Gordon Campbell on the GCSB’s practice of spying on New Zealanders

It is hard to decide what is the most alarming aspect of Prime Minister John Key’s plans to expand the role of Big Brother. Or, as Key describes it, his “proposals to significantly strengthen the oversight regime across the intelligence community.” Is it the fact that the GCSB has apparently been behaving like a rogue agency for the past 10 years (at least) under successive governments, and has been carrying out spying on New Zealanders, even though it has repeatedly said it doesn’t? Incredible really, given that the GCSB legislation could hardly be clearer in forbidding the GCSB from spying on New Zealand citizens and permanent residents – even when, and one would have thought especially when it is offering “agency support” to the Police and to the SIS.
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On Criminalising Protest, and Christchurch Cathedral Options

The Tauranga MP Simon Bridges – he’s also the Labour Minister and the Minister of Energy and Resources – is carving out quite a niche for himself, on the gratuitously petty side of Tory politics. First, we had his brushing aside of official advice to raise the minimum wage more substantially, and now we have his attempt to criminalise freedom of expression by restricting protests at sea.

Thanks to Bridges’ belated amendement to the Crown Minerals Bill, those protesters who get within 500 metres of seismic measuring vessels or mining operations can be jailed and fined significantly, and so can the organisation to which they belong, up to the level of $100,000. These draconian measures have been brought in to fix a non-existent problem – can Bridges point to an instance of oil or mining exploration at sea that was scrapped primarily because of protest action?

The Brazilian oil giant Petrobras for instance, pulled out of its East Cape exploration because of its own internal financing problems, not because of protest action. Which example of protest action can Bridges point to in order to justify this outlandish law – which is being pushed through without select committee scrutiny?

The prominent New Zealanders – including Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Dame Anne Salmond – who have banded together to oppose this legislation should be applauded. As Peter Williams QC pointed out on RNZ this morning the measures being contemplated are entirely to do with restricting the rights and the behaviour of protesters, with no balancing measures with respect to the obligations of oil and mining companies – who, as Williams says, could criminalise the protesters merely by sailing or flying close to them, as was done by the French during the anti-nuclear protests at Mururoa. Read the rest of this entry »

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Gordon Campbell on John Key’s gaffe about North Korea

Just how Prime Minister John Key thought that invoking the “proud history” of our 1950s Korean War contribution would help to minimize the current tensions on the Korean peninsula is anyone’s guess. If nothing else, such utterances would confirm the worst fears of the paranoid clique in North Korea that the imperialist war-mongers were indeed out to get them, once again. Key has since backpedaled and said that New Zealand would in fact “consider its position” and that he was talking about an extreme situation that was very unlikely to happen. Which only makes one wonder why if that’s the case, why did he mention the prospect of war in the first place?
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Gordon Campbell on Ian Fletcher, Jon Stewart and the new avian flu

At this point, the Ian Fletcher affair risks getting lost in the‘angels on pinheads’ detail that fascinates the Beltway, and bores the pants off everyone else. What remains clear is that Prime Minister John Key intervened and changed the selection process for a spymaster’s job that – for very good consitutional reasons – is supposed to be kept at arms’ length from political interference. On this occasion, Key not only held a ‘brainstorming’ session about possible candidates with Iain Rennie, the person running the candidate selection process but took it on himself to solicit an application from someone he knew personally. Key needs to admit that was wrong, and should apologise for his actions, at the very least.
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Gordon Campbell on the GCSB appointment, and bird flu scares in Beijing

In our political system, which has few checks and balances – a single chamber Parliament, no written Constitution, a weak Bill of Rights etc – a lot has to be taken on trust. For instance: there is a lack of any genuine oversight mechanisms on how the SIS and the GCSB operate, and if anything, security analyst Paul Buchanan was being kind on RNZ this morning when he called the parliamentary oversight committee a “toothless wonder.” This means that we have to take it entirely on trust that politicians will not subvert the powers of those agencies for their own political and personal ends. In such a situation, perception matters.
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Gordon Campbell on the smelter fiasco, and its impact on the asset sales programme

Mum and Dad investors were supposed to be plain ordinary folks that the government was rewarding with the option of buying ..er, of re-buying a stake in the energy companies they already own. Not any more. Clearly, those ordinary Mums and Dads will now need the investment savvy of Warren Buffett and the predictive power of Nostradamus if they are to make any kind of rational judgment about what’s likely to happen to electricity demand, to electricity prices and to the subsequent profitability of state energy companies over the next five, ten or twenty years. At his press conference yesterday, even Prime Minister John Key confessed that he didn’t know how the possible closure of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter might affect the value of the state’s three other energy companies, besides Meridian. If Key doesn’t know, how are Mum and Dads – or institutional investors – supposed to make a rational decision about whether to invest their money?
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Gordon Campbell on the “Rocket Docket” US injustice that Dotcom faces, and the Bluff smelter

This month’s Werewolf cover story is about the Kim Dotcom extradition case and is available here, but there’s an interesting footnote…This week, ABC television news in the States ran an AP story about how and why the Eastern Virginia District gets to prosecute international cases such as Kim Dotcom. The story was fascinating on a few different levels. For starters, it lumped in Dotcom with Somali pirates, corrupt Colombian generals involved in the drug trade, and mortgage lending fraudsters. Even Dotcom’s sternest critics would struggle to credibly equate him with such offenders.
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Gordon Campbell on the latest messy falling out among Syria’s rebels

Routinely, US foreign policy in the Middle East seems to suffer from a karmic backlash. Ten years ago, the Iraq invasion was supposed to produce a democratic state that further isolate Iran’s Shia revolution. Instead, the March 2003 invasion has installed in Baghdad a Shia-dominated partner state to Iran. The invasion has significantly strengthened the power of Teheran. To achieve that end, the US has spent an estimated $2 trillion, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and sent millions of them into exile, including an entire generation’s investment in education and technological expertise. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like that.
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Gordon Campbell on Susan Devoy’s appointment, and the Gillard non-coup

It is hard to tell which aspect of Susan Devoy becoming Race Relations Commissioner is worse. Was it the selection of someone who plainly has no skills for a job requiring tolerance and empathy – or was it the rationalisation offered by Justice Minister Judith Collins, who said that Devoy would ‘tone down her views” once she was behind the desk? Memo to Collins: the prime quality required in a Race Relations Commissions is not the ability to learn on the job how to avoid embarrassing the government by speaking your mind. At least part of the requirement should be having a mind that doesn’t need to have its contents “toned down” in order to function properly.
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Gordon Campbell on the official emergency plan to steal from your bank account

“Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen” – Woody Guthrie

Put your money in the bank, not under the mattress. That’s always been a mantra, especially for people who don’t want to speculate in property or the sharemarket, and who don’t want to run the risk of putting their savings into shonky finance companies. Belief in the stability of banks is one of the tentpoles of the economy – so the revelation from Green Party co-leader Russel Norman that the government and Reserve Bank are about to give themselves the power to raid the deposits of ordinary bank customers in the event of a banking crisis seems simply outrageous.
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