A 300 police counter-terrorism raid in New Zealand as item 4 on the BBC World news certainly gets the attention of a kiwi channel surfing on the first cold evening of a Greek autumn. I guess it seems no more real in NZ than on the peaceful island of Kos.

I last met Tame Iti several months ago as a co-guest on Willie Jackson’s ‘Eye-to-Eye’. I had looked forward to it. My previous conversations with him had been civil despite him telling people he held me personally responsible for his last Arms Act prosecution.

I did hound the Minister of Police in Parliament for the failure to charge Tame Iti for firing a shotgun to frighten Waitangi Tribunal members. My concern was not about the incident, but about unfairness. A farmer stepping out with an unloaded shotgun to investigate noises on his lonely porch late at night would be charged if unwelcome visitors complained. If Tame Iti was immune when he actually fired the weapon, I asked whether the Police were going to abandon their discredited charging policy? Juries almost always refuse to convict on such prosecutions.

I later had some businesslike even friendly conversations with him, as we tried to find a sponsor to fund him to Wellington to debate the issues with me face to face. It got too hard when he required payment for time off work.

The feeling was completely different in the Green Room at TVNZ’s studio a few months ago. He was pointedly cold. He was frosty to the other whitey Willie had arranged to set up the common pattern of that show, but when I went over to exchange the courtesies that are normal off camera, Iti told me I was going to “pay for” having got the cops to prosecute him. He would not be specific. He tried to avoid further conversation.

I asked him how he expected to get attention as a demonstrator if the State he was needling simply ignored otherwise unlawful activity. I recalled that in my demonstrating days hostility from the authorities was essential to making a demo effective.

Iti stayed meaningfully silent.

I put it down to his desire for the gravitas thought to accompany menace.

I was a student at a time when young ‘revolutionaries’ strived for Che/Lenin mien. Essentially it involved a permanently grave look, softening at suitably rare intervals to wise sorrow at the thought of the desperate deeds demanded in the near future. Also permissable was righteous rage (as long as it was cold). The gravity could also deepen to a lemon sucking frown if anyone near was frivolous enough to laugh or to show warmth or affection.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps he was savouring the thought that he would show us all in the near future. Certainly his gnomic utterances on the show that evening did not show much interest in the persuasion that democracy requires.

This morning at 5-45 am  the first muezzin called me. I went to the computer instead. 

I am happy to be woken by the braying loudspeakers. Turkey is enchanting, and I cannot wait to get going. Normal sleepers waste so much time. I love the joking courtesy of people in markets, shops and streets, to each other as well as to tourists. I love the food, the unexpected cleanliness and absence of litter.

And everywhere the architectural evidence of power, and the inevitability of succession. Shelley’s Ozymandias comes to most minds that have even partly stored it (‘look on my works ye mighty and despair….’).  

How does H Clark visit this region for her ANZAC pieties without renouncing her 60’s and 70’s student union worldview, that everything would be ‘benign’ if only the perfidious Americans could suffer defeat?  

The saddest days in this region were when power was uncertain, Perceived weakness drew in destruction and enslavement, in cycle after cycle. The golden periods (expanding populations, monument and utility building) were when rulers were confident.  They could then exile war and strife to the outer boundaries of their empires, where their people were the inflictors, not the victims. 

There is a more alarming message from this history. It is not new, but our effete classes have removed it from our safety-dominated syllabus. Rich, learned, sophisticated, security obsessed peoples are often subjugated by single-minded primitive inferiors. Empires fall to tougher, more resilient people who make war their preoccupation.  

What is it about Central Asia? We were shown Viking graffiti in the Hagia Sofia, but  they were overnight visitors. The Turks came from Central Asia and stayed, ushering in dark ages for large swathes of this region. We’ve visited site after site along this Turkish coast where great cities housing up to 250,000 people became desolate quarries for local populations of a few thousand. The subsistence scratching survivors housed themselves in huts with stone walls incorporating marble lintels, and pediments and capitals from buildings they could scarcely imagine. 

Warriors from Central Asia destroyed Rome. Mongols burned Baghdad. They drove successive Chinese empires into their bad centuries of ‘warlordism’. After the Turks over-ran this country the Ottoman capital became great, but it could not match glorious Byzantium.  The Turks found reading and writing to be important only after they acquired an empire to rule, but too late for much of the knowledge.  

The invaders destroyed the great library at Pergamon (which invented books with pages instead of scrolls, and competed with Alexandria) because they reaoned (in the words of our guide) “ if the books have the same knowledge as the Holy Koran they do not need it, and if it is different it is wrong”.

The Romans could make concrete, and build a dome not matched until St Paul’s in the 18^th century, and effective sewage systems. So much knowledge went up in smoke. Not just of philosophy and medicine. Concrete making knowledge vanished. The slaughter was so great that until recently the dry and faded inhabitants of Istanbul did not even know about the enormous underground water storage cisterns built by Justinian 1500 years ago, though they were still there, and still held water.

I see that my government is to honour Islam with a Parliamentary celebration of the end of Ramadan.

I have been in Turkey for the past week. I love watching every evening’s buildup to breaking the Ramazan fast.

Restaurants and coffee shops are full (mostly of men ) Families spread picnics in parks and mosque grounds. The bread is broken, soup bowls filled, waterglasses in hand. The hawkers of delicacies do a roaring trade before and after the magic moment. It took us several evenings to realise that we were the only ones gobbling what we queued to buy. Everyone else was carrying it off wrapped to stay warm, to add to the picnic.

All are waiting for the muezzin’s sunset call . That is when a white thread can no longer be distinguished from a black thread according to my wife, who is working her way through the Koran.  The always startling blast of the amplified call from the minaret is the go signal to a long collective drink. Joyful eating seems to wait till the prayer is over.

 The following couple of hours are delighful. After eating kids wheel and dive. Teenagers parade in protective single sex groups, most of the girls scarved, and adults promenade in family pairs, or stand gossiping in the warm evening air. There is general bonhomie, with no antagonism toward the curious tourists even when they have broken the taboo by eating and drinking throughout the preparation.  A small child is encouraged by his burka-swathed mother to offer Cathy a biscuit.  

Yet here in Turkey Islam is the political problem. No nincompoop politician could do without malice what the ‘godless atheists’ who have usurped our Labour movement are now doing. That is to buy minority votes with apparent indifference to our conventions by offering a selective switch-off of the electric fences that guard the separation of church and state. They switched them off to hound the Exclusive Brethren. Now they switch them off again to show favour to a force that can be demonstably more malevolent in some of its manifestations.

Those who advocate such moves here in Turkey know exactly what they are doing. They seek to destroy separation of church and state, the compromise lines painted in blood on the nation’s floor, by Ataturk.

The ground is fertile. Yesterday’s newpapers report the Turkey results of a PEW survey conducted in 47 countries between 10 April and 8 May. 58% of Turks say they support the core democratic values (free speech, freedom of religion, honest elections etc).  But only 31% think democracy can work in Turkey. 24% think there should be restrictions on the employment of men and women in the same place. 55% think state and religion should not be kept separate and only 14% (down from 22% in 2002) think that homosexuality should be tolerated.

As has been reported so often before, the secular leadership of the army holds the line against the democratic majority’s wish to see more of an Islamic state.  With a mildly Islamic party in power the composition of the army will change. As I type this sitting at a table of an idyllic waterfront cafe army vehicles grind past. As from yesterday they are at their highest level of mobilisation. The government is responding to a clamour for warlike action against the Kurdish camps across the border in Iraq. We are a thousands of km away, but fighters screaming overhead, mostly unseen before they are gone, remind one of how little humans have changed since slaves built the awesome walls at which we’ve spent days gawping.

Is the latest appointment to the Law Commission (of Val Sim from Crown Law, and till 2004 the Ministry of Justice) confirmation of a determined fightback by Mark Burton, against Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s takeover of justice policy – or is it the culmination of that policy? The Commission makeup seems calculated to help it win battles within the public service, but lose the intellectual authority to oblige any government to act.

Sir Geoffrey has secured fast-track procedures for his Commission’s recommendations, but Mark Burton’s appointments have ensured that an incoming government can safely reject them.

The Commission will now comprise the President (Sir Geoffrey) and Dr Warren Young (ex Ministry of Justice), Professor John Burrows QC (highly respected former Dean of the Law School at Canterbury), Ms Helen Aikman QC , Mr George Tanner QC (former Chief Parliamentary Counsel) and Val Sim.

I understand that Ms Sim was the author (or at least in charge of the author) of the Crown Law opinion on the Electoral Finance Bill. It is a pitiful piece of legal work, an advocacy opinion, written to help  a client defending the indefensible to claim an arguable case.

Advocacy opinions are common in ordinary legal work. Your job is to speak for the client, to say for them what they would say if they knew enough about the law. This is commonly misunderstood. Thus I did not blame my former Chapman Tripp colleague, Dr Ingram for the pathetic media acceptance of his thin whitewash of Taito Philip Field. He was acting on H Clark’s instructions. He was to report to her. His job was to do what she wanted, to make the best case he could without lying. 

But Crown Law’s role under section 7 (giving those opinions on Bills) was supposed to be independently adjudicative. They are charged with blowing the whistle so that Parliament knows whether it is about to legislate human rights breaches. For some time (since before, but certainly throughout Val Sim’s watch) they have been easily mocked irrelevancies.

Accordingly her appointment as a Law Commissioner is ridiculous. Perhaps it was a cruel Burton  riposte to some unreported Palmer jibe at Burton’s performance in Justice? Or perhaps Dr Warren Young and George Tanner and Sir Geoffrey are genuinely unaware of how lightweight the Commission looks, when the President is seen as a politician, and Prof Burrows is the only lawyer on it with an unequivocal high rating from other lawyers. George Tanner is respected as a dedicated law drafter.

I always tried to avoid judging the performance of government lawyers in their relationships with Select Committees, because one never knew their instructions. They might have privately disagreed with an impossible position their Minister tasked them to defend. One nevertheless formed views on ‘technical’ matters, like speed of comprehension, and cunning, and their ability to engender confidence.

On none of those measures could I see why Val Sim held her high rank within Justice. On the other hand Justice has been a poor Ministry for many years. It should have held ‘control department’ status like Treasury, holding other government agencies up to standard by the penetration of its analysis, and adherence to principle. With exceptions it simply did not have enough quality in its people to carry that off.

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Labour, the Greens, NZ First and United Future [originally this post mistakenly implied the Maori Party wanted the Bill to proceed] got no comfort from today’s submissions on the iniquitous Electoral Finance Bill. 

John Boscawen vowed to pursue and fund a campaign right through to the election. He is willing to go to jail, but as he intends to be absolutely above board he is comforted by the fact that he should face only a fine of $30,000, because he will not be deemed ‘corrupt’.

Law Society President John Marshall’s approach was almost as forthright at least by the dignified standards of the Law Society. John’s gentle manner should not be mistaken for lack of opinions or courage. He is the son of Sir John Marshall, member for Wellington, whose maiden speech was a dedication to defining and upholding classical liberal freedom. I quoted Sir John in my maiden speech. 

That bluntness in the Law Society’s submissions is extraordinary for the Society.

Congratulations Matthew Hooton for today’s Sunday Star Times piece, and David Farrar for the quality of his blog on it, and its comment string.

They’re the first concentration of commentators I’ve noticed willing to risk the accusation of standing beside the Exclusive Brethren.

For months the PM and her lackeys have silenced criticism by branding it as support of the EB. As well as the insults and threats mentioned by Matthew Hooton, Hansard shows Minister Mallard repeatedly referring to them as “chinless scarfwearers”.  Minister Dyson threatened to end their ability to claim benefit of a longstanding employment law exemption for conscientious objectors.

Imagine if an opponent had denigrated a viewpoint of Ms Clark’s Islamist friends by calling them “towelheads”, and suggesting that they lose their right to welfare until they denounce Mahomet’s polygamy. What would be the left’s reaction to an MP insulting Tim Barnett as a ’shirtlifter’ instead of dealing with Tim’s arguments.

Any substance in the debate would have been media buried for days in outraged howls for apologies, and the insulter would have lost from the moment of opening his mouth.

Instead most media have treated the ad hominem attacks and threats to abuse administrative and lawmaking power as to be expected, just Labour giving the EB as good as they deserve. Commentators have not wheeled out even their usual justifications for condemning salty political comment on non-politicians (imbalance of power, breach of privacy). To be fair the Herald and Audrey Young have frowned (though usually with obligatory distancing from the EBs).

 The threat to confiscate the EB’s free speech rights should have had every sanctimonoius clergyperson scrambling to his or her pulpit to ask just what that leaves of the Human Rights Act promise of freedom from discrimination on the grounds of religion.

I watched a number of submissions to the Select Committee around mine (for Sensible Sentencing Trust). On the pro-bill side, the Green MP was absent and Labour and NZ First members affected a bored indifference, confining themselves to taking turns (Benson Pope then Doug Woolerton) with variants on the question “So you support the EB right to rort our system”.
It worked on some submitters. They were reduced to confused mumbling along the lines that they “supported the objectives, just not how ‘extreme’ the bill is”. To his credit, the Forest Owners Association’s Roger Dickie did not fall into that shameful category.
This is our generation’s fight to preserve freedom.
All the anti-discrimination rhetoric and legislation of the past 20 years has been hypocrisy. Terrorised by a farcical expression of EB views, the left Establishment have shed their sheeps’ clothing of pretended tolerance (expressed mainly in law ordering ordinary people to pretend tolerance).

The long term worry is not now the current generation of politicians. They’ve been exposed.  The question is  whether the media’s crusading sensitivity on free speech issues (or even to hypocrisy) can be re-created. Intolerance has masqueraded as “human rights activism” for years. That brainwashing seems to have worked on the youngsters now holding the media reins.

Few journalists who should have been sceptical have blown the whistle with more than the most feeble of breaths.

The kiwiblog commentators have grabbed that whistle.

PS A belated commendation of the Human Rights Commission stand on the Bill. I’ve long deplored their conflation of positive rights (unequal privilege for minority groups) with the civil rights that were so hard won a couple of centuries ago. I’ve yet to read their submission  but I should have contacted them before now to congratulate them on their unequivocal public position .

How often does National give an immediate warm hug to a long awaited Labour policy?

And how hard it must be for Labour to appear to welcome those congratulations.

Because the environment was supposed to be a circuit breaker for Labour, an area where they could make silly promises and leave National looking calculating and uncaring in the normal opposition stance of sceptical caution (however common sense that might be).

The speed and simplicity of the supportive statements from Bill English and Dr Nick Smith tell Labour strategists there will not be daylight between them on this issue. English left only one concession to National’s rational supporters – “Part of the package must be reform of the Resource Management Act to make sure that renewable energy projects can get off the ground more easily.”

 National strategy on this has been deft. The ground was prepared many months ago. It extended to having international research overseen by Geoff Thompson.

Nick Smith’s highlighting of what appeared to be incompetence and hypocrisy in DoE’s failure to follow up on a DoC proposal to kill possums to save trees, deflated the start of what was supposd to  be a week of eager public anticipation of Labour leadership, then delivery.

The lack of political combat could deprive the issue of the  oxygen needed to fire it up. new Zealand could be the beneficiary if it remains a matter of interest only to interest groups and experts. Electioneers will have to find something else to grandstand on.

Shareholders and company directors might be chortling at the PC lunacy in this morning’s Audrey Young story about Crown Law advice that it is a breach of the Bill of Rights to have a rule entitling a Board to toss out a director who goes loopy enough to be committed.

The scoffing might not last. The opinion reasoning is not confined to the government sector. And many if not most committee and board constitutions, as well as most laws constituting boards, contain that old provision.

Sure, at this stage it is only Crown Law’s advice, the same outfit as managed to tell the Attorney General that the Electoral Finance Bill was not an attack on the most important free speech of all – citizen/voter speech to each other at election time.  Citizen/voters are now “third parties” in Parliament’s new jargon.

But the fact that Crown Law come up with these things with a straight face, and some one as shrewd and cynical as Dr Michael Cullen feels obliged to announce it as the word of the law, shows the way the current is flowing.

Constitution drafting should start taking account of that currrent. My drafting will now reserve more arbitrary powers for a Board majority to toss out troublesome members.

Not so good for preserving challenge in free and frank Board discussion, but better, perhaps, than having to tolerate a loony in your midst until you’ve proved how how badly he affects you.

For 150 years employment law has been largely kept out of the shareholder/company/director relationship. Freedom from its idiotic dismissal remedies has been to the benefit of them and all of us who depend on effective company governance.

That happy state might be ending.

TV1’s Agenda followed up last week’s post on the bizarre decision to transfer (read close) the Serious Fraud Office in the first programme in its new Sunday slot. The Herald provided excellent backgrounding and yesterday’s editorial summarized the issues.

Nevertheless this issue will not catch fire till it appears that the change could be defeated in Parliament. Most parties and politicians are cowardly on any issue on which they might be thought hostile to the Police. Peters is not a coward, but he will presumably vote for anything that damages the SFO.

The Maori Party should have no reason not to listen to reason.

Business will not leave National under any doubt about where the national interest lies on this matter, so eventually they should oppose the decision.

Accordingly the key will be awakening Nandor Tanczos and the Greens.

That should happen when Keith Lock recognises that the SFO’s oppressive powers will inevitably be vested on the Organized Crime Agency within the Police. The Police will have no leadlined containment vessel around their new Agency. Indeed a main driver for taking over the SFO has been resentment at its special powers and the desire to have them within the Police.  Those powers will of course leach into the general Police armoury, whatever temporary assurances are given to the contrary.

What a delightful film, a funny string of vignettes of adolescent gaucherie (though Jarrod the Eagle is of indeterminate age).

I was intrigued throughout despite the repelling storyline (watching a good woman throw herself away on a loser) by the recognition of incidents with that “ah yes how embarassing” quality.

The fun of laughing at elements of the secret self one had finally disposed of without discovery was punctured by Cathy’s comment from beside me – “Jarrod is just like you”.

“You’re not as nice as Lily” somehow did not get even.