Being the son of Elsie Locke I was interested to see who won the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction at this year’s NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. The Elsie Locke Award recognises my late mother’s contribution to children’s literature.
We now have a clear choice between a reasonably presentable Kyle Lockwood design and an out-of-date colonial flag, with its Union Jack in the corner and looking too much like Australia’s.
As presently organised, our prisons are violent places, but it doesn’t have to be that way. One country with an enlightened prison policy is Norway, which has much less prison violence and a lower reoffending or recidivism rate.
It’s common for governments to spin a story to make the indefensible sound defensible. Usually it is the government putting the best light on some commonly agreed facts.
Hager and Gallagher revealed in the Herald on Sunday that New Zealand was specifically targeting the emails of Solomon Island Prime Minister’s chief advisers, the Cabinet secretary and non-government political players.
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.
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.
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.
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.