A Reluctant Jeremiad (Thoughts On The Latest Vice-Regal Appointment)

A Career of Blameless Excellence?: We must all hope that Lieutenant-General Jerry Mateparae is, indeed, that rarest of beings: a senior military officer who has never failed to do what was right - in a shooting war. It's certainly not something that can be said of the last Governor-General with a military background - Sir Bernard Fergusson. Not unless you consider torture and murder to be accepatble instruments of military policy.

THE APPOINTMENT of Lieutenant-General Jeremiah "Jerry" Mateparae as New Zealand’s next Governor-General has puzzled many New Zealanders. Hardly surprising, given that the last vice-regal appointee from a military background was British-born Sir Bernard Fergusson, way back in 1962.

Since Fergusson’s term came to an end in 1967, all those appointed to the position have been native-born New Zealanders – and none have been soldiers.

Sir Arthur Porritt was a distinguished doctor. Sir Keith Holyoake and Dame Catherine Tizard were politicians. Sir Paul Reeves was an Anglican Archbishop. All the others: Sir Dennis Blundell, Sir David Beattie, Sir Michael Hardy Boys, Dame Silvia Cartwright and the present Governor-General, Sir Anand Satyanand, were judges.

There’s a very good reason why Fergusson was the last Governor-General with a military background. How many senior military officers are there who, at some point in their careers, have not found themselves involved in matters that really couldn’t stand the light of day? When the application of deadly force is the essence of one’s profession, moral failure is practically inevitable.

Fergusson was no exception to this rule. Had he been forced to withstand the same degree of scrutiny to which Presidential nominees to the United States Cabinet are subjected, Fergusson would never have made it to Government House.

It is highly unlikely that Keith Holyoake, New Zealand’s Prime Minister at the time of Fergusson’s appointment, was unaware of the very large skeleton rattling around in his new Governor-General’s closet. That it was not deemed sufficiently important to block Fergusson’s nomination merely confirms how subservient to the "Mother Country" New Zealand’s politicians still were in the early-1960s.

Their reticence is understandable. It was a time when the United Kingdom absorbed more than three-fourths of New Zealand’s primary exports. "God Save the Queen" kicked off the programme in every movie theatre. And royal visits sent normally undemonstrative New Zealanders into paroxysms of royalist fervour.

If Downing Street and the Palace considered Brigadier Fergusson the right man to take up the same vice-regal duties as his father and grandfathers, then not even his role in the torture and murder of an 16-year-old Jewish boy was going to persuade the New Zealand Government to disagree.

The tortured teenager’s name was Alexander Rubowitz, and he’d been murdered 15 years earlier in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

Members of a Special Police Unit had arrested Rubowitz as he was pasting up posters on behalf of Lehi – a Zionist resistance organisation. He was bundled into an unmarked car and driven several miles down the Jericho Road. There he was tortured by the counter-terrorist unit’s leader, Captain Roy Farran. When Rubowitz refused to reveal the names of his comrades, Farran repeatedly struck him on the head with a stone, killing him. Farran then ordered the boy’s body stripped and disposed of in a roadside ditch.

The counter-terrorist unit responsible for Rubowitz’s death was the brainchild of Palestine’s Assistant Inspector-General of Police, Colonel Bernard Fergusson. He had persuaded his superiors to set it up in February 1947 to seek out and destroy the Zionist terrorist cells against which the British army of was fighting a vicious guerrilla war. The unit itself was made up of former SAS soldiers and modelled on the "Special Night Squads" established by Orde Wyngate (with whom Fergusson had served in Burma during World War II). Wyngate’s units – which were little more than death squads – had been highly effective in quelling the Palestinian Arab Revolt of the 1920s and 30s.

It was to Fergusson that Farran confessed the murder of Rubowitz on 7 May 1947. The record shows that the British authorities first instinct was to cover the whole thing up. Indeed, had it not been for the dogged efforts of a British CID officer the disappearance of Rubowitz (whose body was never found) would have remained a mystery. Even so, Farran escaped any punishment for the boy’s murder. At the trial, Fergusson’s refusal to testify – on the grounds that any answers would constitute self-incrimination – caused the prosecution’s case against Farran to collapse.

Fergusson, himself, was packed-off back to the United Kingdom where his staunch defence of a self-confessed murderer, and involvement in the cover-up of a war-crime, did not appear to do his career the slightest harm. He retired from active duty with the rank of Brigadier in 1958.

That Holyoake and his advisers were aware of Fergusson’s record in Palestine seems highly likely. The rumour-mills of the armed services grind away with no less energy than those of other large institutions. In the early 1960s, however, Fergusson’s moral failure would never have surfaced in the New Zealand press. Nevertheless, the fact that the New Zealand Government never again allowed Downing Street and the Palace to choose our Governors-General, and that no military person has been appointed to the position for 44 years, strongly suggests that Fergusson’s role in the "Farran Affair" made a strong impression.

Which is why the appointment of Lieutenant-General Jerry Mateparae is such a puzzle. Our news media has come a long way since 1962. In today’s much more transparent political environment, the slightest hint of a skeleton lurking in the closet of a Governor-General Designate is certain to be revealed.

Did no one in authority pause to consider the sheer unlikelihood of a senior military officer, in command of military forces engaged in the subjugation of a guerrilla army, in a theatre of war rife with reports of "terrorist suspects" being tortured and murdered, emerging from the process entirely innocent of even one serious moral failure?

It is surely a critical weakness of our current constitutional practice that the proper scrutiny of those chosen to fill the role (in the Queen’s absence) of New Zealand’s Head of State cannot be undertaken until after their appointment has been announced.

We must all hope that Jerry Mateparae is, indeed, that rarest of beings: a senior military officer who has never failed to do what was right – in a shooting war.