Polite conversational dodge, as I'm sure you guessed, public control of information also worries the hell out of me but public TV, like public schools, is often advantageous too, so its a subject I mostly avoid delving into. Especially since I'm an active republican and enjoy NPR, puts me in an awkward position

Well I'm sure done properly it can be useful, its more that it is so routinely abused and improperly done that I view it negatively. It needs to be set up with very clear switches in it. For instance, on abortion, I do not consider legalized abortion a mark of freedom, obviously, but if we remove every one someone can object to half-reasonably we not only degrade it but ignore that freedom vs other freedoms calculus. e.g. there's no getting around that a gun registry impinges on personal privacy, but if that gets included as an aspect of the personal privacy index but guns themselves get left out a country with free gun purchase and carry, but a registry, would score worse then one in which guns were utterly banned. That's why I think these always need to be not only 'pick your own priorities' but also 'Is X freedom?'.

A touch of sarcasm in those remarks, I'd never encountered the concept before and was trying to wrap my head around it.

The problem is those issues are so politicized that people will climb mountains rather than walk around them to stick to the party line. Stuff gets enshrined and so it isn't just narcotics vs public safety, or narcotics for minors, but an individual narcotic. As an example one of my initial reactions in Germany to the lower drinking age was anger that upon introspection I realized came to a violation of custom. I assume someone sharing drinks with me in a bar is 'of age' for more than drinking, and hence reacted with anger and a touch of scorn in spite of being raised not to think anything wrong with having a glass of wine or beer with a meal at almost any age. It was the presence of underage girls in bars, not the drinking, which bothered me and quite a few of my friends, and it extended to guys as well, because there's a whole range of social interactions or relaxations in play in a purely adult setting, like be able to say 'Let's take this outside asshole' which is constrained if the 'asshole' is 17. That sort of byproduct of a long-standing custom and right/restriction represents a huge factor that isn't really meaningfully quantifiable but exists nonetheless.

Or rent a car, yeah, as above those represent impingements on freedom with major secondary effects. Barring a few early years, when 24 hour mega-stores weren't yet as common, as long as I've had a car I've been able to acquire pretty much any product at any time on simple whim. That's a huge freedom and like the bar environment was one sorely missed when I lived in Hesse. In terms of raw ethics, the ability to legally torch a flag trumps being able to buy fresh oranges at 3 AM Sunday morning in January but in terms of real impact of personal freedom, well I think that's another story.

Of course it is just that old saying made manifest, that you never appreciate something till you don't have it anymore, and you don't really miss things you've never had.

I'm sure it could be run down, of course NZ is a free nation, as are ours, so its inevitably going to come down to nitpicking about specific scores in a lot of categories and the selected criteria for judging them. I've never heard of any particular thing NZ does just way freer then the norm for the West.