Tag Archives: impunity

The rot at the top (2).

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Thanks to a report from the Acting Inspector General of Intelligence and Security following a complaint by Nicky Hager, we have come to find out that the SIS illegally spied on Mr. Hager on behalf of the NZDF after publication of Hager’s 2011 book, Other People’s Wars. The NZDF justified its request by arguing that it was investigating potential espionage, although it turns out that it was actually looking for the NZDF source of leaks to Mr. Hager. This occurred when John Key was the Minister of Intelligence and Security, Warren Tucker was SIS Director and LTG Rhys Jones was Chief of the NZDF . Did the SIS and NZDF go rogue or were these individuals aware of the spying?

It seems hard to believe that none of these people were unaware of what their subordinates were doing. The NZDF request might have been accepted as a tasking under the partner agency agreement whereby the SIS assists other government agencies when and where needed. But for this to happen the Commissioner of Warrants or the Minister of Intelligence and Security would have to have approved the request. So the question is: did this happen? Was the request, while done through proper channels, truthful in its justification or was the warrant signed under false pretences? Or, did the NZDF and SIS agree to monitor Mr. Hager’s phone records without authorisation from above? If so, who authorised that action? Mr. Tucker and LTG Jones? Some mid level managers in the NZDF and SIS?

It should be noted that this unlawful spying occurred before the Police illegally searched Mr. Hager’s home and accessed his bank and phone records after the publication of his 2014 book, Dirty Politics. Here too we have the question of who, exactly, authorised the intrusion: the Minister of Police? The Police Commissioner? Someone below that rank? A friendly Justice of the Peace? Was the illegal Police access–again, supposedly to find the hacker called Rawshark who leaked to Hager a rightwing attack blogger’s emails and social media communications–a follow up or in any way connected to the previous NZDF/SIS investigation? After all, security agencies share information even after investigations are concluded or cases closed, so it is not inconceivable that the SIS file on Hager was forwarded to the Police once they opened their investigation into Rawshark’s identity. Ironically, the Police ended up with the same result as did the SIS when looking for Hager’s sources: nothing.

After the Acting IGIS issued her report, the Director General of Security (head of the SIS), Rebecca Kitteridge, issued an apology to Mr. Hager, seven years after the fact. But apologies are not enough. Punitive sanction must be meted, however retroactively, on those who ordered the spying in both the NZDF and SIS as well as those in cabinet who may have been aware of it. Will that ever happen? It is for the current Labor-led government to decide, which means that it needs to seriously think about yet another official Inquiry.

This may seem tedious and burdensome on the taxpayer, but it is now pretty clear that there is a systematic pattern of abuse of authority in the NZ security community. In the last ten years the Police, GCSB, NZDF and SIS have all been found to have committed unlawful acts against NZ citizens and residents. Little to nothing has been done to address, much less correct these institutional excesses, so the opportunity is ripe for a calling to account from those involved. Once the inquiries into Operation Burnham and Christchurch terrorist attacks are finalised and their reports submitted, that can be used as a starting point for a fuller inquiry into what I have previously labeled the “culture of impunity” that pervades the repressive apparatus of the NZ State.

As things stand and unless an investigation is launched into the mechanics of these unlawful and illegal acts, those who ordered the spying are likely to go unpunished. The maximum penalty for the SIS breaking the law is a $5000 fine for the agency, not any individuals employed in it. Key, Jones and Tucker are all retired and unlikely to receive any a posteriori punishment. So unless there is an investigation and subsequent law changes that hold people strongly (and retroactively) accountable for ordering or facilitating illegal acts committed by security agencies, impunity will endure and the institutional foundations of NZ democracy continue to be corroded from within.

Have some impunity with your privilege.

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Extending the theme of short posts about current events, here is this one:

An up and coming sportsman gets name suppression and no jail time for filming a sex act with a women and posting it on the internet. In his sentencing the judge said that naming him and serving jail time would interfere with his athletic career even though the victim suffered significant emotional harm. The athlete/secret taper is ordered to pay a $2000 reparation to the victim–a day after he paid her that sum.

A case of domestic violence against a doctor in Auckland is thrown out of court and he walks free after his father-in-law pays Crown witnesses (the exact reasons are not specified in media reports but one could expect that whatever the reason this is a pretty straight forward example of pervasion of justice given that the couple had reconciled and wanted to “put things behind them”). The police say that they are “aware” of the payments but refuse to say anything else.

The Minister of Health attends a Vegas themed fundraiser for Northcote Primary School in which parents partied with fake cocaine. He says revelations in the media are a “beat up” because the event raised $30,000 for the school. He claims that he did not see the faux coke and did not ingest. Apparently none of the parents involved thought anything was wrong with simulating drug use at a school function, and the Health Minister (of all people!) thinks it is all good because much money was raised. As a friend of mine mentioned, they would have made a lot more money if they had used real coke instead.

All of these episodes were made public in one day. What do they have in common?

Well, they follow a long history of instances in NZ where people of privilege, be it via sports, money, political clout or social connection, engage in and are later absolved of full consequence for behaviour that otherwise would be considered worth severe sanction. I am sure that readers will remember many such instances. What does this say about the supposedly egalitarian and honest nature of Kiwi society?

Or look at it this way: if the clandestine sex taper was mediocre at sports, if the doctor and his wife were recent immigrants, if the Northcote Primary parents were from South Auckland, and if the politician was an opposition backbencher, would the media coverage and outcomes be the same?

The Impunity Files, Police Edition: Trolling for Rawshark.

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By now it is well known that in their effort to find the source of the information upon which Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics was based, the NZ Police searched and seized computers, phones and personal records from Mr. Hager’s home. They also intimidated Mr. Hager’s daughter (who was home at the time) by forcing her to dress in front of an officer and relinquish her personal computer. In addition, they asked a number of service providers to give them access to Mr. Hager’s personal details without a warrant or production order. Most of the service providers refused or asked for a warrant but at least one, the financial corporation Westpac, gave up eight month’s worth of Mr. Hager’s transaction records without asking the Police for a legal instrument compelling them to do so.

News of this caused a brief furore amongst civil libertarians, privacy advocates, some journalists and a few business people. But as with much that the Police does that is borderline in terms of legality, the issue soon dropped from the public eye. Few if any follow ups have been published and for all intents and purposes the Police have emerged unscathed from yet another episode of operating with impunity and contempt for the law.

I have had opportunity to review Police documentation regarding the case released under Discovery (79 pages in total). Readers are invited to read the full dossier released by the High Court over at Scoop, which also has an interesting newspaper story detailing the genesis of the investigation into Mr. Hager.

Much in the Police documents is redacted but there is plenty to consider nevertheless. In the spirit of public interest journalism (although I am not a journalist by training, inclination or employment), I have decided to add a bit more to the public domain on this case. As it turns out, the Police did more than ask various service providers to give them access to Mr. Hager’s private information, and they got things rolling just before and then accelerated  the investigation very quickly after a complaint was laid about the source of the material from which Dirty Politics was constructed (the infamous or heroic hacker known as Rawshark, depending on how you view things).

On August 22, 2014, amid the sequels to the publication of Dirty Politics and the speculation as to the identity of the hacker who accessed the information from a notorious right-wing blogger that detailed his unsavoury connections to government officials and corporate interests, Rawshark tweeted what most observers saw as a satirical or diversionary tweet saying that s/he was on vacation in Vanuatu. Rather than take it with a grain of salt, and after the blogger formally complained on August 25, 2014, the NZ Police fired up their investigative resources and on September 18, 2014 a detective constable by the name of Rachelle (I shall leave her last name out), who was assigned to the case by a superior named Simon (again, I shall leave his surname out for the moment), telephoned Immigration New Zealand (INZ) for information on all NZ residents and citizens who had traveled to Vanuatu around that time.

I should note that this very same detective Simon was the police officer who made the “enquiry” of Westpac about Mr. Hager’s financial details on September 24, 2014. In the days that followed the Police were able to obtain detailed information on Mr. Hager’s property holdings from Wellington City Council as well as full details of his Westpac bank accounts and credit cards. Although some of this information was available through the Council web site, on at least one occasion detective constable Rachelle was able to obtain information directly from the Council without a warrant or production order (this information is available on pages 25-26  of the Discovery documents that I have read. (KEB Vol 4 Part 1C file pages 1468-69).

One has to wonder what relevance Mr. Hager’s property valuations and rate payments have with regard to the search for Rawshark. If the figures were obtained for a future asset seizure in the event Mr. Hager is found guilty of a crime, we have to remember that he has not been charged, much less convicted of any such thing. A search for aspects of his worth with an eye to future seizure implies a presumption of guilt on the  part of the Police before any charges have been laid against Mr. Hager. To say the least, that is a perversion of natural justice.

During the September 18, 2014 conversation with detective constable Rachelle, a female senior INZ officer replied that it would be difficult to compile a list of all New Zealanders who traveled to Vanuatu during the referenced time period because INZ only had data on those who traveled directly to Vanuatu from NZ and did not hold information on those who may have stopped off elsewhere (such as Fiji) on their way to the holiday destination. She sent the Police an OIA form to fill out (which was completed and returned that day) in order to assist the INZ side of the investigation. A day later, on September 19, 2014, she emailed detective constable Rachelle and wrote that there was nothing more that INZ could do “on their end” and suggested that the Police “might want to try Customs.”

That was a good tip.  Detective constable Rachelle noted then that she would speak to someone at Customs who was working on organised crime to find out the best source for that information. On September 23, 2014, after approaching NZ Customs, the NZ Police received from them spreadsheets containing the names of 2500 NZ citizens or residents who travelled directly from NZ to Vanuatu in the two weeks prior and after August 22, 2014. The spreadsheets were then sent to an officer Nichola (again, no last name needs to be published at this time) “at intel to see what plan we can come with in relation to analysing this information.”

The passenger information was presumably sourced from Air Vanuatu and/or Air New Zealand, who code share the three weekly flights between Auckland and Port Villa. No warrant or production order was issued for the release of this information, and it is unclear as to who and how Air Vanuatu and/or Air New Zealand were approached, or whether they were approached directly at all. This information is detailed on pages 70-71 (KEB Vol 4 Part 1C file pages 1525-26) of the Police documents released under Discovery in the case Mr. Hager has brought against them.

It is unclear whether the Police ever came up with a plan to analyse the personal information of the 2500 NZ citizens and residents that flew to Vanuatu from NZ in the two weeks before and after August 22, 2014. What is clear is that it was done, at a minimum, in violation of the Privacy Act because the data was obtained without a warrant or production order. Moreover, it is not clear what was ultimately done with the information about the 2500 people whose details were obtained by the Police. Was it analysed? Did any of it lead to further inquiries or action? Was it stored? Was it destroyed? Was some records kept and others not? The bottom line is that this information was obtained based upon a “courtesy” request, not a lawful order, and was part of a trolling exercise that began before a complaint was laid and not as a result of specific or precise information related to the Hager investigation. Both procedurally and substantively, obtaining this travel-related data of 2500 NZ citizens and residents was unlawful.

Given that Rawshark appears to be a pretty savvy hacker who knows how to cover his/her tracks, it is arguable that any of the 2500 people whose privacy was violated by Customs and the Police (and perhaps Air Vanuatu and/or Air New Zealand) had anything to do with obtaining the material for Dirty Politics. Beyond the issue of what was done with their personal information, the question is whether they have been told by any of these agencies about their records being accessed. After all, they have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide, so it would seem natural that the Police and/or the other entities involved in the privacy breach would let the 2500 travellers know that their private records are safe. That is important because these records could well be more than passport details and could include ticket purchase location details, credit card information etc. At this point we do not know the full extent of the Police handling of this private information, but the privacy breach is a pretty big one in any event so the duty to inform those affected is great.

Published information is that the senior officer in charge of the investigation into Rawshark is Assistant Commissioner Malcolm Burgess. It appears that Mr. Burgess was contacted by email by the rightwing blogger on August 19, 2014 and immediately assigned the matter to the National Criminal Investigation Group (see the NZ Herald article on November 14, 2015 by David Fisher). That is odd because at the time no formal complaint had been made–that did not happen until August 25, 2014. In fact, it appears that an investigative plan of action was drawn up before the blogger made his formal complaint, then quickly put into action once he did.

In any case, perhaps Mr. Burgess is a “hand’s off” manager who did not know what those under him were doing, particularly detective Simon. But it would be interesting to see how he feels about the way the information on Vanuatu travellers was accessed given that it appears to have shed no light on Rawshark’s identity and seems to have violated the Privacy Act. In other words, it looks like it was a useless and illegal fishing expedition, which should be a concern for him as the senior office in charge.

I understand the importance of chasing all leads and avenues of inquiry in criminal investigations. I understand the notion of professional courtesy amongst security agencies. I understand the utility of informal agreements between government offices. I understand that institutional cultures may see legal requirement more as a challenge rather than as an obligation. I understand that sometimes investigatory overkill in one case is needed to serve as a deterrent to others who might seek to pursue similar courses of action.

But I also know, from both my academic writing on democratic governance and my professional experience while working in security branches of the US government, that at its institutional core democracy is about self-limitation and the universal rule of law, to which can be added the bureaucratic axion “CYA.” Yet when it comes to the NZ Police in this case and others, it seems that an institutional culture of impunity far outweighs respect for the self-limitations imposed by law when it comes to decision-making on matters of policy and operations.

Perhaps the Privacy Commissioner and other civil rights groups might want to take another look into this case because it is not just Mr. Hager who has had his rights violated by the Police investigation into Rawshark’s identity (in what to my mind is more a case of journalistic intimidation rather than a legitimate investigation into criminal wrong-doing). As much as I would like to believe that the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) would seize the opportunity to examine the particulars that I have outlined, its track record suggests otherwise.

One thing is certain: there are 2500 people in NZ who got a lot more than they bargained for when they booked direct flights to Vanuatu in the middle of last year.

Blog Link: Slater/Key/OIA/SIS–irrefutable proof of the PM’s lies.

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Not that readers of KP will need much convincing, but Selwyn Manning has written a decisive essay on why the PM is lying about his involvement in the Slater/SIS/OIA fiasco. To do so he uses the State Services Commission’s guidelines for the release of sensitive information. The question now is twofold: 1) should NZ trust an individual as PM who overtly involves himself in political dirty tricks such as those uncovered by Nicky Hager? 2) should NZ trust a PM who repeatedly bald faced lies to the public on matters of considerable import?

As the saying goes, we may be stupid but we are not idiots.

Anyway, read the proof for yourself.

A Culture of Impunity?

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During the dark years of dictatorship in South America in the 1970s and 1980s, there emerged a phrase to capture the attitude of the elites who benefitted from such rule: the culture of impunity. It referred not only to the attitude of the uniformed tyrants who ran the regimes, but more to that of the civilian elites who gave them social and economic support, and who benefitted lavishly thanks to the repression and restrictive laws on basic rights of association, dissent and movement. These civilian elites literally lived above the law, since they could, if not be directly protected by the regime’s thugs, be immune from prosecution or liability for crimes and other transgressions they committed simply because of who they were. Murders, rapes, abuse of servants, violent attacks on members of the public–all of these type of behavior were excused, ignored or bought off rather than be held legally accountable (I do not mention justice simply because it is impossible to have real justice under dictatorial conditions). Although there was variation in the attitude of some elites and cross-country differences appeared as well, the bottom line is that during the authoritarian period in South America a culture of impunity developed that was one of the salient social characteristics of the regimes in question.

With that in mind I ask readers if such a culture of impunity exists in NZ. I ask because it strikes me that although diluted and less repressive in genesis, there appears to be an attitude of impunity in the political and economic elite. They can buy silence and name suppression when they misbehave; with a wink and a nod they accommodate employment for their friends and provide sinecures for each other (think of various Boards); they consider themselves better informed, in the know, more worldly and therefore unaccountable to the popular masses when it comes to making policy (think of the use of parliamentary urgency to ram through contentious legislation and the NZDF command lies about what the SAS is actually doing in Afghanistan); they award themselves extraordinary powers in some  times of crisis (Christchurch) while absolving themselves of  responsibility in others (Rena). They use the Police for their own purposes (Teapot Tapes and Occupy evictions, the latter happening not because of public consensus but done by summary executive fiat). More generally, think of the lack of transparency in how government decisions are made and the duplicity of elite statements about economic issues (say, the price of wage goods) and political matters (e.g., recent internal security legislation). Coupled with equally opaque decision-making in NZ’s largest publicly-traded firms, or the cozy overlap between sectors of the judiciary and other elites, the list of traded favors and protections is long.

None of this would matter if NZ was run by Commodore Bainimarama. It would just be another Pacific island state ruled by a despot and his pals. But as a liberal parliamentary democracy NZ regularly scores highly on Freedom House and Transparency International indexes, to the point that it is often mentioned at the least corrupt country on earth (which is laughable on the face of things and which raises questions about the methodologies involved in such surveys). To be sure, in NZ traffic cops do not take cash bribes and judges do not have prostitutes procured for them by QCs representing defendants, but corruption does not have to be blatant and vulgar to be pervasive. And in the measure that elite sophistication in accommodating fellow elites outside of the universal standards applicable to everyone else is accepted as routine and commonplace, then a culture of impunity exists as well.

My experience in NZ academia, two respectable volunteer organizations and in dealing with national and local government officials suggests to me that such a culture of impunity does exist. It may not be that of Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner, Banzer or Geisel, but it seems pervasive. It appears to have gotten worse since I arrived in 1997, which may or may not be the fault of market-driven social logics and the “greed is good” mentality that has captured the imaginations of financiers, developers and other business  magnates (or it could just be a product of a long-established tradition of bullying, which has now spilled over into elite attitudes towards the country as a whole).

Mind you, this does not make NZ a bad place. It simply means that there is an encroaching, subversive authoritarian sub-culture at play amongst the NZ political and economic elite that undermines the purported egalitarianism and equality on which the country is ostensibly founded (I am sure there are sectors of Maoridom who will take reasoned exception to that claim). And if so, has the corrosive culture seeped into the body politic at large so that almost anyone is a relative position of power vis a vis others thinks that s/he can get away with behavior otherwise contrary to normal standards of decency and responsibility?

Does NZ has a culture of impunity?

 

What the media is for

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There has been a lot of coverage about the coverage of the second Canterbury earthquake, and this is another post on that general topic. However rather than deal with the specifics — already superbly examined by Mediawatch (45 minute audio) and others — this is a comment on the purpose and functions of media in a society such as ours. It should be read in light of my previous post on the topic.

A commenter on Tim’s piece at Pundit makes the following objections about the media coverage of the most recent Canterbury earthquake:

I always thought the media collected news, let those involved explain the significance and do their best to give complete and balanced coverage.
It is not the media’s job to carry on carrying on “to show support.”
Media should be getting out the information to those affected and to the general public. Not manipulate us with their constructs of “courage” and “tenacity” but provide the important facts.

It is common, but this is just the sort of idealised notion of the media’s role which I referred to earlier in that comment thread when I said:

So the trend I’ve observed, here and in other discussions on the topic, is that a few of those who don’t really understand the media or its social role, or who have idealised notions of that role, or who are amateur ‘MSM’ critics with an ideological beef, just hate it all the more for doing more of what it does. On the other hand, those who work in or with the media, or have a broad understanding of its wider functions down here in the real world pretty much agree — with a few notable exceptions, like Steven Price — that there’s some sort of social purpose being served by all this additional coverage, even if it’s imperfect; and at least have some respect — if not awe — for the magnitude of the undertaking.
Haters gonna hate, I suppose.

The media’s job is not “just the facts, ma’am”. The media’s job is right there in the name: to mediate events for a society which, by and large, will never experience them firsthand but which nevertheless relies on a strong baseline of common experience. Most New Zealanders’ main exposure to the Canterbury earthquakes will be via the media. So their job is not simply to report the facts of a situation, but its essential truth, or — as usually happens — the various truths. It is incumbent upon the media to present more than a dessicated, dispassionate view of the Canterbury quake, for it is not a dessicated, dispassionate situation for those involved. As a matter of fairness to Cantabrians, if the events they cover speak to narratives of courage and tenacity, or loss or anguish or triumph or solidarity or whatever, then the media has a responsibility to convey those narratives more or less faithfully. And as a matter of national cohesion they need to convey a sense of the magnitude and intensity of it all to the rest of the nation. This is the rough-cut of history, after all, and history is neither dessicated nor dispassionate. So that’s a very open-ended task; incorporating also the functions Bruce mentions. These are non-exclusive.

There are other roles, also. Not least among the media’s other functions down here in the real world is to attract and hold audiences (without which they cannot survive), and to strengthen their newsmaking reputations (without which they cannot retain any credibility). In the case of disaster coverage, the former is almost totally subservient to the latter, since the cost of producing wall-to-wall coverage in trying conditions far outweighs the advertising return from doing so — especially since much of the resulting coverage has been shorn of commercials or aired in place of other, much more lucrative programming. But this is a rare example of a genuine crisis, an opportunity for the news media to put their worst-case-scenario plans into action These are (some of) the self-interested aspects of media conduct, and many of the media’s critics like to pretend (or wish) these imperatives don’t (or didn’t) exist; that the job of the media is simply to be altruistic without consideration of the cost, and without an eye to the benefits they might draw from their coverage. But all major media outlets in this country operate along essentially commercial lines (even those which are not commercially funded, such as Radio NZ, are benchmarked on ratings in ways similar to how commercial media are), so these imperatives apply almost as much to the ‘public service’ broadcasters as to those owned by foreign venture capital firms whose sole interest is shareholder returns.

I mention this because, right or wrong, it is a crucial link in the chain: without some sort of return accruing to media outlets (whether directly financial, or in terms of strengthening their brand, or the profile of their top people, or whatever) they won’t — can’t — dedicate resources to covering an event. As long as media outlets’ performance generally rests on attracting and retaining eyeballs and earholes, media outlets will engage in the sorts of behaviours which tend to maximise their attractiveness to those eyeballs and earholes. (I’d argue that even in the case of public service broadcasters like Radio NZ, this isn’t a bad state of affairs, since a medium not accountable to an audience basically enjoys impunity, and impunity is bad wherever it exists.)

Among the most crucial roles is the ‘fourth estate’ function of holding power to account. Without more than half of the country’s best journalists in Christchurch this past week, this most crucial democratic function would be severely atrophied. While the crisis response capacities of the media are stretched, those of wider civil society are far more so. It is crucial that the quality of the social response, and especially the elite response of the government, civil defence, police, emergency services and the military is adequately scrutinised. Wall-to-wall coverage makes it worthwhile for Mediaworks and Fairfax and TVNZ and APN and RNZ and TRN to give those journalists a reason to be there. Without that strong presence, those whose job it is to coordinate the response and recovery — during a state of national emergency, which gives them the legal authority to do very nearly anything they like, as long as it can be argued to serve the response — would be working with considerably less scrutiny than they are. Impunity, in other words. And that’s no good for anyone. There have been few, or perhaps even no ‘gotchas’ revealed so far. Absent strong media scrutiny this would give rise to suspicions that failures were being hidden. Because the scrutiny has been there — including the constant and often distasteful badgering for an updated death toll — it rather suggests a competent and transparently-run response. That’s something which is good for everyone.

L

Impunity, freedom and student body politics

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fat_boy_slim_-_youve_come_aJust before the end of the university term last year, Peter McCaffrey and ACT On Campus gave the Victoria University of Wellington Student Association an object lesson in how democracy works. They successfully passed a resolution that VUWSA make a select committee submission in support of Roger Douglas’ Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill (making student association voluntary) despite various machinations employed by the VUWSA members and officeholders there. These events were well documented in text by Jenna Raeburn and in video with a ridiculously triumphal soundtrack (irony noted by felix).

The fundamental problem of non-democratic (and poor-quality democratic) political systems is that they shelter those in power from the consequences of their actions. Authoritarianism (and authoritarian communism in particular) is deleterious not so much due to the economic failings of the system (such as the economic calculation problem) as due to the fact that in such systems there exists no mechanism to force, require or even encourage the leadership to act in its peoples’ interest. I’ve written a lot about the power transfer problem of orthodox Marxist pragma, and this is an aspect of it. When the leadership is invested with the monopoly power and authority to suppress a counter-revolution, how do you ever get them to relinquish it?

The effect of impunity is similarly evident in other fields; particularly in commerce, where the customary opposition of the terms “freedom” and “regulation” are little more than straw soldiers in a propaganda battle. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite have written at length about the extent to which so-called free trade mechanisms such as TRIPS are instruments of international coercion more than they are of international trade, and how almost the entire intellectual property system of the modern world has been so thoroughly captured by existing rightsholders that it now functions as a form of privatised regulation by asserting near-impassable barriers to entry into the information marketplace. This suppresses competition, promotes the establishment and maintenance of cartels between existing participants, and all this breeds impunity, where participants have no (or few) reasons to develop their products and services to suit their users’ needs, and so they develop them to suit their own needs. The results are everywhere; for instance, in the fact that people are compelled to purchase Microsoft software with most new computers although they might hate and despise it, or simply not need it; or in the fact that those same users, having reluctantly purchased Windows since there are no easily-accessible alternatives (those having been shut out of the market years ago by patent thickets, bundling, cross-licensing, and so on) are then locked into using proprietary media formats, players, content distribution and communication systems with (in some cases well-known) surveillance functions and which are designed to restrict a users’ rights to their own hardware, content and communication, so that the system — and users’ participation in it — works in the provider’s interest, rather than the interests of its users.

That example is just one with which I’m familiar. Much more socially and economically important examples exist; particularly around medical development and crop research. But the point is that this whole system, billed as being about “freedom”, does not mean freedom for users so much as rightholders’ freedom from the need to cater to their users without fear of someone else eating their lunch.

Returning to student body politics. When a student union compels fees from its students, and when students who disagree with the union’s agenda are unable to withdraw their support, what incentive is there for the union to represent the interests of the student body? The political consequence of that system is a student body politic so complacent due to impunity in charge of millions of dollars a year in revenue that it literally cannot organise a SRC vote to save itself.

I am no great supporter of VSM; I view the threadbare rhetoric of “freedom” employed by Douglas, McCaffrey and so on with a jaundiced eye. I don’t believe people should simply be able to “opt out” of their society if they don’t like it, and I accept that the loss of revenue which will result from the (almost certain) passage of Douglas’ bill will place much of the genuinely good work student unions do in jeopardy. But the integrity of political systems is more important than discrete policy outcomes, and to be perfectly frank VUWSA, for its rank incompetence and duplicity in the face of legitimate challenge, deserves to be humiliated in this way.

I hope that the lesson about how democracy works will be well understood — that is: unless people make it work, it doesn’t. CSM as currently implemented promotes apathy and idiocy in student body politics, to a greater extent than it would exist in any case. That is bad for student body politics, and it’s bad for students. It depresses the quality of candidates and policy, and reduces the system to a comic farce which many students are justifiably ashamed of (if they care about it at all). Much better, for me, would be the the genuine politicisation of student politics, with groups organising and campaigning on their positions, winning a mandate and executing it, as in national and local body politics. If ACT on Campus want to campaign on “letting you keep more of your money”, let them do so, and good luck to them. (Of course, they have been, and it hasn’t been working out for them, so the parent party has resorted to regulation in the name of freedom. Plus ça change.)

So in my view the current threats to compulsory student unionism is largely the fault of the student unionists and their sense of entitlement to membership dues without the need to prove the value of their work to those who pay for it. The Douglas bill, while it will likely prove deleterious to the good work student unions do, may have a silver lining in that it will enforce greater discipline and competence upon student politicians, and require them to prove to their constituents that the work they do is actually valuable in order to win a mandate. If the work they do is genuinely valuable, as they say it is, such a mandate should be winnable. May they go forth and win it.

L

Postscript: Go and submit!
Select committee submissions on the bill close on 31 March 2010. Whatever your views, make them known. As I’ve said, I think it’s likely to pass (bloc support from ACT, National and UF), but that shouldn’t prevent you from making your views known. Incidentally, I approve of the relatively impartial editorial line taken by Salient, the VUWSA magazine. Especially given that this august [sic] organ depends on CSM for much of its funding, this is a bold and principled decision. Well done Sarah Robson.