Machinion Post

Wellington, Aug. 13 - Superintendent Naidoo was confirmed on the eighth of June as a list-only candidate for the Labour Party, ranked thirteenth on that list, a position that all but guarantees him a seat in Parliament. Before that confirmation, and it now appears afterward as well, he was present at a briefing described as sensitive. The Minister of Police, Mark Mitchell, has said he held pre-existing concerns about that attendance. Beyond that, the record now before this newspaper is silent on what the briefing concerned, what safeguards were or were not applied, and what the Minister did with his concerns once he held them.

What is at stake is not the career of one officer but the public's confidence that sensitive Police information does not travel by a side door into party politics. Aotearoa has long permitted serving officers to seek office, and rightly so; a uniform is not a lifetime bar on citizenship, and Parliament is the poorer for excluding those with operational experience of crime and its consequences. The Police service has proper mechanisms, stepping back from sensitive work, declaring a conflict, in some cases resignation ahead of confirmation, precisely so that this right can be exercised without compromising what the public is entitled to expect of its intelligence apparatus.

The fair question, then, is whether those mechanisms were used here, and if not, why not. It is entirely possible that Superintendent Naidoo's presence at the briefing was proper and unremarkable, arranged before his candidacy was confirmed and ended promptly after. It is equally possible that a gap in oversight let a foreseeable conflict run longer than it should have. The Minister's own admission of pre-existing concern suggests this was not simply hindsight; if he saw a problem forming, the country is owed an account of what steps followed that recognition, and when.

Wellington, Aug. 13 - Police have admitted spreading incorrect information about Superintendent Rakesh Naidoo after his announcement as a candidate for the Labour Party. An assistant commissioner has apologised. That much is not in dispute, and this newspaper takes it as the starting point.

What is at stake here is larger than one officer's reputation, though that reputation matters and the apology to him was owed. Police stand apart from the parties they serve under; the public accepts direction from them only on the understanding that the force treats every citizen, and every one of its own members, without regard to politics. If incorrect information about a serving superintendent happened to circulate at the very moment his candidacy became public, the coincidence deserves an explanation, not merely an apology. Without one, the episode will sit in the public mind as evidence of something worse than error, whether or not that suspicion is fair.

It may be no such thing. An apology offered readily, without argument, is at least some evidence of good faith, and this newspaper has seen nothing to suggest deliberate targeting rather than an administrative failure poorly timed. Mistakes of this kind do happen inside large organisations, and Police have not been shy in the past about correcting themselves in public, which is to their credit. But an admission of error is the beginning of accountability, not the end of it, and the public has been told what went wrong without yet being told how it happened or who allowed it to happen.

The Minister of Police, Mark Mitchell, has no business directing the operational detail of how Police handle information about their own staff, and this newspaper does not ask him to. He does have business asking the Commissioner for a full account of the failure, and seeing that the account reaches the public rather than a filing cabinet. Neutrality is not preserved by silence after an error; it is preserved by showing the workings once the error is found.

Wellington, Aug. 12 - A police superintendent, Rakesh Naidoo, corresponded with colleagues and with the Labour Party about entering political life, and told the Commissioner of Police of his intention two weeks before his selection as a candidate. That is the fact of the matter, established by information released to RNZ. What has not been established, and what ought now to concern the Minister of Police, Mark Mitchell, is whether two weeks is what the rules require, or whether there are any rules at all that the public can see.

What is at stake is not one officer's ambition. It is the public's confidence that the Police stand apart from party contest, so that a citizen dealing with a constable has no cause to wonder which side of politics that constable favours. This matters as much for a Labour candidacy as it would for a National one, and the Minister should take no comfort from the party involved. The question is institutional, not partisan.

The strongest thing to be said for the Superintendent, and it should be said plainly, is that a serving officer remains a citizen with the same right to stand for Parliament as anyone else, and nothing in the record disclosed suggests he did anything but notify his superior in advance of his selection. On the facts released, he told the Commissioner before the fact, not after it. If two weeks' notice satisfies whatever policy the Police hold on this question, then no fault attaches to him at all, and this newspaper does not suggest otherwise.

The trouble is that nobody outside the Police appears to know what that policy is, or whether one exists in any settled form. A timeline has been reconstructed from correspondence obtained under request; a rule has not been produced. That is the deficiency the Minister should address, not the conduct of one officer who, so far as the record shows, followed whatever process there was to follow. The next officer who wishes to stand for Parliament, of whatever party, deserves to know in advance what is expected, rather than have it assembled afterwards from files.