Fran O’Sullivan: Terror alert no political smokescreen

What's all the fuss about Prime Minister John Howard doing the right thing by his citizens and rushing through urgent legislation to beef up counter-terrorism laws?

The terror threat in Australia - where 600 New Zealanders migrate each week - is real.

That became apparent yesterday when police confirmed Howard's warning about the emergence of new potential terrorist groups.

Predictably the liberal chattering classes have demonised him, claiming he has mounted a diversion against the introduction of new employment legislation.

Political analysts were dismissive of the PM's tactics. But if Howard is guilty of concocting a diversion, so is Labor Leader Kim Beazley, who was briefed on the terror threat and who approved the urgent legislative changes.

If Prime Minister Helen Clark wanted to put out an alert, inevitably she would brief National's Don Brash confidentially. Inevitably Brash would back her if the facts stood up.

Three aspects need to be considered before the rose-tinted spectacles are applied.

First, New Zealanders will be affected if Australia has a major terrorist attack. Kiwis make up the largest migrant group in Australia and are heavily represented in Sydney and Melbourne - the two most obvious targets.

Howard's decision to back George Bush's Iraq invasion was high-risk. Other Bush allies - notably Britain and Spain - have been subject to domestic terror bombs.

Only the irrational would believe Australia is not a potential target. Only the irrational would not thank Howard for having the courage to face down liberals with their misguided focus on the preservation of "civil rights" (do they really want to protect potential terrorists ?) at the expense of the rest of us.

We would rather our Governments exercise a fundamental duty to protect their citizenry from being blasted into a bloody mess of spare parts by those same terrorists.

Second, it is short-sighted to claim a terrorist threat is unlikely to emerge in New Zealand. The first Bali bombing should have finally dispelled the notion that we live in a "strategically benign environment".

Islamic fundamentalism is alive and well - even here. The initial signals came - even before September 11 or the Bali bombing - when police busted an Afghan network in Auckland which had plans of Sydney's nuclear facility.

Afghanistan's Foreign Minister, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, is convinced that New Zealand still harbours more than a few individuals who received their own training in terrorist tactics at special Al Qaeda camps in his country.

Abdullah held confidential talks with both the Clark and Howard Governments in August to enable greater sharing of intelligence between all three over the movement of potential terrorists in the region.

"Countries like New Zealand might be better off because of their own perception of the level of threat," he told me. "But there is a need for everyone to be part of it.

"Safe havens like yours are also safe havens for terrorists."

Third, it is the secretive war in which our SAS special forces are engaged within Afghanistan that poses a more fundamental threat to domestic safety.

The Government's misguided belief in the efficacy of the United Nations - and strong proselytising by former Foreign Minister Phil Goff - blinds New Zealanders to the reality that UN-sanctioned war in Afghanistan has turned very nasty.

Abdullah's visit - in the thick of the election campaign - did not make front-page headlines. It was mainly portrayed as a "thank you" trip for the $110 million of help New Zealand has given to the bid to rid Afghanistan of terror networks and establish democratic government in the aftermath of the Taleban regime.

That assistance was portrayed as essentially humanitarian. But dig down and you find that only $20 million is development aid for the so-called humanitarian work by the 123-strong Provincial Reconstruction team in Bamiyan Province. Dig further and there are questions over how much of the PRT's work is essentially militaristic.

In fact most of New Zealand's resource is spent on funding our SAS special forces working alongside the US, Australia and Britain - effectively a US-led coalition - to stop the resurgence of the Taleban.

But the real nub of Abdullah's visit was to try to persuade the Clark-led Government to extend the SAS tour beyond next September. We have 40 SAS soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. Clark has deferred the decision for now.

Independent reports have found that terrorist attacks against civilians in Afghanistan have burgeoned since 2002.

The problem for New Zealand is that news has emerged of major abuses by US troops that rival those in Iraq. Psychological abuses - including the desecration of Taleban corpses - have made headlines. US troops are in the frame.

But our Government's secretive approach to the SAS operations means citizens have little understanding of whether this invasion has left us just as exposed to terrorist retaliation as those countries who joined the Iraq mission.

Until those risks are assessed we should not be too quick to demonise John Howard.