REVIEWS
- Jeremy Agar
JOE HENDREN'S THESIS
That's not actually the title, but because the work I am reviewing is not a book but a thesis for a PhD, and the title is very long, as a heading, it'll do. That's the way it is in academia. This will probably be the only time Watchdog carries a review of a thesis. We do it now because the topic is CAFCA. So, a couple of declarations of possible conflicts of interest: A while back Joe was a Committee member, and I have been on the Committee for most of this century. So, we might not be willing to admit to mistakes or errors.
Has CAFCA Been Successful?
The thesis is an answer to the question of whether CAFCA has been successful as an organisation within civil society. Has it achieved its aims? One answer, as Murray Horton has several times reminded us, came from one of our founders, the late Owen Wilkes, who opined that it was the least successful movement in New Zealand's history. Existing to oppose foreign ownership of the economy, it has witnessed instead a tsunami of investment from offshore, most often from Australia and the USA, that has drowned the local economy.
Despite this, in these pages we are mostly absolved. CAFCA has always been a small organisation, so small in fact that the late Michael Cullen - and others - dubbed it a "one man band", that man being Murray, its sole paid worker, so its range is limited. Joe Hendren would call it a two-man band at least, the other one being Bill Rosenberg. For many decades Murray and Bill played their tunes, with Murray providing political analysis and public rhetoric and Bill providing economic analysis. Their styles, very different, complemented each other. At least that's what successive Committees have thought.
This longevity - and consistency - might be CAFCA's greatest success, Joe writes. Our ability to keep going, albeit with inevitable hitches, after Bill moved from Christchurch to Wellington to take up a time-demanding job with the Council of Trade Unions (CTU) has been an achievement in itself. And the very fact that Cullen was moved to make his wisecrack showed that CAFCA was an irritant in the corridors of power.
There will always be disagreements and debates within civil society, especially when the topic is economics. There are so many different ways of going about it. CAFCA's approach has been that, as the concentration has been on foreign control, we have talked of "imperialism" rather than "capitalism". There are two reasons for this. Our members - both within the Committee and of course within the wider membership - have a variety of views about capitalism. Some are opposed in principle; others are not.
The other reason is that the topic of capitalism is vast, quite beyond the resources we have available to critique it. That is what political parties are here for, and we are not a political party. And anyway, we probably vote for different parties. A related criticism that pops up from time to time is that CAFCA's policy of "economic nationalism" means that it supports New Zealand capitalists. The Committee would say (I suppose) that the term refers to our advocacy that NZ society is ill served by its subservience to foreign profiteers. I am unaware of any instance when CAFCA has said or done anything to support local capital. It might accept that it exists. That's not the same as endorsing it. Why would we?
From another quarter comes the charge that we should broaden our critique to include ... What? Just as we could not provide general economic commentary, so we could not adequately focus on other themes. And amongst both the Committee and the membership there would be no agreement as to which cause merited such attention.
With one exception. Murray also works as the Organiser for the Anti Bases Campaign on the basis that defence and foreign policy is an aspect of imperialism, linked essentially to global economics. Or could we add a third theme. With imperialism and big corporates doing their worst to foul our planet as they plunder its resources, the need to resist climate change is urgent and compelling.
Watchdog The Last One Standing
So, we need to be disciplined. But we also think that solidarity with other progressive groups with their own mandates is an essential ethic and we work with others as circumstances and time allow. Joe does not venture an opinion about these matters, his thesis being strictly on topic throughout. Watchdog gets brief attention, with Joe making the point that it is the only Leftist publication still around. In the bad old days, there were quite a few such magazines, but they often looked at ephemeral themes or depended on ephemeral people. None has lasted. Watchdog is valuable in these post-print days as an outlet for a wider expression of topics where there can be more than just the one-man band leader.
Bill once remarked that we are the group with the most unacknowledged citations of any in the country. Individual researchers and publicists regularly seek out our work, even if they don't necessarily acknowledge it. As you could read in the thesis, that includes the Government itself. Joe offers a brief epilogue which does not venture into any such suggestions, limiting his comments on the near future to matters administrative rather than polemical.
As he says, politely, engaging with modern technologies and communications is something we struggle with. We might add that our people and our styles tend to be older and we need to broaden our reach. However, that aspect exists within a wider societal trend and it won't be an easy or complete adaptation. There are advantages to having a long memory. As the daily news keeps reminding us, lots of world leaders keep making huge mistakes.
Joe introduced his analysis with a look at what gave us neoliberalism, making the vital point that giving all power to the corporates was never the inevitability that politicians, economists and academics claimed. Globalism and modernity's virtual elimination of the problems imposed by distance did not mean that governments, once "sovereign", were powerless. He offers Germany and Japan as examples of rich and certainly capitalist economies that moderated the trend.
But even within the "Anglosphere", the English-speaking countries which became zealots in the cause of neoliberalism, New Zealand was the most extreme - as CAFCA and Watchdog have had to repeatedly point out. The 1984-90 Labour government which gave us Rogernomics, and the 1990-99 National government that followed with its Ruthanasia, were run by Cabinets made up of people from the same Boomer generation, few of whom had sufficient life experience or historical knowledge to help temper their radicalism. Aided by an economically illiterate intelligentsia, the libertarian economics then in vogue swamped alternative possibilities.
That was then. Historians with a wider perspective than theirs note that policy fads typically last about 30 years. Neoliberalism peaked around the mid 1990s and there are signs these days that "market" mania might be on its way out. When Liz Truss tried to ruin Britain in 2022 by reverting to a cultish latter-day version, it didn't go so well. As Karl Marx observed, events which are tragic first time round, when repeated, usually turn out as farce. The tortoise might catch up with the hare after all. Elsewhere in this issue Joe summarises his thesis in greater detail.
Joe's thesis title is: "Assessing The Impact of National Political Civil Society Organisations In New Zealand. A Case Study Of The Campaign Against Foreign Control Of Aotearoa (CAFCA)". It can be read here: Ed.
ANDERTON
His Life And Times
by David Grant
Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, 2022
David Grant has previously given us biographies of Norman Kirk and Ken Douglas*. Big Norm, Prime Minister from 1972 to 1974, remains a giant in Labour Party folklore, while Douglas was a trade union leader whose legacy is more ambiguous. This background very much informs Grant's present project. For many years he has immersed himself in the history of the Labour Party and associated movements.
This bio is nothing if not comprehensive and detailed. *Jeremy's review of David Grant's Ken Douglas biography "Man For All Seasons", is in Watchdog125, December 2010. Murray Horton's obituary of Douglas is elsewhere in this issue. Ed.
Grant does not try to hide his sympathy for Anderton and the values he held, but this does not get in the way of objectivity. While some might have supposed that this is something of a hagiography, the charge is a cheap shot. The historian might have admired the politician but he was awake to his faults - just as he was awake to Big Norm's. In fact, by writing so comprehensively - the book weighs in at nearly 500 pages - this is very much a warts-and-all portrait.
Social Democrat Through & Through
In his background Anderton was at the centre of New Zealand's social democratic traditions. He was born into a working-class Auckland family of Irish descent and a committed Catholic within the social justice stream of Christianity. From primary school days on, when the two boys played together for the Auckland primary schools' cricket team, he knew people like Roger Douglas (it might be significant that over all the decades since, the two never got to know each other).
He was a great admirer of a later schoolmate, racing car driver and designer, Bruce McLaren, and not because he was a political or religious mate. This detail is indicative of Anderton's rounded and wide perspectives. Besides his cricketing prowess, he played school rugby and he sang in a choir. He was a prefect and a scholar. From early on he was immersed in charity activities through the church.
Why this emphasis? It's because it confirms that Anderton's initial impulses were to involve himself in improving the lot of poorer or disadvantaged people. Unlike so many career politicians these days he came to politics to give expression to his values - and not because he thought it might provide a secure career path.
The background further suggests that Anderton was versatile and rounded. He had to have been intelligent and energetic. As a young man he established a business with his brother which apparently was successful and no-one from the Right side subsequently tried to tag him as a "bleeding heart" or otherwise well-meaning but impractical.
That's the good side. The other side to him was his permanent failure to forge the relationships with colleagues that would get his projects off the ground. Grant describes a series of occasions when he announced his intentions, without first enlisting support, coming across as arrogant and insensitive. In politics and business, the way people interact is often a key to success and Jim never built these contacts. The reason seems to have been that he was impatient rather than dismissive. This is obviously a good idea. What's the problem? Let's do it. We're wasting time.
Anyone who has toiled in the world of organised politics would confirm that its processes can be tortuously slow, its bureaucracy frustrating, but if you are a leader of a party in Parliament with 119 other colleagues, you need to adapt to that. And if your fellows don't see it exactly your way, you need to listen to them. In all his 27 years in Parliament it never quite coalesced.
That's the prosecution's case. The defence would point out that Anderton had good reason for this intransigence. The Rogernomic coup after 1984, when Jim was first elected, had not been offered to the electorate, and Anderton's anger was justified. If Anderton was grumpy and something of a lone wolf, Douglas and co made a point of being unaccommodating. They were secretive and manipulative as a deliberate modus operandi, knowing that they needed to be to get their betrayal of Party principles enacted (for more on this, see also my take on the 2022 US midterm elections, elsewhere in this issue).
None of the cabal round Douglas and David Lange, the figurehead leader, thought of accommodating Anderton's critique. Anderton was a rookie. He was meant to shut up and leave it to the big boys. So, maybe it is more accurate to say that he was not disloyal; he was brave and principled. And right. Let's rephrase that. And correct.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Attorney General back then was Geoffrey Palmer, who had written a book in which he charged that the highly centralised political structure in NZ meant that the central Government - the one whose rules he was now in charge of - was virtually an "elected dictatorship". It needed to be restrained. Yet the Labour Party had a rule which stipulated that MPs had to vote in "accordance with the Parliamentary Party", meaning that Anderton could not criticise Rogernomics and remain a Labour MP. In other parliamentary setups, all of which already diffuse responsibilities to a greater extent than does NZ, members have more latitude.
So, the rule only consolidated the "elected dictatorship". Yet there has never been any indication that Palmer sought to intervene to soothe a way for a more accommodating culture, not even after he became Prime Minister as a result of the split that Douglas' zealotry eventually brought about, when Lange finally cottoned on to what neoliberalism was all about and resigned. By then Anderton was gone, forming New Labour with the claim that he had not left Labour, but that "Labour left me".
Lone Voice Within 80s' Labour Party
Which it had. There has been a tendency ever since these events for commentators to emphasise the undemocratic and treasonous nature of the revolutionaries, which is fair enough. But it should also be seen that in the months leading up to the election, Anderton had critiqued the tenets of neoliberalism. Douglas and his fellow conspirators had given out enough hints that they were up to something, yet Anderton's was a lone voice within Labour's ranks seeking to engage in a debate.
A more economically literate - and politically principled - leadership might well have wanted to chat with Jim. They might even have engaged the Parliamentary caucus, something that never happened. And a more independent and critical media might well have discussed policy options before 1984. And not been so bemused by events after 1984.
Anderton's most obvious gain was Kiwibank, an initiative that was condemned, even ridiculed, by Helen Clark, the Prime Minister in the next Labour administration, and Michael Cullen*, her Minister of Finance; a response that looks bizarre, and not just in retrospect. While both subsequently relented, admitting that for a Labour government to set up a bank which might deny foreign owners a total monopoly was not such a crazy idea after all, the conflict reveals what an unseemly hold neoliberal dogma held over the Labour caucus and Cabinet. *Jeremy's review of "Labour Saving", Michael Cullen's autobiography, is in Watchdog158, December 2021. Ed.
No Happy Marriage Between Red & Green
So, there are several good reasons to sympathise with Anderton in his struggles with his colleagues over the years. The record after Anderton left Labour to form New Labour is more ambivalent. New Labour combined with several other parties to form the Alliance. They had in common a hostility to Rogernomics but were otherwise diverse, so tact and flexibility were always required. Anderton could never pull it off, being always the old-style boss who demanded discipline and unity - his discipline and unity. This intransigence resulted in the Greens leaving the Alliance to enter Parliament in their own name. And, of course, theirs is the only brand that has survived.
The Green style was very different from New Labour's, and Anderton should have recognised and respected this and adapted. The history between them suggests that an inherited division between red and green had not been overcome. All players involved were formed within an ethos which tended to be either red - the economy is front and centre - or green - the environment is. Anderton might have been right that the Greens at the time seemed annoyingly uninterested in matters economic, but it was equally the case that he never showed a real appreciation of the centrality of environmental issues.
Had the Alliance forged an easier harmony of style and substance it could have survived and grown. For a while it did. In the early 90s Anderton was personally popular across the country, to an extent that has scarcely been achieved before or since. He had highlighted the problems posed by Labour and National and offered a viable alternative. Until the cracks in the Alliance showed up, there was every chance of a red (and green) wave. We will never know how successful it might have been.
It could be that the pragmatic centralism of Anderton will emerge after its long absence from NZ affairs. A favourite gambit of Rightists is to claim that the past is bad and the future is good. They say meaningless things like "that is what they did in the 70s", as though to have been done in the past is to disqualify an idea from serious consideration. Anderton always ignored such knee-jerk irrelevance. When he ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Auckland in 1974 one of his platforms was a reduced reliance on roads and cars and more reliance on public transport.
That would have merged red and green. It is one example of how a better future might have looked, yet 50 years later Auckland has still not made the right choice. So, it's the usual suspects on the Right who, rhetoric notwithstanding, are stuck in the past. Unlike the neoliberals, Anderton was never ideological, but always grounded in the needs of the present tense.
Beloved Local MP
Perhaps the final verdict should be the one delivered by the people of Sydenham. They gave Anderton huge support throughout his 27 years as their MP. Within the electorate (now called Wigram) he was always admired, even loved, as a champion of their interests, a legacy respected as well by those who otherwise opposed him. Grant's treatment of the tensions and impulses within the Alliance is very detailed. Future researchers will find it invaluable. His conclusion: the popularity of the Alliance was always the personal popularity of its Leader. No Jim meant no Party.
After his retirement from Parliament in 2013, Anderton, always restless, joined with former National Cabinet Minister Philip Burdon in a campaign to restore Christchurch's munted Anglican Cathedral. While this particular alliance has always drawn comment along the lines of how it bridged the (supposedly) rigid Christchurch fault line between working-class Catholic and blue blood Anglican, this lazy assumption overlooks the actual moderation and common sympathies of both men. The Cathedral is going to be rebuilt - eventually - so that was one more win for Jim. He might well have scored another one when he ran for Mayor in 2010, but the same quakes that brought down the Cathedral brought down his campaign as Bob Parker donned his orange outfit and surged ahead.
Murray Horton's obituary of Jim Anderton is in Watchdog147, April 2018, Ed.
JUMPING SUNDAYS
by Nick Bollinger
Auckland University Press, 2022
"On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1969, thousands of people defied Auckland city bylaws and came to party in Auckland's Albert Park". That's Nick Bollinger's opening sentence in this entertaining account of what is identified in his subtitle as "The Rise And Fall Of The Counterculture In Aotearoa New Zealand".
It's not a bad place to start. Until that Sunday afternoon the kids had been limited to Myers Park at the top of Queen Street, and the big crowd that moved down the hill that day was launching not just its Jumping Sundays of music, marijuana and milling around, but also, Bollinger suggests, a sort of cultural revolution. The authorities came to accept that allowing the young people to hang out in a public park near the university on Sunday afternoons would not unravel the fabric of civilisation after all. In the last year of the decade the 60s had arrived.
There's plenty here on the communes that became popular, and on the arts, with the musical author being in the cast of characters. As is his father, Conrad Bollinger. 1969 was the year when a successful mass mobilisation against a proposed raising of the level of Lake Manapouri to generate a bit more electricity fostered an emerging environmental consciousness.
Other ongoing protests called for the withdrawal of NZ troops from Vietnam and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. The former was achieved in 1972 by the Norm Kirk government. The latter look longer. A new Māori activism, largely influenced by American themes, was a part of the new perspective. At the same time, but not in concert with the activists, the Kirk government introduced Treaty ideals into the country's practices.
This Third Labour government, strong on social policy, was thus the first to express several themes which have since become dominant in the national conversation. But it lasted just one term, undone by a brief recession brought on by Britain's entry into Europe. Bollinger dates the end of the countercultural revolution to the ensuing election in 1975 of the National government of Rob Piggy Muldoon. It was not so much brought on by the repressive attitudes of Muldoon as by familiarity. The revolutionaries were still on their communes and were still sticking it to the man, but as a wave the movement was petering out.
Positive Legacy
For anyone around in the 70s this detailed account is a treasure, full of telling anecdotes and copious photos. Memories will come flooding back. And for those who are too young to have been a hippie or thought of "dropping out", it will help explain who we are and how we got here. Lots of the hippie stuff might have been middle class indulgence, the self-absorption of the first generation to enjoy widespread material security, but it's too easy to look back at our grandparents with condescension. We are always the product of a particular time and place, and what seems sensible always evolves. Bollinger's sympathetic research convinces that the legacy of the counterculture is positive.
In 2022 we have an unmarried Prime Minister with a child and no-one is fussed. We don't hold it against people if they are gay or if their skin is a different shade. We don't notice others' religion - or lack of religion. We think there is more to life than rugby, racing and beer. We care about the environment. Well, let's modify the above generalisations: let's say that more of us than in the past are tolerant of difference. In 1969 conformity to what has been dubbed a short-back-and-sides society - referring to the ubiquitous male hair style - was stifling. That's why the counterculture grew its hair long.
If the opening sentence was apt, so too are the last ones. By the end of the 80s, Bollinger notes, as he signs off, "weekends were as de-sanctified and commercial as any other day of the week. Is that what Jumping Sundays had come to mean?". The suggestion is that the Lange Labour government, made up of the first generation of Boomers to hold executive power, the outfit that brought us neoliberalism, were social liberals too. In one obvious sense the flower children and the cost accountants were opposites. But, in another way, they were the same.
Hippies Might Have Hurried Up The Process
Bollinger's hint at this is not at all a regret or a criticism. It's his way of pointing out that just as no-one 50 years ago could have predicted the way political and economic policy has rolled out, so too do none of us now have much of a clue as to what future generations will have to say about our assumptions. We're offered an epilogue in which Bollinger reassures us that any judgemental ahistorical moralising is unhelpful. The counterculture did not invent the new ways as much as the evolving world created the new ways. The hippies were never more than a small minority and their liberal values, that most of us now share, would have been adopted anyway. They might have hurried up the process.
REVIEWS
MURU
A Film By Tearepa Kahi, 2022
In 2007 police raided the Ruatoki Valley in the Ureweras with the claim that they were responding to a "terrorist" threat. The life of the Prime Minister (Helen Clark) had been threatened. Loose emotional rhetoric had been discerned as sinister intent. The Government was mindful of the war game exercises being run by Tame Iti, long a figure to worry people in their Wellington offices, and so it came about that the locals were surprised by the arrival of loads of cops charged with apprehending the non-existent schemers. Initiated under misapprehension, the raid could only be clumsy as families were disrupted.
For a charge so serious to be levelled on the basis of so little precise and considered analysis was bad enough. What made the raid even worse was its insensitivity to history. The hills between the Bay of Plenty and Gisborne have a long history of unease between Māoridom and the State. The locals, the Tuhoe iwi, never signed the Treaty of Waitangi and there is a body of opinion there which holds that the present constitutional arrangements are illegitimate.
The film centres on Cliff Curtis' character, a local policeman, the bridge between the remote Government and the village. Curtis drives the school bus. He knows the place intimately. He tries to blunt the crude misunderstandings of an intervening force. It was the bureaucratic impulse of the outsider police to leave local cops out of the loop that was the essential error.
A History Of Poor Judgement
It's not only about tensions between ethnicities. The Police, and NZ authorities in general, have a history of poor judgement when it comes to distinguishing between the playful and ironic and serious intent. They would say that they have to initially respond by taking every piece of information at face value. Maybe, but look carefully before you respond.
Tame Iti is very much within this tendency and it was not the first time that he has bewildered officialdom. But as Cliff Curtis remarked in an interview on RNZ, Iti is an "artist" more than a terrorist. Which he is not, and never has been, but the moody hills provide a great location for some theatre. By playing himself - were we witnessing documentary or fiction? - Iti added a further layer to the ambiguity he cherishes.
Curtis suggests that the film itself can be seen in this vein, that Kahi's "sly" approach is fitting as his film is essentially an "allegory". Director and actor have both sought to remind us that "Muru" is a "response" rather than a re-enactment. As such, it is admirably restrained, always resisting any urge to slip into easy caricature. The police we see were not bullies so much as fellow victims of a clumsy State. It was only a few years after the raid that the 2019 events at the mosques in Christchurch, for which the system was unprepared, were to emphasise just how misplaced has been the official understanding of actual terrorism and where it comes from.
A BAD CASE OF "TERRORISM" HYSTERIA
- Murray Horton
"Muru" is publicised as being a "response" to the 2007 Tuhoe raids, rather than a re-enactment. Below is the article I wrote about the actual events, for the Anti-Bases Campaign's Peace Researcher 35, December 2007. Those "anti-terrorism" raids also took place in other centres, such as Auckland, Wellington, Palmerston North, Hamilton, and even as far away as Christchurch. And they involved pakeha, as well as Māori, activists being arrested and facing trial. I've included this historic article to provide context for the film. MH.
I have a confession to make (so pay attention, spies, and have those black ninjas on full alert). I've spent a week in the Ureweras with gun toting Māori. From memory they also sported bullet belts, camouflage gear and cowboy hats. It was in 1981 (if ever there was a year when activists were tempted to become "terrorists" that was it) but it was a tourist - not terrorist - trip run by the country's first Māori-run tour company.
The only shots fired were by one of the guides at a deer (I was his spotter and, I'm pleased to say, he missed). But God knows what weird and wonderful distortions would be made of it in today's climate of hysteria and paranoia. After all, my then partner and I were both leading "Leftwing radicals", with impressive criminal records to prove it. Case closed; we must have been up to no good.
Like the rest of the country, I've been watching agog as recent events have unfolded. Indeed, I've been feeling rather left out, I'm obviously no longer on the cops' A list. Two journalists rang me on October 15 (2007) to ask if I was included in that day's "anti-terrorist" raids - I didn't have a clue what they were talking about. Nor can the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) claim any inside knowledge about what has or, more to the point, what hasn't, been going on.
On a November Monday morning I was reading the Police's leaked "evidence" against the "terrorists" who never were when the Marlborough Express rang to ask for comment on the "fact" that surveillance intercepts had revealed suspects talking about bombing the Waihopai spy base. The reporter asked if I knew who might be likely to do that? Funnily enough, I don't.
He then asked if I thought that Waihopai is a "vulnerable target"? How's that for a leading question over breakfast? I suggested he ask those tasked with defending the place and was duly quoted as saying that I thought the biggest physical threat to the spy base is the grapevine monoculture relentlessly taking over the whole Waihopai Valley.
Bloody Funny Sort Of "Terrorists"
As for the arrested "terrorists" (who are now facing only Firearms Act charges, which could still have serious consequences for them) I know a couple of them. I've known Tame Iti for more than 35 years, starting from when he lived in Christchurch in the early 1970s (he had nothing to do with my Ureweras' trip, I've only met him in various cities).
I don't know him at all personally but from my dealings with him I find the very notion of him being described as a "terrorist" to be laughable. To be sure, a provocateur, a showman (he'd probably prefer to be called a performance artist), a bloody nuisance to a lot of people, with highly questionable views on subjects like Fijian coups, but terrorist, no way.
He's always depicted in the media as this scary tattooed Māori radical (a godsend to scaremongers who face the problem of a dearth of scary bearded Muslim radicals in NZ) but what sort of "terrorist" has such an extremely high public profile, let alone attracts attention for the various "offensive" public stunts of the sort that Tame has regularly pulled?
I don't recall Osama bin Laden venturing within shooting distance of his enemies and giving them a brown eye. Speaking as a South Island pakeha activist of the sort possibly expected to be given a hard time by "Māori radicals", I can honestly say, using very old-fashioned language, that in all the decades I've known him Tame has always been the perfect gentleman.
As for the pakeha anarchists and other activists picked up in the October 2007 national dragnet, we in ABC know Valerie Morse from Wellington. The only terrorising she's done (and she's done it plenty of times) is getting naked in public, to make a political point, in settings ranging from outside Parliament to lying down on the boiling hot asphalt outside the gate of the Waihopai spy base. So, Valerie's definitely an exhibitionist, a political nudist and very much a bloody nuisance to lots of people as well but, once again, I am incredulous at the description of her as a "terrorist" (who tend to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible).
None of the faceless guys who flew the planes into the Twin Towers in 2001 had any previous form, let alone a propensity for spectacular public nudity. And, of course, the dragnet extended as far as the Christchurch activists of the environmentalist Save Happy Valley Campaign. The cops tried to get into the home of Campaign spokesperson Frances Mountier and she had the nous to tell them to bugger off as they didn't have a search warrant. Now this one does affect ABC directly as Francie is a valued member of our Committee. She is a very determined and successful non-violent direct action specialist, with the criminal record to prove it, and a very articulate and effective campaigner. But not a bloody "terrorist" by any stretch of the imagination!
I can't comment on what Tame and Valerie et al are alleged to have been up to in the Ureweras because I know no more about it than any other member of the public. And, if I did, I would try not to lower myself to the gutter tactics of the Police who, having had their "domestic terrorism conspiracy" so comprehensively rubbished by the Solicitor-General, resorted to selective leaks of "evidence" (it's no such thing until it's been proven in court) to a salivating media. The "radicals" found themselves in the ironic situation of defending the "conservative" position on the sub judice rule and the defendants' right to a fair trial - in a court and not in the media.
This is not the first time that the State has played dirty when it couldn't make sensational politically motivated charges stick - after the Security Intelligence Service failed to have the late Bill Sutch convicted as a Soviet spy in his 1975 Official Secrets Act trial, the SIS stage managed a whole series of defamatory leaks about Sutch to the media, in the hope of provoking him to sue and thus have the case re-heard in a civil court where a lower standard of proof is required. Failing that, to permanently smear him in the process. He didn't take the bait but died just a few months later, which may well have been the aim of the whole grubby exercise. In those Cold War days, of course, Communists and Russian spies were the bogeymen.
Deliberate State Intimidation
But seeing that the case is now (very selectively) in the public domain I feel free to comment on the Police tactics in these raids. The leaked "evidence" claims that they had had this "domestic terrorism conspiracy" under surveillance for more than a year and that one of these Urewera "terrorist camps" took place just the weekend before the Monday raids. So why didn't they bust it and catch everyone red-handed? What a field day the media would have had with that.
But, no, they had to put on the show of Monday dawn raids throughout the country, with a complete lockdown of Ruatoki in Tuhoe country, traumatising innocent people and kids in the process. Why? Because the anti-terror laws say that they can. This was an exercise in muscle flexing and mass intimidation by State forces, a forceful demonstration of "we're the boss and don't you forget it", a further illustration of the militarisation of the Police (who are not called the Police Force for nothing) which behave in such situations like an occupying army.
They dressed, looked and acted like their military counterparts in Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine, or their Police counterparts in the US where heavily armed cops routinely behave like an occupying army towards their own people. They were supposedly looking for terrorists - as many commentators have pointed out, the Police were the only ones looking and acting like terrorists that day. Because that's what they were - State terrorists.
In continuing the finest traditions of colonisation, the worst manifestations of this behaviour were directed at Māori and specifically in Ruatoki. This was just the latest example of occupation, dispossession and powerlessness that Tuhoe have had to suffer in the 160+ plus years since the British Crown and pakeha settlers came to New Zealand. The tribe has never signed the Treaty of Waitangi and was never defeated militarily by the British but it paid a heavy price, to this day, in terms of massive land confiscation. It continues to resist and has accordingly attracted official heavy-handedness.
This spectacular attack by the State was intended to lay the first ever charges under the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act (much as the 1975 unsuccessful prosecution of the late Bill Sutch was intended to be the showpiece use of the Official Secrets Act). Instead, it came an inglorious gutser and never made it to court when the Solicitor General declared it "incoherent" and basically unworkable in relation to alleged domestic terrorism.
ABC is happy to join the chorus of those (such as unflappable Green MP, Keith Locke) who could say "we told you so". Back in 2001, ABC was among those who made submissions opposing this law, which was rushed through in the American-led global panic after the terrorist atrocities of September 11 that year. A central point we made was that the Act would suppress dissent, not terrorism. You can read our full submission online here.
So, what was the Government's reaction to this stinging rebuff by its own top legal official? Did it have a rethink? No, within hours of the Solicitor General's decision, it rammed through Parliament, with the backing of all parties except the Greens, Māori Party and Act, the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act which simply makes a bad law worse (in 2007 ABC made a submission opposing that one as well). If the medicine doesn't work, then double the dose. It's just a pity if the patient dies in the process.
Putting It Into Global Context
These laws dont exist in isolation, they are simply part of a plethora of security and intelligence laws dating back to the mid 1990s, when the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) was given an extended mandate to target people who "damage New Zealand's economic interests". Within a fortnight of that law coming into effect, SIS agents were caught trying to break into the Christchurch home of anti-globalisation activist, Aziz Choudry.
The resulting successful court cases brought by him and David Small (who caught the bungling spies and suffered Police harassment and dirty tactics as a result) were extensively reported in Peace Researcher over the several years they took to reach their conclusion. This established that domestic dissenters were targeted by the State and were also smeared with the "terrorist" tag (the homes of both Aziz and David were raided by cops looking for non-existent bombs, after a highly suspicious "mock bomb" was planted in central Christchurch by persons unknown).
These laws don't exist in isolation, they are simply part of a plethora of security and intelligence laws dating back to the mid 1990s, when the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) was given an extended mandate to target people who "damage New Zealand's economic interests". Within a fortnight of that law coming into effect, SIS agents were caught trying to break into the Christchurch home of anti-globalisation activist, Aziz Choudry.
Post-September 11 the securocrats in every Western country, including New Zealand, were given a major boost and saw it as a godsend to push through a whole range of ever more repressive laws. The Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act is just the latest manifestation of this hysteria. Up until these raids, the main New Zealand victim of this has been Ahmed Zaoui. That was another total malicious cockup by the State.
Globally, terrorists have replaced Communists as the bogeymen. The powers that be have taken to labelling everyone who opposes them as "terrorists", ranging from the thousands arrested without charge in Pakistan's martial law regime to seaborne environmentalists challenging Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean, to give just two of the most recent, 2007, examples. It has become a catchall label to easily smear opponents.
For example, in the Philippines, the Government was able to get the Communist Party and its New People's Army and Party founder, Joma Sison, put on lists of international terrorists. This is patently absurd as, throughout the nearly 40 years of armed struggle waged by the Party and its Army, it has always been exclusively a civil war, with no foreign content to it at all. Even in the days when the US had huge military bases in the Philippines, the Communists did not target them.
This terrorist listing has had real personal consequences for Sison, who has lived in Dutch exile for 20 years. He has been denied the ability to work, earn an income or live in State housing, having to rely on friends and supporters for the wherewithal to live. Things got worse in 2007 when Dutch police arrested him on completely trumped-up charges of conspiracy to murder (the actual murders having taken place in the Philippines).
After nearly three weeks in solitary confinement, the charges were thrown out for lack of any evidence and he was freed. Another ignominious defeat for "the security State". The irony is that the Philippine State really is a terrorist regime, with its forces committing hundreds of political murders, disappearances, torture and false imprisonments with complete impunity. It routinely terrorises its own people and has done for many decades, only now that repression is justified as being part of the "War on Terror".
And the "War on Terror" is the global context for these unprecedented raids in NZ. All around the world governments have seized the opportunity to ram through repressive laws and to act outside any law by actions such as torture, abductions, "renditions" of "terrorists" who then disappear into extra-judicial black holes such as Guantanamo. "Anti-terror" raids and lengthy or even indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial are the norm in many so-called First World countries.
Australia harassed and detained a perfectly innocent Indian Muslim doctor for weeks in 2007 after claiming he was involved in the abortive "doctors' plot" to bomb civilian targets in Britain. At its worst, the "War on Terror" authorises the State to murder the innocent, which was the fate of the unfortunate Brazilian man shot repeatedly in the head at point blank range by British cops as he sat on a London Underground train in 2005.
Those State terrorists and murderers are still free, untouched by the law and unidentified. So, that very culture of State impunity which is the norm in countries such as the Philippines is fast becoming the norm in the "civilised" countries of the West as well. In this case the treatment is much worse than the disease.
Bringing Home The "War On Terror"
New Zealand is internationally involved, of course, in the "War on Terror". From the outset, in 2001, this country has had troops in Afghanistan, either directly involved in combat, in the case of the Special Air Service (one of whose members was awarded NZ's first post-World War 2 Victoria Cross as a result, and hasn't that been milked for its maximum propaganda value), or in reconstruction, "winning hearts and minds" work.
The war in that benighted country is rapidly becoming a quagmire, just like the bigger swamp in Iraq, with this latest bunch of foreign invaders destined to go the same way as all the other foreign invaders who have come to grief in Afghanistan over the centuries (the British and Russians being only the most recent before this lot). The occupying armies are definitely not helping their hearts and minds mission by inconvenient facts such as that more Afghan civilians were killed by their "liberators" in 2007 than by the resurgent Taliban forces.
New Zealand's main contribution to the "War on Terror"(and any other US-led war) is the Waihopai spy base. Peace Researcher readers don't need me to spell out what it does and how it is involved in waging war and killing innocent people thousands of kilometres from the tranquil setting of its Marlborough valley. In October 2007, for the first time, I took to Waihopai a member of one of the "target groups" of the international network of spy bases of which Waihopai is part. Amirah Ali Lidasan is a leader of the Moro (Muslim) people of the southern Philippines, a people who have been waging a struggle on many levels, including a decades-long civil war, for autonomy and/or independence.
The US never paid it any attention until after September 11, 2001 whereupon President Bush and his Philippine counterpart, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, declared the Philippines to be the "Second Front in the 'War on Terror'", and the Philippine Muslim struggle suddenly became important to the US (and its regional allies, particularly Australia which has signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the Philippines, already has intelligence agents operating in the Muslim South and will be stationing troops there as of 2008).
By taking Amirah to the intimidating gate of that top secret spy base, and having her visit there well covered by the mainstream media, we (the [former] Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, another one of my hats) made the very clear connection between aggressor and victims. New Zealand has blood on its hands by dint of that spy base and will continue to have as long as it functions in this country as a vital outpost of US electronic intelligence gathering.
So, the October 2007 "anti-terror raids" are the logical conclusion of New Zealand's involvement in the "War on Terror". This was the bringing home of that war, in all its' manifestations (short of actually killing people) - the repressive laws; the ninja attire of the heavily armed and militarised stormtroopers cum police; the treatment of a small rural Māori community as an occupied territory; the deliberate whipping up of a terrorism hysteria in the media and among the public; the dragnet approach to a wide and disparate group of activists, Māori and pakeha and the attempt to brand them as "terrorists"; the criminalising of dissent and the demonising of dissenters as "terrorists".
Having failed to find any foreign terrorists despite several years of valiant effort (Ahmed Zaoui being the best they could do and that became a public relations disaster for the security State), the powers that be decided to create a "domestic terrorism conspiracy". It failed because it was an elaborately staged show and when you go to the theatre it requires what is technically called "the willing suspension of disbelief".
Once that disbelief was no longer willingly suspended, the whole "terrorism" thing was revealed as bullshit. Now those arrested still face serious charges under the Firearms Act, which could send them to prison for years, but they are no longer in custody facing the prospect of extremely serious consequences under the now discredited terrorism laws.
Fight Back
This whole saga proves that the security State can and will attack any political activists, individually or collectively, Māori and pakeha, if it thinks that it can get away with it. The progressive movement in this country, backed by a lot of public opinion, put aside any disagreements and differences, recognising that an attack on one is an attack on all, and threw itself into an ongoing campaign against the terrorism hysteria. The lesson out of all this is that we need to redouble our efforts against the "War on Terror", globally and at home.
Of course, there are real terrorists, who have committed appalling mass murders, and they must be caught and dealt with as the murderers that they are. But the greater crime is that the securocrats, aided and abetted by compliant politicians, have seized this opportunity to launch a massive assault on the peoples of the world, all in the name of "anti-terrorist security" and to plant the boot of "anti-terrorism" firmly on the neck of their own peoples. As I've already said, the treatment has proven to be worse than the disease. And, in this country, if we don't fight back hard now against this manufactured hysteria, then who will be next? I'd better not take any chances - I'll be wearing pyjamas to bed from now on, just in case.
Where Are They Now?
Of the people named in this 2007 article, only Aziz Choudry is no longer with us. Tame Iti was one of only two defendants (both Māori) to be sent to prison. He is now routinely described as a "national taonga". Valerie Morse is still a Wellington political activist; Francie Mountier is no longer in Christchurch or on the ABC Committee, but is also a Wellington political activist.
As for me, I had my FOMO (fear of missing out) reaction in 2007. That was partially assuaged in August 2022 when I was unexpectedly confronted by rifle toting cops on our back doorstep while I was eating breakfast and reading the paper. But they weren't conducting a "terrorism" raid; they were looking for somebody else at the wrong address. It will have to do for when I'm asked for my war stories.
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