Straight from city council A personal view, by Councillor Steve Morris

The night Winston Peters announced he'd selected Jacinda Ardern to be the least experienced Prime Minister in New Zealand history, he called capitalism a ‘blatant failure'. I reflected on those words as I was feeling hunger pains one night in February.

The kids wanted pizza, so we grabbed one from the local multinational establishment in West Berlin. As we walked back to our hotel in the east we crossed the border near Checkpoint Charlie. My seven-year-old was blissfully unaware that when I was her age, such a trip was impossible and at least 140 locals had been gunned down for making the casual journey we'd just made.

New Zealand is great today because we have freedom of movement and speech, whether it be through the efforts of Dame Whina Cooper or Kate Sheppard and countless others.

However, we can tell how free we really are by how we react to people we disagree with. Mayor Phil Goff's decision last week to block right-wing speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux from speaking exposes how ‘tolerant' some on the political left in New Zealand really are.

To be clear, I disagree with many of Southern's opinions and I think much of what Molyneuax says is ‘bonkers.'

Rather than organise their own speakers, social justice bullies were planning to disrupt the event. The threat to the ‘health and safety' of the audience and Goff's political views led to the cancellation. Doesn't it worry you that we have leftists who hate free speech so much that they're threatening other people's ‘health and safety' for expressing it? What about politicians who want to shut down debate they disagree with?

Perhaps Auckland looks more like East Berlin these days! If the speakers chose to speak at a TCC venue, I wouldn't attend, but I wouldn't want us to stop free speech either. It's not up to council to censor.