Article downloads

Some of the world’s most extreme Islamic preachers, and organizations linked to terrorist groups, have spent seven years infiltrating New Zealand’s moderate Muslim community – running training camps and "intensive" courses – and the Government never realized. IAN WISHART has the extraordinary story that’s left local Muslim leaders shocked and embarrassed, and raised major questions not just about our border security, but whether al Qa’ida has been actively recruiting on the ground in New Zealand

 A massive breach in New Zealand's national security has been discovered by Investigate magazine, with revelations that senior Islamic "preachers of hate", some with links to al Qa'ida, have been able to come and go from New Zealand with no one in the media, the Government or even the security services apparently aware of who they were.

Among the roll-call of dishonour that's left the head of New Zealand's Muslim community reeling and pledging major changes within mosque vetting procedures: two firebrand clerics named as "unindicted co-conspirators" in New York's infamous 1993 Day of Terror case, when Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Centre the first time and a dozen other men planned to explode ammonium nitrate car bombs at other major New York landmarks.

Additionally, Investigate's inquiries have shown that a majority of the organizations listed as international affiliates of New Zealand's mosques have been named by the United Nations, intelligence and law enforcement agencies as supporters, fundraisers and sometimes active participants in al Qa'ida terror plots. Yet members of these organizations have been able to come to New Zealand unobstructed, supply "educational and spiritual" literature to Muslim youth here and run training camps.

Undercover video footage taken by Britain's BBC television of training camps run by the same organization overseas has shown children being trained to become suicide bombers.

The President of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand (FIANZ), Javed Khan, was doubly shocked to find out about the backgrounds of the extreme Wahhabi Islam visitors, because he and his organization had personally invited them here to help encourage local Muslims in their faith.

For seven years, preachers who have urged followers to kill Jews, Christians, pagans and Hindus have been holding "workshops" in mosques and university student halls up and down New Zealand, yet no one from the Government, Security Intelligence Service or police ever lifted a finger to ring Javed Khan and ask why moderate NZ Muslims were inviting the world's most extremist clerics here.

While Khan and senior figures in New Zealand's Islamic community are now urgently reviewing their policies and links to overseas Islamic groups, there's also growing concern about why, if the Government really regards the NZ Muslim community as friends, it never even bothered to have a quiet word in their ear. Worse, if the Government didn't know about the backgrounds of the extremists visiting New Zealand, what implications does that have for national security?

More in the latest INVESTIGATE, or buy the 18 page article by clicking the shopping cart icon above (PLEASE NOTE: BECAUSE THE COMPUTER SPITS A DUMMY IF YOU DON'T ENTER A SHIPPING OPTION, JUST ENTER "ECONOMY" WHEN IT ASKS YOU)

National's leadership team spill the beans on where the party is headed in their most indepth interview yet:

They say New Zealand politicians can’t be bought, but tell that to the person who, just before Christmas, shelled out more than $4,000 to have lunch with new National Party leader John Key after a charity auction on the Zillion website. All we can tell you is the mystery buyer wasn’t us. Instead, IAN WISHART caught up with John Key and his deputy Bill English for their most in-depth media interview yet on their vision for New Zealand.

JOHN KEY

KEY: My view is that this brand is in incredibly strong shape, these are values and principles that go back 70 years. And if you really look at the sort of things that, say, for instance Holyoake was saying and you apply them to what I've been saying in the last three weeks, then I think you'll find there's a pretty strong match there.  I think the reason that the party has endured for so long is that those values are very very durable.  Now of course individual policies come and go, what worked for Holyoake and others won't necessarily work for me in terms of absolute policies, because the environment is different, but I think one of the aims of that speech is to really spell out that while I've used a slightly softer tone in the last few weeks, than maybe Don did, that fundamentally we are still going in exactly the same direction with values that line up with where we think New Zealand is heading.

INVESTIGATE: It's been an interesting time in politics, particularly since Labour took over in 1999, and I guess the period up to the 2002 election, where it had its vicious electoral defeat was marked, I think, by National still trying to establish what it actually stood for.  Is there a danger in the slightly softer tone that the clear delineation between National and Labour won't be kept?

KEY: Well, yeah, look, there are always risks as, in a sense, I don't think beneath the surface, Labour has truly moved towards the centre, and I think the language they want to use and the spin they want to put on things is that they've got a tinge of blue in them, if you like, and they are hunting in the centre ground.  Inevitably that's where most New Zealanders inhabit and if we don't try and win that space then by definition, it pushes us out to a much smaller audience.  And clearly we want to win the bulk of the party vote come Election 2008.  So in a sense, we don't make any apologies for hunting in that ground but I think there will be very different outcomes.  Fundamentally, we trust the private sector and we trust New Zealanders to make good judgement calls for themselves and their families, and we don't think Labour does and we think that their response is always one of the sort of Nanny State where Wellington knows best.  When you see the results of the last few years, I mean, health is just a classic example, no one can say that Labour hasn't thrown enormous amounts of money at it - they've taken the spending up annually from $6 billion to about $10.5 billion a year, but the results are at best pathetic.  And why is that?  Well, because they're hiring as many bureaucrats as they are nurses.  So I think you'll see a very different approach from us, but one that the public will buy into, and I don't think it's one where they will be intimidated by it.  I mean, my view is that if someone is looking for a hip operation or a knee operation, they care about the quality and the timing of that operation; in the end, the hospital that carries it out is probably irrelevant.

INVESTIGATE: I see the suggestion that women in Nelson/Marlborough will be without epidural services, because the government has rundown the health system to that extent, in what is a major provincial city.

KEY: That’s an example of where their priorities are wrong. I think you can argue the same case with Pharmac – I mean, Pharmac’s funding has been static for the last four years, in nominal terms it’s been around half a billion dollars. In the last election campaign our policy was to increase their funding reasonably dramatically, and of course we were going to do that by not rolling out a subsidy in another area, but we thought that was a better allocation of funds. Now, that doesn’t mean it’ll be our policy in 2008 but what it shows is, I think, that we are prepared to tackle – you can’t just look at these incredibly large portfolios and just argue that there’s one solution, throw a bit of money at it and you’ll get the right outcome at the other end. I think you really do have to demand productivity and performance and have the right allocation of resources.

INVESTIGATE: From my own time in Government working for Mike Moore in 1986, one of the key things in that first Lange administration was the perception, the hangover from the Muldoon years, of “bureaucracy capture”, whereupon a lot of the civil servants at the time had been with a National administration for years and were used to dealing with National and were very suspicious of the incoming Labour people. The reverse is now the case, you have bureaucracy capture with Labour – Tamihere touched on it in his interview with Investigate last year about the networks that now exist in the civil service. How seriously do you treat that as a problem?

KEY: I think the winds of political change drift pretty rapidly in Wellington, it’s a world that revolves around the Beehive and Parliament, and my sense of the anecdotal stories and approaches below the radar screen that we’re getting at the moment is that the core bureaucrats in Wellington can sense pretty rapidly a change.

So while, superficially, they may have nailed their colours to Labour’s mast for a while I think they can see that the time of this government is rapidly coming to an end and they’re making pretty clear and overt signals that they want to work with us. Of course, we’ll have to demonstrate through our policies and our people that we’ve got the goods, but I think we very much do.

INVESTIGATE: One of the issues, with the State Sector reform of the 80s, and it’s been a bit of a bugbear for parties in Opposition when they want accountability out of Ministers – is that Ministers now say “well, we can’t touch these civil servants because it’s all independent…” – Is there room for more political control of the senior departments and so forth so that you can get accountability back into the political system?

KEY: Well I think you do need accountability. My guess is that the public will be looking aghast at the Liam Ashley case, and asking why a Labour party in opposition were so quickly calling for heads on the National side when we had Cave Creek, and yet when it comes to Liam Ashley they’ve been pretty quick to accept that they are politically accountable but not responsible, and therefore they don’t intend to do anything about it. So I think the public is entitled to accountability, and across a wide range: accountability even just for value for money – I think New Zealanders know they are paying a hell of a lot in tax, that the government expenditure has increased dramatically and in part that’s putting pressure on inflation in New Zealand, yet coming out the other end is something that even the incoming briefing to ministers confirms – to describe it as “sub-optimal” would be gilding the lily. It’s really a very low level of productivity. Yet every quarter for the last 20 quarters we’ve seen the state sector wages rising faster than the private sector, so there’s a real imbalance here. Government is a big beast now, and we need to have that beast performing if New Zealand’s economic growth and productivity levels are going to get us back into the top half of the OECD.

INVESTIGATE: Well that gets me back to the question about bureaucracy capture, because there is this perception that we have an elected political system, but it has been disconnected legislatively from the civil service that it operates –

KEY: Well I think that’s been a deliberate political ploy by Labour, I think you’ve seen that through the DHBs – that was a level put in place to ensure, again, that they were responsible but directly not accountable. Every time you ask a question they can simply say ‘Well that’s a matter for the DHB, take it up with them’, and when you try and take it up with them you get a blank response. I don’t think any of us should underestimate that Helen Clark is a cunning woman who understands the systems well and has worked them to her best advantage.

INVESTIGATE: So is a Key government likely to be brave enough to figure out some way to bring that accountability back in legislatively so that it can control the public sector?

KEY: We’ll certainly take a look at it. I think it is important when money is spent – and we’re talking about very large sums of money – that people feel there is a process of accountability. It’ll probably never be at the level that every journalist and lobby group would want, but I think nevertheless there are improvements that can be made.

INVESTIGATE: In other words the pendulum has swung too far?

To read more, purchase the Feb 07 issue or buy the article by clicking on the shopping cart icon above

WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE ONLY...

UPDATE: When the story was first published online, journalists at the Otago Daily Times and NZ Herald attempted to get comment from David Benson-Pope. The Minister rang one journalist at his home at 10:28 pm that night to ensure the Otago Daily Times "does not print a denial".

Since then, other media and Investigate have repeatedly asked Benson-Pope to issue a point by point denial, or indeed any categorical denial at all, which he has refused to do. Instead, the Minister has silenced general media by threatening to sue them if they run any further stories. Lacking their own witnesses to what in reality was a very intimate event attended by only a few people, other media have been unable to match Investigate's coverage and therefore are unable to take the story further. Benson-Pope has not, however, taken legal action against Investigate, nor are we concerned at any attempt to "gag" us.

Meanwhile, other people involved in the BDSM community in Dunedin have come forward to Investigate with further corroborating evidence, and the magazine has a taped conversation between two members of the community discussing Benson-Pope's involvement.

We should make it very clear, right now, that the purpose of the story was not to expose Benson-Pope's private life for the sake of it, but to expose activities which we believe are incompatible with his position as a Minister in charge of CYFS and heading anti-violence programmes.

Excerpt follows, full story is R18, with explicit photos and literature, and is only available by a credit card purchase for the special price of $1, to reduce the risk of children being exposed to its content. IF YOU WOULD PREFER A VERSION WITHOUT EXPLICIT PHOTOS, click on the BensonNoPix article above, right

WARNING: The following 10,000 word story contains R-18 photos and descriptions of an explicit sexual nature, relating to bondage, discipline and sado-masochism. It is premium content for several reasons. Firstly, a credit card purchase for $1 is our way of enforcing an R-18 limit. Secondly, this has been a lengthy and expensive investigation, and thirdly we may have to re-locate some of our sources either temporarily or permanently. They have put much at risk to help us bring you this investigation.

BY IAN WISHART

In July 2004, at the height of the clash of cultures surrounding Labour’s civil unions legislation, the man responsible for ramming that law through Parliament laid down a gauntlet challenging the integrity of groups opposing him. Married, with two children, Associate Justice Minister David Benson-Pope was the heterosexual face of the contentious gay marriage bill, and he’d been brought in to front it amid fears that the public would react badly to having openly gay Labour MPs Tim Barnett and Chris Carter leading the charge.

Both Carter and Barnett had taken prominent positions to push through the legalization of prostitution just months earlier, and the last thing Labour wanted was even more accusations that its homosexual wing was really in control of the party.

“It’s helpful if they’re not identified as the main supporters of the bill,” Benson-Pope was quoted in the Herald, “because that lends fuel to the fire that this is pandering to the gay community, which it isn’t.”

As a father, former schoolteacher and close confidant of Prime Minister Helen Clark, Benson-Pope was the epitome of tolerant middle-class Labour – comfortable in his own marriage and reaching out to protect the rights of oppressed minorities.

It was in this context, then, that Benson-Pope threw down a gauntlet to groups opposing the Civil Unions Bill. In a media statement dated 30 July 2004, the minister accused lobby group The Maxim Institute of not declaring its interests:

“The minister responsible for Civil Union legislation is welcoming people taking an active part in the debate but he says this must be done in an up-front and open manner.”

One of the minister’s criticisms was that members of Maxim were writing letters to the editor “without identifying themselves as Maxim members” – an accusation that hit home more recently with several letters published in the NZ Herald from “Brian Edwards, Herne Bay”, without reference to the fact that he is Helen Clark’s approved biographer and media trainer.

But Benson-Pope’s main beef was that in such an important public debate, it was crucial that people were honest about declaring their interests.

It was a theme he repeated in a speech to the Orewa Rotary Club, when he launched a stinging attack on Christians for opposing civil unions:

“These type of people and organizations have found labeling people 'PC' a very useful distraction as they try to influence mainstream debate from their very narrow and often extreme standpoint.

“They represent very small minorities, yet through sophisticated use of communications, lobbying and the media, we have seen in other countries and are starting to see here, are able to carry sway far greater than their numbers indicate that ought to.

“I described their intolerance as a challenge. The way to meet that challenge is head on. Ask them to explain their views. Call on them to be honest about what beliefs are really driving their agenda.”

In case you missed it, it’s now clearly on the record that David Benson-Pope doesn’t like people pushing barrows without being honest about their own motives and background. This, then, is the standard Investigate is about to apply to David Benson-Pope. Before we get to the fresh allegations, however, we first have to give them some context by briefly re-visiting the earlier allegations.

Mention the name David Benson-Pope these days and you get two reactions. “Tennis balls” would be one, while the other is invariably: “They went too far when they called him a ‘pervert’.” Benson-Pope is a man who polarizes. The classes of children he taught at Dunedin’s Bayfield High School were divided over his brusque style, and in his seven year parliamentary career he has continued to intimidate and bully his opponents, particularly attacking National’s female MPs like Katherine Rich and reducing some to tears in private encounters.

But when National’s law and order spokesman Judith Collins picked up on a Rodney Hide comment and called David Benson-Pope a “pervert” during an incandescent parliamentary Question Time this year, you could hear jaws drop not just around the debating chamber but around the country, as little old ladies tut-tutted and the traditional kiwi support for the underdog set in.

Although Benson-Pope had bound and gagged a student, had bashed another youngster in the face, and had spanked teenage girls on their thighs and busted into their changing rooms repeatedly while girls were showering on school camps, suddenly in one fell PR swoop he became the ‘victim’ of a media and political ‘witchhunt’.

In the House, Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen hinted he had “dirt” of his own about National’s Judith Collins, and Labour wheeled out its own female MPs, Lianne Dalziel and Annette King, to launch a blistering attack on Collins:

"She has been prepared to expose David's wife and children to unjustified personal abuse and public attention," Ms King said. "She has laughed and she has celebrated as she made her despicable comments of 'pervert' and 'dirty old man'."

For her part, Collins denied ever calling Benson-Pope a ‘dirty old man’, nor had she ever referred to Benson-Pope’s wife and children, but it was too late: Labour’s spin machine was in high gear.

Supported by the PR wunderkinds on the Beehive’s ninth floor, Benson-Pope finally came out of hiding to begin a charm offensive with the parliamentary press gallery, explaining how “hurtful” and “offensive” he found the allegations.

“I don't think anyone should have to put up with the filthy, despicable behaviour we saw yesterday,” he told the Herald that week. "I did use corporal punishment for a little while. There was always a witness -- and one told the policy inquiry (into the tennis ball incident) how distasteful I found it. I was actually one of the people who got rid of it."

According to the newspaper, it was the accusations of violence and ill-treatment that seem to have hurt him the most.

"I guess that's why I'm bruised and cut up. I'm seriously angry about what went down, because the accusations that (Judith) Collins and (Rodney) Hide have been making are so contrary to the bulk of the work I did in the classroom, and the work I did in the outdoors."

“To be accused of being violent and bullying is pretty unpleasant."

Remember those statements professing an anti-violence mentality – in a few minutes they will become highly relevant.

But the Herald article wasn’t the only one.

“I guess I’ve been pretty upset by the attack on my integrity,” he told Close Up’s Mark Sainsbury, before complaining about the impact on “my wife and kids”. Yet in a Sunday Star Times feature a couple of days later, Benson-Pope poses with his wife and children for a large photo on page A3, above a rambling interview with both himself and wife Jan Flood. It seemed strange behaviour for a man professing concern at his family being publicly identified, to then display them in a national newspaper.

“I continue to describe the Wishart claims as deeply offensive and nonsense,” Benson-Pope continued in his Close Up interview, “and I’m not resiling from that, they are, just as the behaviour of Rodney Hide and Judith Collins is deeply offensive.

When challenged by Sainsbury as to why the Investigate claims were “nonsense” and “ridiculous”, Benson-Pope replied:

“Well when you’re accused of being a vicious bully and beating children with a cane until they bleed, I challenge you to actually react calmly.”

“Did you ever beat a child with a cane until they bled?”

“Not that I’m aware, but how would I know? What I will say is that I did use corporal punishment for a short time. I found it distasteful, actually, as one of the fellow teacher witnesses comments on the police file.”

But Benson-Pope is not telling the whole story. The police file published in Investigate, and which was the basis of the “nonsense” and “ridiculous” retort, discloses students were left bleeding.

One student told police that when Benson-Pope delivered canings in the corridor outside the classroom, he did so with apparent relish:

“Mr Benson-Pope would whistle the cane in the air before taking a run up of about 10 feet. I'm estimating the distance but you could actually hear him running up. It was pretty psychologically damning, standing there bent over listening to the run-up. I'm pretty sure it was a run-up for each of the three canes on that occasion. As a result I suffered severe bruising but no bleeding. Obviously very painful to sit for the next few days.”

A second boy remembers refusing to jump the vault at PE in the third form because he didn't feel confident. He told police his punishment from Benson-Pope was the cane. He was one of two boys given the cane for non-compliance at PE that day.
“I had to wait outside the school hall while Tony [the other offender] was dealt with first. I could hear screaming and yelling. I still remember it well today because [Tony] was such a tiny boy.”

A former teacher confirmed the incident to police. “It's a lasting impression because it's the only caning I've witnessed. I remember Tony ran a lap of the assembly hall yelling in pain after the caning.”

“When it was my turn,” continues the former student who'd refused to jump the vault, “I was brought into the hall. I was bent over and caned once over my trousers by Benson-Pope. I pleaded not to be caned again but was struck once more with the cane.
“I remember Benson-Pope laughing while he caned me, and that's what got me the most. When I got home I realized I had blood on my bum.”

So when Benson-Pope accused Investigate of publishing ridiculous nonsense, he omitted to tell Close Up that the allegations actually came from within the official police file.

“Are you a bully?,” Mark Sainsbury asked Benson-Pope on TV.

“I don’t believe so.”

“Are you a liar?”

“Certainly not!”

The responses to those first two questions from Sainsbury were instantaneous. But the next question appeared to give Benson-Pope something to think about, and if you study his response carefully you’ll see he actually did not answer the question directly.

“Are you a pervert?”

(four seconds of silence, so questioner moves to fill the pregnant pause)

“Because that’s what they’re accusing you of in this building?”

“I know, and that’s why I said to you earlier that it’s one of the most despicable things I think I’ve ever had to face and one of the things that my colleagues have said – was they felt like having a shower afterwards, because of the filth that was thrown at me in the chamber yesterday. And I don’t think anyone in this country, MP or not, should have to put up with that despicable mudslinging.”

The “pervert” allegation raised in parliament was based on accounts in the police file, such as one where a girl described Benson-Pope as “sleazy”:

“Quite sleazy, some of the comments he made used to grate me. The girls, including me, felt that he was always staring at our legs beneath desks…with the girls he was always sleazy if he could be, he seemed to thrive on it.”

Remember, that’s a witness interviewed by police, not by Investigate. The “pervert” label was further enhanced – again by witnesses spoken to by police – when girls told of being made to strip down to panties and nighties and forced to stand outside in the cold night air for an hour while Benson-Pope spotlighted them with a torch.

“I remember he told us that we had to take any surplus clothing off, eg, jerseys and trackpants. It was just our nighties and no footwear,” one girl said in her police statement. The police files show both girls and boys were punished this way, finding it “humiliating” and in some cases painful – having to stand absolutely still for an hour in the same spot.

“We had to stand on the concrete, outside the long dorms. There were a few girls involved, over a dozen. I remember [one girl] being there as she told Benson-Pope she couldn’t do it for health reasons – that night her ankles swelled up really badly as a result. I remember later a lot of the girls tried to comfort her.

“I remember the incident so clearly because it was freezing cold, I believe it was winter. We were out there for about an hour.

“Benson-Pope just stood there, watching. If anyone spoke he threatened we would have to stand out there longer. I imagine I was feeling pretty self-conscious standing there in just a nightie,” the girl told police.

But it was after Investigate published the police files in our March 06 issue that the cat really landed among the pigeons. The incidents just detailed occurred on the 1982 school camp, but this time stories emerged of Benson-Pope overstepping the mark on a 1997 school camp, bursting in on the girls’ shower block.

“Certainly I opened the door and shouted, or banged on the door, and shouted at students who were spending more time in there than they should have, to get out,” the minister admitted to Close Up.

“Did you go into the girls dormitories?”

“Only under appropriate circumstances. The routine had previously been that [I] would get up, make tea for the staff, deliver that, wake up the four dorms by going in, turning on the lights and opening the doors saying ‘Time for the run, out you go’…it was just because of the concerns that came out of whatever questions were raised there that we strengthened up the policies and said male staff would not do any wake-ups in the girls dorms. Can I say Mark, we’re talking about cold environment, people in sleeping bags.”

But contrast David Benson-Pope’s explanation of the dorm incident with what the girls actually told Investigate. It wasn’t a wake-up call where girls were safe in their sleeping bags, it was during the day, after an afternoon mud-run.

“He knew we were in there. It was straight after the mud run [Investigate’s emphasis], he knew we were all in there getting changed and things like that and he just wandered straight on in, and thought he had the right to do that.”

The woman says up to twenty-five girls aged 14 and 15 were in various stages of undress, some fully naked, during Benson-Pope’s “visit”.

“Girls were naked and in the process of getting changed.”

She says the Labour MP lingered, staring, for 30 seconds, before finally getting out because of the pandemonium his presence was causing.

“Screaming and yelling and telling him to get out, and all this swearing.”

The woman says it was the second time that day [Investigate’s emphasis] Benson-Pope had attempted to see the schoolgirls undress.

“He walked in on the showers one time, then later on that day walked into the dorm room while we were getting changed. Straight on in. He’s an a**hole. He really is. I don’t know if any other students did, but me and my parents made a formal complaint about it, but nothing was done about it.”

According to Bayfield High, which admitted receiving a complaint from a different family after media pressure was applied, the policies were changed so that there would be no repeat of the 1997 dormitory incidents.

But Investigate found a girl on the 1998 camp who confirmed the old leopard had not changed his spots, despite the new policy.

“I do remember one incident involving him when I was in 4th form at a school camp at Tautuku. I remember that the girls were in their dorm getting ready for a tramp and we were all mucking around and taking ages to get changed. BP [Benson-Pope] got quite agitated and just marched on into the dorm without knocking or any warning at all and yelled at us all to hurry up. At this stage quite a few of us were still trying to get changed.
“I'm not sure if anybody reported this incident to the other teachers but it was talked about for a few years after that and it didn't do much for his image with the students in my year!”

The same woman told Investigate she also found the Labour cabinet minister “sleazy”.

“He was not well liked among the kids in my year, or by too many people at all! He came across to me as really arrogant, self important and a little sleazy, and could be very domineering and intimidating to students who didn't obey him.”

These, then, were the incidents that prompted Rodney Hide to call Benson-Pope a bully, a liar and a pervert, and because of the public and media backlash, much of it overlooking the mountain of evidence in the police files, the wind turned and David Benson-Pope survived what was getting close to a political execution.

Little did anyone know, as parliament and the media stepped back from the brink back in March, that both Rodney Hide and Judith Collins had been far closer to the truth with the “pervert” label than anyone realized, because David Benson-Pope, the Minister for CYFS and Social Development, has a secret life, one well and truly worthy of a nervous twitch.

What you are about to read is R18 rated, because it has to be. It is impossible for readers to understand the mind of David Benson-Pope and whether he is fit to be Minister of Social Development if we shield you from all of the specific detail that follows. Additionally, the Labour Government will again challenge Investigate to “put up or shut up”, as the Prime Minister has done before, so this time we’re releasing enough information to prove the allegations beyond reasonable doubt. There is other information that we hold which may become relevant if Benson-Pope chooses to make it so.

When Dunedin private investigator Wayne Idour went public back in October with revelations that he’d been investigating the Labour government, it caused a shockwave in the Beehive. What no one, possibly not even Idour, realized was that it also caused shockwaves in Dunedin. Questioned on TV3’s Campbell Live, Idour at one point had admitted that he was looking into the activities of David Benson-Pope, and hinted that there might be more to come. Not only – according to observers at parliament – did Benson-Pope look stressed, but  hundreds of kilometers away in Dunedin members of a BDSM (bondage, discipline, sado-masochism) group known as “Southern Kinx” suddenly froze like possums in the headlights.

“All of a sudden,” Roxanne*, one member of the group, told Investigate, “I don’t know what has gone on…but all of a sudden the Southern Kinx group – most of its official members have taken a big step back. Officially there are now only seven members. But it’s not for reasons of people dropping out because at the last ‘play party’ [a BDSM orgy] there were still 25, 30 people.”

What’s the connection between a private eye checking out Benson-Pope, and a BDSM group? Benson-Pope is part of Dunedin’s BDSM scene....(more)

To read more, please click on the chopping cart icon. You will be charged NZ$1, and will be delivered the article via a secure download, with photos. The entire article is nearly 10,000 words long

SPIN CITY: THE MARKETING OF A VACCINE CAMPAIGN 

Around a million New Zealanders, many of them children, are being targeted in what some are calling a public scare campaign - TV commercials, schools and daycares enlisted to terrify parents into authorising the meningitis jab for their kids. But, as BARBARA SUMNER-BURSTYN writes, are we being played for suckers?

For the past 13 years an uncontrolled epidemic has raged in New Zealand, maiming or killing hundreds of New Zealanders, mainly the young.’ So began one of many recent New Zealand Herald exposés on meningococcal disease. Detailing the horrific effects of meningitis being suffered by two Auckland babies, Charlotte and Junior, I cried and like many New Zealanders was hooked on their tragic stories. Newspapers across the country filled up with letters, columns and editorials about the disease and the vaccination that would release us from its grip. Then the NZ Herald ran an article extolling an educational program in South Auckland schools. The accompanying picture showed a cozy classroom of five year olds playing with oversized, multicolored cubes with words like scarring and death attached to the sides. And it dawned on me: we may be in the middle of an epidemic but we are also in the middle of a massive advertising and promotion campaign. In many ways it’s an entirely new public health environment where the concept of informed parental consent is being undermined by direct advertising to children and where vaccination is being turned into a moral duty, the gold standard of good parenting that only the most careless caregiver would shun.

But as recently as January 2000 Health Minister Annette King was extolling the findings of a landmark two-year Meningococcal Disease study that clearly demonstrated the link between the disease and poor housing and overcrowded living conditions. “Members of this government have been saying that for years, but the link was consistently denied by Jenny Shipley and members of her former government,” she said.

But to Dr Jane O’Hallahan, the Director of the Meningococcal B Immunization Programme it was never that simple. “The poverty theory,” she says, “oversimplifies a complex situation.”

She’s right. Meningococcal disease, and New Zealand’s experience with it, is far more complex than the Ministry of Health’s glossy brochures, their website or any of the articles and information promoting vaccination would have us believe.

Take risk as an example. I’m a middle class Pakeha with a reasonable standard of living. If I had a baby would she be at risk? Yes, says Dr O’Hallahan, citing the ‘devastating epidemic’ we’re in the middle of.          

But calculating out the MOH’s own figures that show 5400 of us have contracted the disease and 220 have died from all strains of it, the risk for New Zealanders suffering from the Nesseria meningitides B strain, the one causing all the trouble, is 0.007%.  Put another way, 99.993% of us will not fall ill from meningitis. Of those who do and survive, up to a fifth are left with disability.  At the latest figures that’s a total of 1,080 New Zealanders over 13 years, or just 18 people a year.

While we’ve been in the grip of this ‘uncontrolled epidemic’ 203,387 New Zealanders were injured on our roads and 7632 were killed. While Looking Upstream - a Ministry of Health report released in March - estimates 11,000 people die from diet-related causes such as heart disease every year. That’s 30 per cent of all deaths, far eclipsing deaths from tobacco, drugs, alcohol, motor accidents, violence and meningitis.

And it turns out the bugs that cause meningitis are fairly common. The Ministry of Health, whose figures are based on nasal swabbing, recently found 22 percent of students swabbed in Otago carried meningococcal bacteria, with only two percent carrying the B strain. But in 2000 the Lancet reported that by doing the far more accurate tonsillar tissue test, the disease could be found in 45% of the population. Studies also found that despite such high carriage rates and the mobility of the bacteria, progression to invasive disease occurs only rarely.   

Add all this to a 1982 study that showed natural immunity to meningitis is reinforced throughout life by repeated and intermittent carriage of different strains, and you have to ask why some of us are so susceptible to this cruel disease, while for others it’s self-limiting and harmless?

For a start numerous studies have found associative factors such as parental smoking,  Vitamin C levels, panadol use, overcrowded, unhygienic housing conditions and iron anemia are all irrefutably linked to the disease (a recent Auckland study found iron deficiencies in 29% of young New Zealand children). In June, New Scientist magazine said an extensive survey of baby foods has found the presence of a bacterium linked to a handful of fatal outbreaks of meningitis. The magazine said the meningitis-causing bug has been found in powdered infant formula before, but this study was the first to detect it in dried infant food. Premature babies and those with a weakened immune system are at particular risk, they said.

Meanwhile a 2001 study from the Netherlands found convincing evidence of genetic background in the invasion of meningococci. 

Since genetic testing is, for now, out of the question, and the vaccine has been found not to confer herd immunity – meaning only the individual and not their wider community is protected, and nutrition as a preventive seems to have fallen out of favor, perhaps there’s a way for an individual to find out if they’re already immune.

I phone a range of doctor’s surgeries and ask if there’s a test. The answer is similar at each. “We’ve not been given any information on that.” “There is no test.”     

Of course there is a test. But like everything with this disease, it’s not that simple.

The trials, run by Dr Diana Lennon at Auckland University, have shown a minimum of three vaccinations is necessary to raise antibody levels. And despite the fact the opening statement on the official consent form says: Parents/Guardians this is all it takes to protect them, up to 25 per cent of participants gained little or no immunity.

How do they know that? “It’s a blood test,” says Dr Lennon. But then she goes on to say it won’t be available to the public because there is no clear point at which it can be said that antibodies are conferring immunity.

Pardon?

“Decisions on the efficacy of the vaccine are made on a population base, not an individual level,” she says, “therefore an antibody test prior to or between receiving the vaccine would be meaningless.”  She admits it took her ages to cotton on to the concept. With less time to dwell on it, it strikes me that it’s only meaningless for those of us who want to know if our children have natural immunity, while for the trial participants, for the licensing committee, for the government spending 200 million, it’s the primary way of assessing the efficacy of the vaccine. In other words, it makes no sense to use antibodies as proof of acquired immunity and then say that antibodies are not a good measure of immunity.

So given the MOH intends to vaccinate one million New Zealanders it seems appropriate to find out just exactly what’s in that little vial of clear liquid. When asked by a group of concerned parents about the ingredients besides those published on the data sheet (outer membrane vesicles,1.65 mg of aluminum and histidine) MedSafe, the government organization responsible for safety in medicine was unequivocal. That information is withheld under the provisions of the Official Information Act on the grounds that it’s not in the public interest to know.

Okay, how about the vaccine culture, the agents used to deactivate the bacteria and agents used to purify the vaccine?

“Withheld.”

To read more, click on the shopping cart icon above

Alien cats, and we don’t mean extraterrestrial, appear to be on the loose in New Zealand and Australia with hundreds of witnesses telling similar stories: there are black panthers and mountain lions living on the outskirts of Christchurch, Sydney and Melbourne. IAN WISHART investigates

“I had started to drift off when a most unusual sensation came over me,” wrote retired Kiwi soldier Frank Burdett in the very first issue of Investigate magazine nearly seven years ago. “The hairs on the back of my neck slowly began to prickle. Not all at once, a few at first, then a gradual increase. There was a heavy concentration of a dusty, musty aroma that permeated the air and my nostrils seemed to be full of it.

“I lay there momentarily trying to account for the strange smell. I strained to hear but, apart from the sound of the moving waters of the two rivers, everything appeared deathly still and quiet. Then I felt the nylon parachute panel [being used as a mosquito net] fall from my face and all hell broke loose.

To read the complete ten page feature, buy now  by clicking on the shopping basket icon above

As Edwardian villas go, this one is a monster, stretching back from the roadside and looking every inch the grand mansion it used to be in its heyday. On a quiet street in leafy Epsom, I get only seconds for this first impression before I’m already on the doorstep reaching for the old Edwardian twist-n-turn door ringer. Naturally, like most of that vintage, it doesn’t work, but one quick tap on the opaque glass door pane and it springs open with a paw extended to mine in a firm greeting.

“Mr Wishart, I presume?”

Right about now, I think to myself, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sunday Star-Times journalist Tony Wall pounce from behind a bush with a photographer in tow accompanied by a loud “Aha!” followed by a banner headline in tomorrow’s paper about “Despicable Investigate Editor’s Secret Meeting With Right Wing Cult”.

Of all the exposés and scandals surrounding the media’s coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon, the Red Cross "Ambulance Incident" stands out as the most serious. The other exposés were spectacular in their simplicity (photographers staging scenes, clumsy attempts at Photoshopping images), but often concerned fairly trivial details. What does it matter whether there was a big cloud of smoke over Beirut, or a really big cloud of smoke, as one notorious doctored photograph showed? The fact that the media was lying was indeed extremely important, and justified the publicity surrounding the exposés – but what they were lying about was often minor, a slight fudging of the visuals to exaggerate the damage.

Take this editorial from the New Zealand Herald on August 1: