Locke Keith: Budget Debate 
Locke Keith: Budget Debate 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 New anti-terrorism or security spending comes up in a number of Government departmental budgets. There is a large category of $19.8 million in the immigration budget supposedly to “manage immigration risks”. No doubt some of the anti-terrorism spending is justified but there is also an overreaction to imitate what is happening overseas. It is not so much to keep up with the Joneses but to keep up with the Bushes—that is George W Bush. It might be fair enough to strengthen security at our embassies overseas but do we really need to be spending a lot of money on detaining asylum seekers here in New Zealand when before September 11 we almost always let them out into the community while awaiting their refugee status? I have not been able to find in the Budget papers or through inquiries to the Minister’s office how much we are spending on detaining asylum seekers this year. This year’s Budget is much less enlightening than last year’s in terms of breakdowns. Last year’s Budget had an expenditure of $601000 on detaining asylum seekers. 
There will be virtually no terrorist threat to New Zealand unless our Government is silly enough to hitch itself to the arrogant interventionist policies of the United States. All international terrorism—as opposed to domestic terrorism—over the last few years has been targeted at Israelis Americans or people from closely allied countries. Of course the Greens are utterly opposed to and condemn such terrorism but we have yet to see any evidence of the targeting of New Zealand or New Zealanders or even Western countries as a category. Keeping out of the war in Iraq was a big plus for New Zealand although we will make few friends in the Middle East by having our Orion and our frigate in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman under overall American command. According to the Budget that deployment will also cost us an extra $5 million. 
The Greens think we should fight terrorism in both its main forms. The predominant form is State terrorism which we have seen an explosion of this week with the invasion of Aceh by Indonesian troops. We see it on the West Bank in Gaza with Israeli troops again firing on Palestinians. We see it with Russian troops continuing their human rights violations in Chechnya. The Greens favour the use of considerable sums from our foreign affairs budget on political and diplomatic efforts to fight that State terrorism and it is good to see the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Phil Goff visiting the Middle East. 
The second form of terrorism is small-group terrorism as we have seen in Saudi Arabia and Morocco recently and which continues amongst Palestinians in the form of suicide bombers. We also very strongly condemn all of that terrorism which is born and sustained by the anger and despair felt by many people in the Islamic world and in other less-developed countries. It is anger towards domineering American Government policies and in cases like that of Palestine it is the despair of people who live in an occupied country without any real control over their own future. But military action and over-the-top security measures do not defeat that small-group terrorism. They merely help them recruit as we have unfortunately seen with the recent atrocities in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. Instead we should help empower the people of poorer countries and help their socio-economic development. 
In that context it is good that the aid being sent overseas by New Zealand is rising from $230.4 million in last year’s Budget to $245.6 million—a 6.6 percent increase—in this year’s Budget. But it is really only a catch-up for inflation because in the first three Labour Government Budgets aid increased by a total of only 5.2 percent. We will still be languishing at around 0.25 percent of gross national income (GNI) compared with the international standard of 0.70 percent. 
New Zealand aid is now correctly focused on poverty reduction on building the capacity of communities and on human rights. I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I think there is a second— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: You will have a bell at the end of your 5 minutes. 
KEITH LOCKE 
: I would like to pay tribute here to those many New Zealanders who are posted overseas helping more needy countries to build a better future.