This podcast episode caught my eye because nurses are one of the few unionised workforces remaining in Aotearoa. Also because one of the guests was one Deborah Cunliffe;

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/300927875/aussiebacked-antimandate-union-trying-to-recruit-kiwi-nurses

A name I confused with Deborah *Manning*, a lefty-leaning lawyer and environmental campaigner, who I remember as one of the student politicians involved in the student occupation of the Auckland Uni registry building in 1996 (yes, I slept in the registry, for days!).

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I wonder if this is common, if Deborah M has their own version of Naomi Klein's Doppleganger experience? Or was it just a unique brainfart on my part.

Anyway, the other guest was Dr Roderick Mulgan, a medical doctor and lawyer, who has served as a Free Speech Onion Council member;

https://www.fsu.nz/blog/introducing-dr-roderick-mulgan-new-free-speech-union-council-member

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The cunning of the Free Speech Onion methodology is hard to fully appreciate, unless you've spent decades working in independent media, learning to identify and filter out reputation laundering and NewSpeak ("PR"). Or perhaps spent a similar length of time as an anticorporate activist or campaigner against other forms of military-industrial power.

They're very good at sounding reasonable and balanced, while framing debates in ways that support their biases.

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#PR #ReputationLaundering

By presenting Cunliffe's Ozzie-backed reputation laundering operation as a nurse's "union", and framing the new professional standards as an attack on the private speech rights of nurses, as unionised workers, the Free Speech Onion codes their discourse as nonpartisan. Even left-leaning.

It is nothing of the sort.

Their strategy is a form of "flooding the zone with shit". Sanewashing obviously whackjob claims like 'Michelle Obama is a man', while pretending to do it from a leftish POV.

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IANAL but when someone publishes claims that Michelle Obama is really a man, I'm pretty sure that's defamation (specifically libel). *Unless* they have some rock-solid evidence to support that claim.

If nurses go around defaming public figures, I think it's fair to say there's a risk that will bring the profession of nursing into disrepute. I believe it would be grounds for Michelle Obama to bring civil action in the courts. It's certainly reasonable grounds for a disciplinary hearing.

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A disciplinary hearing is just that. A forum where nurses accused of behaving unprofessionally can defend their actions before their peers. Yet to the Free Speech Onion it's a Cultural Revolution style struggle session, or Romulan trial, where nurses are judged as guilty before they appear, and raked over the coals by gleeful commissars.

One has to wonder why the Free Speech Onion might oppose professional standards, and due process hearings, and spread disinformation about them.

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Dr Mulgan goes through a laundry list of the swivel-eyed lunacies spewed by Cath Simpson and defended by Cunliffe's zone-flooding operation. Minimising each one - as with the Obama example - as if it's just an opinion that reasonable people can disagree on.

Each one is at best misinformation, and given the affiliations here I think it's reasonable to call it disinformation. If spreading provable mis/disinformation doesn't risk bringing a profession into disrepute, I don't know what does.

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More to the point, if a professional is falsely accused of spreading mis/disinformation, the very *best* thing that can happen - for them, the profession and the public good - is for the accusation to be aired in a structured hearing. Where the accused can present their side of the story to a neutral tribunal of their peers.

Rather than just being quietly shoved out the back door by "Human Resources" pod people for their social media posts. Which routinely happens to US professionals.

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Formal professional standards - including about public conduct professionals engage in during free time - is there to *protect* professionals. As much as it is to protect professions. It's also there to protect the public from abuse of the outsized social influence people in professional roles can wield. Even in their non-work activities.

Maybe FSO are building a case against professional standards in case they're used to hold cowboys running corporatised "services" to account.

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But it's not just the Free Speech Onion spreading disinformation.

"Kate Hannah, director and founder of The Disinformation Project, said she was not surprised nurses were being targeted with disinformation.

Nurses were one of the professions [in which] people did lose their jobs as a result of the mandates.

Those people genuinely have a sense of grievance. It might be misdirected, rather than towards the disease itself, to authority or the institution.”

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/300927875/aussiebacked-antimandate-union-trying-to-recruit-kiwi-nurses

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It wasn't the disease that fired nurses who were well within their rights - under basic medical ethics - to refuse any form of medical treatment, for any reason. It was authorities and institutions who violated human rights and employments rights by doing that - as subsequent legal cases in the High Court confirmed - and not only to nurses.

Nurses have every right to hold grievances against the authorities who made those calls, when they have *not* been held professionally accountable.

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