Locke Keith: Estimates Debate — In Committee Procedure 
Locke Keith: Estimates Debate — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:618;Page:14420] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Firstly I want to praise the police for tracking down and trapping those Israeli Mossad agents who were trying to obtain fraudulent New Zealand passports and undermine our sovereignty. The police did a great job and it shows that resources should be put into the estimates for the police to allow them to do that sort of national security work rather than too much funding sitting in the Security Intelligence Service budget. It is obvious that in this particular case the Security Intelligence Service and its Australian partner did not catch Eli Cara one of the agents who have been imprisoned who had crossed the Tasman 24 times. It seems that the Security Intelligence Service in this particular case was seen as a bit of a soft touch and according to the  
New Zealand Herald 
 yesterday there is information that Mossad approached the Security Intelligence Service to try to get its help to have the charges against those Mossad agents dropped. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation did not seem to do anything about Mr Cara or about the operation which may have been largely run from Australia. In fact it seems that the Australian Government is too closely associated with the Israeli Government. A few days ago it was one of only six nations in the United Nations to support the Israelis building the West Bank wall which has been condemned by the International Court of Justice. I think the Australian Government and its intelligence services have fallen down very much in not supporting New Zealand in that important matter. 
I would also like to praise the police activities on the hikoi. The police did very well in making sure it proceeded peacefully and in a very orderly fashion from one end of the North Island to the other. I would like to contrast that with some of the mistakes that the police have made recently in prosecuting other protesters. 
In the court last week Mr Hopkinson who had burnt a flag at a protest last year was let free. It was not right for the police to proceed with that prosecution in the first place. That law has been on the books for 22 years. There have been plenty of flag burnings in that time but no prosecutions. That law is contrary to the New Zealand Bill of Rights as Justice France pointed out in his decision last Friday and the police should not have proceeded in that case. 
The police should not have proceeded either with the prosecution against Aucklander Bruce Hubbard for sending an email to the United States Embassy referring to the United States “napalming babies” which was considered offensive by the people at the embassy. However that case had to be dropped after quite a bit of harassment of Mr Hubbard because whether or not we like what he said the prosecution infringed Mr Hubbard’s right to free speech. All of us have the right to free speech. 
The third case that the police should not have proceeded to prosecute and was a waste of police time and of the money put into the police estimates was the case of Auckland teacher and animal rights protester Jesse Duffield. He had drawn the attention of the threat assessment unit of the police because last October he had gone up to Tegel chicken headquarters with a couple of mates and he had handed out a letter saying they did not like the way the company treated chickens and a couple of his mates had thrown a bit of straw on the floor. He was subject to a charge that has now been dropped. For 9 months he had a large proportion of his possessions seized—his computer hundreds of disks and videos cellphones posters and even an anti-GE T-shirt produced by the Young Greens in Christchurch a year or two back. It was just a simple anti-GE T-shirt but it was seen as an illustration of nefarious activities. 
The police should take heed of those three cases which were either overturned by the court or dropped due to public pressure and they should do the sort of thing they did on the hikoi.