Is already a fascist -state? By Richard Bardon lobby group the Business Roundtable and by political stooges “Fascism should more appropriately be called corpora- such as Douglas, New Zealand underwent what MPS found- tivism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” ing member Max von Thurn und Taxis described in 1989 as —Italian Fascist “philosopher” Giovanni Gentile, The “the world’s most radical free market revolution”. Most state- Doctrine of Fascism, 1932. sector industries were privatised (82 per cent of which were snapped up by Business Roundtable members), as were es- 15 Oct.—The “Anglosphere” nations of Australia, Canada, sential services such as electricity, telecommunications, ed- New Zealand, the USA and the UK like to hold themselves ucation and healthcare; those not privatised outright were forth as champions of democracy and its attendant civil “corporatised”, and thereafter run on a for-profit basis. Mean- liberties. But in fact they have for many years been sliding while, all-powerful financial regulator the Reserve Bank of towards a system better described, in the original sense of the New Zealand, which had once played a key role in steering term, as fascism: a “corporatocracy” in which the authority the economy for the national interest, was made “indepen- of government serves corporate interests ahead of the dent” of government control and mandated instead to en- Common Good. New Zealand has in many respects gone force the monetarist rules of London and Wall Street’s glo- farther down this road than any of its fellows. The radical balised financial system.2 deregulation agenda launched in 1984 has by now become so pervasive that even some national security functions have Five Eyes and privatised spies become virtually “privatised”, at the same time as Parliament New Zealand’s intelligence agencies, the New Zealand has handed security agencies ever more draconian powers Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) and Government Com- which they have used to crack down on political dissent, munications Security Bureau (GCSB), like the rest of the Five and secrecy provisions to shield themselves from scrutiny. Eyes global spying apparatus, are enforcers for the same An- This is not a coincidence: both the neoliberal ideology that glo-American world order. As political activist and journalist has gutted New Zealand’s once productive economy, and the Suzie Dawson revealed in a January 2019 exposé for Consor- Anglosphere’s overarching “Five Eyes” intelligence apparatus, tium News,3 these agencies too have embraced the privatised were spawned by the British Empire in the wake of World War model; instead of counterterrorism, they spend much of their II with the same aim: to bring the increasingly independent efforts spying on political dissidents, whistleblowers, and any- “former” colonies, and as much of the rest of the world as it one else who threatens to disrupt or expose the establishment’s could reach, back under its control. agenda—including by subcontracting domestic spying oper- As the Citizens Electoral Council documented in a 1997 ations to private companies in order to circumvent what few issue of the New Citizen newspaper, New Zealand’s 1980s restrictions they themselves remain subject to, a story which economic “reforms”—known as “” after Labour finally blew up in the media late last year. Party Finance Minister Roger Douglas, who oversaw their im- Having spent six years trying to get mainstream New Zea- plementation—were designed by an organisation called the land journalists to investigate state-sponsored spying on activ- Mont Pelerin Society (MPS),1 founded in 1947 in Mont Pèler- ists, including herself, “it is somewhat bemusing to now ob- in, Switzerland by “Austrian School” economist Friedrich von serve the belated unfolding of what ex-Member of Parliament Hayek. In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, von Hayek and Greenpeace NZ Executive Director is had denounced the sovereign nation-state as “tyrannical”, describing as New Zealand’s ‘Watergate moment’”, Dawson and called instead for the establishment of a one-world em- wrote. “In the wake of the bombshell release of a State Ser- pire, “an international authority which effectively limits the vices Commission [SSC] report into the affair, Norman wrote: powers of the state”, whose ruling philosophy should be that ‘My key takeaway is that under the previous government, no of 18th- and 19th-century British “liberal” economists Adam one was safe from being spied on if they disagreed with gov- Smith, David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill— ernment policy.’ This is a remarkable statement from Norman, all of whom had been senior officers of the British East India who once sat on the very government committee tasked with Company, whose economic “theories” were concocted to jus- oversight of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies.” tify the wholesale looting of Britain’s colonies. Soon after he The report in question, on the SSC’s “Inquiry into the Use founded the MPS, Hayek moved to London, where he was of External Security Consultants by Government Agencies”, made a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II (one of was published 18 December 2018. It focuses on the rela- only sixty at any given time) and where the MPS was built up tionship the Police, intelligence agencies and various gov- into the premier economic warfare unit of the British Crown. ernment departments had with a company called Thompson Its principal early sponsor was City of London magnate Har- and Clark Investigations Ltd (TCIL), described in the report as old “Harley” Dayton; as the New Citizen reported, “Though “a private investigation and corporate intelligence company little known to history books, Drayton managed the private that specialises in security risk management”, whose found- fortunes of the Queen, and all of the early personnel and the ing directors are all “former police officers now acting as li- first headquarters of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), censed private investigators”, and which “bolsters its work- the main think tank and organising body for the Mont Peler- force with private investigators and analysts working on con- in Society, were financed by Drayton.” (Emphasis in original.) tract, many of whom have backgrounds in the New Zealand Under MPS diktats, fronted by high-powered corporate 2. “New Zealand heads into monetary madness to save banks”, AAS, 1. “Nazi ‘reforms’ rip New Zealand—Australia next”, New Citizen, 21 Aug. 2019. Jan.-Feb.-Mar. 1997. 3. “They Spy with Their Little Eye”, Consortium News, 18 Jan. 2019.

12 Australian Alert Service 16 October 2019 Vol. 21 No. 42 www.cecaust.com.au Police and related fields.” Wrote Dawson, “Over a dozen government agencies in- cluding the are revealed [in the SSC re- port] to have been engaging private intelligence firms such as … [TCIL] to spy on New Zealand citizens engaged in issue- based democratic dissent, activism in general, or who were deemed to present an economic or political ‘risk’ to the bu- reaucracy or the private sector in New Zealand.” (Emphasis added.) Under the Intelligence and Security Act 2017, the definition of both “national security” and what constitutes a “threat” thereto are left to the government of the day. Dawson cites a Cabinet Office briefing paper on the Act, which states that it “avoids defining the term ‘national security’ in legis- lation … [to allow] it to be adaptive to an ever-changing se- curity environment”. Instead, “it must be determined by the Minister responsible for the relevant intelligence and security agency and a Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants whether something is a matter of national security.” And according to pre-existing law, any such decision must take corporate inter- ests into account. As Dawson explains: “Post 9/11 anti-terror- Eight days after the massacre, NZ Police HQ issued this ism legislation deemed a number of corporate industry titans notice for the arrest of one of the men who had warned them about the to be a part of the ‘critical infrastructure’ of New Zealand— gunman, describing him as having “anti-police views” just because he had banks, telcos, transport companies etc. This brought them un- complained about being ignored. The description could have provoked a der the umbrella of the state to enable information sharing be- dangerous overreaction when he was arrested, had not local police known tween those commercial entities and intelligence agencies. him very well to be a friend of law enforcement. A judge eventually threw out the charges against him, but not before they had ruined his life. “The information sharing hubs are known as Fusion Cen- tres [a concept at the centre of the UK’s security strategy]. They unaccountably missed “red flags” suggest, witting complicity act as a bridge between military, police and corporate custom- at worst—had long been evident. As just one example, in the ers. They ‘fuse’ commercial, governmental, police and pub- immediate aftermath of the Christchurch attack, a number of lic data sources, analyse the material and feed relevant parts people told reporters that they had tried to warn the author- back to interested parties. All of this data is available to the ities about Tarrant and/or the Bruce Rifle Club, near Duned- Five Eyes through New Zealand’s military partnership and in- in, where he trained for his atrocity. They complained that the formation sharing agreements with the [USA]…. Anti-money club was a “perfect breeding ground” for a mass shooting, and laundering legislation, and a string of Bills and Acts enhanc- that members and patrons of the club, Tarrant among them, ing the powers of the [NZSIS] and GCSB in New Zealand, had talked about preparing for combat and railed against Mus- have been fundamentally about empowering this interactiv- lim immigration—while lauding Martin Bryant, who killed 35 ity between commercial, domestic and international [intel- people in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996, as a role model. The ligence agencies].” All of which is sheltered by provisions of police dismissed these concerns out of hand. the Privacy Act 1993 that let the intelligence agencies keep One of these witnesses, who asked not to be named, told secret any information they deem would impact national se- the Australian Alert Service that a few days after the Christ- curity, trade secrets or international relations—including, ac- church shootings, he and others who had tried to sound the cording to section 27 of the Act, “any information likely to alarm became the victims of a vicious crackdown by the same prejudice the entrusting of information to the government of authorities that had ignored their warnings, and were now at- New Zealand on a basis of confidence by the Government tempting to cover up for their gross failure. He was arrested on of any other country or any agency of such a Government”, trumped-up firearms charges, handed down from the top eche- i.e. the rest of the Five Eyes. lons of the NZ Police in . His arrest order effectively portrayed him as a heavily armed potential terrorist; had he not After Christchurch already been well known to and on good terms with his local The scope of New Zealand’s police-state powers came into police, the situation might have ended very badly. The charges sharp focus in the wake of Australian white supremacist ter- were eventually thrown out of court, but not before his liveli- rorist Brenton Tarrant’s 15 March attack on two Christchurch hood was destroyed by bail conditions that forced him to re- mosques, in which 51 people were killed and 49 injured. As port daily to a police station several hours’ travel from both his AAS has reported, the terms of reference of the Royal Com- home and his workplace. All this because, as one sympathet- mission of Inquiry (RC) into the attack contains near-identical ic police officer told him, he had dared contradict the “official language to that from the Privacy Act cited above, which the narrative” that there had been no opportunity to stop Tarrant RC has used to mandate blanket secrecy across all 200-plus in advance. “They basically destroyed my life”, he told AAS. government departments and agencies, giving rise to the ques- He has since left the country, and does not intend to return. tion of whether it is presiding over the same kind of shameless Do these sound like the actions of a “democracy”? New cover-up conducted after similar terrorist attacks in the Unit- Zealand is an increasingly extreme example of police-state ed States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.4 And even be- fascism that is intensifying in all Five Eyes countries, includ- fore this, the intent to suppress evidence of intelligence ing Australia, where the government is raiding journalists and and law-enforcement culpability for the attack—through banning cash. The key to defeating this agenda is understand- appalling incompetence at best, and, as a multitude of ing that such police-state measures are used to enforce fascist economic policies that subjugate nations to corporate pow- 4. “The Christchurch Royal Commission: A witting cover-up, or simply er, whereas only sovereign nation-states governed of, for and a farce?”, AAS, 21 Aug. 2019. by the people can guarantee true freedom and democracy.

www.cecaust.com.au Vol. 21 No. 42 16 October 2019 Australian Alert Service 13