KEY POINTS:
Rarely has a New Zealand law suffered such a rubbishing as that given the Terrorism Suppression Act by Solicitor-General David Collins yesterday.
He has slammed it as "unnecessarily complex", "incoherent" and "almost impossible to apply" to the circumstances surrounding last month's anti-terrorist police raids. Yet Mr Collins has
also gone out of his way in backing the police for trying to lay prosecutions under the law.
That ringing endorsement will probably save Police Commissioner Howard Broad's neck. He must otherwise shoulder some of the blame for the shambles, and the embarrassment, resulting from the police over-reaching themselves in pursuing terrorism charges when they could have been laid under other criminal laws.
Phil Goff, who was the minister in charge of the Terrorism Suppression Act when it was passed by Parliament in 2002, cannot escape some liability. Likewise, the political parties complicit in backing the law, and ignoring the pleas from the Greens' Keith Locke to reconsider.
The Government spin yesterday was that the law was written to cover terrorism activities by foreigners and never intended to be used in a domestic context. That is sort of true. But, if so, why were the police seeking to use it?
The Beehive also sought to defuse the impact of Mr Collins' bombshell - for want of a better word - by saying it should not be forgotten those who had escaped possible terrorism charges still faced serious charges under the Arms Act.
The other defence was that the system and its safeguards worked. The police gathered evidence of alleged terrorist activity. It was placed before the Solicitor-General. He determined it was insufficient for prosecutions to be taken.
But if the law is such a dog, why did the police's legal advisers proceed in trying to get prosecutions?
The overseas experience is that of those detained under terrorism law, few are actually charged and fewer convicted.
The police should have been doubly careful, because in New Zealand's case the law had not been tested.
There is also the question of intent. Mr Collins says there would have been major difficulty proving intent to commit a terrorist act under the law. The police obviously saw things differently. But because we still have not seen the police evidence, and may now never see much of it, it is impossible to judge whether they had grounds for claiming intent on the part of those allegedly involved.
If this has been a lesson to the police, it should be a lesson to Parliament. But that message seemed lost on most MPs yesterday. By coincidence, they were scheduled to debate the final reading of the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill shortly after Mr Collins' announcement.
You might have thought the absurdity of debating a bill amending a flawed law might have given Parliament pause for thought.
But no. MPs went ahead with the debate on the pretext the bill should be passed into law because most of its clauses relate to terrorism by foreigners and, anyway, the whole legislative fiasco can be sorted out by the Law Commission - as recommended by the Solicitor-General.
