[asia-apec 1438] Fw: Editorial from this week's NZ Listener magazine

[APEC Monitoring Group]

>NZ Listener
>
>Vol 282 No 3130 May 06 2000 - May 12 2000
>
>SOS security
>
>
>by Bruce Ansley, Senior Writer
>
>
>
>How watching police bashing heads in Washington took one back! Anti-war
>rallies, race riots, our own 1981 Springbok tour protests. Mostly, the
>protesters won in the end. Their causes became respectable. The United
>States now only fights wars that do well in the ratings. Everyone agrees
>that racism is bad. The Springboks bite ears. So the tear-gas last week
>moistened eyes far beyond the streets of downtown Washington.
>
>World financial leaders from the rich nations met in the US capital to
>discuss financial reforms. Outside, the protesters complained that their
>policies hurt the poor and destroyed the environment. The US government
sent
>in the long batons. This was not war stuff nor wussy race relations. This
>cause was definitely not respectable. It struck at the foundations of the
>new world order. It was rank economic subversion and bad for business, too.
>
>The other side of the world, meanwhile, was grappling with its own kind of
>economic threat. University lecturer David Small battled the police in a
>Christchurch courtroom. In the winter of 1996, Small caught two Security
>Intelligence Service (SIS) agents pursuing their shady business at the home
>of his friend, Aziz Choudry. Apec trade ministers were meeting in
>Christchurch that week. Choudry was one of the organisers of an alternative
>conference, whose proponents argued that the free trade proposals on the
>ministers' agenda were bad for the world in general and us in particular.
>Not a radical view, just different to that of the New Zealand government.
>
>At that time, the SIS's powers had just been expanded. Our economic
>wellbeing was placed in its care, along with its routine diet of espionage,
>terrorism and subversion. Although one of the palliatives offered with its
>extended powers was, allegedly, strengthened rights of protest and dissent,
>the SIS's interpretation of that guarantee was to bug Choudry's home.
>
>A week later the police discovered a fake bomb, labelled "bomb", such a
>cunning ploy that Small immediately suspected that the SIS had planted it.
>They searched Small's home, found nothing, laid no charges.
>
>Choudry sued the SIS and eventually won a cash settlement and an apology.
>The SIS is protected from public scrutiny on all but the most rudimentary
>front. But the Court of Appeal declared that the service did not have the
>power to go around breaking into people's houses. Small went to court also.
>The police acknowledged that their search was illegal, but said it had been
>an honest (sic) mistake. So this was the outcome: pursuant to its new
>powers, but without regard for the caveat attached to them, the SIS set out
>to bug the house of a dissenter, and was impeded only by its own legendary
fallibility. With or without the SIS's direction, but in suspicious
circumstances, the house of an innocent man was searched.

The government's response was immediate. It changed the law to make all of
this legitimate. It gave the SIS power to break into homes, and made it
retrospective, with, of course, the usual range of useless guarantees.
Labour firebrands who had breathed hot and heavy over SIS excesses were
reduced to damp matches by the pressing need for change - which remained
invisible to the public, for politicians counter the pressing need to laugh
by according our secret service solemn silence. Still, everyone made it
clear that our economic wellbeing was too important for scruple. As Small
and the police slugged it out in court, Switzerland's International
Institute for Management Development produced new world competitiveness
ratings. New Zealand rated number one for lack of protectionism, lack of
price controls and access for foreign finance. We rated near-bottom for the
brain drain, export growth, current account balance and domestic savings.
Despite a decade of the world's most advanced economic reform, we remained
among the world's most economically challenged. You might conclude that the
nation's leading economic subversives are nowhere near the courtrooms with
Choudry and Small. Our best advice to those masterminds is to listen for
clicks on the line, keep those ministerial houses locked at all times, and
always take a hard hat to Washington.