It’s About Class, Stupid

The internet meant the collapse of a communication hierarchy, the loss of control over who may speak, and this terrifies the laptop class, who have the most to lose.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority was born in 1989, a relic of a gentler, more ordered media village: three television channels, a handful of radio stations, and a nation that, if not out swilling Lion Red, were gathered to watch the six o’clock news together. Its mission was modest and quaint in retrospect - prevent the titular frontman of Holmes from leaking a swear or slur and to allow an outlet for the nation’s letter-writers to exercise their authoritarian impulses.

Thirty-five years later, that village has vanished. The chaplain now has no flock, a heathen public having migrated to the sprawling metropolis of the internet. And yet the BSA refuses to bow out gracefully. It has declared war on broadband, seeking relevance (and the taxpayer funding that comes with it) where none should exist, and has chosen veteran journalist Sean Plunket as its do-or-die test case.

In July 2025, Plunket, co-founder of the online talk network The Platform, called tikanga Māori “mumbo jumbo.” One complainant, Richard Fanselow (somewhat of a serial moaner who, despite doctors’ advice, remains subscribed to The Platform and enraging TERF newsletters), took offense and referred the matter to the BSA. There is a problem, however: The Platform does not broadcast. It streams. It operates outside the 1989 Broadcasting Act, which defines broadcasting as the “transmission of programs by any means of telecommunication.” Rabbits-ears, not YouTube feeds, are the BSA’s stated remit.

Yet, in October, chief executive Stacey Wood announced the complaint would proceed. Plunket called the audacious move “Orwellian,” and thousands agreed, signing petitions via the NZ Free Speech Union. Woods’ defenders would say that, legal or not, regulation is overdue. But why? For what reason? The forever nebulous concept of harm? Better social cohesion, as if making the internet as tediously conformist as mainstream fare would force us back around the box once again?

The answer can be applied to nearly all forms of censorship: classism. For decades, only the credentialled elite, our politicians, lawyers, consultants, policy wonks, and business giants could influence a sizable national audience. An illusion of cohesion was maintained by bourgeois values being promoted as the accepted parameters of culture. The internet, however, took that power away. Now, anyone with a webcam can outdraw a corporate newsroom. Voices from bedrooms, garages, the streets of South Auckland, and farms in Ruatoria are visible in ways previously unimaginable. Where once a teenager in South Auckland tagged a fence to say, “I exist,” today they can stream for an hour to thousands, and no one can paint over it. With this play against The Platform, Woods and co are reaching for that brush.

The BSA is not seeking to protect society as much as polite society. The internet meant the collapse of a communication hierarchy, the loss of control over who may speak, and this terrifies the laptop class, who have most to lose. Their “standards” are not any standard for public morality; we’re talking brunch etiquette and deference to luxury political causes, enforced through legislation. Censorship has always been a class project: the working class swears; the ruling class regulates the swearing. One class imposes on the other. The state will never sanction the Takanini tire changer to pull up Woods on her classism. This is never the way the censorship game is played. The highest amount of arrests for online comments in the world? The UK, the Western country still with the most entrenched class system, with over 12,000 in 2023. It’s about class, stupid.

The Left once understood this. Socialists and unionists defended free speech because censorship silences the working class first. The right to speak, offend, and be visible is not a liberal luxury but a tool of survival. Free speech guarantees that lived experience - coarse, angry, unrefined - enters public life unfiltered by genteel approval.

And yet, society hasn’t changed all that much without the BSA. For all the warnings of division, New Zealand politics remain relatively stable. The NZ Green Party, despite its flirtations with cultural radicalism, has not grown beyond its usual electoral ceiling. If New Zealand were sliding into extremism due to unfettered online speech, it would show at the ballot box. It doesn’t. This may be because of our comfort that dissent won’t be crushed. We have little of the resentment censorship generates. Who would swap what we have for the heavily policed yet dangerously riven UK or wider Europe today?

The BSA’s obsession is not about harm. It is the chaplain forcing attendance in his rickety church. It is about reinstalling Centennial Street in the War Museum; bringing back a world that no longer exists, yet gave the upper classes a degree of comfort.

Let it die. Thank it for its service - perhaps even give it a commemorative plaque at Te Papa. But this chapter should close. The age of the censor is over. If Woods really wants to silence the underclass so badly, she can always start a graffiti removal business.