Brendan Horsley

Keeper of secrets

Brendan Horsley has been losing sleep. A keeper of the state’s most powerful secrets, he has total access to the locked-away knowledge of budding terrorists, foreign operatives, the full suite of perils facing New Zealand.

But, a year into the job as the inspectorgeneral of intelligence and security, the watchdog of the country’s spies, all of this is not what’s keeping him awake at night.

He has a new puppy, Turtle. The designer dog has taken the spot left behind by an aloof, anti-social shar pei called Walter, who died more than a year ago. ‘‘It’s cute. Seriously cute,’’ Horsley says about his new spaniel, poodle, labrador-cross.

The puppy is a disarming detail about Horsley, 54, a high-ranking lawyer with a reputation for being ‘‘powerful’’ – a reputation over which he shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Sitting in a conference room on the first floor of Defence House, a new office building behind the Beehive, Horsley is dressed in a sharp blue suit and perfectly shiny black leather boots. He has a wide smile and a deep chuckle.

‘‘I don’t lose sleep over the safety and security of New Zealand, that’s true,’’ he says. ‘‘But you do get worried for things like the challenge to democracy, when you think about things like the interference . . . On the security side of it, I think everybody worries about what extremists, of whatever nature, might end up doing.’’

Horsley has come into the job at an interesting time, and already he has ideas that might make a spy similarly squirm. As inspector-general, it’s his job to scrutinise the intelligence agencies – the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau.

Easier said than done. The agencies have for decades been notoriously closed off, there’ve been difficult headlines about how they’ve applied their intrusive powers, and, after the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Attack on Christchurch Mosques, there’s another sweep of reforms to come.

Horsley, like the spies he deals with, operates out of a ‘‘sensitive compartmented information facility’’, somewhere within the building. It’s not exactly a windowless box, but it is somewhat insulated from the outside world. No cellphones are allowed.

From his office, he is able to peer into the agencies’ work. He has access to every warrant application they make, to their document management system. ‘‘We mostly review the actions they’ve taken. There are some occasions where [they] might even contact us proactively and ask us whether . . . a particular step they were going to take would be something we would be concerned about.

‘‘Every time they get a warrant to surveil somebody or to intercept some communications . . . We would look at that warrant and look at its lawfulness.’’

The agencies are generally co-operative, he says. But there remains some resistance to his probes, and in his most recent annual report, he noted ‘‘this office at times finds the agencies overly defensive’’.

‘‘They’ve had a long time of having a form of oversight but probably not as intense of oversight as there has been in recent years. And I think there are still pockets of the agency that don’t necessarily see the full benefit and opportunity that there is with oversight, or the importance of it. It’s hard to know whether it is just an individual, or whether it’s a part of an agency. But I think that’s just sort of an educational thing.’’

What Horsley wants to change is something the directors-general, Rebecca Kitteridge of the SIS and the GCSB’s Andrew Hampton, say they also want to change – but maybe to differing degrees. He wants to pull more of the secrets out of the darkness.

‘‘I’ve got a real ambition to bring transparency to the work of the agencies. They deal with highly classified material at times. I think many times overclassified material. It’s very difficult for the public to actually engage in that debate if they just don’t know anything.’’

And there is a need for the public to engage. For instance, in response to the mosque attacks inquiry, the Government has already begun passing law that would criminalise ‘‘precursor crimes’’, the planning or training for a terror attack before it occurs. Horsley shares a personal opinion: ‘‘You’ve got to be careful how far you go in criminalising something that happens before even an attempt.’’

His background adds weight to his view on this. Raised in the Wellington seaside suburb of Seatoun, he spent a short stint at Scots College, a private school that until recently was boys-only. He then chose to spend a ‘‘much more educational’’ time at Rongotai College, a boys’ public high school nearby.

Neither of his parents went to university. Dad was a valuer, taking stock of ‘‘strange things’’ such as bridges, and mum was a nurse.

He says an argumentative streak – which is hard to fathom, given how genial he appears – drew him to law. The intellectual challenge, the history behind it, and the debate around its interpretation, all appealed.

He ran a side business with a friend painting houses and, after graduating from university, he landed in Gisborne by sheer circumstance. Having interviewed for a job in Tauranga, he met a friend in Gisborne, Isaac Wilson, as he passed through. Wilson is now the chief Ma¯ ori Land Court judge.

Before long, the local Crown solicitor said: Come and work for me. So he became a criminal lawyer. After a brief stint at the Commerce Commission, he was back with the Crown, working the appellate courts for nearly a decade, including litigating more than 350 cases in the Court of Appeal.

Then he was hired as the inaugural national director of the Public Defence Service, a move which had him installing public defence lawyers across the country. ‘‘It was a relatively high-profile position at the time, because it was a new – it didn’t make me powerful – it was a new role and it was controversial. We were seen as effectively public servants, coming in to take away work from private operators at the time when legal aid rates were being severely pared back.’’

From there, he took the job of deputy solicitor-general in 2014. Lawfuel, a blog for lawyers, does a ‘‘power ranking’’ of members of the profession. The ‘‘low-profile’’ Horsley ranked 14th. It is one of the few mentions of his work outside a handful of news stories found on Google.

‘‘As the decider upon major criminal appeals, including manifestly inadequate sentencing issues, Brendan Horsley holds a major role where even his boss, Solicitor-General Una Jagose, will not tread,’’ the blog says about him. Horsley says there ‘‘were a couple of big prosecutions that I had to make calls on’’. For instance, he successfully pursued a greater sentence for Kasmeer Lata, who forced her underage daughter into prostitution. Her initial six-year and 11-month sentence became 10 years and three months after Horsley appealed.

Of course, there’s more to life than work. Horsley lives a plainly Wellington life. He calls Karori home, plays a regular weekly tennis game with old friends, and shares a predilection common among well-salaried public servants: mountain-biking. ‘‘I appreciate a work-life balance. I think it’s really important to disengage when you can.’’

He and his wife, Gaye Searancke, have three children – Thomas, 23, Charlotte, 21, and Oscar, 19 – the two oldest of whom still live at home. ‘‘Charlotte is only home, I think, because we have a puppy.’’

Searancke is the chief executive of Land Information New Zealand, which manages the country’s land titles and surveying. The couple spend their holidays making use of her knowledge of public lands, particularly in the high country near Lake Hawea, where Horsley has two brothers. ‘‘Gaye is awesome and amazingly supportive, and there’s a really mutual sort of support for what we’re both doing, but yeah, it does mean we are busy.’’

Two high-ranking public servants – are they a power couple?

‘‘Do not say that,’’ Horsley says, laughing.

‘‘It’s very difficult for the public to actually engage in debate if they just don’t know anything.’’