Graham Kennedy: Intelligence and Security Committee — MembershipText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGraham Kennedy: Intelligence and Security Committee — Membership[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1712. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green): The motion before us is that three members of Parliament—Chris Finlayson Amy Adams and David Shearer—be endorsed as members of the Intelligence and Security Committee. All three people are no doubt fine individuals. Speaking for myself I have nothing against any of them. Each has no doubt some shining quality. The issue for the Green Party is not one of individual competence. Each of these individuals would no doubt pass the litmus test of minimal competence to serve on this committee. That is not the problem. The problem is that in one of these nominations the law was breached.The Intelligence and Security Committee Act provides for the membership of the committee. Section 7(1)(d) addresses the nomination by the Leader of the Opposition. The member shall be nominated “following consultation with the leader of each party that is not in Government”. In February 2015 for the 51st Parliament the Leader of the Opposition did not consult with the leaders of the Green Party. That is a violation of the Act and a breach of New Zealand legislation. Does it matter? Yes it matters. The Parliament is the sovereign body of New Zealand. It is not constitutionally proper for any member whether the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition to ignore its legislative provisions. To do so undermines the constitutional integrity of this country which they are sworn to uphold.It is strange for an Opposition leader aspiring to be Prime Minister to do such a thing. Perhaps Mr Little did not mean to do such a thing. Perhaps it was an oversight. But he stands by his decision not to have consulted. He declared an undertaking to consult with the Green Party about the committee’s deliberations. This he said would fulfil his legal obligations—wrong on both counts. First the section states clearly that the MP shall be nominated following consultations. Mr Little acknowledges he did not consult. It is disingenuous to then assert that future consultation on the committee’s deliberations will meet his legal obligation to consult prior to and on the subject of a nomination. As a lawyer he knows very well that this is incorrect. As a political leader he knows very well that this is disingenuous. As an aspiring Prime Minister he knows very well that he should have done better. He should have done better not only leading up to this nomination but in his subsequent dissembling.Secondly the law prohibits Mr Little actually from consulting with anyone about the deliberations of the committee. For someone aspiring to be a good committee member this gentleman is in need of some elementary training. Well that is that and we leave it to Mr Little to reflect on what he needs to do. In case he has not reached for the legislation it may be worth pointing out that section 9(2) states: “The Leader of the Opposition may at any time revoke the nomination of any person nominated by the Leader of the Opposition …”. This Act obviously presumes that the Leader of the Opposition has the moral compass to realise that people make mistakes and that a nomination might be invalid through procedural error.We repeat: the Green Party has nothing against the member whom Mr Little has nominated. The individual has some admirable background in issues of UN affairs being a humanitarian aid chief in a number of conflict zones. It is not an easy job to do. It often takes courage to go there. It takes stamina often to stay. It requires judgment including political judgment about how to be effective there and what to do in some tough spots. I know how difficult some of these challenges can be. When I worked in the Ministryof Foreign Affairs I was privy to intelligence reports we used to get about the strategic thinking that would go on in the major capitals of the world during the height of the Cold War. I found it sobering to say the least. Some of the tactical scheming that undermined and underpinned much of the strategising was not disarmingly pretty. You could age a few years on reading just one report.Of course this does not make every intelligence report a model of perfection. The US National Security Agency got it badly wrong over Iraq’s nuclear weapons in 2002 leading to the sad picture of a misled Colin Powell an honourable man by and large misleading the world with a PowerPoint and a pointer in the Security Council. And it is possible for an excitable Prime Minister to over-interpret some ambiguous material. Mr Blair’s disposition to hype anything that passed under his nose led him to declare London to be 45 minutes away from disaster from Iraq’s missiles—some intelligence. Maybe this is the price of the club.Intelligence reporting is an art and part of that art is in not overhyping the fragile shards of evidence that you can glean from fallible often biased and occasionally fraudulent sources. There is a temptation to bake a cake from crumbs. I recall that when I would travel to the Thai-Cambodian border shortly after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia back in the early 1980s I and colleagues from other countries would try to make sense out of what was going on in front of our eyes in the resistance fighters’ camps up there. They were Son Sann’s Khmer People’s National Liberation Front and Sihanouk’s FUNCINPEC. We then went to Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge hung out. I remember talking with Son Sann one day about the strength of his forces and then a few hours later to Sihanouk’s people about theirs and then comparing notes with colleagues. Arriving at an informed estimate that we could agree on was a nightmare.So intelligence gathering is more an art than a science. This is not to say it is a completely useless art but it is to say that you need to be politically careful and circumspect with your material. I guess that is the job of the committee in the sense of responsible political oversight. That is the reason the Green Party has in the past called for a review of the reviewers—not because we do not live in the real world but because we know how complex the real world actually is. These days that complexity is increasing. It is not just military violence and geostrategy that is at issue these days in a world of intelligence.In the past decade or so the UN has begun to recognise the broader array of threats to peace and security that now exists. In 2004 the Secretary-General appointed the High-level Panel on Threats Challenges and Change to report to him on this. That report for which I served as a consultant identified the whole gamut of new threats to peace. The report said: “we know all too well that the biggest security threats we face now and in the decades ahead go far beyond States waging aggressive war. They extend to poverty infectious disease and environmental degradation; war and violence within States; the spread and possible use of …. [weapons of mass destruction]; terrorism; and transnational organized crime. The threats are from non-State actors as well as States and to human security as well as State security.”So our intelligence gathering in New Zealand whether it is through our own national resources or through a sharing arrangement needs to focus on the whole notion of human security and how to ensure that the State serves to protect the individual rather than the other way around. I saw this in starkest relief when I served as a UN official in the Middle East. When I went to the Syrian border and into the West Bank and Gaza it was clear that human security begets instability and instability leads to violence. It was equally apparent to the Jordanian intelligence the Mukhabarat just down the road. That was why the king was so attentive to both his Bedouin tribes and his Palestinian refugees at home and to neighbouring Governments on his borders.No doubt our Intelligence and Security Committee performs its functions with due diligence. No doubt it needs parliamentary review. It would not be a bad idea if the Leader of the Opposition recognised the need for a diverse range of experience and humble viewpoint on this committee.