Monthly Archives: December 2018

It’s over.

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Media coverage of the Trump administration is like a group of people standing around the bedside of a terminally ill person. Instead of dealing with the fact that the person is soon to depart this earthly coil, they linger on the details of her illness, the early symptoms that remained undiagnosed, the downhill course of her trajectory, the therapies used to prolong her life, the deterioration of her body and the awfulness of it all. That is all well and true but the bottom line is that for the person in the bed, life will soon be over and no amount of picking through her medical history will change that.

Whether it be out of morbid curiosity or driven by ratings boosts linked to the politically macabre, the US media fixates on Trump’s every action. He fuels their addiction to administrative chaos with his inane tweets and moronic statements. Truth be told, the press cannot get enough of it and many a pundit has made his name off of analysing the Trump train wreck. But all this ignores the larger picture, which is that, whether it happen in days, weeks, months or a year, the Trump presidency is finished. Done. Dusted, Kaput. Finis.

The disaster that is his presidency is too obvious to recount in sordid detail here. Suffice it to say that people are being fired or leaving the administration in droves, and many jobs remained unfilled or have been taken by intellectual lightweights. Trump lashes out and reacts impulsively across a range of issues, with suspicions emerging in print that he is addicted to the prescription stimulant Adderol (which is a 25th amendment grounds for removal). He is besieged on several legal fronts, both at the federal as well as state level. Congress is soon to see Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives (which means his legislative agenda is all but finished), and his own Party is not wiling to blindly follow his policy leads. His foreign policy is in tatters, his border wall will not be built and the Mexicans certainly will not pay for it, North Korea still has nukes, his trade war is hurting the states where is electoral base is strongest, the Russians and others laugh at him to his face, his children are in legal jeopardy, and his cabinet has an increasingly feral character to it. Daily scandals, lies and inanities are a constant soundtrack of his presidency. Absorbing all of that, Wall Street, which had been so opportunistically bullish when he entered office (and for which he claims credit), is now moving beyond skittish into full bear territory (for which he blames the Federal Reserve). As New York state prosecutors pointed out with regard to the Trump Foundation, his administration is basically an on-going criminal enterprise rooted in fraud and corruption posing as a government. His lying acolytes are no longer able to keep straight faces when spinning the White House narrative and many of his supporters in high places have simply gone to ground. Even Fox News and rabid rightwing radio personalities are breaking ranks with him. The exact precipitant and method of exit remain unknown, but one thing is clear: He is isolated, incoherent and irrational. He will soon be irrelevant.

That is why the media would be better off ignoring him and focusing on the line of succession and other aspects of institutional continuity. The era of president Mike Pence is at hand, and if it turns out that he played loose with the Russians during the campaign (as is claimed), then he too may be shown the door. That brings the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, into the Oval Office, and if he is unfit to serve, then Nancy Pelosi as the incoming Speaker of the House follows in the line of succession. If Pence is not indicted or otherwise tainted by his association with Russians during the campaign, he is free to choose his own Vice President (subject to Senate confirmation).

It behooves the US political elite to be working with Pence on transition scenarios. Pence is a religious freak and troglodyte on gender and sexual issues, but as a former congressman and governor he knows what it takes to get things done in DC and he is rational in a hyper-conservative way. Although he will likely return to the neoconservative approach to foreign policy and continue to be on the wrong side of history when it comes to guns, reproductive choice and race relations, he will be, after the lunatic steps down, positively easy to deal with. The same goes for Pompeo, who served in Congress before being named CIA director and then Secretary of State.

The institutions themselves need to develop transition plans. Already defence strategists openly worry about Trump going rogue and trying to launch a nuclear strike somewhere as a diversion or as a act of petty revenge on his successors. They point out that he can do so on his own and that there are no formal institutional checks on him (he is only supposed to consult with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defence and National Security Council as well as other cabinet officials, but he is not obliged to do so or to heed their counsel). Even if senior officers refuse his orders to launch a nuclear strike, he can work his way down the nuclear chain of command until he finds a compliant one. There is consequently a move to get Congress to re-write the law governing nuclear weapons use, but in the meantime DoD and the service commands need to consider the very real possibility of having to refuse a presidential order to use the arsenal. There is precedent for this under Nixon (during Watergate) and Reagan (after his Alzheimer’s became apparent), so it is not an unimaginable task.

The same can be said across the federal bureaucracy. Although Pence will not roll back all or most of Trump’s policies (say, on the environment), he will want his own team at the helm of federal agencies and will want to impose his own stamp on the policy-making process. In order for that to happen in an orderly fashion, planning must be done in anticipation of the change-over. It would be best for career public service managers to prepare contingency plans with an eye towards moving out from under Trump’s political appointees, particularly in contentious portfolios like Education and Homeland Security.

The bottom line is that the obsessive focus on Trump obscures the inevitability of his demise and the need to prepare for a change of administration. Because his downfall of itself will not right the ship of state. For that to happen a plan of action must be in place, something that requires congressional and executive branch coordination even if done without the knowledge of the political moribund in the White House.

Cyber-hacking comes to Aotearoa.*

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The Government Security Communications Bureau (GCSB) has announced that Chinese hackers were responsible for cyber intrusions against New Zealand managed service providers (MSPs), the telecommunications firms responsible for providing phone, email and internet services and data banking to individual, public agency and corporate consumers. This is surprising only because it confirms what private security analysts and partner intelligence services have been claiming for some time: that the Chinese are engaged in a global campaign of cyber theft of commercial secrets and intellectual property. They do so as part of a strategy to become the world’s dominant information and telecommunications player within 50 years, and they do so by using ostensibly private firms as cover for hacking activities directed by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS).

The GCSB announcement coincided with indictment by the US Justice Department of two Chinese nationals who have been identified as belonging to the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)-10 Group of MSS hackers operating under the cover of a Chinese-registered firm, Tianjing Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Company Ltd. (Huaying Haitai). Huaying Haitai claims to provide network security construction and product development services but has only two registered shareholders, one manager and no web presence (the domain name huayinghaitai.com is registered to the firm but cannot be found on-line, which is particularly odd for an internet security provider). The US has publicly identified Huaying Haitai as the corporate front for ATP-10, and the GCSB has confirmed that ATP-10 was responsible for the New Zealand-targeted cyber intrusions it has detected since early 2017.

The UK simultaneously announced that Chinese hackers had conducted a decade long-campaign of cyber-theft against British commercial entities, while the US identified 75 US-based targets as well as others in 12 other countries (excluding New Zealand). The GCSB announcement is therefore part of a coordinated effort by Western governments to identify Chinese-based cyber-theft campaigns, and follows on similar Australian revelations announced during the 2018 APEC summit a month ago.

The ATP-10 cyber-hacking campaign violates the terms of a 2016 APEC agreement signed by China (and New Zealand) committing member states to not use cyber hacking in order to engage in commercial espionage or intellectual property theft. It violates similar pacts signed with the US and UK in 2015. This means that China is deliberately violating international agreements for commercial gain. It also makes all Chinese-based telecommunications suspect, both in terms of their purported use of so-called digital backdoors built into their products that can be used by Chinese intelligence as well as their duplicitous corporate behaviour when it comes to proprietary information. In effect, Chinese telecommunications are seen as bad corporate actors as well as intelligence fronts by Western countries. This has caused firms such as ZTE and Huawei being excluded from critical infrastructure projects and 5G network upgrades in a number of countries, including, most recently, New Zealand.

The GCSB announcement refers to Chinese hacking in pursuit of cyber theft of sensitive commercial and intellectual property. It does not mention specific targets or refer to cyber-espionage per se.Yet the two are overlapped because of the nature of the targets and means by which they attacked. ATP-10 hacking attacks are aimed at Managed Services Providers (MSPs) who store data for individuals, public agencies and firms. These include large multinational email, internet and phone service providers as well as smaller cloud-based data storage firms.

If ATP-10 and other hackers can penetrate the security defenses of MSPs they can potentially bulk collect, then data mine whatever is digitally stored in the targeted archives. Although the primary interest is commercial in nature, the overlapping nature of data networks, especially in a small country like New Zealand, potentially gives ATP-10 and similar hacking groups access to non-commercial political, diplomatic and military networks.

For example, a home computer or private phone that has been compromised by a cyber hack on a internet service provider (ISP) can become, via the exchange of information between personal and work devices, an unwitting entry point to work networks in the private and public sectors that are not connected to the individual’s ISP. This raises the possibility of incidental or secondary data collection by hackers, which in the case of state organized outfits like ATP-10 may be of as much utility as are the commercial data being targeted in the first instance.

The dilemma posed by the GCSBs announcement is two-fold. First, will the government follow the GCSB lead and denounce the behaviour or will it downplay the severity of the international norms violations and intrusion on sovereignty that the ATP-10 hacking campaign represents? If it does, it sets up a possible diplomatic confrontation with the PRC. If it does not, it exposes a rift between the GCSB and the government when it comes to Chinese misbehaviour.

Neither scenario is welcome but one thing is certain: no response will stop Chinese cyber hacking because it is part of a long-term strategy aimed at achieving global information and telecommunications dominance within fifty years. But one response will certainly encourage it.

  • An earlier version of this essay appears on the Radio New Zealand website, December 21, 2018 (https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/378835/cyber-hacking-comes-to-aotearoa).

Differential Justice.

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For some time now I have wondered about standards of justice in NZ. Coming from the US and Latin America it seems that all to often people convicted of serious crimes are handed fairly light sentences, including violent recidivists. I understand the importance of rehabilitation over punishment, but sometimes it seems that the Courts let very unpleasant people get away with their crimes.

I thought of this recently when I read the news about a teenager hit and run driver who killed a boy crossing a crosswalk on his bike and who not only did not show any remorse, but in fact posed for a social media photo in an orange jump suit and Halloween makeup, presumably as a joke on where she could be headed. She got 11 months home detention and 250 hours community service instead.

That seeming injustice brought home another recent court case, one in which a famous Blenheim winery was fined $400,000 for adding post-fermentation sugar to its export wine in violation of EU standards (to which much of the wine was headed). The winery owner, a general manager and a wine-maker were fined between $20,000 and $35,000 each for their role in the subterfuge, which involved 6.5 million liters of wine, 3.7 million of which was sent to the EU between mid 2013 and late 2015.

That seemed about right to me. The Crown argued for serious fines because it damaged the reputation of the entire NZ wine industry. The individual fines were high enough to send a message of warning to others so inclined to cheat for opportunistic advantage, and the company fine was presumably large enough to make a negative impression on its bottom line.

Contrast this judgement against that handed down to a Hamilton-based aerospace company that sold a utility aircraft to a Chinese aerospace company knowing that it would be on-sold to North Korea in violation of international sanctions. Because the plane had potential military as well as civilian applications (such as parachuting) and was seen at an air show in DPRK Air Force livery, the violation was of “tier one” seriousness. 

The Chinese aerospace company has in fact majority ownership of the Hamilton company and three of its executives sit on the company board of directors. The contract for the plane included post-sale parts supply and servicing by Hamilton-based mechanics, so the initial claims that the company had no idea that the plane was on-sold to the DPRK fell flat in court. In fact, the entire defence went from “we assumed it would be used in the PRC” to “we did not know where it would end up” to “we did not know about the sanctions” in a hurry. That also did not stand up to the light of prosecutorial scrutiny as the Crown demonstrated that the firm falsified export documents in order to get the plane on its way out of NZ. Selling the plane directly to the DPRK would have required a special export license and would have been prohibited by the international sanctions regime. Selling to the Chinese parent company incurred neither constraint.

In other countries similar “tier one” violations of the international sanctions regime have resulted in million dollar company fines and jail time for company executives involved in the sanction-busting. There are enough successful prosecutions of such violators in Europe, the US and the Commonwealth to provide the Courts with sentencing guidelines. So what did the rogue Hamilton company get for what is an egregious violation of international norms that potentially damaged the reputation of the entire NZ aviation industry?

A $50,000 fine and no punishment to any individual. In some circles where corruption is rife that would be considered to be the acceptable, if not normal price for conducting dodgy business dealings. But is that the way business is conducted in NZ?

In light of the very different sentences handed down in these two cases, my questions are this: which is worse, the sugared wine scandal or the sanctions-busting affair? Is deceiving commercial partners overseas worse than helping a rogue dictatorship with nuclear ambitions and an atrocious human rights record skirt measures emplaced to hinder its ability to continue unchecked? Is international sanctions-busting considered to be a lesser offence than playing sleigh of hand with a commercial export product?

Perhaps the laws on the books limit the types of punishment available to the Crown when it comes to sanctions busting by NZ firms but give wider and heavier range to the penalties for instances of corporate malfeasance that do not involve sanction violations. If so, then the laws needed to be amended because if anything violating international sanctions regimes is a worse reflection on a country’s governance than is cheating within private commercial networks . If not, then the justice meted out in these cases appears at odds with international precedent and compound the reputation damage done by the Hamilton aviation firm because it gives the impression that “tier one” international sanctions violators will be treated more leniently in NZ courts than unethical commodity exporters.

If one egregious Kiwi-based sanction-busting firm can get away with a financial slap on the wrist when caught, so too may others decide that is an acceptable price to pay in the pursuit of profit over principle. That is another area where the application of differential and universal justice comes into play.

From a rules based order to a state of nature.

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One of the most disappointing aspects of the last decade as been the erosion of a rules-based majoritarian consensus in the conduct of international relations. Slowly but surely the painstakingly crafted set of institutions, norms, laws and rules by and through which foreign affairs were conducted during and after the Cold War were subverted, disregarded and outright ignored. The trend towards anarchy in international relations has been accelerated by the emergence of authoritarian great powers, China and Russia in particular, and by the unwillingness or inability of the architects of the rules-based order to aggressively defend the principles upon which it stood in the face of transgressions from these powers and others. Once Donald Trump took presidential office in the US and began to renege on US commitments to international agreements and institutions, the descent into anarchy accelerated.

Take a few examples. The Chinese island building project in the South Island Sea is a clear violation of international maritime law and has been ruled unlawful by the International Court of Arbitration. The Chinese have ignored protests and the ruling itself while lying that the islands would not be militarised. Because no one pushed back strongly against it at a time when they could have, the PRC not only maintained that the islands provided them legal cover to their claim to the entire South China Sea basin as China’s territorial sea under the Nine Dash Line or First Island Chain policy (as it does with the East China Sea), but built permanent military installations on them in order to reinforce the point. From there it began to challenge maritime freedom of navigation within 20 nautical miles of the artificial islands in a de facto assertion of the “possession is 2/3rds of the law” doctrine. Now Chinese dominance of the shipping lanes connecting Southeast Asia to the world, while periodically contested by the US and its allies, is on its way to becoming a fait accompli. Any move to reverse the new status quo will result in bloodshed.

The Russians went further. In 2014 they militarily invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea by force when a pro-Moscow kleptocrat was removed after Western-backed demonstrations. They have built a bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland and subsequently asserted territorial rights over the Kerch Strait connecting the Azov and Black Seas (which was previously considered to be an international waterway). In Syria they have turned the tide of the civil war in favour of the Assad regime using attacks on civilian centres as well as rebel held territories and by casting a blind eye on, if not assisting with, the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime against civilian targets. Since no Russian will be charged with crimes against humanity or war crimes over these atrocities, their impunity has been rewarded.

Lesser despots have gotten the message. The Saudi Crown Prince ordered the murder of a Saudi expat journalist in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Although his involvement was discovered by Turkish and US intelligence (and perhaps others), concerns about Middle Eastern geopolitics and oil make it unlikely that the Kingdom will face serious repercussions, especially if they offer up some lesser sacrificial lambs in the face of international outcry (as they appear to be doing).

Most recently, the US decided to unilaterally withdraw from the nuclear control agreement signed by Iran with the P5+1 group (US, UK, China, France, Russia and Germany). It declared that it would impose additional sanctions on third party individuals and firms that did business with Iran after the US withdrew from the agreement. This month it requested the arrest and extradition of a Huawei executive–a daughter of the company founder as well as a very high ranking Chinese Communist Party official–on suspicion of fraud involving the creation of a shell company doing business with Iran. Under extant treaty obligations the Canadians agreed to the extradition request and detained the executive, who is now out on bail but confined to Vancouver while the extradition request is processed.

Not surprisingly the Chinese reacted poorly to this train of events. Within days two Canadians resident in the PRC found themselves behind bars on “national security grounds.” Although the tit for tat exposes the lie that Huawei is an independent private firm unconnected to the Communist Party (otherwise, why the official outrage and resort to hostage taking if it was just a private commercial matter?) and demonstrates that the Chinese will play rough when they feel that their interests are being contravened (something that may inform the New Zealand government’s approach to their bilateral relationship), it also shows what happens when one country unilaterally decides to impose its views against the opposition of others. Actions may have unintended consequences for more than the principles involved, and in this instance Canada is the caught between a rock and hard place just because it complied with a legal request from its southern neighbour.

There is plenty more. The US-backed Saudi and UAE campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen has seen war crimes and atrocities committed on an industrial scale. The Chinese have a million Uighurs locked up in “re-education” camps designed to strip them of their Muslim beliefs. The Russians carry out poison assassination plot abroad. The US detains and separates refuge-seeking children from their migrant parents and places them in detention centres hundreds of miles from where their parents are imprisoned or deported. Australia indefinitely holds asylum seekers on a remote island without access to proper legal representation. Indigenous lands are seized, occupied and expropriated throughout Latin America without compensation or redress. And then, of course, there is Daesh, which even if on the retreat in the Levant continues to represent a transnational evil with no regard for basic human rights, much less international norms.

The sclerosis of international organisations also contributes to the erosion of norm abidance. The dysfunction of the UN is well known, but everything from anti-poaching regimes to international fishery conventions and the much vaunted but piecemeal actioned climate change mitigation agreements are violated in the main. Regional organisations meet regularly, rooms full of delegates fill with hot air as speeches are given while sideline pontificators prattle, statements are issued and commitments to more dialogue are made. But very little gets done in a substantive way because in the end it is nation-states that must “walk the walk” after all that talk. US withdrawal from the climate change agreements while it renews fossil fuel exploration under the Trump administration is a case in point.

The larger point is two fold: the international rules based order is in perhaps terminal decline. The decline is attributable in the first instance to the belief that it would receive wide-spread voluntary adherence regardless of national interest or specifics of the policy issue. This was compounded by a lack of enforcement capability when it came to norm violations. Countries were either unwilling or incapable of committing to enforce the rules-based order in the measure that they had rhetorically championed, so it quickly became clear that violators, if strong enough or if the issue was not universal in nature, could literally get away with mass murder. And so they did.

That is where the decline of democracy and rise of despotism has had a negative impact on international norms. Since the very notion of democracy came into question in countries with long histories of it, and since autocrats of various stripes used authoritarian measures to impose their rule under the guise of imposing efficiency in governance, then it was only natural that such tendencies would flow into the realm of foreign affairs. Why get bogged down in international gabfests with “lesser” states when an easier, immediate and more favourable solution is at hand?: imposition by fact or force in the face of a lack of international norm enforcement capability.

Once again, might makes right in international affairs. Once again, the strong dominate the weak. Once again, power is truth and there is no speaking contrary to it. We are sliding into international anarchy

Policy-makers in Wellington can speak to the need for multinational norms and the importance of being an honest broker in a contentious world. But those claims hark to an international system that was stable and in which rules and norms were adhered to in the main rather than the exception. That is no longer true for the current international moment, where absent a rules-based Leviathan to enforce the agreed upon rules of the game, the global commons has reverted to a state of nature.

In such uncharted waters NZ policy-makers need to not only read their charts but also understand the interplay between geopolitical tides and winds. Because no matter how much faith they have in their current abilities and connections to larger states and international organisations, the fate of small nations in turbulent global seas rests as much on a deep understanding of history and long-term trends as it does on the benefits and consequences of policy decisions made over the last two decades. 

Tacitly encouraging local conspiracy theories.

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I do not mean to bang on about the Anne Marie Brady case but since it is coming up on one year since the campaign of criminal harassment began against her, I feel compelled to mention how the Labour-led government’s silence has been used as a window of opportunity by pro-China conspiracy theorists to question her credibility and defame her. Until I blocked the troll I shall call “skidmark,” this was even seen here on KP where he launched numerous attacks on professor Brady as well as question the very notion that the burglaries and vandalism that she has been subjected to were somehow related to her work on PRC influence operations in NZ.

What we know so far is this: the Police/SIS investigation has been passed on to INTERPOL and therefore is not yet complete. Professor Brady said that she was told by the Police that the investigation was complete, but perhaps that was just on the domestic side of the case. The fact that it has been handed over to INTERPOL suggests that the culprits are not common domestic criminals and that they have left the country. Otherwise, why involve INTERPOL? To be sure, it could mean that some local common criminals left the country once the heat was on, but given that what was taken in the burglaries were not items of common value but were related to her research, and given that the tampering with her vehicle occurred a few months ago, long after the burglaries, that suggests that it was not an ordinary crime done by locals. Repeated targeting of one individual spanning ten months using different criminal methods also suggests that there is more to the story than theft. The word “intimidation” comes to mind.

Because the government and its security agencies refuse to offer status reports or provide a fuller brief on what they know, the field has been left open for the pro-Chinese conspiracy trolls to jump in. They have three main angles of attack.

The first is to question Ms. Brady’s credibility because she receives external funding and spends time in US think tanks. They apparently believe that such funding and hosting is contingent on her spinning a particular anti-Chinese line. This betrays ignorance of how US think tanks and funding work, where scholarly independence is respected. Her critics also point to Taiwanese sources of funding, but there the link between money and research product is assumed rather than firmly established. I do think that it was unwise for professor Brady to be seen as closely associated with the US Embassy in Wellington and some China-focused US think tanks given the current state of PRC-US relations, but no one has credibly argued that her findings about PRC influence operations are wrong. In fact, they have clearly sparked calls for review and reform of NZ political contribution regulations, so her concerns are not imaginary.

The irony is that Brady pointed out that PRC-backed academic institutions like Confucius Institutes and various PRC funded scholarship programs do come with ideological strings attached. Perhaps the trolls simply believe that the same is the case for non-Chinese academic exchanges.

The second and third attacks centre on the criminal harassment against her. The first posits that it is a hoax perpetrated by Ms. Brady to increase public wariness of the Chinese and promote herself. I have already mentioned that she would be taking a great risk to her reputation and have to be pretty cunning to pull that off to the point that the cops and spies have not yet figured it out. Claiming that she perpetrated this hoax questions her mental stability and veracity on other matters (which has never been questioned before), and if untrue is defamatory. The latter has not stopped “skidmark” and others from propagating the claim.

The second line of attack is that the burglaries and vandalism are the work of the NZSIS and/or the CIA with or without professor Brady’s complicity in order to poison public sentiment against the Chinese. Again, as I said before, this would entail a degree of risk and expenditure of resources disproportionate to any potential gains. And if this was indeed the case, would not the Police and SIS have come out with a stronger move against the Chinese by now? After all, if you want to falsely frame a specific party as responsible for a crime you drop evidence pointing in its direction. Delaying offering proof of the accusation only casts doubt as to its veracity in part because it leaves things open to the type of bad-minded diversionary conjecture and speculation that I am discussing here.

It is very likely that the government’s reticence to talk about the case is due to diplomatic concerns, and that political pressure has been put on the Police and SIS to delay offering any more information about the status of the investigation until ITERPOL has come up with some answers. My feeling is that the culprits will  not be found and certainly not extradited if they are identified (for example, by checking the movements of Canterbury-based Chinese student visa holders in NZ in the days after the burglaries were first reported).

The problem is that the longer the government delays providing anything more than it has so far, the more oxygen it gives to the pro-Chinese trolls, which when added to the other doubters and conspiracy types I mentioned in my previous post serves to confuse the picture even if the circumstantial evidence pointing towards (even if indirect) PRC involvement is strong. That helps sustain the slander campaign against Ms. Brady and/or the view that it was all the work of the NZ and US Deep States working in concert.

Gathering from the tone of her recent remarks it appears that Ms. Brady is frustrated and increasingly frightened by the government’s inaction. I sympathise with her predicament: she is just one person tilting against much larger forces with relatively little institutional backing. I also am annoyed because this is a NZ citizen being stalked and serially harassed on sovereign NZ soil, most probably because of things that she has written, and yet the authorities have done pretty much nothing other than take statements and dust for fingerprints.

If this was a domestic dispute in which someone was burglarising and vandalising a neighbour’s or ex-partner’s property, I imagine that the cops would be quick to establish the facts and intervene to prevent escalation.  If that is the case then the same applies here. Because to allow these crimes to go unpunished without offering a word as to why not only demonstrates a lack of competence or will. It also encourages more of the same, and not just against Ms. Brady.

If one of the foundational duties of the democratic state is to protect the freedom and security of its citizens, it appears that in in this instance NZ has so far failed miserably. The government needs to step up and provide assurances that the investigation will proceed honestly to a verifiable conclusion and that it will work to ensure the safety of Anne Marie Brady against those who would wish to do her harm.

To not do so is to abdicate a basic responsibility of democratic governance.