Shearer David: Ministerial Statements — Islamic State Conflict—Government ResponseText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Ministerial Statements — Islamic State Conflict—Government Response[Sitting date: 05 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:623. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert):I join with others in thanking the Government for opening up this opportunity to discuss this very important issue. We do face an uncertain world and the brutality and the atrocities of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is part of that but obviously not the only issue. There are threats to New Zealand and we have to acknowledge that. We have said as Annette King said before that we will adopt a bipartisan approach to strengthening where necessary New Zealand SIS. We appreciate again the opportunity to be briefed on that. But we will also reserve our final comment until we actually see that legislation before us. Where there are gaps obviously we will need to plug them but we also need to be vigilant because this is ultimately about the balancing of our security with our human rights. Select committee consideration as we have insisted upon is a critical issue. The option of urgency is not acceptable. I was also pleased to see the sunset clause which means that this legislation will ultimately fade out as the review of the legislation goes ahead.I want to make the point that we have to be very very careful here that we do not overstate the issue of the threat that is before us. We have just heard Gerry Brownlee talk about this as being the worst terrorist organisation in history. John Key said last week that ISIS will “rain carnage on the world”. Make no mistake it is a nasty brutish organisation that violates human rights in an awful way. But is ISIS about to bring mayhem and terror into our neighbourhoods? The answer is no. It is brutal. It does commit atrocities and it uses those as a weapon to dominate two countries—Syria and Iraq—and it is sophisticated in the way that it uses local people to take up arms.We need to be very careful—very careful—about what we do to our local Muslim population which is a productive and peace-loving part of our community. We are in some ways radicalising those people—in ways that we do not know how they could be radicalised—by the actions we take. I am mindful of a study by the Royal United Services Institute in the UK which was looking at the UK’s role in the Iraq war. It said that that role increased the radicalisation of young Muslims. It said that far from reducing international terrorism the 2003 invasion had the effect of promoting it. If the cause is right then we accept whatever risk we take but we should understand that whatever we get into will affect the security of us back here in New Zealand.The Prime Minister also argues that this is an international a regional and a local problem. I do not agree. This is a conflict that should be contained locally and regionally but it is actually we who are internationalising it by our presence in that local and regional area. If we contrast the Islamic State with al-Qaeda for example al-Qaeda actually started the other way. It internationalised a Muslim or an Islamic issue rather than doing it locally. Arguably in 2001 it posed a much greater risk than the Islamic State does today. The Islamic State is not threatening the world. Again I am mindful looking back in history to 2002 of when Tony Blair and his Cabinet said that Iraq posed an imminent threat to Britain. That is fairly laughable today but it was the rhetoric at the time that was used to justify the Iraq war. We should take real care that we do not exaggerate the threat of ISIS to justify the action that we are taking in New Zealand.Let us look at the broader contribution to Iraq. On the issue of Iraq this Government appears to be driven by the desire to do something alongside our “Five Eyes” partners. The rhetoric was somewhat dialled back immediately after the election when John Key was talking about deploying the SAS. So New Zealand’s possible military contribution as announced is a sort of balance between doing something to be there and on the other hand not upsetting the New Zealand public. The Prime Minister has probably looked at some of the polling data that has been coming through. If he has he would realise that New Zealanders actually see sending our young people off to war when there is little understanding of what they are there to do or what they are there to achieve as folly. They might be right to ask those questions and have those doubts about what the reasons would be. If you look at what military analysts are saying about the current tactic of airstrikes they are saying that those will not work without boots on the ground.We should remember actually that the forerunner of ISIS was what we called al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was actually defeated by the surge it was called of tens of thousands of American soldiers alongside the arming of local Iraqi tribesmen—the same sort of tribesmen who fought valiantly but were defeated and then brutally murdered just this week by ISIS when they were trying to stand up for their freedoms but were not given the weaponry and the support that they needed. That points to the problems within Iraq rather than the problems of outsiders trying to do the job.If we are going to go into Iraq then we need to make a contribution and a sensible one. We appear today to be emphasising a more military solution. There was talk about sending nine people into Iraq. We already know that three have gone so we have made this decision despite the fact that we have made no decisions! We have made this decision already in terms of who we are sending off to Baghdad. I can be pretty emphatic that those people coming back will not be saying there is nothing for us to do there. They will be coming back with a job for the military. We have to balance that off with the risk that we face by becoming involved in even the most benign form of contribution militarily—that we then slide further into additional deployments that we up the risk of our own insecurity. Most of all we have to be looking at what we will achieve. I do not believe that the contribution of some military trainers frankly will achieve very much. Let us remember that the US spent 10 years in Iraq and spent billions of dollars training an entire Iraqi army only to have it collapse in the first assault that it faced. This is not something I believe that we are going to contribute meaningfully in and around. The army itself was not the problem; it was the way Prime Minister al-Maliki at the time favoured his Shi’a group and in a sense undermined the very confidence that the Sunnis had in the work of the Shia. That was commented on today by the Prime Minister in passing.In terms of the diplomatic role that we can play I believe we can play a much more positive role in strengthening the Government the judiciary and the political framework that is operating in Iraq. We should seek a United Nations Security Council resolution for a mandate to have forces on the ground and we should be able to up our humanitarian contribution from the $1 million announcement today. We should be focusing on those areas of ISIS where there is vulnerability. It is paying thousands and thousands of military and administrators at the moment. It needs money. It needs oil revenues. We should be shutting off those possibilities of that revenue—oil coming out and armed shipments going in. We should be looking at the difference we can make to Iraq.New Zealand has never hesitated to go into conflicts where we believed the cause was right or where we were standing up for human rights or humanitarian law—Afghanistan and Timor-Leste being the two most recent. But we have to question the contribution that we make and whether it might be effective. There are consequences that might flow from our actions that we cannot see or perceive today. We need to be operating under a clear mandate. Our position on the United Nations Security Council and the confidence that the world has shown in us in voting us on give us ample opportunity to be able to do that.