The Journal of Urgent Writing by Nicola Legat

Author:Nicola Legat [Nicola Legat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780994136398
Publisher: Massey University Press
Published: 2016-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

Inherently political action by the secret state was not confined to ‘countering’ communist activity during the early cold war. Another hardy perennial in the surveillance world was the anti-apartheid movement. It’s hard these days to find defenders of apartheid. Who now says they supported the long imprisonment of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island? Those who took to the streets in New Zealand during the 1981 tour were part of the same historical process and are now part of the same somewhat amnesiac reframing. John Key famously can’t remember which side he was on in 1981.

As I have alluded to earlier, the intelligence agencies during 1981 were clearly on a very particular side in the shifting pendulum of political righteousness on apartheid, and it would be foolish to argue otherwise. Trevor Richards and HART (Halt All Racist Tours) were on their target list throughout the 1970s, as were the leaders of the movement in 1981 and beyond. More recently, some environmentalists and peace activists have felt themselves to be unduly and unfairly under scrutiny by the secret state. In 2008 a long-term activist was found to be a police informant and outed very publicly in the Sunday Star-Times. This ‘insider’ had shared his knowledge of events for money, and — for some even more damning — he had been in long-term personal relationships with women who were also his surveillance subjects. This raised more than the usual ethical questions, and they were compounded by the suggestion that he may even have incited or encouraged illegal activity so that he had something to report back in exchange for his regular stipend.

One of the responses to the Cullen/Reddy report was to note with concern that it suggested an extension of the powers for the GCSB to conduct surveillance on New Zealand citizens. Both Cullen and Prime Minister John Key responded in a very Orwellian fashion that this was merely a ‘technical extension’ of power. Some extensions are apparently not really extensions at all. Again a historical view is useful. The Cullen/Reddy report seeks to address the shortcomings of the current security legislation and this is a direct response to the very public exposure of intelligence service operations as ‘beyond the law’. A plain speaker would say illegal.

There is a prior historical pattern of such adjustments. The NZSIS Act 1969, for example, has had a series of amendments (1977, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2011 and 2014) that have frequently extended the power of the service to bring its actions into line with the law. The very wide-ranging changes in 1977 were the outcome of a report by the chief ombudsman, Guy Powell, that phone taps and covert entry operations undertaken by the SIS were illegal. The 1977 and 1996 amendments both widened the definition of subversion, creating a broader, rather than narrower, space for the services to conduct surveillance. The Cullen/Reddy report itself followed Rebecca Kitteridge’s report on the GCSB in 2013, which John Key conceded was ‘pretty damning’. Kitteridge suggested there was a systemic problem with legal compliance in the organisation.

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