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Dunne and The GCSB Bill
Reports of Peter Dunne’s political demise are premature. Ohariu’s fence-sitter can still play the Joker, the card representing the one vote that John Key must have to get his Stazi Bill passed.
Submissions on the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill close this Thursday 13 June. Presented in friendly fashion as an amendment to the GCSB’s 2003 establishing legislation . to “improve clarity about the legal parameters” and “accommodate changes in the prevailing security environment” the bill changes the spy agency’s fundamental purpose and gives it frightening new powers that would be the envy of East Germany’s Stazi secret police.
Gone is the troublesome Section 14, making New Zealand citizens (including Kim Dotcom) off-limits, along with the word “foreign” which has been disappeared completely from the new bill. The pretense that the GCSB is concerned only with external threats, which ensured the 2003 legislation support from all parties except the Greens, is absent from the bill that scraped through its first reading under urgency on May 8 by the narrowest of margins.
With the 61 votes of National, John Banks and Peter Dunne defeating the 59 of all other parties, the bill was sent to the Intelligence and Security Committee. Set up in 1996 for the new multi-party MMP environment, the committee is not a parliamentary select committee but is convened by the prime minister and staffed by his office. Its current membership is John Key, David Shearer, Russel Norman, John Banks and Peter Dunne (now replaced by Tony Ryall).
Mr Dunne first expressed disquiet publicly at “revelations about GCSB acting improperly in the Dotcom case” on October 24. “I am starting to feel very uncomfortable,” he wrote. Privately, his views may discerned in a tweet exchange with Dominion-Post reporter and leakee, Andrea Vance, published by the Herald.
“After the GCSB spying revelations he was interviewed and told her: ‘Dotcom comments played well tonight.’ She replied: ‘So I believe. Well done you.’ Dunne responded: ‘But shouldn't really have been a surprise. Nice people like me quite like civil liberties.’
Mr Dunne now has a chance to show his true colours as a civil libertarian.
Is he (a) comfortable, (b) uncomfortable, or (c) very uncomfortable at the GCSB passing “incidentally obtained intelligence” (eg emails between a security risk and a reporter) to the police, army, SIS or “any department”?
What about the requirement for the GCSB to “co-operate with, and provide advice and assistance” to any “public authority” at home or abroad on any matters relating communications through “information infrastructures . . . communications systems, and networks, information technology systems and networks” (eg banks, power companies, Trade Me)?
Mr Dunne’s political future now depends on him climbing down from the fence and choosing whether to be hero or zero as Dotgate continues to unravel over the coming months.
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