KEY POINTS:
Praise be to Allah. God is great. The elections are over and next week I'll be sworn into office for my seventh term as a mayor.
This makes me the longest serving mayor, still in office in New Zealand, the longest serving mayor in the 150 year
history of Invercargill and the only mayor in New Zealand's history to be Mayor of a North Island city and mayor of a South Island city.
The issue that upsets me most is the steady decline in voting. As founding president of AUSAPOCPAH (the Auckland University Society for the Active Prevention of Cruelty to Politically Apathetic Humans), I've always campaigned against apathy.
My father, along with many thousands of fellow servicemen died fighting for democracy, yet we can't be bothered spending 10 minutes voting every three years. I admit that local government voting procedures are partially to blame for this. Having nominations opening on 27 July and not getting a result at the polls until 13 October is far too drawn out. Postal voting is OK but it has to be a short, sharp, dynamic process.
Most mayors have newspaper columns which help keep locals informed and interested in local affairs, but we are all banned from writing columns in case it gives us an unfair advantage.
Well, not all of us, of course. Mayor Michael Laws is allowed to keep publishing his columns, but I guess that's because he's a right wing bigot.
Fairfax seems to have different rules for different mayors. The majority of us are forced to become silent political eunuchs for the entire two and a half months during the elections.
But the entire issue of democracy in local government pales into insignificance compared with the spectacular bust of Tama Iti and the revolutionary People's Army plot to overthrow our entire democratic system.
I've known Tama Iti from numerous Maori land occupations and the 1981 Springboks Tour and I've never seen him throw a punch yet. He's provocative, theatrical and radical, but I would never classify him as a terrorist.
I'm sure there's plenty of unregistered guns, unregistered dogs, molotov cocktails and revolutionary rhetoric. Radical Kiwis have always been involved in plenty of the Che Guevara type romance and revolutionary bravado. Molotov cocktail throwing has often been a left wing party trick.
During the 60's a radical group of students engaged to blow up military depots but after a spell in jail they became hard working citizens. I wrote about all this in Bullshit and Jellybeans.
My worry is that if we react to 9/11 by refusing to fly, avoiding the London tube, cancelling our holidays to Bali or treating our own Kiwi radicals like card carrying members of Al Qaeda then the terrorists have won.
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to political murders in New Zealand, it's the right wing extremists we should be arresting. The Waihi strike, the Wellington Trade Union Hall, the Lyttleton tunnel picket and the Rainbow Warrior are all instances where right wing bigots have murdered left wingers but for the life of me I cannot recall a single instance in New Zealand's history where a left wing revolutionary has killed a right wing bigot.
But judging from the sensational media reports and Police responses you would think our history was all about violent left wing revolutionaries.
The other issue that worries me is where on earth the police get their information from. I've just finished reading a book called Adrenalin Rush by Andy Bell. He worked as an undercover cop spying on radical student groups during the 1970's. He wrote some very flattering stories about me and I guess I should feel flattered, but none of the stories he wrote about me were true.
Before he became a police officer he used to come to happenings in Albert Park and listen to my speeches so it can't have been a case of mistaken identity. He had me popping up in Wellington and Christchurch when I was in Auckland. As I said he was very generous in his praise but the inaccuracy of these reports really did disturb me.
If this recent spate of arrests is based on similar "information" then this country has got some real problems. We saw what happened during the McCarthy era and the hysterical paranoia that was generated by the threat of communism. It would be tragic if we dramatically changed our lifestyle and ditched our liberal political philosophies because we were convinced that Tama Iti was an international Islamic styled terrorist.
Some will argue that the mass arrests of "terrorists" has nipped armed insurrection in the bud as well as being a brilliant diversion from mounting sexual allegations against the Police, while others will argue that this exercise is a provocative over reaction that is more likely to transform Smith's Dream and Brown October from fictional novels into political reality.
