they're looking at ratcheting up the fees and everything. But they've got this bunch of wambles down there who really don't know how ordinary people use firearms. Coming up with cockamamie scenarios of alleged crimes with no evidence that such a crime has even happened, or if it has happened, has caused considerable harm. And passing regulations using order and counsel to regulate this new event that may or may not happen. Now, what the police have been doing in some districts is unconscionable. What they've been doing is waiting a kilometer down the road from a gun club and then stopping every vehicle that was at the gun club as they leave it. And then saying to them, we'd like to inspect how you stored your firearms in the vehicle. And most people don't understand the law. And the law says that the police can't... That's not a proper reason for them to inspect inside your vehicle. And the regulation allows them to do this sort of, except the regulation doesn't trump the law. And the law says that they have to give you seven days' notice of a time that's suitable to you as the firearms owner, not the police. So if they pull you up on the side of the road and say, can we have a look at your firearms in the car, you're perfectly entitled under the law to say no. And there's nothing they can do about it. And so you've got these regulations that are operating in contravention of the law and the police essentially bullying people or relying on people's goodwill to comply with the regulation in the first place. And another example of that is for collectors, for example, like myself, we can buy and sell pistols and machine guns and submachine guns and hand grenades and artillery pieces and all of that sort of stuff. And it's all permitted and it's all, you know, in order to buy such a thing, we have to go and... This is the ludicrous thing. There's so much paperwork. You have to fill in an application for a permit to possess that weapon, right? So you've got to apply for the permit to possess. You fill out what it is you're buying, who you're buying it from, what their firearms license number is, all of those sorts of details, and you fill in yours. You then send that to the armed officer who then farts around. Now, I'm lucky I get them done within 24 hours because they're scared of me. But what happens is you get mucked around and then eventually they say, oh, it's okay, you can come and pick up your permit to possess, right? So you then go to the police station to pick up the permit to possess and it's got exactly the same details on it for you as you put in your application. All they've done is handwrite what you put into the application form, transfer it into the permit to possess, but left the bottom part, who you're buying it from, the seller's details, completely blank, even though you've already provided it to them in the application. You then take that permit to possess to uplift the firearm, fill in all of their details, and then you've got to take the firearm and the permit to possess back to the police so that they can expect that what you've bought is in fact what your permit is allowed. Then they take a copy, you take a copy, and you leave with the firearm. But it's different if you, say, buy something at a gun auction or at a gun show. There's usually police officers there who won't even do the application for a permit to possess. They'll just provide a permit to possess right there and then on the spot. Now, I either had an inspection at my house and the police accused me of disposing of a firearm illegally. And I sold that at a gun show and a police officer was there who'd given the permit to possess to the new person and taken it off my license, except they never processed the paperwork from that. And so it was still on my license and technically I was in breach of the law because I couldn't present the firearm to them that I still owned it, even though I'd sold it. And then, after they accused me of all of that, and I said, well, why don't you ask what actually happened and instead of accusing me from the get-go. And that's the problem is the police just accuse you. They treat all gun owners as potential criminals rather than remembering that they had to approve us as a fit and proper person, bearing in mind that list of things that you can't do. And one of those is break the law. So we are law abiding people because if we weren't, we would be a fit and proper person. But the whole premise of their attack on us is that we're criminals. And so we need to have these regulations to the billers. So this arms officer says to me, well, do you have a copy of the paperwork to prove that? And I said to him, yes, I do. And he said, well, well, can I have a copy? And I said, no. He said, well, why not? I said, because I'm not required under the law to give you that piece of paper. I could voluntarily give it to help you out, but I don't see why I should help you out because you've just accused me of committing a crime. And so therefore, it's not in my interest to help you out. It's in my interest to protect the information that will give me a good, solid defense. And if you knew the law and you're a police officer, you wouldn't have done that. So no, I'm not going to give you the paperwork. And this is the thing. If you know the law, then you're in a much better position than just accepting what the police say. And we've seen during the pandemic that police are willing to break the law. ENDS justifies the means for them. So anybody out there who thinks that the police are on firearms owners' side is deluded. They are against you. They are the enemy. They're not there to help you. They're there to hinder you. And all these regulations that have been passed have been dreamed up by people who know nothing about how people actually use firearms. And they're creating a legal morass for themselves and for shooters. That's not based on any law. And this is the real problem that we have. And there's no constitutional right to bear arms in New Zealand. So... No second amendment here. No second amendment here. But if you are a fit and proper person, you can possess firearms. And under New Zealand law, if you've got a firearm, you have to have a lawful, proper and sufficient purpose. Right? Those are the legal terms needed to use, discharge or carry the firearm. And self-defence is not... One of those. A lawful, proper purpose and sufficient purpose. Self-defence is not one of those. What are some of those? Well, if you're doing pest control, if you're going hunting, if you're going to the pistol club, if you're going to target practice, that's a lawful purpose is for you to carry a firearm. That is, it's on your person and under your control. Right? It doesn't mean transport. Transport's different. And that's where the police get in trouble when they're stopping you. And the firearms in your car, you're not carrying it. It's not on your person. And so they have no legal basis to stop you to inspect how you stored something in your car. That then comes under a premise or a house or a vehicle. And they have to give you seven days notice. So you can't possess a firearm in anticipation that you might even need to use it in self-defense. Right? So if you say, I'm going to get a firearms license because I need to defend my family. You won't get it. Right? You have to have a lawful purpose to get that firearm. But the Crimes Act, the Crimes Act's slightly different. And it says that you're allowed to use reasonable force to defend yourself, right? Against assault or entry into a dwelling house. But it needs to be proportionate to any force that's been used against you. Right? So you have to make an assessment that the person trying to break into your house is going to give you do harm. Is carrying a firearm. Is prepared to use that firearm before you can even make the decision to go and get your firearm out of the safe. And then use it to defend yourself. And even then, the police will probably charge you, put you through the hoods, and cost you $90,000 to defend it. Yeah. But some people have successfully defended themselves in that way. And Greg Carvell at SAI Guns is one of those people. But he was put through the ringer by the police. You know, there was a guy who came into his shop armed with a machete or a large knife who was trying to harm the suspect. And Greg shot him. But the police still charged him. But he got off. Right. Well, a few questions that I have is firstly, how many people in the last 12 months died in a firearms-related incident, do you know? I don't know the number. But it's a small number. We're passing regulations for much less deaths than there are people dying on the roads. So that was the bow that I was going to draw. Because, well, 300-odd people die on our roads every year in a motor vehicle accident, one form or another. The regulation in terms of exchanging ownership of a motor vehicle or of any sort is a fairly straightforward affair without all of the hoo-ha. And yet gun ownership is applied with this level of convoluted complexity that benefits no one. Yeah, it used to be easy. It was straightforward. And then Christchurch happened. And the police used that for an ideological reason to clamp down on gun owners. Because the police have imported a lot of English police into the police force. And in Great Britain, the gun laws are very restrictive. And they don't see a reason why we shouldn't do the same thing here. Forgetting our upbringing, you know, we were a frontier nation, really. You know, there was a need to hunt. There was a need to provide food. There was a need to do all of these sorts of things. And that's all been strictly controlled, you know, by the aristocracy in the UK for thousands of years. But we had to provide for ourselves and defend ourselves. And, you know, we've had, essentially, civil wars occur in the 1800s. The land wars, et cetera. And firearms ownership was quite less up until about the 70s. You know, when I first started work, I started working in the National Bank. And I worked with a guy who was like 400 million years old. And he was telling me about how they used to go and collect the money from the Reserve Bank on a flatbed truck with big chests. And they were issued revolvers. And they would sit on the back of this truck with revolvers in their hands and some banks actually had revolvers in the bank. You know, in my younger days, there used to be a gun shop on Queen Street called Tisdall's. And you used to go, it was a good gun shop. It had a good gunsmith's there. And you used to walk down the street with a gun over your shoulder, down Queen Street with a gun over your shoulder to take it into the gun shop, to have some work done on it. And now you'll have 57 police and sort of swat deer trying to shoot you because you're preparing a firearm in public, even though you're actually allowed to do that. Yeah, look, I'm from a rural community and it was just normal. I mean, on the back of the ute, I mean, everyone had a sort of a cradle in the back of the truck where the shotgun sat. And that's... So you're not allowed to do that now. You're not allowed to have them in a cradle on the back of the ute. You're not allowed to have them visible. They have to be locked and secured and all that. Now, you know, either if someone's a drive-round on the ute or they're a motorbike, they've got a .22 handy, they see a rabbit, it's dead, right? They just shoot it right there in the end. And now if it's locked up and it's... and they have to stop and get it, well, the rabbit's gone. It's just nuts what these people, the police are dreaming up. So, you know, the legislation in 1983, which I actually helped write, was quite good. It was focused around mental health. It was focused around licensing the person, not the firearm. The police had actually recommended that firearms registered be abandoned except for restricted and prohibited firearms. And that's pistols and collectors, items and things like that. So we kind of have a gun registered now, but as I explained earlier, it's got holes in it. Things that are on my license that I don't have anymore that I legally sold and did with the proper paperwork, but the police lost the paperwork, but I'm the person who's at fault. So the recommendation was to carry on with that and tighten it up around certain aspects. But they've gone completely overboard now and spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring in a gun register on the premise, the false premise, that having a registered is going to prevent criminals getting guns. I don't know what world they live in, but criminals don't follow the law. So they won't care that there's a gun register because they don't follow the law. They're criminals. So it's not going to stop criminals getting guns. So let's cycle back to the buyback. So, I mean, all of this Christchurch was the catalyst of all of this. Well, it wasn't a buyback because the government never had the guns to give to you that they could buy back, right? It was a confiscation with compensation. Because the Arms Act actually said, if you're going to confiscate somebody's firearm, you have to pay fair market value for it. So they changed the law rapidly. They couldn't have done that. They have to pay money for it, you know? So, sorry. No, so because from my perspective, as someone who isn't a gun owner now, I mean, my father, I mean, as a farmer, he was. And we grew up with it. I mean, I learned how to shoot a gun. Literally shooting rabbits on the farm. So I, for me, it was part of everyday life. I look at that now. Or is all of this the cost that we're paying, that gun owners are paying for the virtue signalling from our former Prime Minister to look good? It's worse than that. Yes, there's the virtue signalling the, you know, hug and immigrant type, you know, behaviour that she has. Which was appalling it in the worst aspects. But the biggest gun grabbers ever in the world, in the history of the world are communists and socialists. They're the biggest gun grabbers because the last thing that they need is to have people with firearms who can rise up and say, you know, we don't like what you're doing. And so they confiscate guns and take them away. Totalitarians, whether they're fascists, they're fascist socialists. Anyway, you know, they're the corporate version of socialism. But they want the general public disarmed, vulnerable, and then the apparatus of the state can grind you down with their application of force. So at the same time that the police were passing all these new regulations and rules and changing the arms act and doing all this in the wake of Christchurch, at the same time as they were doing that, they were buying up an armory of advanced weaponry that includes replacements for their 223 or 5.56mm assault rifles, which they banned everybody else from having, but they've got them. They then upgraded a large number of weapons that were used in the early days of the war. And so they were able to buy weapons and they then upgraded a large number of those with 7.62mm or 308, which is a much bigger caliber, leaves much bigger holes. They've got a whole lot of those, and they haven't told anybody that they've got those. They let me know by mistake when I answered a official information act request when I asked about magazines. Because the rifles that they bought all came with 20 round magazines. And the waker of Christchurch, the police were all on the streets, but they had 30 and 40 round magazines. And I wondered where they got those from and why. And then asking the question about the magazines, they admitted to owning all of these other firearms with much bigger hot firepower. And then of course we saw in Wellington the use of baton rounds, grenade launchers. These are military weapons that the police have obtained. They kept it on the down low. It's only when there's something like that that we saw them come out. So when you say the police have obtained, are we saying that they have been obtained, they've gone out and purchased those? Yes. Because where did all the guns that they confiscated go? Well, that's a good question because I happen to know of some guns that were confiscated, paid out to the owner and then were suddenly on the license of somebody else. And there was supposedly a lot of them destroyed, but what I'm talking about the police have got are new. They have bought those in, including the Hickler and Cotton. So that didn't appear in our budget deal, did it? No. So they've bought grenade launchers. They have fire 40-millimeter grenades and a variety of rounds that are available for those. Now, we've seen them use the baton rounds, which is essentially a hard plastic, which will knock you over and leave you with a bad bruise. And if it gets you in the face, it could cause permanent damage to your eyes or whatever, knock your teeth out, whatever. But the police have these weapons. These are military-grade weapons. They're assault rifles and military-grade weapons. But at the same time, they've been disarming people from having similar firepower. So you kind of look at it from a philosophical point of view or a political agenda point of view. The police are arming up while they're disarming citizens. That would normally cause a little bit of consternation. It used to be the police armed offender squad with the only ones that were armed, and then they had Sarko treble II rifles. Well, now they've got military weapons. They've got, you know, they have Americanized the police. They've got ballistic armor. They've got ballistic helmets. They've got vehicles with bulletproof doors and windows. So they're militarizing the police and raising their capability at the same time as taking guns off people. And that's a concern at the moment. But the more the government pursues a divisive agenda where they're separating society into groups. You know, we saw this with vaccinated, non-vaccinated. Now we're seeing it with Maori and non-Mauri. Co-governance, which 15% of the population get 50% of the say. These things create division in society and increase, especially when you apply racial divisions, increase the likelihood of seeing civil unrest and potentially civil war. Now, you mentioned the Second Amendment in the United States. And you have to understand that the Second Amendment supports the First Amendment, right? So the right to free speech is the First Amendment of the US Constitution. And the Second Amendment, in order to protect the First Amendment, is that free persons have the right to bear arms, form militia and protect themselves from the excesses of the government. Now, the US Constitution was written by a group of people immediately after the Revolutionary War where they seceded from United Kingdom and fought a war against the best army in the world. This is the army that then went on to defeat Napoleon. So it's only a few years before that that the British army was getting beaten by a bunch of hunters and trappers and civilians that had armed themselves to protect themselves from the excesses of, in this case, a world-est army. And it comes out of having that war, a civil war, a Revolutionary War. It comes out from being oppressed. And we haven't had that in New Zealand. We haven't had a full-on civil war. We haven't had a Revolutionary War. The Treaty of Waitangi, a lot of people criticize it, but it actually stopped civil war. And we haven't got that background that would lead us to having smart and well-read people coming up with a written constitution that protects free speech and supports that protection of free speech by allowing people to have firearms. And so we're not in the same boat constitutionally as the United States. But we're getting close to having that civil unrest happening and we're already seeing the start of that with increasingly violent crime and where people are rebelling against society. But also too with the increasingly violent crime, the police almost appear to be bystanders in this. So they've armed themselves up to the teeth and yet they don't appear to be doing anything in order to prevent it or stop it. No, but as society breaks down and crime becomes more rampant and people then make the next step and they start to defend themselves and they'll start with using baseball bats and iron bars and things like that. And when that doesn't work, then they'll step it up. It's a matter of time before some little ram raiding scumbag in a car gets shot by a guy who had his 15th robbery and has had enough and has gone and got himself... The hockey stick's no longer doing the trick so let's go with something a bit stronger. That's right and then they just blow them away. And then you're going to see it all clunk down on the victims of the crime, not perpetrators of the crime, which just go back even to the Christchurch situation. We've had all of these laws come in to stop what was an aberration and an aberration that was allowed for through mistakes by the police and including changes to the legislation that allowed people like Tarrant to buy ammunition and firearms willy-nilly online and Jacinda Ardern himself was the one who pushed that law change through. So what we've got is an ass-covering situation with these laws to protect something happening again, which will happen again. There's nothing we can do to stop it. People want to go and kill lots of people. They'll find a way to do it, whether it's a truck or a bicycle bat in a movie theater or a bomb or a firearm. They'll do it. They'll drive a car through a crouch. If they want to kill lots of people because they're crazy, you can't stop crazy. There's no law that you can use to stop crazy. And so what they've done is victimized 250,000 innocent Dan-owners who bear in mind that we are fit and proper people. We have to be law-abiding because if we're not law-abiding, we're not a fit and proper person. The police gave Tarrant a firearms license on the basis of people that he met online being referees after being in a country for next to no time. And they made the mistakes. They made the mistakes in the vetting. They made the mistakes in giving him the license. They made the mistakes in having a system that allowed him to buy large amounts of ammunition. They made all those mistakes and it's us as firearm owners who are paying the penalty for that, not the police. In terms of having an effective opposition when any of these sorts of things happen, I know it's an oxymoron, why then is it that so often when these convoluted pieces of legislation come down and you do have a change of government that those who are coming in don't do anything about it. They just leave it in place. Is it because it is too much effort? Why? It's called political inertia. It's easier to do nothing than to do something. And unless there's a political will to do this and the political will usually manifests itself after a tragedy. And then you get aberrations with law and stupid law and rushed law. In 1983, when the Arms Act was written, there was no cause for that to be written. They realised that the existing Arms Act was out of date. They needed to modernise it. They needed to simplify it. And they actually wrote a really good piece of legislation. And Peter Hilt was involved in a lot of that. He's now passed. Then we hit there on the Weiner Massacre, which then led to the creation of additional regulations and rules around what they called military-style, semi-automatic firearms. But it was bizarre. They said if it's got a bayonet lug on the barrel and can carry a bayonet, then it qualifies as a military-style semi-automatic. What is a bayonet lug going to do that a bullet's going to do less? It's just ludicrous. If it had a pistol grip. Now, most hunting rifles these days come out with some sort of chassis and the target rifles have got pistol grips and so all of a sudden you've got these laws applying to stupid things. So what usually happens is there's a massive event and then something happens and they change the law and then you get bad law and then it just compounds. Or they're trying to amend the act in such a way that renders it unfit for purpose. And that's what we've got now. We've got so many regulations, so many amendments that the Arms Act is not fit for purpose anymore and it requires a political party or parties who have got significant strength to actually say, no, we need to rewrite this law. We need to start from the ground up and we need to get people who understand firearms to write the law, who understand how people use firearms and how they use them, how they collect them, how they store them, how they transport them and write the law so that it's sensible not being run by a committee controlled by the police whose default premise is that firearms owners are potential criminals and we need to cut down every avenue we can dream up to have one. And going back to that transport thing, I actually asked the police how many guns have been stolen from vehicles that would not have been stolen if they'd been secured in accordance with the new law. And they came back with a number and then I said to them, okay, now exclude the police from that and the number was zero. So all of the guns that have been stolen from cars in the last 10 years and then subsequently used in trying to have been police weapons stolen from police cars. So they've passed the law to inconvenience the shotgun shooter who belonged to the local shotgun club on the basis that there's actually no crime that's ever been committed amongst the general population. And then you asked about shootings. You know, it's a small number but there's a significant amount of that small number of people who have been shot by the police. So if you exclude that, the number's even smaller. You're with Counterculture. I am Marie. I'm talking to Kim Slater discussing the state of firearms and firearms legislation here in New Zealand. I'm going to pivot slightly. Last week, the radio New Zealand did a piece around police staying tight-lipped in regards to the preparation towards the election. I thought this was an exceptionally bizarre story. What on earth are they expecting to happen? This is the problem with the police, with the disinformation project, with politicians in general, right? If you are always looking for monsters, everything you find is a monster because it's what you're looking for. If you've got a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. And this is what the police do. You've got the disinformation project that's talking about political discourse. There's herty words and mean things and stuff like that. This is polarising people. They don't look at why people have been polarised. They don't look at how people are reacting, why they're reacting like that. It's the politicians that cause the polarisation, but it's our fault when we react against it. They create these scenarios and then the police buy into that and start talking about the risks of politicians. It's bollocks. It's complete bollocks. I mean, we saw in the budget yesterday that the politicians have voted themselves $14 million for increased protection for themselves. You know, because it's terrible, people are saying heady things and they might act on it. Well, in my experience in New Zealand, people don't act on very much at all. Just look at the vaccine mandates. Nobody said, you know what, that's against the Bill of Rights. How many people said that? You know, I can name them. That's how few they were that were saying that. And everyone else just went along with it to get along. And then Kiwis are their own worst enemy, and especially the firearms community. People will get along to get along. You know, they'll comply with things because they think if I don't comply, well, then it'll go badly for me. And we've got people in our club at Antique Arms that think that the police walk on water and that, oh, no, it's only reasonable. And this is the problem that the arms community has had. You've got organisations like Colfo and some other people like Pistol New Zealand. And Pistol New Zealand's perhaps the worst offender. They only care about what affects them. So when all of these bans on firearms and things came in, the Pistol New Zealand said, I know, we agree with that because that doesn't affect us in our pistol shooting. And I said to them at the time, and I said to Colfo, you've got to stop complying. It's just like the pandemic. You can't comply yourself out of tyranny. And it becomes a slippery slope. And you agree, okay, we'll agree to that. And then next week, they're coming at you with another regulation and they'll say, oh, well, you need to be reasonable about this. And then being reasonable with the police invites them to squeeze you a little bit more. And then they say, oh, no, come on, be reasonable. And they squeeze you a little bit more. And they squeeze you a little bit more. And now, of course, the Pistol New Zealand is squawking because the new rules and regulations around ranges and those sorts of things are now hurting them. The new transportation laws are now hurting them because the armour has got all these guns in its car and it has to secure the wall somehow. But they caused that because of their soft compliance on issues that didn't matter to them. But now they're getting squeezed. They're expecting everybody else to come to their aid. Well, sorry, you didn't stand up. You didn't stand up for collectors. You didn't stand up for three gun shooters. You didn't stand up for these people. Now you want to stand up because it's hurting you because you've been squeezed. But sorry, my understanding and caring about your problem has existed a long time ago. For me, all of this always circles back to free speech, always. Absolutely. Because we've been groomed into complacency. We've been groomed into complacency that if you do not push back on this, your comfort, your level of comfort will be maintained. If you do push back on this, because we do not live in an environment where free speech is cherished, you then get cancelled or called out either amongst your peers or in the media or by people in authority or in the public service. And most people do not have thick skins. They're not disagreeable. That's, I mean, New Zealand is a nice people. They're agreeable people. And we actually, in a way, I think, need to go back a bit to our mongrel roots and find a little bit of disagreeableness to actually go back and put our hands up and say, actually, no. And I think that momentum is starting, but it's not, I think, anywhere near fast enough. And it's certainly not reaching the echelons of our political classes. That's for sure. Well, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, too. So, you know, the pandemic allowed, I call them the regime, you know, because that's how they were acting high-handed and extrajudicially. They created a situation where people accepted excesses and breaches of the Bill of Rights. Now, no one in the United States accepts breaches of the Bill of Rights. They sue straight away, or they fight. New Zealanders have lost the fight. Now, we used to be such a capable nation. Now we get a weather forecast that says it's going to be a bit of rain. And you've got this grief porn and weather porn being pushed on all the media in it. How it's terrible. People are going to die. We all need to stay at home. And it just turns into, we've just become feeble and weak and pathetic. You know, in 1944, 18-year-olds were charging off landing craft into German machine guns and artillery and bombings. Across the beaches of Normandy. Now, 18-year-olds can't work out whether they're Arthur or Martha and need safe spaces. We've actually created a society where people like Charles Uppam are not revered anymore. They're despised. And, you know, the Barry Crumps of this world would never get anywhere because he's so politically incorrect. But that is the ethos that we've come from. And somehow, we've allowed society to degrade the extent that we've become weak and pathetic and victims. And the politicians, if you give them an inch, they'll take 100 miles. And they've saw that with a little bit of frowning faces, some clever messaging that they could do awful things to society and we'd suck it up. That's the cultural shift in terms of demonising what is called toxic masculinity. I mean, masculinity isn't toxic. It's masculinity that's gotten us to where we are. And you just look at the leadership today. I mean, gosh, I wish that Christopher, either Christopher would find a little bit of disagreeable toxicity that would be a damn sight better than this sort of simple... I don't know about you. Have you ever met a Christopher that's strong? The name's weak anyway, isn't it? I think it just breeds it. You know, Jordan Peterson touches on that. He doesn't call it the toxic masculinity. He talks about dangerous men doing dangerous things. And he says that a dangerous man is a good man, someone who has the ability to be dangerous to other people use extreme violence but chooses not to is a strong man. And we've immaculated society where strength is not a desirable trait that we see in our politicians. And instead we've got wet woats and weak people who are trying to lead us. We've left that ability, that menace just amongst strong men who are disciplined, that if you cross this line that it's going to hurt has been bred out of society, you know, by the wheat and the feeble. The ones who are tough behind their keyboard and their screen, but you confront them in person and their pathetic weak human beings. And we're seeing this in society in many, many different things, you know, in relationships where the soy boy type in touch with their feelings you know, soft bloke is held up as the sort of guy that women are seeking. When the reality is women like strong men and they like to be protected and they like to feel safe. And no, you know, stringy, vegan soy boy type, pansy bloke is going to be able to get away when things get tough. No, no, not at all. Have you caught up with any of the shenanigans that's going on in the Deep South at the moment? No, which shenanigans are they? So in the Deep South there's obviously there's stuff that's going on in Goa, but a little further south in Southland they have the public swimming pool there called Splash Planet. There has been a group of locals that called a meeting with I think the chief operating officer Paul around concerns when they realized that the pool were going to now enforce rules that biological males could enter into female changing rooms, so they just needed to identify as female to be there and the locals came across this and were quite concerned and so they called this meeting those at the meeting only expected to have four or five people turn up, meanwhile several hundreds turned up. Now I've heard 45 minutes audio of that meeting and what I heard in there were a lot of very angry fathers and it actually gave me some hope that there are some men, well there's families and there's fathers there's parents out there who are now starting to push back and like we're all so busy as you said there's a lot of complacency and a lot of parents we've actually you've served a lot of that parenting back to the state, to the schools you send the kids off to school get them back at three o'clock and you assume that they have been taken care of whereas now there is actually a level of indoctrination that's going on at schools that most parents are only just discovering, so this meeting it's still evolving down there but they were going to take it to council there's a name for him there for you Nobby Clark he has said that they're not going to bring it in front of council this issue and what they're hoping to do is to say that the family units or unisex changing rooms or toilets can be used as a compromise for people who are biologically one way but identify as another so they're trying to put a bandaid over it for me the hope was seeing a combined anger from a community actually standing up and saying no we're not comfortable with this now but we need more of that across many issues not just this one Well it comes down to terminology really and the manipulation of language yeah correct so you'll always hear corporates and woke corporates you'll hear politicians and they talk about protecting the trans community right so that's presuming that there is in fact a community of such people right it's a lie there is no community now I happen to know a couple of trans people and they've been trans people before it was a thing right so they're brave people they've decided to live like that and that's all good one's a property investor but anyway they tell me there's no such thing as a trans community it's not a community they don't live together they don't socialize together they're just ordinary people just getting on with their lives and that's how they want to live but there's this this woke culture agenda that has seeped into society through woke corporates and you know I'll probably get attacked for this but my experience is that if there are key women in key positions in organizations particularly in human resources particularly in senior management then that company starts to degrade because they start embracing this kindness and woke and they forget about profit and looking after their customers and they start pushing these agendas to be inclusive which is ironic because it's actually exclusive it's like the meme the other day in Australia have decided to embrace the voice there it's all about inclusiveness and all of this and somebody posted a picture and said what about including him right so all of this inclusiveness that they talk about is actually exclusiveness it's if you don't fit in with this then you should be excluded it's a lie and it's a fantasy that there's a community and it's also if you just look at the math right around about 5% of the population give or take a couple of percent and not heterosexual that's the easiest way to say it so they're not heterosexual they're something else and trans people are a tiny percentage of that 5% and we're talking hundreds of people certainly not thousands of people and we've got this massive vocal violent push to promote their wacky ideology on to the vast majority of people and there's going to be pushback and it's starting and it's not going to be pleasant and then they'll shrink a whole lot more and there'll be handbags at dawn but this is the fantasy of all of this you know creation of separate little communities that actually don't exist well it's the devolution of individualism because they don't create strong individuals they want to pop everybody into their little box and woe betide if you're a Rachel Stuart of the world and you get out of you know we've popped you in the rainbow box darling with the ever growing alphabet that's the box that we've put you in and she's like no I'm just who I am I just happen to see you know you know you know they want us to care about who they are but they don't care about who we are you know this whole thing about pronouns is a classic example right that is control of language what these people are saying to us is that they want to control how we speak about them in the third person when they're not there right because when we're speaking to them to the face they say okay Marie right or you're only using pronouns when you're talking about someone in the third person he said that or they did that or whatever and they're trying to control the language about how we speak about someone when they're not there it's bizarre I mean I'm sorry a plural cannot be a pronoun what if I decided I want to call myself killer whale instead of can you know that's the pronoun actually here's a better one what if my pronoun's handsome now I'm not handsome right but I now insist that everybody describes me as handsome because that's my pronoun that's the ludicrousness of it all right that they're trying to control the language about how everybody else speaks and Marie are doing this too with the insidious creep of you know pigeon Marie into into our language on television and radio where you get a situation where the whole idea about language is that information is imparted and they're making it exclusive so you don't actually know what the hell anyone's talking about anymore I spoke to Di Landi last week and she is one of the founders of a group called Manawahini Kaurero and she was talking about exactly that I mean it's not only the English language that has been captured and bastardised it is also the Māori language as she said English alliterations that have been turned into Māori and she said no one she said none of the nannies on the marae understand this they're just like what is this this isn't our language we're at university all those academics that have laundered themselves with multiple papers that claim that they're the greatest things that slice bread you mean a colonial invention called universities you mean that they will argue that no the language is a living thing and it needs to evolve ultimately language is there to communicate and if you're actually going to devolve a language to a point where the native speakers of that language can't even understand it themselves because these words were invented yesterday well then that's not inclusive is it? What cracks me up is this massive insistence that we all use macrons for how we spell things now well you know at the same time the people who insisting that we do that are railing against colonialism well how colonial is it to use a Greek creation a few hundred thousand years ago to describe how we speak Maori in modern society is that not colonialist to use European language constructs to describe Maori now this is the nonsensical logic that these people are employing the same person who is complaining about cultural appropriation of Maori movie studios and songs and designs as a guy wearing a cowboy hat you know in a Bolo tie like what about your cultural appropriation you look back in the years I went in Monty Python 40 years ago was in the life of Brian they were talking about Loretta I want to be called Loretta now why can't I you know it was Lutacris then and it's Lutacris now and then the same thing goes on this colonialism thing what is the Romans ever done for us well there's the aqueducts well okay apart from the aqueducts what are the Romans ever done for us well there's the roads well okay but it's the same thing this colonialism argument is what of the British ever done for us well there's the laws, the hospitals, the society you know all of these sorts of things they want to use all of those things but they want to rail against colonialism it doesn't make sense it's nuts and the more we tolerate it the more we accept it the more farcical it becomes it certainly does and I think I mean we could talk about this all morning but we're not going to I will pick it up on another day Cam I'm absolutely thrilled that you've been able to give us some time this morning thank you very very much if you have any questions out there for us or me at counterculture the address to write your email to is inbox at realitycheck.radio that's inbox at realitycheck.radio or send us a text 2057 is the number stay tuned more to come here with realitycheck and counterculture this is counterculture with Marie Buskie Wednesdays at 10am on realitycheck radio