Of Course, There's Nothing Like The Original

Eighties Satirical Song: "We're All Working For A Labour Victory"

THERE WE WERE, sitting in the student cafeteria at Otago University back in early 1983, talking about the good old days when all three of us, in one guise or another, were supporters of "The Revolution", and contrasting our red past with our pink present. Each of us was serving on the campaign committee of a Labour Party candidate: Me in Dunedin North, Brian in Dunedin West and Ian, if I remember rightly, in Wellington Central. We all shook our heads, laughing wryly at our respective excuses, and I felt a song coming on …

We’re All Working For A Labour Victory

(Sung to the tune of Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday.)

We’re all working for a Labour Victory,

No more Trotsky, no more Lenin or Mao.

We’re all working for a Labour Victory

I’m glad the comrades cannot see us now.

We all used to carry placards,

We all used to hurl abuse.

But now the Marxist vanguard

Just murmurs ‘What’s the use?’

Chorus

We all used to think that the workers

Would follow our clarion call,

But we’ve given up the Revolution

To go canvassing door-to-door.

Chorus

We’re told that ambition is a good thing

But we’re warned that dissension is a sin,

So we’ve learned to turn the rhetoric down

When David’s listening in.

Chorus

But it hasn’t all been plain-sailing,

The conservatives shook their heads,

When we forced through a remit requiring

Retirement homes for Reds.

We’re all working for a Labour victory,

No more Trotsky, no more Lenin or Mao.

We’re all working for a Labour victory,

I’m glad the comrades cannot see us now.

(I’m glad the comrades cannot see!)

Chris Trotter

1983

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Same Sex Marriage - A Turning Point

The Man Of The Moment: President Barack Obama's public affirmation of same-sex marriage, like LBJ's famous 1965 civil rights speech to Congress in which he pledged "We shall overcome.", marks an important turning point in the quest for full civil equality for all Americans.

HE WASN’T ALWAYS A GOOD MAN, in fact Lyndon Baines Johnson was very often a bad man. He was from Texas, of course, which explains a lot. In Texas’s primary elections, which were the only electoral contests that really mattered in the “one party” states of the Democratic South, political bosses would ask their candidates: “Do you want us to vote ‘em, or count ‘em?” By this they meant: do you want us to bring in actual people to pad your vote; or do you want us to stuff the ballot boxes? LBJ won the 1948 Democratic Party primary for the US Senate by “counting ‘em”. He never looked back.

But if LBJ was a byword for the sort of “dirty deals done dirt cheap” that made the US Senate such an august example of republican virtue, he did have one truly great redeeming feature: he loved the poor. And in the United States of America, and most especially in the southern states of the old Confederacy, that meant loving black people. Not enough, it is true, to seat the integrated “Mississippi Freedom” delegation at the Democratic Party’s National Convention of 1964. But enough to put his Presidential signature on the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

To be fair, he did more than simply sign the crucial piece of legislation giving teeth to the Civil Rights Act of the previous year. President Johnson came to Congress on 15 March 1965 (just one week after a murderous attack on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama) and delivered what was, arguably, the greatest speech of his life.

"We Shall Overcome." On 15 March 1965, just one week after civil rights marchers were attacked by state troopers in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson placed the full weight of the executive branch of the US federal government behind the Voting Rights Act.

“I speak tonight for the dignity of man, and the destiny of democracy”, he told the assembled representatives and senators. Speaking to America’s purpose: to the promise of freedom and equality that gave it birth; and to the dignity that is the birthright of every American citizen; LBJ said:

“This dignity cannot be found in man’s possessions. It cannot be found in his power or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his leaders, educate his children, provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being.”

The President brought his address to a close with the words that only a week before, as the dogs and the state troopers were unleashed upon them, the Selma marchers had sung to the world. Openly supporting the demonstrators, LBJ declared:

“Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Crippling Legacy: State troopers assault civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.

Last week the world heard another American president speak out for civil rights. Barack Obama told his fellow citizens that: “It is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

How fitting it is that this president offered that affirmation. Because there are still many Americans (some of them in his own party) who refuse to see the question of who can marry whom as anything more than a trivial, second-order issue, and a political diversion. They forget that when Barack Obama’s own mother was born there were still places in the United States where not only marriage, but even sexual intercourse, between a black man and a white woman could land them in jail – or worse. The union between President Obama’s white mother and his black, Kenyan, father, in many American states would have seen outraged Klansmen reaching for their robes, and their ropes.

Presidents are not saints, but neither are they wholly sinners. Light and dark may have been blended in LBJ’s soul to an unsettling degree, but that 1965 pledge to Congress: “We shall overcome”; was a vital step towards the full emancipation of Black Americans.

The question of “Who can marry whom?” is not a trivial, second-order issue. It’s about human dignity and human rights.

There are occasions, said President Johnson, when “history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.”

President Obama’s affirmation of same sex marriage tells us: that time is now.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 May 2012.

The Journey: Posting No. 5 - Saturday, 14 July 1984

Victory! Naomi and David Lange (and an extraordinarily youthful Fran O'Sullivan!) arrive at the Mangere Election Night headquarters to celebrate the election of the Fourth Labour Government on Bastille Day 1984.

It was supposed to be a book about the birth of the NewLabour Party, but somewhere along the way it turned the story of what led me into, and out of, the old Labour Party. In hopes of providing future political studies students with a glimpse of what it was like to be a left-wing Labour activist in the days of David Lange and Roger Douglas, I am publishing The Journey on Bowalley Road as a series of occasional postings. L.P. Hartley wrote: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” May these memoirs, written in 1989, serve, however poorly, as my personal passport.

Saturday, 14 July 1984

THE QUEEN’S ROOM of the Dunedin YWCA is buzzing. From all over the Dunedin North electorate Election Day workers are arriving to await the results of the Snap Election. Stan and Anne Rodger moved amiably from one knot of excited party supporters to the next, greeting everyone by their first names and reassuring them that: “Yes, this time I think we’ve got them.”

As the first results began to trickle through there’s the usual furrowing of brows. Country booths mainly, with few votes to count, and almost always favouring the National Party, are traditionally the first results to be posted. It never makes for a promising start to Labour Party gatherings on Election Night.

By 8:30pm it’s beginning to look unstoppable. I think back over the past four weeks. ‘Herculean’ barely describes the enormous effort the party has put into the struggle for power. As Stan’s publicity officer, I have been at it non-stop: thousands of pamphlets, flyers, bumper-stickers, newspaper advertisements – all the standard paraphernalia of electioneering – have had to be designed, approved, printed and distributed, and all in under 14 days.

But, we have done it. All of us. The Labour Party has never been stronger or larger. Nearly 100,000 New Zealanders have acquired those little yellow membership cards. Anti-Apartheid veterans of the ’81 Tour; peace activists from the myriad groups and organisations that comprise the most successful anti-nuclear movement in the world; trade unionists in their thousands, desperate to put an end to the two-year wage freeze that has seen the value of their real wages plummet; the unemployed, organised to a degree not seen since the 1930s; feminists, hoping fervently for a genuine political response to the needs of their sisters; Maori, emerging into the light after a century-and-a-half of repression and assimilation: a gorgeous, shimmering, rainbow-coalition of the angry, the alienated, the outraged and the dispossessed people of Aotearoa. We have done it.

Muldoon concedes defeat, and I break into a grin. It seems a very long time since that November night in 1975, but we are back. Labour is back! I shake Stan’s hand with genuine affection. The room is reverberating with noisy celebration.

Francesca and I drive out to the Fairfield Community Hall where Clive Matthewson – darling of the Dunedin Left – is celebrating with his supporters. As we come through the main entrance I am greeted by Brian. Former flatmates, we had both joined the party after that crucial television address by Rowling in 1978, and now we are laughing and whooping like a couple of sand-boys. I recognise Clive further down the hall. “Victory!”, I cry, and we hug each other. Brothers. “Victory!”

Eighteen hours later I’m standing with my father on a windswept Waverley balcony, overlooking Otago Harbour. The freezing air is bracing, Dunedin can be cold in July.

“The winds of change are blowing, Dad,” I laugh into the teeth of the gale. “The winds of change are blowing!”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Cunliffe Muzzled: The Courtiers Fight Back

Team Effort: David Culiffe's enemies in the Labour caucus attacked his "Get Your Invisible Hand Off My Assets" speech of 29 April as "naive and stupid" and demanded he decline an invitation to appear on last weekend's edition of The Nation. David Shearer then attempted to impose Labour's finance spokesperson, David Parker, on the current affairs show which, predictably, refused. Result: Last weekend Labour's economic policy remained invisible.

DAVID SHEARER’S DECISION to muzzle his rival, David Cunliffe, is deeply worrying. Right now, there’s nothing Labour needs more than an open debate about its future. That its leader, and the coterie of courtiers with which he has surrounded himself, was willing to go to the extraordinary lengths of preventing Labour’s spokesperson on Economic Development from appearing on The Nation reveals how ruthlessly Shearer’s faction intends to stifle all dissent.

Mr Shearer’s petty, politically self-destructive decision can only be interpreted as Mr Cunliffe’s punishment for delivering a speech to his New Lynn electorate’s Women’s Branch highly critical of Labour’s fraught, 25-year association with neoliberal economics. Clearly, the disparity between the Labour Leader’s three uninspiring “positioning” speeches, and the compellingly radical content of Mr Cunliffe’s April 29 address, had rankled.

In spite of Mr Cunliffe seeking – and receiving – a written guarantee from The Nation’s producer, stipulating that TV3 political editor, Duncan Garner’s, line of questioning would be confined to economic issues only, Mr Shearer’s objections persisted. Mr Cunliffe had to make himself unavailable.

Astounded by this refusal, Mr Garner did some digging and discovered that Mr Cunliffe had been on the receiving-end of a sustained and bitter attack from Mr Shearer and his supporters at the caucus meeting of Tuesday, 8 May. According to Mr Garner, Mr Cunliffe’s critics described his speech as “naive and stupid”. Labour’s “Leadership Group”, advised of The Nation’s invitation, then weighed the issue and decided Mr Cunliffe should not appear. The Nation failed to change their minds.

This sort of overt factional squabbling has not been seen in the Labour Party for more than fifteen years. Throughout Helen Clark’s record-breaking reign as leader open dissent was almost always cast as treason. Such limited ideological debate as did occur was hidden deep down in the party’s organisational bowels, far from the public gaze. It was a political style more suited to breeding courtiers than comrades, and Ms Clark’s sudden departure, coupled with the effective coronation of her successor, gave the Labour Party no serious opportunity to decompress. Now it appears to have the bends.

Labour’s full recovery as a vibrant, creative and politically relevant organisation cannot be secured except by a radical opening-up of the party. Interestingly, recent reports about Labour’s organisational restructuring exercise suggest that this may be happening. The party’s constitutional review committee is rumoured to have recommended that rank-and-file members be given a deliberative voice in the choice of party leader, as well as an effective veto over sudden, caucus-inspired, leadership spills. Unsurprisingly, it is also rumoured that Labour’s caucus is doing all it can to prevent such changes coming into immediate effect. The party’s annual conference in November promises to be a bloody affair.

Courtiers make poor campaigners. As Game of Thrones addicts know only too well, power is not always to be found among the wielders of swords. As often as not it lies in the hands of eunuchs and whoremasters: the manipulators, tricksters and casters-of-shadows who keep their daggers hidden and seldom venture beyond the palace gates.

Which is why Mr Shearer’s muzzling of Mr Cunliffe is so very worrying. Seldom has Labour been blessed with two such impressive champions. Both men should welcome the open and principled debate needed to set a new course for the party: one suited to the powerful currents in which New Zealand (and the rest of the world) now find themselves. It’s also needed to ensure that Labour is not secretly corrupted – as it was in the early-1980s – by a “Leadership Group” who were only too willing to promise one thing and then deliver its opposite.

If Mr Shearer believes the country will be best served by turning the Ship of State’s tiller hard to starboard, then let him say so, and let him and his faction spell out clearly what the policy implications of such a rightward shift would be. Mr Cunliffe has made it clear that he believes a sharp leftward turn to be in order. How exhilarating and liberating it would be, not simply for the Labour Party, but for the whole country, to see this debate played out. How depressing, therefore, to learn that, instead of welcoming Mr Cunliffe’s offering, his jealous courtier colleagues described it as “naive and stupid”.

In those words we hear not only the echoes of Clarkian caution, but also, perhaps, the treacherous whispers of a new breed of neoliberal hijackers. Rogernomes Redux, who, like their predecessors, won’t show their policy hands until it’s too late for the party – and the country – to stop them. One would like to believe that, once-bitten, New Zealanders would be twice shy, and yet the editorials and commentaries hailing Mr Shearer’s leadership abilities multiply.

And surely it’s instructive that nearly all of Mr Shearer’s recent applause is coming from the Right.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 May 2012.

National Attacks Unions ... Again. How Will Labour Respond?

Other Options: If Labour fails to meet National's latest challenge to the right of workers to trade union protection, then other, less timid, political forces will step into the political space they have chosen to vacate. The dialectic does not sleep.

“YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED in the dialectic,” quipped Leon Trotsky, “but the dialectic is interested in you.” As the National Party prepares to introduce yet another tranche of employer-friendly changes to New Zealand’s labour relations law, Labour will be required to respond. What will that response be? Will it continue to promote policies that have hardly changed in 25 years? Will it go on behaving as if the charges laid against the trade union movement of the 1970s and 80s were true? Or, will it serve notice on the Employers that: if they persist in attacking and undermining the trade union movement legislatively, then Labour and the other parties of the Left will be forced to retaliate in kind?

Here’s a tip. If you expect the current leaders of the Labour Party to do anything more than mutter: “Tut, tut! Nasty National Party! Why are you being so mean to the poor little unions?” Well, you’re dreaming.

It’s the party’s labour relations spokesperson, Darien Fenton, that I feel sorry for. Her instincts, as a former trade union secretary, are generally pretty reliable. I strongly suspect that, if her caucus colleagues would only let her, she’d come out strongly in favour of a full-scale counter-attack against National’s legislatively-driven union-busting. But, of course, her caucus colleagues won’t do that because, like the former SUP leader whose advice on industrial law Labour has followed consistently since 1987: “they would rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side”.

To the middle-class professionals at the summit of the Labour Party the very idea of re-empowering working people in the workplace, and restoring a semblance of balance to the employment relationship, is anathema. Why? Because it would very quickly lead to a massive recovery of working-class confidence – and that is not something the current crop of Labour politicians are either personally or ideologically equipped to deal with.

The litmus test of a Labour politician's commitment to genuine labour relations reform is whether or not they support universal union membership. It was the introduction of universal membership by the First Labour Government in 1936 that instantly evened-up the balance of social forces in depression-ravaged New Zealand, and its re-introduction in 2014 would have exactly the same effect. For most Labour MPs, however, universal membership (or, as they insist on calling it, “compulsory unionism”) has become what the Americans call a “third-rail” issue: touch it and die.

“Far better,” they parrot, “to have members by conviction than compulsion.” The fact that we have had “members by conviction” for the past 20 years, during which private-sector union density in New Zealand has fallen from just under 50 percent in the mid-1980s to less than 10 percent currently, makes not the slightest impression on their thinking. It’s as though “voluntary unionism”, far from being a busted flush, is still a viable experiment in progress – and they’re just waiting to see how it turns out. Not even the Council of Trade Unions’ graph showing the inverse correlation between union density and the share of national income controlled by the “One Percent” has dented their absolute certainty that a restoration of universal membership is neither feasible nor desirable.

And yet, raising the age of eligibility for National Superannuation was once declared to be a “third-rail” issue, but that didn’t prevent Labour going into the last election with a policy of lifting the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. The same used to be said about the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax, but, once again, Labour (alongside the Greens) campaigned in 2011 for its introduction. Strange, isn’t it, that policies applauded by the Centre and the Right are deemed worthy of risking the electorate’s wrath, but those associated with the Left are not?

A genuine Labour Party would have little difficulty in both formulating and promoting a campaign for universal membership. Recent and current disputes have driven home to the public the considerable legal powers available to employers and the corresponding vulnerability of employees in the post-union workplace. Is the Labour Party of 2012 really so much less capable than the nineteenth century Liberal Party that it cannot draft a comprehensive set of progressive labour reforms? Is there no one in its ranks equal in eloquence to the Rev. Rutherford Waddell, whose famous sermon, “The Sin of Cheapness”, led to the setting up of the Sweating Commission and recruited even middle-class reformers to the unions’ cause?

Labour does not even seem to possess anyone with the political smarts to approach National quietly and say: “Listen you guys, if you’re stupid enough to introduce this latest round of anti-union legislation, we’ll be forced to announce a comprehensive reform package of our own – which, we assure you, your friends the employers will not like. Why don’t we both agree to simply let sleeping dogs lie?” It wouldn’t be a very courageous, or ethical, way of operating, but it would probably work. [The same strategy would, of course, succeed in relation to the Government’s plans for “partial” privatisation. A constantly re-stated pledge to take the assets back into 100 percent public ownership would seriously dampen investor enthusiasm. And yet, Mr Shearer insists on telling potential investors: “Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.” Such a helpful fellow.]

It is one the great ironies of recent political history that the Right has learned the lessons of effective left-wing propaganda more thoroughly than the Left itself. Groups like the Business Roundtable and the Maxim Institute have always understood the enormous power of ideas, and how an argument well-researched, well-presented, and then powerfully and consistently advocated, will almost always shift public opinion in the desired direction. Copious evidence of exploitation, poverty-level wage-rates and oppressive employer conduct is available to any Labour MP willing to sit down for an hour with any union organiser. And any employment lawyer will succinctly list for them the insurmountable legal barriers to effective union protection. The only thing preventing Labour from campaigning for the comprehensive restoration of fairness in the workplace is its own, selfish, disinclination to meaningfully empower the party’s electoral base.

Labour’s disinclination to lead effective action to assist working people will not, however, prevent such action being proposed and, ultimately, taken. National and its employer mates have need of these proposed reforms precisely because, in the current economic climate, the profitability of their firms cannot be preserved except at the expense of their employees. But workers barely earning enough to cover basic living expenses now, cannot afford to accept a future in which they are paid, in real terms, even less. Like the response of the Greeks and the French to the policies of austerity, low-paid New Zealanders’ response to falling living standards will be to turn to the political parties of the Left for support. If Labour wants to know what a future based on surrendering to the power of the bosses looks like, it need only consider the fate of PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party. In 2009 it won 44 percent of the popular vote. In 2012, after allowing itself to become the IMF’s, the ECB’s and the EU’s bailiff, it won just 13 percent.

As Trotsky knew only too well: the dialectic is never uninterested in human affairs, and it never sleeps.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

In A Weakened State

Insufficient Evidence: The failure of New Zealand's national security apparatus to acquire the human intelligence (and thus the eye-witness evidence) to convince a jury of the defendants' guilt in the Urewera Terror Trial has exposed serious weakenesses in the protective institutions of the New Zealand State.

Salus populi suprema lex
The safety of the people shall be the highest law
Cicero

THE DECISION NOT TO RE-TRY the “Urewera Four” sets the capstone on a comprehensive failure of New Zealand’s national security apparatus. At almost every level, the public has witnessed examples of ignorance, indecision and incompetence that agencies similarly placed in poorer and more marginalised countries would look at askance. After the Urewera debacle, it is debateable whether New Zealand even has a national security apparatus. That twenty or so highly politicised individuals could be observed undertaking military training with lethal weapons, on tribal lands with a long and strong tradition of resistance to the New Zealand state, for close to a year, and still manage to escape serious convictions, certainly argues against the proposition.

At the heart of this failure lies a paucity of intelligence. (And I’m using the word here in its double sense of intellectual sophistication and useable knowledge.) New Zealanders have been seriously let down by the tradition of anti-intellectualism that pervades our security services. It has fostered an institutional environment in which anyone possessing a sophisticated understanding of this country’s history and culture is treated with hostility and suspicion. Doubly so, if that knowledge extends to anything more than a superficial grasp of left-wing and/or right-wing theory and practice. It’s an environment in which the received “wisdom” of our (often even more ignorant) American and Australian allies counts for much more than specialised local knowledge.

Assistant Police Commissioner, Jon White’s, operationally brutal and strategically idiotic raid on the sleepy Tuhoe village of Ruatoki destroyed any chance the Crown might have had of mounting a successful prosecution of the fledgling Urewera guerrilla force. The NZ Police utterly underestimated the vigour and sophistication of the Left’s propaganda capabilities and, from the very beginning, were forced to play “catch-up” in the struggle for hearts and minds.

The other fatal flaw in Operation Eight was its (no doubt US inspired) fascination and reliance on technologically acquired intelligence. Neither the Police Security Intelligence Unit (PSIU) nor the Security Intelligence Service (SIS), appear to have anything remotely resembling an effective spy network. Indeed, in this regard, New Zealand’s private sector intelligence gatherers seem to be well ahead of the State’s. This lack of human intelligence drove the Police to what were subsequently deemed to be reckless and illegal attempts to acquire persuasive evidence of criminal intent.

Also lacking were the reliable media “assets” so highly prized by the British security services. Individuals to whom key elements of the Crown’s case might have been judiciously leaked as a way of counter-acting the Defence’s extremely skilful use of sympathetic journalists strategically located throughout the news media. Our own security services appear utterly unaware of the role social media and the Internet play in shaping public opinion. Where, for example, was the Crown’s equivalent of Wikileaks? Clearly no one was prepared to play the role of Private Bradley Manning by dumping all the evidence denied to the Prosecution on a suitably insulated and legally untouchable website.

From the very beginning of Operation Eight it should have been clear that the Crown was engaged in a full-scale political battle with the individuals behind the Urewera Training Camps and their supporters in the wider left-wing community. Every one of the agencies tasked with protecting our national security: the PSIU, the SIS, the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security Co-ordination  (ODESC) and the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG) individually and collectively failed to meet this political test.

Bluntly, the accused’s’ defence team and their tireless army of propagandists ran rings around the Crown. They not only won a significant political victory in terms of the “Urewera Four” case, but their undeniable success in making the Crown look both weak and stupid will very likely deter its servants from attempting anything similar for many years to come. It will require a very brave Police Commissioner indeed to repeat Howard Broad’s gutsy call of 2007.

Nor will Tuhoe, and the Maori nationalist movement generally, be content to rest upon their laurels. Already we’re hearing demands for a Crown apology to, and massive compensation for, the traumatised residents of Ruatoki. Pressing forward from one victory towards another has always been an intelligent strategy – both politically and militarily. The Crown, already in full retreat, will be harried unceasingly by a Tuhoe nation intent on reclaiming as much lost land and mana as possible.

The New Zealand State has been seriously weakened by its failure to convince a jury that what was happening in the Ureweras constituted a clear and present danger to our national security. The Crown’s prosecutors appeared almost entirely ignorant of the philosophical, ideological and historical arguments which have, in other parts of the world, persuaded hitherto peaceful individuals to embrace the theory and practice of political violence. Where were the Crown’s expert witnesses? Why were no academics from the USA or the UK called to tell the Jury how and why people become terrorists? The defence team’s carefully fostered notions that Tame Iti and his comrades posed no sort of threat to the Queen’s Peace, and that the charges levelled against him were farcical, were never adequately challenged by the prosecution – and they stuck.

Partly, this is explained by the failure of the Police to supply the Crown with the right sort of evidence. But the prosecution’s ham-fisted use of the evidence it did possess reflected the susceptibility of even the Crown’s lawyers to the “two worlds” argument advanced by the defence. The latter insisted, with all the silky conviction a skilful barrister can muster, that events which looked like military exercises when viewed through Pakeha eyes, appeared no more dangerous than a job creation scheme when viewed through Maori eyes.

To insist that people running around with guns and balaclavas were terrorists, warned the defence, was to revisit upon these noble Maori “reformers” all the sins of our colonial fathers. According to their lawyers, the accused weren’t training to be terrorists. No, they were training to be security guards in Somalia and Iraq! This preposterous argument convinced not only at least one of the jurors, but also, seemingly, the Crown itself. Guilty verdicts on the most serious charges, it was cleverly insinuated, would be proof positive that Pakeha racism had triumphed. Not surprisingly, on the most serious charge - belonging to an illegal organisation - the Jury was hung.

Russel Fairbrother, Tame Iti’s lawyer, has hailed the Crown’s decision not to re-try his client as a victory for the New Zealand justice system. But there is another, much less sanguine, way of looking at the Crown’s capitulation. If, under the rubric of “national security” one includes the preservation of New Zealand as a unitary, constitutionally-coherent state in which the safety of every citizen is guaranteed by the rule of law, and where the state, and only the state, is permitted to maintain and train armed forces, then the Crown’s decision, and the lamentable way it has conducted itself throughout the entire Urewera affair, gives cause for grave concern.

A group of armed individuals, who gave every appearance of levying war against the Crown, have somehow escaped serious convictions. This entirely unsatisfactory outcome sets an extremely dangerous precedent. We should not feel in the least bit reassured that, ultimately, the guerrillas in the Urewera mist failed to inflict any harm on their fellow citizens. Next time (and given the extraordinary failings of our national security apparatus a ‘next time’ cannot be discounted) we may not be so lucky.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.