New Zealands history of state spying
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History of the Rottweiler
After the recent revelation that the New Zealand police have been infiltrating activist groups for the past decade it is worth examining the country's history of state spying on peaceful protesters. As political scientist Bryce Edwards has pointed out:
The state in New Zealand has always taken a strong interest in the surveillance of leftwing political activity. The Security Intelligence Service, in particular, has a long history of spying on leftwing activist groups and individuals. And in recent years the power of the SIS has been extended, with the help of MPs from Labour, National, the Maori Party etc. There has even sometimes been some slight 'innovations' to the spying configurations - with state owned corporations using private investigators to do the spying on political activists.
The private investigators Edwards refers to are Thompson and Clark, a firm that claims to specialise in political activism which in recent years has infiltrated the Save Happy Valley Coalition, an environmental group opposed to coal mine expansion. Yet this history goes back even further than that. One blogger recalls:
Friends of mine who were involved in the SAL (Socialist Action League) in the 1970s and in CARE, HART and the PYM in the late 60s, 70s and early 1980s were well aware that their groups had been infiltrated. When he was Prime Minister, Muldoon regularly used the police and the SIS to infiltrate “anti government” and “subversive” (his words) groups, organisations, unions and political parties such as the Labour Party, the SUP and, in 1983/4, even the right wing New Zealand Party.
It has became easier for the state to spy on activists since the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, with a large amount of “anti-terrorism” legislation now on the books. New Zealand has only had two instances of terrorism in the past century; the Wellington Trades hall bombing in 1984 which killed cleaner Ernie Abbott, and the bombing of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
The first bomber was never caught, the second act was state terrorism ordered by the government of France (the ship was protesting French nuclear testing). The “anti-terrorism” laws were most famously used on October 15 2007 when a number of activists had their homes raided by police. These new laws have not prevented terrorism (as there is none to prevent), but have only acted to persecute legitimate protesters, the laws should be repealed.
