"The service has a duty to follow the activities of Communists and other subversive individuals, into whatever organisation or walk of life they attempt to penetrate."

Brigadier Gilbert (18-4-69)

Financial Vote, 1968

Marriage Guidance Service … $26,000

Prisoners Aid and After-care Societies … … $12,000

Probation & Release Hostels $6,000

Security Service … … $272,000

A further reference to incompetence was made in the House by Mr. J. C. Mathison, the Labour M.P. for Avon, publicising a little-appreciates incident on 20th August, 1963:

"We are disturbed by newspaper and broadcasting appeals … it is inevitable it will be construed by many as an exhortation to inform the Security Police of suspicious circumstances attending their neighbours, friends and enemies."

Canterbury Council of Civil Liberties.

"It is a sign of his political naivete that he seems to equate radical political activity with communism … he must waste a large amount of time investigating people who are utterly reliable and trustworthy … it is repugnant to think that the Security Police was compiling files on people for secret use against them and spending public money to do it.'

W. J. Scott, Council of Civil Liberties.

I Would think that radical political activity in university circles today is at a very low ebb compared with certain times in the past, in particular the late thirties and the forties when impetus was given to radical political thought by the depression and the Soviet achievements during the War.

I recall hearing of an October Group at Victoria which copied the name of a Communist group at Oxford, a name presumably relating to the October Revolution in Russia. I recall also that a VUC Branch formed part of the Wellington District organisation of the Communist Party. These Communist groups are long since defunct, and I do not know of any counterparts in existence now. An awareness of Communist influence is indicated by the manner in which the student body has steered clear of affiliation with the Communist front organisation known as the International Union of Students.

As a New Zealander I regard Communism as evil and subversive. A New Zealand Communist by conscious act when he joins the Party abandons his loyalty to God and country and gives allegiance to an atheistic and materialistic movement operated in the interests of and directed by a foreign power. In the international field the proven duplicities of the Communist bloc countries are legion. One grim example was last year's Soviet resumption of nuclear tests at the very time that Soviet negotiators were sitting at the disarmament conference in Geneva. The Chinese seizure of inoffensive Tibet is another. We in New Zealand are geographically remote from those parts of the world where the "Cold War" is of immediate reality This remoteness inclines us to a detachment—a tendency to equate the Western and th Communist positions, to blind ourselves to the essentially aggressive motives of the Communist bloc and to overlook the inherently immoral character of Communism.

Some of my readers will no doubt have read books such as Neat Wood's Communism and British Intellectuals and Koestler's The God That Failed (about which there was an interesting series of radio programmes on the YC Stations recently). These books tell of the disillusionment which progressively overcame Communist intellectuals in the Western World and which led nearly all of them to break with the Party. Here in New Zealand something similar happened. The intellectual element of the Communist Party was strongest in the late thirties and the forties. Disillusionment increased as the years went by. The final shocks were given by the events in Hungary and by Krushchev's de-Stalinisation speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. No less a Communist leader than its General-Secretary, S. W. Scott, defected from the Party this time, and has told his story in his book Rebel in a Wrong Cause. Following the defection of its intellectual wing the Party has tended to isolate itself under the cloak of "proletarianism". By and large it is the emphasis on proletarianism which makes it such a small factor in New Zealand political life today.