STEVE BRAUNIAS INTERVIEW: Make love, not war

Former cop and foaming right-wing MP Ross Meurant now wants it known that he believes police culture is sick, and that the arrests of so-called Urewera terrorists are a farce. What explains this peculiar metamorphosis?
DEEP IN THE FOREST

Look what the cat dragged in. It was thought, and hoped, that Ross Meurant one of the most loathsome figures in modern New Zealand history had disappeared into whatever ether of his choosing. But he performed an unlikely return to public life last week. There he was on Morning Report, then on Campbell Live, then on John Tamihere's Radio Live show, not to talk the windy militant trash he used to spout as a cop who was voted into parliament as a right-wing National Party MP for three terms. Bizarrely, eloquently, he re-emerged to pour scorn on the arrests of suspected terrorists in the Ureweras, and to blame it on a self-serving, deluded police culture. He was concerned about the abuse of our civil liberties. He warned Helen Clark ("a wonderful prime minister") not to "tread on our dreams". Dreams, and civil liberties, from Ross Meurant? He said: "I've changed my way of thinking."

Interesting. I called him up for an interview. He rambled for a long time, and said, "No." He phoned back approximately 20 minutes later, rambled for a long time, and said, "Yes." We arranged to meet on Wednesday morning. His chosen venue: a cafe inside a garden centre in Remuera. The day's specials were German pots, and flowering clivias; Meurant, 60, barrel-chested, dressed in black, was delivered to the door in a 4WD driven by a slender young blonde. Two hours later, when she picked him up, I remarked that he had a very attractive driver for a man his age. He said, "I run every morning, don't drink grog, so ..." What, I asked, is she your girlfriend? He smiled, and said, "That's my personal life."

Meurant said: "I don't want this about me. It's not about me. It's about the issues." As soon as we sat down in the cafe, he opened up his laptop, and read from a prepared statement. This dictation, with asides, took nearly 30 minutes. Later, he tidied it up "titillated it", he said when I invited him to publish his speech in its entirety on the newspaper's website (sstlive.co.nz).

Highlights? He read out: "Behind every tree they see a bad guy." And: "As a detective in the mid 70s I applied to go to university. I was asked: `Are you a Communist?'... My lecturers included Helen Clark, Phil Goff and Michael Bassett ... The first rays of lights began to appear. Slowly the mists began to abate and I saw things from a different perspective." An aside: "The things that some of these people were teaching, I just thought were a crock of shit. I'd probably share their views now." He continued his dictation: "I'm immensely grateful for how those institutions unwittingly helped me exorcise the demons of excessive exposure to police culture."

Also: "I've had experience with the Police Complaints Authority, and it's just a farce. A laughable mockery. That only leaves one institution, and that's the Fourth Estate." He took off his glasses, and said as an aside, "I never used to think that. I just thought all media people were bastards. I thought like a policeman: they should all be shot."

I began to miss that Meurant. You knew where you were with him he was unequivocal, primitive, disgraceful. As second in command of the police Red Squad during the 1981 Springbok Tour, he wrote a book about that experience, and cast himself as a heroic warrior who defended New Zealand against the anti-apartheid protest mob. Later, as an MP, he criticised National leader and Prime Minister Jim Bolger's decision to apologise to Nelson Mandela for 1981, and argued that police should have used stronger force.

Another of his books, The Beat to the Beehive, was reviewed thus by the late Michael King: "Outstandingly bad ... Laughable ... Sinister." King concluded: "Keep your eye out for an ex-policeman with near psychopathic inclinations. And avoid him."

Know thy ghoul. But who was this strange rooster who now talked gravely of a "constitutional crisis" at a garden centre in Remuera, where crazy old dames creaked out of their Mercs? He spoke of himself as "the new Ross Meurant". He was Lazarus among the gardenias. Actually, I suspected he was doing what he'd always done: scaremongering, spuriously.

"All of a sudden," he said, "the police have the power, through this anti-terrorist legislation, to take away our rights before our very eyes. If they can get away with that, where to next? I mean, maybe they won't like who you vote for. Maybe they won't like who I vote for. Who knows?"

MEURANT NOW lives in Prague. He said he works in corporate and agricultural trade: "Everything's up for sale in eastern Europe ... There are always enormous opportunities where there is deregulation and privatisation." At least his economic principles remained consistent: "I think Roger Douglas saved the planet."

Similarly, his reason for selling his infamous aluminium PR24 police baton from the 1981 Tour on TradeMe: "I'm a capitalist." He said he got $20,000 for the "stick", which is now in a museum in South Africa.

This was a Meurant you could recognise. Still, it seemed entirely reasonable when he said, "I'm pleased with me that I grow and evolve and change my opinion. I'd hate to be thinking as I did when I was a detective on the drug squad." And you could very easily say it was brave of Meurant to speak out against the cops. They've always been the same, he said, always stretching information to their own ends. He gave an example when I asked him about his role on June 23, 1970. He knew instantly what that date meant: as a constable on his first homicide, Meurant searched the garden outside Harvey and Jeanette Crewe's house.

He said, "I'm the guy who raked that bit of dirt where subsequently the partial bullet was found." This was the cartridge which led to the conviction of Arthur Allan Thomas, who was later pardoned for the Crewe murders, and the cartridge "discovery" discredited. Meurant continued, "I gave evidence in court to say I sieve-searched that garden methodically, exactly as the manual said, and there was no bullet there. Pressure came on me, from the highest authority, to say that I'd actually been careless, and that's why the bullet was subsequently found. I remember saying to one very senior officer that you can't seriously be expecting me to go and say, `Well, maybe I did cock up and missed it.' There's no doubt the bullet in its cartridge case was planted."

As for the "data" collected by police to obtain warrants for the 17 arrested in anti-terrorist raids he doubted that it amounted to anything more than loose talk, perhaps a few unlawful firearms offences.

Meurant has long experience of the culture he now wants to damn. You might describe him as a credible witness.

But I doubted his claims that he had been "exorcised of his demons" by attending university. It was as though he was saying he had been raised by wolves, but education brought him into civilised thought. That felt like a nonsense. If he really had changed his views, if the leopard had changed its spots, then something else, something more intimate, was the agent.

Meurant told a story. It began as the reason why he left New Zealand for Europe.

He said, "What I noticed most when I finished parliament was the phone stopped ringing. It took five years actually for me to hit the bottom. I went out and bought a farm, taught kids how to ride horses, and I kind of atrophied. I didn't realise at the time it was taking a toll on my self-esteem.

"I was on a contract in Australia, in 2003, and all of a sudden I started to cry. And I thought that was just bloody stupid. Ross Meurant doesn't cry. But I cried, and I couldn't stop crying. I got off the plane back over here and spent some time with my kids, and they encouraged me to go see a shrink. Which I did. Three sessions at $300 a pop.

"He was able to explain to me where I was at. He said, `You were a hotshot in the police, a hotshot as an MP, and all of a sudden you're nothing, you're nobody, and it's taken you a little while to work out that you're not in control of things as you were before.' And I'd just lost the farm through a second matrimonial cock-up.

"So that's the human side of why I left. I am human. I did cry a lot. And then I thought, well, I've got to do what I know I'm best at, what I've got experience at, so that's how I ended up, on my own initiative, flying into Russia. I made contact with somebody I knew from the days I was a director on the Russian bank Prok down here. And all of a sudden, the mists cleared for me in respect of my own personal problems."

I asked him whether he had been describing depression. "Oh yeah. I mean, I couldn't drink a glass of water without feeling like I was going to drown. I was going nowhere, and nothing was happening." And then he said, "That was a critical turning point for me in the things we're talking about."

He meant the policing issues. How so? "Well," he said, "now that you're talking to me about it, I suppose that was the critical point. Because when I emerged from that, I read this book by the Dalai Lama. It was only a pamphlet; I just happened to be reading it somewhere. Basically his argument was, don't fight negative battles. It made me realise that I'd fought so many negative battles. It was fighting enemies, you know, from being a cop, and thinking about all these guys behind trees. At that point, my kids would actually say yes, that was when I changed.

"I figured, my kids love me, my dog loves me, my horse loves me, and I'll go and do some positive things and maybe make my life more enjoyable."

And what he was talking about now wanting debate on police powers that was a positive thing, too, wasn't it? "I think it is," he said. "See, I could so easily get on the plane next week, go back to Prague, and think, `Who cares about New Zealand?' But I do care."

He took a call on his mobile phone. He said later, "That was Pita Sharples." The previous night, he said, he met John Minto. "For the first time ever, we shook hands." A historic moment: Meurant, the Red Squad plod, in a peace and reconciliation moment with Minto, the most famous anti-apartheid protester from 1981. That had been arranged by a civil liberties group wanting him to address a rally. Once again, the phones were ringing. Lazarus was back by popular demand.

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