Gareth Morgan is formally stepping away from The Opportunities Party, the party he founded to contest the 2017 election (Image: Tina Tiller)

PoliticsMarch 31, 2019

Gareth Morgan gone for good: How TOP plans to rebuild

Alex Braae

Staff Writer

Gareth Morgan is formally stepping away from The Opportunities Party, the party he founded to contest the 2017 election (Image: Tina Tiller)

The Opportunities Party is in the midst of a sweeping transformation, with founder Gareth Morgan stepping away and a new group around Geoff Simmons taking over the leadership.

When The Opportunities Party launched ahead of the 2017 election, it was all but synonymous with Gareth Morgan. After years of high-profile ventures and acerbic interventions into policy debates, his presence propelled the party into immediate relevance. But now The Spinoff can reveal he has cut all ties to the party he founded.

Gareth Morgan will no longer be giving the party any financial support. He has also resigned from the policy board which, after last year’s leadership election, he said he would be part of.

He says his foray into politics was a one-off, and that his biggest pride was in the policy work he did over the preceding decade. He was warm towards his former TOP colleagues, saying he fully respected those who saw established parties as caretakers, and that the party was in good hands.

Despite a creditable 2.4% of the vote in 2017, The Opportunities Party didn’t make it into parliament. “The voters said thanks very much but no thanks – so that’s it, sayonara,” said Morgan in an interview with The Spinoff. He expected the people taking over would face significant challenges, and that there would be tensions now that the “sugar daddy” of the party was gone, in his words.

“I think those picking up the cudgels – while I take my hat off to them for tenacity – have realised pretty quickly just how hard it is to do all the stuff needed to foot it with those parties that have been hanging about for decades. Others in TOP are just dreamers – think money grows on trees, and have no idea of the work needed,” said Morgan.

Many of the tribulations have been well covered. Two leading candidates, Dr Jenny Condie and Jessica Hammond Doube, split off to form the group Civic, amid heavy acrimony with Gareth Morgan (though some Civic members have now returned). Last year the party’s board decided to de-register, but that was later reversed. Geoff Simmons, the former deputy, won a leadership election at the end of last year, despite Gareth Morgan publicly backing his rival Amy Stevens. In the first two polls of this year, the party hasn’t even been the highest-rating party outside parliament.

As part of the transition to new leadership, Gareth Morgan set up a board to run the party, consisting of Simmons, 2017 Rangitata candidate Olly Wilson, and 2017 Rongotai candidate Paddy Plunket. But both Wilson and Plunket have now resigned from that board, though have remained involved with the party. Two new people are now on the board, membership representative Donna Pokere-Phillips and Matt Isbister – six and 21 on the 2017 list respectively.

“When we took over from Gareth, it’s fair to say it was a bit of a hospital pass. We’ve had to set up an entire organisation from scratch, and it’s been a fair amount of work for both of them,” said Simmons, speaking about the departed board members. He indicated that both Plunket and Wilson are considering standing again as candidates.

Olly Wilson said his reasons for resignation were largely because of work commitments, but he also expressed disillusionment with how voters made their minds up in 2017. In his view TOP’s agenda – which was often characterised as radical during the campaign – would get cut-through with the public only if the country was facing a crisis. “The voters aren’t prepared to sacrifice to set up a better nation for our children, they’re focused on what they’re going to get given now.”

This was similar to views expressed by Gareth Morgan, who during the campaign sometimes berated people for not agreeing with his policy programme. Earlier in the week he maintained that his main interest remained policy, rather than politics. “Frankly I couldn’t care less whether those responsible for achieving that are National, Labour, the Greens or TOP. As far as I’m concerned TOP2017 presented best-practice policy across a range of areas and whether New Zealand takes all or some of them up is up to voters and whichever politicians spins their wheels.”

Geoff Simmons sits alongside his rivals in the 2017 Mt Albert by-election – future PM Jacinda Ardern and future women’s minister Julie Anne Genter – and The Spinoff debate MC, Simon Wilson

One mischaracterisation about TOP is that they were purely a vehicle for Gareth Morgan, though he did wield immense power over the party. During the 2017 election campaign, TOP was highly visible – and not just the visibility that can be bought. Members were active at public events and on social media. It’s the same mischaracterisation that was made about the Conservative Party, back when Colin Craig was there – last year the party morphed into New Conservative after an electoral drubbing, and this year, it cracked 1% in a Newshub Reid Research poll.

Compare that to United Future after Peter Dunne left, where the party was a shell of an organisation that Damian Light tried and failed to keep alive. Or consider the Sustainable NZ party led by Vernon Tava. Despite a flare of publicity in recent months, they are yet to have their registration confirmed by the Electoral Commission, which requires 500 financial members. When contacted, Vernon Tava said the party did not disclose membership numbers.

Recently elected leader Geoff Simmons says the membership for TOP remains healthy, saying it is “about 4200, at the last count”. Of those members, only slightly more than 1000 voted in the recent leadership election – 678 of whom voted for Simmons – but he says that had more to do with the logistics of communicating details about the election to members than lack of interest. “We actually had a pretty big challenge just to inform our members about that stuff. There may have been some that didn’t bother because they thought it was a foregone conclusion, but who knows.”

Simmons has spent much of this month travelling around the country, on a roadshow to speak to the membership. He says around a dozen people turned out to events in each of Ashburton and Waimate recently, and significantly bigger crowds have been turning up in the cities. “We’re only just starting to realise the power of the old telephone and have been getting in touch with our members and volunteers that way. That’s part of the switch from the approach that Gareth was taking as leader, and what we’re trying to do now.”

A major part of the transition is a new, membership-based model of organising and funding. Previously Gareth Morgan, a multi-millionaire, had bankrolled the party’s operations, and the loss of that funding is a blow. Simmons said the party was in no danger of going broke.

However, there are signs that the operations, having previously been relatively slick, are under strain. The announcement of Gareth Morgan’s departure is taking place on Sunday via an email to members. However, the news has been known to some within the party for at least a week. As well as that, the “join” page on the TOP website was returning a 404 error message, until the party was alerted to it by The Spinoff. It has now been fixed.

Simmons was diplomatic when asked if he wanted Gareth Morgan to depart from the party. “Obviously he has a massive intellect and makes a fantastic contribution on the policy side, and on the other side, he often makes the communication strategy difficult, so it’s swings and roundabouts.”

As for Morgan, he had some final words about what he plans to do after politics. “Now I’m off back to living my life. Yippee.”

Keep going!

A still from the film I Spy (With My Five Eyes)

PoliticsMarch 29, 2019

Why mass surveillance is not the answer to the atrocity of Christchurch

Thomas Beagle

Guest writer

A still from the film I Spy (With My Five Eyes)

We should think very carefully before making changes to laws that will affect civil liberties, writes Thomas Beagle

As the initial shock and horror of the Christchurch mosque massacre begins to subside, people naturally turn to the question “How could this happen?” How did the perpetrator become radicalised? And how did our intelligence agencies miss the impending attack? And the obvious follow-up question: “How can we stop this happening again?”

There have been calls for more government intervention. New gun control regulations have been issued and there is cross-party support for a more restrictive firearms law. There are three other possible interventions I’d like to look at.

National leader Simon Bridges is calling for more powers for the intelligence agencies. While his understanding of SpearGun is flawed, he seems to be envisaging some sort of mass surveillance of all internet traffic in an effort to find extremist white supremacist content.

Others are supporting ISP (and now government) bans on websites such as 4chan and 8chan either because they hosted the video or because they are known to host extremist communities (other large websites with this issue like Twitter were not affected).

And finally, there’s the ongoing discussion about whether New Zealand should expand its very rudimentary hate speech laws to limit aggressive and divisive language against minorities.

Any new government restrictions and controls raise concerns for our civil liberties. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act includes freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and of course, freedom of expression. All of these rights are threatened by increased controls and monitoring of what people say and read online.

I believe that these rights are important and worth defending. They allow us to talk, to organise, to stand up against unfair government impositions, to campaign for a better New Zealand. They underpin our democratic system of government. It would be a great pity if we let ourselves be rushed into unnecessarily restricting them as an unthinking reaction.

However, these rights are not absolute. We already limit these rights in a number of ways such as censorship and laws against defamation. The Bill of Rights also say these may be reasonably limited by law “as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. Justification must include that the proposed changes will be effective, possible to implement, as minimal as possible, based in law, and administered fairly. And, importantly, that the changes won’t do more damage to society and our freedom than the harm they’re attempting to stop.

So can these changes be justified?

I believe that increasing the powers of the intelligence agencies and implementing mass surveillance is probably unnecessary when other more obvious explanations are at hand. It seems clear that the agencies have been neglecting the threat represented by the international rise of the white-supremacist extreme right.

We’ve also already significantly expanded the surveillance powers of the agencies with various reforms since 2001, followed by a comprehensive revamp in the Intelligence and Security Act 2017 which merged the laws controlling the GCSB and SIS. The agencies have consistently received much of what they have asked for and have extensive powers to intercept communications and spy on people where this can be justified.

I oppose mass surveillance as unnecessary, expensive, and as an unwarranted intrusion into our lives. We’ve been finding out how Facebook uses data to manipulate entire populations, imagine how much worse it could be if a government could capture all internet traffic and combine it with its own knowledge to manipulate and intimidate people. Even the knowledge that mass surveillance has been implemented has a chilling effect on dissent. I believe that implementing mass surveillance fails the “changes won’t do more damage to society and our freedom than the harm they’re attempting to stop” test.

The nature of the work of the intelligence agencies is that we don’t know how well they have done and they can use secrecy to avoid telling us. The Royal Commission will be looking into this and, while this will take time, we should wait for the results.

The blocking of websites would seem to quickly fail the “possible to implement” and “effective” tests. While blocking might prevent casual users from visiting one of these sites, any motivated person can easily circumvent such blocks through the use of VPNs (so their internet traffic appears to be coming from a different country). While China has demonstrated that it is at least somewhat possible to create an intensely surveilled walled internet, I feel confident that no one is seriously considering that we should copy their example.

Then there is the issue of hate speech in New Zealand where some people feel that our laws have fallen behind countries with similar values to ours. For the record, I believe that speech can be harmful, that those harms tend to fall more on minorities or those without power, and that society has a duty to defend itself and its members from harm. Hate speech also tends to be of low political value: no democracy based on human rights and civil liberties can seriously entertain the idea that entire classes of people are less than human because of their race, sexuality, religious beliefs, or similar attributes.

But hate speech laws are not easy. We are sophisticated users of language and can communicate hateful ideas in ways that are too subtle to catch with the law. There are also many who would like to classify the ideas of their political opponents as hate and thus worth banning. A badly constructed law would not do enough to protect, while possibly preventing non-hateful political debate. While I am open to the idea of improving our hate speech laws to stop real harm being down to some of our communities, I think it would be a terrible idea to rush into it.

If you were hoping to read a full-throated “no more laws infringing on our civil liberties!” I fear you may be disappointed after getting this far. Civil liberties are a tool to help us collectively live together in a democracy. They’re a recognition that while governments are subject to the people en masse, governments are significantly more powerful than individuals or small groups.

They’re important enough that we should be careful about making changes to our laws that will affect them. The killer chose New Zealand because of the sort of society we are. We don’t want to give that away. Making changes as a knee-jerk reaction to a horrific event is obviously not a good idea, but neither is assuming that what worked in the past will always work in the future.

And the one parting thought I’d like to leave you with is that while some argue that the rise of the extreme right is a good reason to give our government more power to monitor people and limit certain forms of political expression, the international rise of neo-fascist governments is surely a reason to make sure we don’t carelessly give our government powers that may be used against us in the future.

Thomas Beagle is chairperson of the NZ Council for Civil Liberties. Views in this article are the personal views of the author and may not represent the views of the NZCCL.