It’s good to see the Sunday Star-Times attempting to get more information from government agencies about Daryl Jones, the Kiwi killed in a US drone strike in Yemen. The paper is right to complain about the government’s refusal to provide anything.
When I saw the NZ Herald headline, “France foils plot to blow up Eiffel Tower” I was immediately suspicious. It is now standard for police and intelligence services to come up with a terrorist scare when they are promoting legislation further restricting people’s rights.
Last week the State Service Commission issued a strongly critical report on our spy agencies. It concluded that there is ”urgency” for “a huge amount of change to be undertaken”. The agencies’ “national security and intelligence priorities are inadequately defined”; vetting systems are not up to scratch, and the public is kept too much in the dark about what the spies do.
Our PM has given Obama a green light to start bombing ISIS. In John Key’s simplistic schema (repeated on Q and A and the Nation) ISIS is a terrorist organisation and its ok to drone kill anyone whose a terrorist. So much for real political solutions.
The Independent Police Conduct Authority’s criticism of Police for tasering a non-aggressive man in his own home reinforce the fears we had when tasers were introduced.
There’s too much grumping about the “coat-tailing” provision of MMP, whereby a smaller (lower-voting) party can bring in extra MPs (in proportion to their party vote) if they win an electorate seat.
The less accountable a public agency is, the more likely it is to become a law unto itself. This is true for the Security Intelligence Service. Only the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security is empowered to check what the SIS actually does, and to date it has been a pretty toothless watchdog.
I sighed when I read the Sunday Star-Times front page headline: “People-smugglers bid to sail first boat to NZ”. Here we go again, I thought. Another scare story playing to racists and those among us who are prejudiced against asylum seekers.