COMMENT: The capacity of human achievement relies on the quality of human discourse.
Conversation matters. It is with this in mind that I suggest the parameters of our public discourse need redrawing as our current vocabulary is serving us poorly in our need to positively advance issues for the betterment of our communities.
The current state of our discussion is poor. Whether the issue is free speech versus hate speech (particularly on the issue of bi and multiculturalism), rural versus urban (involving ecological issues in particular), gender struggles, age based contentions or ideological differences of every type and colour, our discussion seems only to pit one group of our society against another.
Our discussion in these areas leave minority ethnicities' vulnerable, isolate rural folk , pit men against women (and vice versa), and breed resentment in the young against the old (and contempt in the young by the old). New Zealand is better than this. We have a window of opportunity for us to get our conversation right before we fall headfirst into the same problems experienced in other parts of the world.
I started this piece with a promise of resetting the parameters of our discussion. Here is my contribution to a list of must-have baselines for discussion. Conveniently, they are not mine, they have been around for a few millennia.