Former Labour PM disagrees on party's call for inquiry

Former Labour Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer does not support the party’s call for an inquiry into the GCSB affair.

 Speaking this weekend on TV3’s “The Nation”, Mr Palmer said “you have to be very careful about this.” He said the GCSB was an intelligence agency.

“You can't have an open inquiry like a commission of inquiry with evidence in public about that, because these agencies will cease to be any use if their secrecy is not preserved,” he said.

“There are important ways of holding them to account.

“They can be held to account in the courts and no doubt they will be in relation to what happened here.

“No doubt there will be civil legal actions and possible criminal proceedings brought as a result of what happened here.

“When in 1976 there was a difficulty with the Security Intelligence Service, the Chief Ombudsman was asked to conduct an inquiry into that, and he did so, and that is a possible way of conducting an inquiry if that was desired.”

Sir Geoffrey said the GCSB had been helpful to him when he was Prime Minister and had provide him with catch details of fishing boats in the Pacific when he was campaigning at the UN against drift net fishing in 1989.

 “This agency can be very helpful for a lot of things that the New Zealand government does.”

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER

Interviewed by RACHEL SMALLEY
 
Rachel           The Labour Party is calling for an independent inquiry into our intelligence services and the government's management of them.  It follows the Prime Minister's formal apology to Kim Dotcom, after the GCSB admitted to unlawful spying.  Labour Leader David Shearer is on the programme today to talk about this and his leadership.  First I spoke to former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer earlier, and asked him about the relationship between the security agencies and the Prime Minister.
 
Sir Geoffrey Palmer – Former Prime Minister
                        Well they have to give him regular briefings, and they certainly have to bring to his attention anything that may end up being controversial or difficult.  He needs to have a knowledge of what they're doing, but this is an agency that provides a great deal of help to all government departments about how to keep their communications secure.  It also provides a lot of advice to public servants about how to avoid having their communications intercepted.  It deals with cyber warfare and attacks on New Zealand government computers.  It's a highly technical agency in most of its activities, but I spose the most important thing it does is to intercept signals communication, and that can be very valuable from an intelligence point of view.  I recall when I was a minister we were conducting a very big campaign against drift net fishing in the Pacific.  And what happened was the GCSB was able to intercept the communications of foreign fishing fleets who were reporting their catches back to their home bases and we were able to say what the catches were, and that helped us with the negotiations enormously.  This agency can be very helpful for a lot of things that the New Zealand government does.
 
Rachel           So what happens then in the Prime Minister's Office when the agencies go to brief him how does that meeting work?
 
Geoffrey        Well the Prime Minister will probably know what topics are on the agenda for discussion.  He may get a paper about it beforehand, but many of the things that this agency does are fairly routine.  They have to keep a 24 hour watch on signals, they're on duty all the time because when they're intercepting signals they have to find out what is being said, and it may affect New Zealand pretty urgently.  So often what he sees is the result of their activities rather than a briefing.
 
Rachel           Okay, you’ve read the Neazor Report, so having read it, what do you make of its revelations.
 
Geoffrey        I think it's very clear there was very sloppy legal work here, the agency breached its own statute.  The statute makes it very clear that interceptions are not to target domestic communications.  The statute defines what domestic communications are.  They include a person who has permanent residence, and that expression is defined in the statute itself to include someone who is the holder of a residence class visa under the Immigration Act 2009.  They plainly breached that.
 
Rachel           So if you think it's sloppy should Ian Fletcher the Director of the GCSB, or anyone else for that matter, should anyone be offering up their resignation right now?
 
Geoffrey        Well it's hard for me to say that, but it is clear to me that the Prime Minister did really get stuck into this agency very heavily when he found out what they'd done.  I am sure they're all running  very scared there now, and that they are trying to rectify what was an egregious error, and it seems to me that that’s what a minister should do when confronted with this sort of situation.  The doctrine of administerial responsibility says you have to put it right.
 
Rachel           So we know this has happened in this one incident, is it possible it's happened in other cases as well?
 
Geoffrey        It's possible that it has but I'm sure there will be an investigation into that internally to see whether it did, and if it did they will have to tell the minister.
 
Rachel           Is there a need do you think then, for a wider inquiry?
 
Geoffrey        Well I think you have to be very careful about this.  These two intelligence agencies, the GCSB and the Security Intelligence Service are both intelligence agencies.  You can't have an open inquiry like a commission of inquiry with evidence in public about that, because these agencies will cease to be any use if their secrecy is not preserved.  There are important ways of holding them to account.  They can be held to account in the courts and no doubt they will be in relation to what happened here.  No doubt there will be civil legal actions and possible criminal proceedings brought as a result of what happened here.  When in 1976 there was a difficulty with the Security Intelligence Service, the Chief Ombusdman was asked to conduct an inquiry into that, and he did so, and that is a possible way of conducting an inquiry if that was desired.  But it seems to me the essence of it is that it has to be put right, and there have to be assurances given that this will not happen again, and that seems to me to have happened.
 
Rachel           Sir Geoffrey Palmer, thank you.

ENDS

© Scoop Media