'Politicised' NZSIS report focuses on China, ignores attacks on academics

Rights campaigner Maire Leadbeater says NZ's domestic spy agency is helping drag us back to the Cold War, while academics point out its report ignored the Israel lobby undermining freedoms.

Author and peace campaigner Maire Leadbeater. (Photo: Flickr'/Donna Robertson)

A leading human rights activist has voiced concern over a “politicised” report by New Zealand’s domestic spy agency that frames China as “a complex intelligence concern” and cautions over foreign interference in the country.

The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) released its report on September 3, which said “a small number of illiberal foreign states engage in foreign interference against New Zealand as a tool for advancing their interests abroad”.

It added these states were “seeking to change New Zealand’s values and interests to better align with their own”.

The New Zealand's Security Threat Environment report is the second annual assessment released publicly, billed as a move to better transparency about NZSIS activities, as well as a means of informing New Zealanders about threats the country faced.

This year’s report said the level of foreign interference remained an ongoing concern, as it was “limiting the ability of some New Zealanders to access the freedoms and protections our democracy offers” and which had the potential to harm an ability to act in New Zealand’s best interests as an independent nation.

Offering case studies, the report said at least one senior politician, as well as media, academia and public institutions had been targeted by identifiable states.

The report comes as the US and its sub-imperial allies endeavour to create an overarching military architecture in the region, including the AUKUS submarine pact and militarised relationships between nations, in an attempt to contain China and prepare for war to maintain Western hegemony.

The report itself noted “increasing pressure on the rules-based international order” due to states being “more assertive” in pushing competing visions on what the global and regional order should be. In itself it said this competition was not an issue for its attention, unless it spilled into “deceptive, corruptive or coercive” activity, which it said was happening.

However, peace and human rights campaigner Maire Leadbeater said the report was politicised and in part designed to condition the public to accept the need for a more securitized domestic environment and foreign policy settings.

"Much of it is in code, so I really don't know exactly what they're talking about,” she told In Context.

“But when they do bring themselves to name a country, it's either Russia or China. So, it's kind of back to Cold War stuff.

“It's very strongly influenced by its foreign partners and I don't think they deny that. We're a member of Five Eyes [intelligence apparatus] and if you read that report, it's full of language associated with Five Eyes and the ‘rules-based international order’.”

The report mirrors the core theme of a Financial Times co-editorial by MI6 and CIA chiefs Sir Richard Moore and William Burns that the world order is under threat.

Leadbeater has written a book on the history of the NZSIS, The Enemy Within, which will be published in October. It looks at the agency’s traditional targeting of left-wingers and trade union activists, including her brother former Green MP Keith Locke, whom ex-prime minister Robert Muldoon once described as coming from the most “notorious Communist family in New Zealand”.

The Locke family were involved in New Zealand’s push for an anti-nuclear constitution and nuclear-free Pacific. Leadbeater was an Auckland City and Regional councillor.

“The NZSIS has been used by political leaders in the past for their own benefit, especially Muldoon,” she said. It would not be out of step for the NZSIS annual reports to play a similar instrumental role in pushing questionable political agendas.

Another aspect of the report she found concerning was references to the agency’s engagement with diaspora communities, which it said were subject to insidious attempts to exercise control over them.

“Every community of any description has got tensions and rivalries and people can use this opportunity to make anonymous reports against people they take issue with and it's all happening in the shadows,” Leadbeater said.

“It gave me the willies about the bad old days, of informers, of encouraging people to spy on their mates, which produces a possibility of a huge loss of trust and it also lays you open for people with agendas.

“I would concede is that ex-pats here, for example, students are sometimes looked upon by their embassies in ways that are not very nice and may put some sort of inhibition on what they say and the groups that they meet with and that kind of thing. It's not unique to China, there are others like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and it's a hard one to tackle.”

NZSIS boss: China using front organisations

NZSIS director-general of security Andrew Hampton told RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme, such activities may seem trivial but they limited New Zealanders’ exercise of democratic rights.

He said Chinese operatives used “community front organisations” to present as legitimate voices, but received hidden funding and direction from the Chinese government and “tried to shape New Zealand political discourse and community discourse, suppressing narratives from people that don’t support that government.”

When pushed, Hampton said this was achieved through many means, giving an example of a New Zealand-based Chinese media outlet that maintained news-sharing agreements with other outlets sharing a Chinese state perspective.

He repeated a claim in the report that this runs contrary to “widely-accepted journalistic norms in New Zealand”, which is not backed by fact. State broadcaster Radio New Zealand (RNZ) for example has a news-sharing agreement with the BBC, another state-funded broadcaster that has been accused of disinformation and partiality towards Westminster’s foreign policy settings, particularly with regard to the Middle East.

Leadbeater said such contested epistemic claims were based on hegemonic assumptions of power.

“The rules-based order doesn't mean international law, does it,” she said.

“I mean, if it did, what would we be doing at the moment in terms of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We are a state party to the Genocide Convention, but we've been totally silent on Israel’s actions and its occupation.”

Academic freedom under threat

The NZSIS report said academia also faced pressure from state actors seeking to shape narratives and information being shared.

It said foreign interference can include attempts to cancel academic events on ‘sensitive’ topics; the monitoring of university lectures on ‘sensitive’ topics; influence the direction of research and harass students and lecturers.

It also said it included monitoring and secretly influencing student groups, offering a case study of several diplomats from an unnamed state doing just that.

Such activities, it said could lead to self-censorship or the exclusion of diverse voices within academic spaces.

Professor Mohan Dutta, Dean's Chair in Communication at Massey University. (Photo: Supplied)

Professor Mohan Dutta, Dean's Chair in Communication at Massey University, criticised the report for not highlighting harassment of academics by the Israel lobby.

Last October In Context highlighted a campaign of scrutiny by the Israel Institute of New Zealand (IINZ) and other Zionists against several academics critical of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, deemed a plausible case of genocide by the ICJ.  The academics said their work had been deliberately misrepresented as support for terrorism and antisemitic.

Dutta was one of those scholars. He told In Context: “Missing from the report are some critical sources of threats to academic freedom that emerge from far-right Zionists and Hindutva propagandists.

“In Aotearoa, both these extremist ideologies target academics writing about the ideologies, the violence that arises from them, and the threats they pose to society. For instance, since the escalated Israeli attacks on Gaza since last year, we have witnessed targeted Zionist campaigns in Aotearoa using disinformation to silence academic voices and get academics fired from our jobs.

“This campaign is racist, disproportionately targeting people of colour academics, and particularly Māori academics…These threats to academic freedom need to be interrogated critically, particularly in the broader context of the white supremacy of the settler colonial project in Aotearoa.”

The NZSIS report found anti-Māori discourse increasing and a primary threat of extremist violence coming from white supremacists.

University of Auckland’s Professor of Dance Studies, Nicholas Rowe, also said disinformation targeting academic institutions had been making life difficult for himself and colleagues.

The NZSIS report defines disinformation as “information that is intentionally false or misleading, spread with the intent to cause harm or achieve a broader aim”.

In late November last year, Rowe had helped stage the Gaza Monologues on campus, a play created by Gazan teenagers after the Israeli invasion of the strip in 2010.

“We had a bunch of well-known actors, musicians, academics there and politicians like Chloe Swarbrick, who was one of the speakers,” Rowe told In Context.

“Getting it staged was challenging as the university administration paused it four days beforehand, citing security concerns. I spent all day racing around trying to find out how, who, why and where that directive had come from and was shut down.

“Then it reopened it, announcing the decision on the Friday and the show was on the Monday. So, it kind of shut us down during our main promotion. It was presented to me as a security concern but it was just a play and it didn't have any major risk dimensions that would normally trigger that level of security concern.”

He said academic conferences on ‘sensitive’ issues were also being made harder, as was delivering publicity for the events.

In March 2018, fellow Auckland University lecturer David Cumin wrote a piece on the IINZ website accusing Rowe of affiliating with a “terrorist group” after comments he made about his family in Palestine at a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) conference in Sydney.

“They kind of purposely open up a cans of worms,” Rowe said. “After that article I was swamped by emails with death threats and harassing messages. Targeting academic institutions isn't just based on what's perceived to be ‘illiberal states’. We can see this emerging from Israel and there’s a potential for other states like the US similarly having an influence.”

MP spied on and seen as threat

For Leadbeater there are many historical reasons to be sceptical of the NZSIS’ own activities.

Keith Locke received a letter from then NZSIS director-general Rebecca Kitteridge in April 2018 after she discovered he had been inappropriately presented as an example of someone posing a threat during a joint induction programme between NZSIS and New Zealand’s other spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

The PowerPoint presentation document had been in use since 2013 with the text brought over from earlier presentations, Leadbeater said, meaning it was likely used during Locke's parliamentary terms, when he was arguing against NZSIS overreach and opposing the persecution of Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui, accused of being a terrorist by Western intelligence agencies.

"A vocal critic of agencies does not mean you are a threat,” Leadbeater said.

“It really raises all sorts of constitutional and moral issues, doesn't it? The person elected by the people of New Zealand to represent them should not then be spied on by a state organisation.

"I make a case in the book that we just don't need the SIS. If you look back on its history, with some of the major things that have happened in this country, like Christchurch mosques' shootings, the terrorist bomb in the Wellington Trades Hall and bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, who really played the important role in those cases. It was the police.

“One of the things about the Rainbow Warrior bombing and the way that we find the people responsible, the French agents, was an amazing co-operation between police and the community, people spotting things on distant roads and noting down car registration numbers and things like that. There was a real transparent process."

In June, Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Brendan Horsley said part of his duties this year would be to look into spy agencies’ work to determine whether it was political neutral. In his work programme 2024-25, he said:

“Foreign interference and malicious cyber activity are possible threats to the integrity of general elections and the intelligence agencies have a role in identifying, assessing and reporting on relevant activity. At the same time they are obliged by law to be politically neutral (ISA, s 18(a)(iii)) and to respect the right to freedom of expression, including advocacy, protest and dissent (s 19). In the coming year I propose to examine and if necessary review how the agencies understand political neutrality and what policies and practices they have to ensure it.”