Green MP Keith Locke is upset that the SIS continued to keep a file on him even after he became an MP.
Locke, a former far-left Marxist campaigner, found that the spies had watched him since he was 11 years old – and kept his file open after he was elected to parliament in 1999.
“Monitoring a sitting MP, purely because of the views he espouses, is an affront to our parliamentary system,” Locke told the Sunday Star-Times.
Locke’s personal file includes an SIS report from 2003 criticising the MP’s proposed visit to Sri Lanka, where he was to visit both sides involved in the civil war, including areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Some governments have deemed the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organisation.
“It would suggest a level of naivety if Locke did not consider that the organisation and payment for this trip to war-affected areas in the north and east of Sri Lanka was not in some way connected with the LTTE,” says the report.
” . . . In fairness to Locke he most likely does want to meet both sides of the conflict to get a better idea of the situation but needs to raise this delicately with his hosts.”
This file is not included in the dossier the SIS gave to Locke, but is quoted by SIS director Warren Tucker in a covering letter. He notes that Locke was not the subject of the 2003 report.
The files also include newspaper clippings from Locke’s time as an MP, and an extract from Hansard, the parliamentary record, of a speech he gave in support of his bill to provide greater oversight of the SIS.
And it includes a letter to a newspaper criticising Locke, with a hand-written annotation that says “Eeeexxcellent!”
An SIS spokesman told the Star- Times that the SIS “recognises that it must function within a parliamentary democracy and sees one of its fundamental roles as safeguarding that democracy”. It was “not actively investigating any current members of parliament”.
Locke said the SIS might not have been actively investigating his trip to Sri Lanka, “but they are passing judgement on me and transferring that to my personal file. They are monitoring my activities and that is of concern”.
An SIS file was maintained for someone “of continuing security interest – that is, there is some danger to the state in terms of their activities. It suggests they still consider me, to some degree, as someone to be kept an eye on”.
There was a twisted logic to the SIS monitoring him as an MP, “because I am a parliamentary voice for some of the global peace and justice groups the SIS is monitoring”.
But the SIS should know from his file, which covered 51 years, that he had never been a security threat, said Locke. A former leading member of the Trotskyite Socialist Action League, Locke first came under surveillance when he was 11, when he attended a social function with his mother Elsie Locke, the well-known writer and communist.
Locke’s file includes detailed information about his political activities and personal life. None of the groups he was involved in were responsible for law-breaking, Locke said, “with the exception of some civil disobedience by anti- Springbok tour groups in 1981″.
Prime Minister and Minister in Charge of the SIS John Key told the Star-Times there was a difference between the investigation of someone and merely keeping a file on them.
I remember once riding my bicycle down Bangor street and out alongside the Avon River, past Elsie Locke’s former residence and then onto Elsie Locke park just down the street. Little did I know that a former resident of this leafy suburb, much less her son were persons of interest to the SIS. Back then the fingering an author of such classics as the Runaway Settlers would’ve seemed unreal, now it has been confirmed as reality. Worse still, her son has been a person of interest since he was 11.
New Zealand has always been a country that people relate very strongly to the principles of freedom and democracy. We were the first country to give women the vote, we abolished the death penalty (twice!), we stood up to the Americans on the world stage. None of this would’ve happened if it weren’t for grass roots activists – people who today would be watched very closely by the SIS, and who knows – be forced to stop! It is this writer’s opinion that the SIS have overstepped their mandate invading the privacy of many who quite frankly pose no more of a threat to this nation than those attending a vegan cookoff.
February 8, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Hey, it’s not just me who remembers the Runaway Settlers!
A pretty radical book for its time tho, a children’s book predicated on the idea that if a man beat his children his wife would take them and leave him.
But yeah, the SIS have behaved very badly. Of course they’re now claiming that was then, but provide no reassuring transparency to allow us confidence that they wouldn’t do the exact same thing now.
[illuminatedtiger - They do claim to be transparent now with the releasing of files but I'm hardly reassured by the fact that some records received are incomplete. Certainly suggests they're still keeping a close eye on the activist community.]
February 8, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Releasing old files is not transparency about current processes.
What do you think of the chances of someone under current surveillance getting their file including the material collected last week?
Releasing old files was also not their choice. My understanding is they fought it and it took years of involvement of other agencies and lawyers and so on to shake the first file free – Bill Sutch who had died in 1975. They are releasing these because they now understand the rules about what they must release, and they are releasing no more than that.