'N.Z. moving towards police State’

Press, 4 August 1977, Page 2

'N.Z. moving towards police State’

New Zealand is in danger of creating, piecemeal and unwittingly, the apparatus of a police State, according to the member of Parliament for Hamilton West, Mr M. J. Minogue.

Already technological advances, institutionalised re- i cord and data gathering and i storage, and very outmoded < laws had provided the frame- I work for a totalitarian State, < he told students at the Uni- i versity of Canterbury yesterday. “I have heard little public . debate — in fact there seems , to be little public awareness , of the issues involved — but the potential for misuse and ■ abuse, for invasion of , privacy, I regard .’as one of , the most critical threats to . our democracy,” he said. . “How can the ordinary, decent citizens be assured of reasonable protection against the potential misuses of all the equipment and apparatus that exists already for instit unrealised spying?” Mr Minogue said. “Surveilk nee activities, whether conducted by the police or by security services, are open to serious abuse and misuse. In particular they can be employed for political purposes. “The law should afford I maximum protection against potential misuse,” he said. I “It is time now to look at'

what has been done over the years, to question its wisdom, and to spell out the safeguards.” It was necessary to weigh two distinct dangers to New Zealand society: on one hand the danger that major crime might go unpunished and that subversion might go unchecked, and on the other hand the danger that lawful communication among free citizens might be inhibited. Liberty was most often lost in the name of national security, Mr Minogue said, but more definition of what constituted “national securi '” was needed. Canadian legislation attempted to do this with definitions “you could probably drive a horse and car through,” but it was a start, he said. “The country is entitled to be protected against terrorist activity, and counter-in-telligence is a legitimate role for the Security Intelligence Service.

“But the more the S.’.S. moves into the field of surveillance of New Zealand citizens, for instance students and newsmen, the

more dangerous the trend becomes,” he said. “Laws such as Section 6 of the Official Secrets Act also need review. Section 6 is a completely negative catch-all which debars any

citizen from finding out what the Government is doing. It is too easy to put the word ‘Secret’ on Government papers. The rubber stamp seems always at hand. 1 .’hesL things need to be codified and spelt out before we reach the stage where the power of the land knows more and more about its citizens and the citizens know less and less about that power. “How perilously close this can come to disaster has been revealed by the Nixon affair, and I am sure we will see another example of it as more comes to light on the recent news that Britain’s M. 1.5 tapped their Prime Minister’s telephone,” he said. “I think it will be a long time before we see a comprehensive privacy act codifyii.g the rights to privacy of the individual. I would like to see one, but the poli-

tical practicality of it is that there would be considerable difficulty in agreeing what should be included in it. “But the outlawi- , of sur-

veillance devices in itself would go a long way to guaranteeing individual privacy. That would be a substantial protection and a significant contributHn,” he said.