Police private trip to China – who to believe?

The Police say it was a private trip to learn about Chinese culture, presumably because it would help their work here. Andrew Little and Anne-Marie Brady without any evidence gave it a sinister cast.

the Police account was that the trip was private, where all those concerned paid for their travel and expenses. They sought advice before going and did. not take any official police equipment with them.

Brady and Little, assisted by RadioNZ, were full of insinuation. According to Anne-Marie Brady, described as a China expert (more on that later), our police do not understand political interference. Her view may be coloured by the fact that they have not agreed with some of her wilder assertions in the past after full investigation.

She gave away her preferred sources, asking why should the police be allowed to go to China when the SIS and GCSB weren’t. She was also a shade unhinged: “Perhaps”, she said, “they may have received little red envelopes of cash!”

Andrew Little was more sweeping. It was all a plot by the Chinese government or Chinese authorities to “curry favour” with our police, who he obviously considers can’t think for themselves. With complete disregard for the facts he set the hares running as to whether the group had been hosted by Chinese government officials. Then he made this extraordinary assertion: “We don’t want our police officers, at whatever level and rank, to hold a loyalty to institutions or causes other than the service of the New Zealand Police.” The photo above is of Constable Yuh being the first to swear allegiance to the King.

He also raised the question of gifts. Anyone who has received Chinese hospitality at any level knows that gifting is a commonplace of the culture. The police officers would have returned home with large amounts of very good Chinese tea, some scarves and some paintings of the Wu Yi mountains. I don’t think they will be turned.

Apparently a formal complaint has been lodged with the Inspector-General of Police. I expect Inspector Hoyle will be proved to be correct in his account of the matter.

But this storm in a teacup and media beat-up does raise some interesting questions.

The first is the relationship between the Police and the so-called security agencies. Linked to this is the Andrew Little’s assertion that “New Zealand’s intelligence agencies spent a large chunk of their time dealing with foreign interference.”

In the Fabian Society we recently hosted Maire Leadbeater speaking about her book The Enemy Within which details countless years of security make-work looking in the wrong direction coupled with an ever-increasing security build-up driven by Five Eyes. She concluded that crimes of foreign interference would be better dealt with by the Police, ironically because of their better accountability structures.

My take was that if Christopher Luxon and David Seymour were looking for a useless bureaucracy to save some money on, the SIS/GCSB would be the ideal place to start. Or use the savings to put more police on the street.

Finally re Anne-Marie Brady, Radio New Zealand’s go-to China “expert.” She is the official adviser to the Inter-Parliamentary Committee on China, a world-wide collection of self-selected parliamentarians founded by Marco Rubio and Iain Duncan-Smith five or six years ago, with a strong anti-CPC mission. It is funded by notorious regime-change agencies, initially the the US National Endowment for Democracy (‘we do in the open what the CIA used to do in secret”), and the George Soros Foundation.

Brady is an anti-China pro-US pro-Taiwan lobbyist. There is more foreign interference in New Zealand from IPAC than from the Chinese government. Their activities are definitely not in our interest.