Locke Keith: General Debate 
Locke Keith: General Debate 
[Volume:643;Page:13101] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Today a very concerned group of Tuhoe people came to Parliament to express their anger at what had happened to them back on 15 October when their homes and community were blockaded by black-garbed anti-terrorist police who were heavily armed and wearing balaclavas. People were forced out of their cars treated as criminals and photographed beside cards in violation of our law. Today on the steps of Parliament I and other MPs from different parties have listened to their anger. My message when I spoke to them today and it is the same as my message to the Government and to all New Zealanders is that there has to be a better way—a way of respecting all communities a way of bringing them together and not acting as if a whole community were made up of terrorists. 
We have to recognise the hurt of the Tuhoe people and recognise that they have longstanding grievances some dating back to the confiscations of the 19th century. We have to address these issues and we also have to use the good community policing processes that we have built up over the last few years. If the police felt that something was going wrong why did they not turn to their iwi liaison officers? Why were those officers sidelined in favour of a massive surveillance operation for over a year which intercepted the communications of a large chunk of the community and of thousands of New Zealanders around the country? 
It is almost as if the police wanted there to be some sort of terrorist plot. Of course when a huge anti-terrorist capability is developed in the police force there is a certain institutional pressure for the police to want to use it on some people in this country. They forgot their essential crime prevention mission which is just as important as crime detection and prosecution. They could have brought iwi liaison officers into play much earlier if they thought that people were going off-track. But those iwi liaison officers were ignored and sidelined completely on 15 October by the “shock and awe” operation of the terrorist squad. 
In the same sensationalist vein the  
Dominion Post  
today carried lurid details supposedly from the police case. It stated that publication was in the public interest. It is in the public interest long term for New Zealanders to know what happened and to get some of the factual background but that is best disclosed in a public inquiry after the court cases that will proceed shortly on arms charges. The  
Dominion Post  
has prejudiced—possibly fatally prejudiced—those cases. They may have to be aborted altogether. We should wait for a proper public inquiry that can do three main things: firstly bring out the factual situation and put it in context with input not only from the police but from others in the community and others affected; secondly cover policing—cover what was done right and what was done wrong in the police operation and find out what we can learn from it and how we can improve it in terms of building community relations and better crime detection and solution—and thirdly I think as part of that reinforce the role of community liaison officers such as iwi liaison officers and perhaps develop another category of liaison officer called a political liaison officer. 
Plenty of people—and I include myself in this—know some of those who were arrested. There are a lot of wise heads in the political community of people active in social change issues environmental issues and the like who would have jumped at the chance to bring their wisdom to bear if they had been alerted to anything going wrong. That perhaps can be an outcome of all of this. 
We should do the listening. That is what the Law Commission will do now that the Terrorism Suppression Act has been referred to it. We perhaps need to listen to the people we did not listen to when the Act was passed in 2002: all those groups that said that it was a politically biased Act that could affect them as political activists. We should consider whether their claims about the Act and about the recent Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill mean that we should go back to the Crimes Act and get away from these political offences and we should deal with serious criminality through that Act. We should also not go down the track of just increasing surveillance; there are better ways.