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De-Platformed
By Steven | August 20, 2026
The BSA has upheld the complaint against Sean Plunket’s internet broadcasting outfit, The Platform. (Of course, the bigger issue here is whether they had jurisdiction at all, but I’ve covered that elsewhere).
I had confidently predicted they wouldn’t uphold the complaint. I think they shouldn’t have.
The facts:
Plunket was discussing Fire and Emergency NZ’s Kaupapa Maori strategy. He said tikanga was “mumbo jumbo”. But the BSA said, he went further, and ridiculed at length the use of tikanga in relation to public sector organisations generally in a way that was “scornful, anti-Maori and one-sided”, calling it “nonsense”, “nuts”, “stupidity”, utter crap”, “Maorification rubbish” and “woke”. Some of this came from listeners, but Plunket encouraged and endorsed it.
The decision
The BSA held this breached the statutory standard requiring good taste and decency.
When Plunket went on to name the complainant, the BSA found this was a breach of standards protecting privacy and law and order (because it was “likely to promote illegal or anti-social behaviour”: listeners, predictably, had gone on to harass the complainant). The BSA suggested that Plunket may have breached – or at least encouraged the breach of – the Harmful Digital Communications Act.
I’m going to focus on the taste and decency finding, because that was at the heart of the complaint. The BSA’s decision is thoughtful and takes care to set out its reasoning at some length. It says it wouldn’t have upheld the complaint if it had just been Plunket calling tikanga mumbo jumbo a couple of times.
The significance of the discussion
I don’t think this was a breach. For one thing, although I think Plunket was being a bit of a dick about it, he was clearly exploring a range of significant issues. The BSA gives him some credit for this (see para [57](f)) – it raises the significance of the free speech issues. But it doesn’t give enough credit, I think. The BSA’s decision includes lengthy excerpts from the programme, including exchanges with listeners. Reading them, you can see that the programme makes arguments about:
— the importance of fire services
— the lack of salience of cultural values to the practice of fire-fighting
— the incoherence (and local variability) of tikanga
— the fact that it’s only Maori culture that is targeted by the policy
— the lack of democratic legitimacy of such a policy
— the failure of FENZ to agree to come onto the programme to defend it
— the fact that the policy is out for consultation
— people feeling they need to sign up to these values in order to advance their careers
— people being turned off a “quite beautiful” language by having it “rammed” down their throats, which we would not tolerate if it were a religion
— the “unsafe fire stations” and fire trucks “that they can’t afford to replace”, and yet “they waste money on this crap”.
— it might put people off giving money to their local fire departments
There’s more along those lines. I’m not saying I agree with it. I’m not sure there’s much evidence to support some of it. But it feels very largely like political speech. Mostly, they’re playing the ball not the man. And one principle of free speech is that regulators and courts should cut people slack for the way they choose to express themselves. (There’s a US Supreme Court case where it was held that a jacket with featuring the words “Fuck the Draft” is protected speech and can’t be penalised for offensiveness, even when worn in court). Another way of putting that is that regulators should be very leery of using offensiveness standards, which are inherently amorphous, to control political speech.
But some is ugly
To be clear: there are a few ugly moments in the programme, that are pretty racist or at least dog-whistly racism. One caller says “as we Maorify, we become more primitive in all our systems and methods”. Another says, “the cultural BS has not been pushed by everyday Maori, it’s woke-tarded, self-loathing white people and a select group of grifting Maori.” Again, there’s more like this, but not awfully much.
Wrong standard?
One problem is that we do have a broadcasting standard designed to deal with this sort of racism, and it’s the Discrimination and Denigration standard. But that has a very high threshold and exceptions for genuine analysis or opinion. The group attacked must be blackened as a whole. There usually has to be an element of malice. It’s not at all clear that this programme would have crossed that threshold. But the BSA didn’t apply that standard.
Why not? The complaint was expressly about “racism” and about “demeaning” Maori. The problem was that the BSA’s codebook was not drawn up to cover internet broadcasters. So the BSA went back to first principles and applied the Broadcasting Act directly. The Broadcasting Act is a bit weird: it specifies particular standards that broadcasters must observe (taste and decency, privacy, law and order, balance) and then sets up a process for determining other standards in consultation with broadcasters (the Act mentions things like accuracy, fairness and denigration, for example).
So the BSA could have said “you’ve complained about something that’s not an obligation directly specified in the statute” – denigration – “but we’ve got no applicable code so we can’t rule on this”. Or it could have said “The Platform is basically radio, so we’ll apply that code, including the denigration standard.” But it didn’t do either. It applied the statutory standards, but said it was okay for it to draw upon the codebook and its decisions in applying those standards. That’s awkward, because some of those codebook standards contain guidance and even wording that departs from the statute. “Taste and decency” has become “offensive and disturbing conduct”, for example. (Don’t get me started on the glosses the BSA has applied to the balance standard).
Anyway: this is a problem. The Act itself seems to contemplate a difference between taste and decency complaints and denigration ones. But the BSA has shoe-horned the complainant’s “denigration” complaint into a “taste and decency” pigeonhole, then redefined it as an “offensiveness” standard. Worse, it has stretched the “offensiveness” standard to cover opinions, even political ones.
Traditional interpretation of taste and decency standard
The BSA has almost always applied the taste and decency standard – lately interpreted as offensiveness – to cover things like swearing, sex and nudity. I think that’s clearly what the standard is about. The only things in this broadcast that get close to the traditional approach to the standard are a listener calling these policies a “wankfest” and another saying fire fighters “like playing with their hoses”. It’s not enough. Very occasionally, the BSA has found that opinions can be offensive, as when it penalised Radio Pacific talkback host for calling some unnamed Ministry of Education officials designing a new curriculum “child molesters of the mind”. I have said, and still think, that’s a wrong use of that standard. I think the BSA is making the same mistake here.
I can conceive of opinions that are so thoroughly offensive/tasteless that they breach the standard. But not many. And there will always be the danger that the regulator will be tempted to (perhaps unwittingly) take sides in the debate. Extreme language or views will seem worse because they go against prevailing values.
Free speech under the Bill of Rights
The BSA is required to interpret and apply its powers consistently with the Bill of Rights Act. That means, I think, that they needed to do a better job of recognising the political salience of this programme, and the limited scope of the applicable restrictions. Interestingly, they found that if the programme was a bit shorter or contained a little bit of balance, it may not have been held to be offensive. (There are some good points here that show how unfair, unbalanced and possibly inaccurate Plunket’s show was: Maori are overrepresented in fire deaths; they’re important partners in risk reduction relating to their communities and forest ownership; they make up ten percent of front-line fire fighters. In other words, there’s a case to be made that fire-fighting could benefit from an understanding of Maori culture that helps communication and understanding, builds relationships and fosters fire safety. But Plunket didn’t seem interested in any of that.)
You can see the BSA’s point. If listeners had just been given a sniff of the opposing views, the whole thing wouldn’t have been so offensive. But I think this just shows that the BSA is applying the offensiveness standard to what it’s calling offensive ideas (or, to be more fair, offensive expression of ideas). Offensiveness shouldn’t turn on the content of the ideas, and it definitely shouldn’t turn on the viewpoint being expressed. It’s hard to escape the impression that this is what’s happening.
And again, I think this confuses different standards and points up the dangers of using offensiveness to address complaints that belong under different standards. It’s ironic that the BSA has interpreted the balance standard so that it is almost impossible for it to apply to talkback, but then tries to introduce it via the back door in an offensiveness complaint. (Okay, so I did get started on that).
The BSA’s own guidelines
A final point: even if you accept that it is legitimate for the BSA to apply its Codebook’s guidance on the Offensiveness and Disturbing Content standard, almost all of it tells against upholding this complaint. The violation of community norms must be serous; context is crucial; audience expectations and the host’s reputation are important – people can choose what to listen to; and particular care must be taken in upholding complaints about talkback.
Penalty
The BSA imposed no penalty (time is past, case is novel), which makes the impact on free speech less. But I still think that the decision is an unjustified restriction on The Platform’s freedom of expression.
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