There it an inherent contradiction in the operation of a secret service in a democratic society. That service must use subversive, illegal and devious strategies to operate against people defined as 'subversives'. But at the same time the service must subscribe to democratic ideology and abhor the tactics as well as the designs of its enemies. The practice and the ideology contradict each other with the usual result that the ideology is twisted and bent to justify the practice.

A curious example of this process of twist and bend is to be found in the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill. Because Sir Guy Powles found that the SIS habitually tap phones and open mail, the Government, on his recommendation, have decided to make this habitual practice legal. The reasoning is that, since it happens anyway, if we make it legal we can at the same time make it more visible and thus regulate it.

Sir Guy Naive?

Sir Guy's thought has an admirable moral basis But it is labyrinthine enough for the most devious of politicians to discover the odd dark comer in it. So it is unfortunate that a report prepared for Mr Rowling should come into the hands of the present Prime Minister, who is himself a man of strong subversive potential and who may in fact be implicated in the controversies in mid-1975 that provoked Sir Guy's inquiry. A democratic society must assume that its police and politicians, no less than its secret service, are men and women of integrity and principle. The assumption continues to be made despite evidence to the contrary.

But the assumption becomes dangerous when a democratically elected Prime Minister is in fact a man who does not believe in democratic processes or their rationalisation — as Muldoon patently does not. The situation arises where democratic ideology and rhetoric are used to justify undemocratic and subversive practice. Such politicians have an active interest in increasing the power and domain of the state police, as a means of extending their own domain of power. And they will explain such increases as 'the price we pay for our freedom'. Eventually, that price becomes the freedom it is supposed to guarantee. This situation is developing in New Zealand now.

It would be naive and foolish to believe that the proposed amendments to the NZSIS Act of 1969 will regularise present practice with regard to phone-tapping, mail-opening or anything else. This is not even the intention. The bulk of the activities of the SIS will remain secret and unobserved. What the amendments do provide, is a means — a Parliamentary process — whereby it will seem that the activities of the SIS are being scrutinised. But there is no guarantee whatsoever that this will in fact be the case.

Which SIS report?

A precise analogy is provided by the fate of Sir Guy Powles' two reports. The most important information he reported is likely to be found in the secret report that went to the Prime Minister. No one but Muldoon, Sir Guy and presumably the SIS can therefore know how representative the present Bill is of Sir Guy's recommendations. It is probable that there is further information Sir Guy never got a look at — if they had anything really incriminating, why should they take the risk? The possibility remains that Muldoon, as Minister in charge, has access to information Sir Guy never learned. For there are always hierarchies of secrecy, always one more negative area where fewer people have access and even the myth of a public inquiry can't solve that one. So Sir Guy's report, the public one, can be seen as a public reassurance that due processes are being observed while the real shit hides back behind several screens.

Rowling's way through this particular Chinese Puzzle, was to promise that the Leader of the Opposition would also receive a copy of the secret report, thereby making a political use of it difficult, though not impossible. When Muldoon, subsequently Prime Minister, got the report he simply sneered at Rowling, called him a total innocent and announced that the report was for his eyes only.

It is the nature of the Bill as a strategy to allow the SIS to extend its activities under legal sanction, that upsets Michael Minogue. He calls the Bill 'piece-meal' which, by design, it is. It attempts no definitions not subject to interpretation by the SIS itself. It nowhere requires any limit on the sovereign actions of the SIS and the process of supervision the Bill proposes takes no effective account of the secret mode of operation of the SIS. They don't have to tell anybody what they are doing, not even the Prime Minister. They couldn't operate at all if this weren't so.

Phone tapping a red herring

In a number of other respects, however, the Bill is openly fascist in its implications. The phone- tapping and mail-opening bit is only one aspect and anyway, it is something of a red herring. It also proposed that the SIS extend its functions to include the surveillance of potential spies, terrorists, subversives or saboteurs ; that the publication by any medium of information about the SIS be made more difficult and even illegal ; that public servants may be coerced, without right of refusal, into working for or with the SIS ; that New Zealanders not 'ordinarily resident in New Zealand' may be refused right to complaint or appeal ; and that there is a further concentration of responsibility for the SIS in the hands of the Prime Minister. It is indeed, as Minogue keeps saying, the mechanism with which to establish a police state.

The so-called safeguards in the Bill amount to these provisions — that the Prime Minister table once a year a 'review' of the intercept warrants that have been issued (he issues them himself) ; that the Security Commissioner must consult the Minister, the head of the SIS and anyone else involved when investigating a complaint (but not, however, the complainant himself) ; that the Commissioner is allowed to consult what files the SIS allow him to see ; that when someone complains, the SIS must tell him what they think he needs to know about what they have on him ; and that the Commissioner must inform on any SIS agent he thinks is acting improperly. All of these 'safeguards' carry the proviso that they are not to operate so as to threaten security. The one further safeguard is that restrictions on the press are not to apply to the broadcasting and reporting of Parliament. I suppose that one depends on what you think of Parliament as an independent forum.

You can find a basis for many of these provisions in Sir Guy's public report. But it is evident that his recommendations have been treated selectively and very carefully. Most of the strategies he advised to make the operations of the SIS less secretive have been ignored — the so-called sunlight recommendations. For example, his report says that all intercept warrants should automatically expire after 90 days ; but the Bill provides such warrants will be valid 'for the period specified within'. Many of the safeguards that are proposed look rather thin on close examination. There is no strenuous effort anywhere in the Bill to overcome the initial contradiction between the use of illegal tactics to safeguard democratic freedoms.

What is subversion?

The other vital question is that of definition. If you grant that enemies of the state do exist, how are they to be identified? What does constitute 'subversion, espionage, terrorism and sabotage '? And how is the SIS going to discover 'potential' activities of these kinds? It is in this context that the decision of the National Party not to take the Bill before a Select Committee, is most disturbing. Muldoon's reason is, that the Select Committee would have to deal with 'irrelevant' submissions from various 'fringe groups'. In other words, he has defined the views of many groups and individuals 'irrelevant' before these views have even been expressed. No one knows who these fringe groups are. Is the Law Society one of them, or the Council for Liberties, or the Northern Journalist's Union, or the Post Office Association? Muldoon has somehow judged the 'potential' of all these people and has managed to dismiss their claims before they are made. If the SIS under his direction use the same criteria when defining potential espionage or potential subversion, then there is no citizen of New Zealand who is not a potential enemy of the state. There is ample evidence already that Muldoon considers anyone who opposes his will is an enemy of the state. In this sense, the extension of the SIS function to include surveillance of 'potential' subversive, merely gives legal sanction to the paranoid delusions of a sick leader.

It is worth recalling, finally, the words John A. Lee wrote in 1940. It is also worth recalling what happened to Lee in 1940 when he lost his battle with men he considered incipient fascists also. Particularly with Minogue in mind. Lee Wrote

"Megalomania and psychasthenia are by products of democratic leadership not infrequently. Democracy is the best of systems; not because it inevitably produces leaders (History demonstrates freakish exceptions) but because it at least offers a means, short of bloodshed, of getting rid of a descredited leader".

"Psychopathology — Politics" March 1940.

The situation made painfully obvious in this proposed Bill, is that where one of those 'freakish exceptions' is attempting to extend his own power via an organisation committed to secret, illegal and undemocratic practice. Such an extension of power may well operate to subvert normal democratic processes (it may have done so already) and make it impossible for us to rid ourselves of the present power clique by any means. Short of bloodshed, that is.