John McLean
Citizen typist patriot
Stuff’s Saturday broadsheet newspaper, the Post, has once again come to the party with sign-of-the-times subject matter for my Substack.
The 8 August edition contained a piece glorifying Patrick Morgan, a self-styled Wellington cycling advocate and member of lobby group Cycle Wellington Inc. The piece’s author, Amy Ridout, lauded Patrick for hauling Paul Heffernan through New Zealand’s Court system.
Heffernan is a former Wellington Council candidate and current president of Better Wellington Inc, a society that advocates for fiscal restraint from Wellington’s city and regional councils.
Heffernan’s alleged transgression under Harmful Digital Communications Act?…simply happening to be Better Wellington’s president when the following anonymous words were posted on the society’s X page:
“Patrick Morgan’s cycle lobby group would have to be the first against the wall when a decent council getting [sic] in.”
The comment entirely disappeared in November 2025 when Better Wellington deactivated its X page, a fact Morgan conveniently neglected to tell the court, instead claiming “Once it’s been online, it’s going to exist forever...” What tosh.
Morgan paints himself as a vulnerable victim, and credulous Amy Ridout lapped it all up (with my responses in bold italics):
“It was really distressing for me to hear a credible death threat, to see it repeated online, to see that 2000 people had read it.”
It is not remotely credible for Morgan to believe that, if a decent Wellington City Council had been elected (which didn’t happen), its first priority would genuinely have been to execute all members of the Cycle Wellington by having a firing squad shoot the lot of them. If Morgan really believed that, he’d be deluded and need mental health treatment. What the post really meant is that a decent council would ignore Cycle Wellington and stop spending vast sums of ratepayers’ money on useless and disruptive cycle lanes. But almost certainly, Morgan is simply feigning fear and being disingenuous.
“I believe that it’s not a big step from threatening comments online to real harm in life…”
Morgan’s apparent belief – his hot reckon – is absurd. Threatening online comments virtually never translate into real life harm. Again, Morgan is not being sincere or serious.
“I have a certain public profile in Wellington, people know who I am…I’m riding a bicycle on the street every day. It wouldn’t be hard for someone to feel they have a licence to harm me.”
Morgan has almost no public profile and there is absolutely no evidence that anyone is looking to physically harm him. In November 2025 (the same month Better Wellington deleted its X page) a man who deliberately drove into a cyclist in Paraparaumu was found by the court to be not guilty by reason of insanity. That is literally the only example I can find of anyone in the Wellington region ever deliberately driving into a cyclist. It’s simply inconceivable that the hurty words posted on Better Wellington’s X account could possibly cause anyone to think they have a licence to maim Morgan.
“In 2026, we’ve got to take this stuff seriously.”
No we don’t. Idle hurty words should be ignored and not be used to waste nine months’ of court time.
Under the HDC Act, for Morgan’s allegation – that he’d suffered a harmful digital communication – to legitimately get to court it first had to be assessed by Netsafe, New Zealand’s self-styled internet ‘safety’ agency.
Morgan claimed, without supporting evidence, that he’d referred his gripe to Netsafe. Heffernan advised the court that he’d never heard from Netsafe. For that reason alone, Judge Kevin Kelly should have chucked Morgan’s claim out. Kev clearly didn’t know what he was doing and the case itself was a shambles. At one stage the court registrar unlawfully tried to ban the Post from the courtroom, with Kev later having to apologize for that botch up.
In tacit acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of Morgan’s litigation, Judge Kev didn’t require Heffernan to apologize, artfully claiming that imposing any such requirement would bring the comment back into the public eye. But Heffernan apologized anyway to Morgan, an apology that Morgan of course rejected – “I’m not satisfied they really understand how serious this is.” (NEVER apologize to the likes of Morgan or Wokesters in general. They simply reject all apologies, and gleefully construe any apology as an admission of guilt. Never EVER apologize when you’ve got nothing to apologise for.)
Despite not having been formally involved in the court case, Netsafe chief online safety officer Sean Lyons weighed in, but suspiciously without clarifying whether Netsafe had heard from Morgan.
Amy Ridout quotes Lyons as stating, “If [this way of talking] has become how we talk to each other on the internet, why are we allowing this potentially harmful behaviour to exist on the internet?” Lyons was at pains to emphasise to Amy that, “this [proof of harm] was subjective: one person might shrug off abusive speech, while another might not. This was taken into account when assessing harm.” This is the woke primacy of subjective feelings over objective realities, and Lyons’ involvement in Amy’s coverage smacks of an orchestrated stitch up.
Sadly, Amy Ridout’s effort amounts in substance to an attempted smear job on Paul Heffernan and two other individuals who weren’t even parties to the court proceedings: Vlad Barbalich and Glenn Inwood. Absent any valid grounds on which to malign Better Wellington, Amy resorts to the amorphous pejorative, “controversial”.
But she inadvertently hits the mark – not a cyclist – when she writes, “Morgan knows some will dismiss [Morgan’s objection to the “first against the wall” online comment] as attention seeking rhetoric from a group trying to drive engagement.”
Because, in truth, Morgan comes across as a neurotic, obsessive solipsist. I’ve been cycling around Wellington’s streets for over 40 years. My ‘lived experience’ of cycling around New Zealand’s capital city must be much the same as Morgan’s.
Vehicle drivers have become much more considerate of cyclists over the decades. As I ride in and out of Wellington’s CPD, the most unpleasant stretch is the cycle lane along the retail area of Thorndon. Negotiating this grossly expensive waste of money (c $50m) is a game of chicken with oncoming electric bikes and scooters, negotiating raised pedestrian crossings and pedestrians, and avoiding vehicles crossing the cycle lane. It was much better in the old days. But this is what Morgan advocates for more of. The man must be mad or bicycle incompetent, or both.
Morgan’s HDC Act action against Heffernan is yet another example of abuse of legislation that must be scrapped. Legislation intended to protect children and adolescents from bullying is being ‘weaponized’ (hate that word, but it’s almost okay here) to attack robust debate and criticism, and stifle free speech.
In a competitive field, perhaps the grossest abuse of the HDC Act was when the courts allowed representatives of the Chinese Communist Party to resort to this flawed legislation to silence CCP-critic journalist Portia Mao.
But then there’s the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade trying to silence criticism, from the director of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, of MFAT’s pro-Palestinian actions and funding in relation to the Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 2023 atrocities.
Brave Gendermania-critic Rex Landy faces multiple further court appearances under the HDC Act. And so on and so forth. New Zealand’s next government must banish the HDC Act from the books.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
