Locke Keith: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Locke Keith: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:643;Page:12969] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 There has been a great victory today. A great cloud has been lifted off the Tuhoe people and off people who are active in social environmental and peace causes throughout the nation who were fearful that they had been smeared by these raids and these charges being placed under the Terrorism Suppression Act. 
Of course this is not the end of the story. There is now an agreement and I welcome it by the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General to review the Terrorism Suppression Act. That is exactly what the Human Rights Commission called for at the select committee and exactly what I put in an amendment 2 days ago in this House and that was turned down by Michael Cullen and others. I am glad that at last we are having a review of that unjust Act. 
It is a disgrace that we are proceeding with a vote on this Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill because if we are going to review the Act why make the original Act worse as this legislation will? Dr Cullen said that it is all about the rule of law. He said that the accused people—presumably people like members of the Green Party and the Maori Party—are somehow against the rule of law. 
The very reason the Green Party is against this bill and similar terrorism legislation including the Terrorism Suppression Act is that it undermines the rule of law. It does this in several ways. It undermines the rule of law by confusing our existing system of criminal law. Over many years we have established crimes of murder rape kidnapping property damage etc. each with their own maximum penalties. That is all swept aside if the offender is deemed to have a political or religious motive for such criminal activity. Exactly the same crimes if they are deemed to be committed under the Terrorism Suppression Act and as having a political motive are subject to a single maximum penalty of life imprisonment. 
As the Law Society said this terrorist labelling would “have the potential effect of greatly increasing the penalty imposed on persons who are convicted of committing a terrorist act where the underlying criminal act is relatively minor”. Some of the underlying criminal offences in the Terrorism Suppression Act are indeed minor. Someone does not need even to intend to hurt anyone or damage property. One of the actions that can theoretically lead to life imprisonment under this amending bill for committing a terrorist act is “seriously disrupting an infrastructure facility in a way likely to endanger human life”. 
Greenpeace suggested that at the very least this provision should be amended so that there had to be an intention to endanger human life otherwise some of the non-violent disruptive protests that Greenpeace itself occasionally engages in could be defined as terrorism. The select committee turned down Greenpeace’s suggested amendment as did Parliament when I moved a similar amendment during the Committee stage of the bill. 
Let us look at what one might call a lesser crime in the Terrorism Suppression Act—not the actual committing of a terrorist act but of participating in a terrorist group. That has a maximum sentence of 14 years whereas the exact parallel offence in the Crimes Act—participation in a criminal organisation—has a maximum sentence of 3 years. This means that if a person participates in a group campaigning for Maori land rights and that group has planned or done something criminal then he or she is up for 14 years inside. But if a person is in a criminal gang that shoots people or beats them up or terrorises a neighbourhood then his or her maximum penalty is 3 years. The extra penalty for terrorism charges is the extra penalty for having a political conscience of one type or another. 
It is ironic that in the same month in which we have wiped from the statute book the sedition laws that punish people for their anti-establishment views we are tightening up terrorism laws that provide an extra punishment for lawbreakers because of their anti-establishment political views. I think it is right to use the term “anti-establishment”. For example when farmers openly defied the law and introduced the calicivirus—and that could qualify as terrorism under the Terrorism Suppression Act; that is it involved in the words of the Act the “release of a disease-bearing organism”—no charges ensued because the Government sensed that the farming establishment was on the side of those who released the virus. But when the charges involve Tuhoe people quite vigorously asserting greater Tuhoe autonomy there is a much greater possibility of terrorism charges being laid—although of course in the end thankfully they have not been. 
Clearly there is a highly charged political context around the current charges with New Zealand First accusing the Tuhoe leaders and Maori Party MPs of promoting apartheid. That is why it is so wrong for political leaders—like the Prime Minister in the case of the Terrorism Suppression Act—to be designating terrorist groups which is why the Green Party is opposed to an amendment in this bill that means that the Prime Minister will not only do the original designating of terrorist groups but also review those same designations 3 years later taking away the review role that previously lay with the High Court. Any Prime Minister’s judgment is clouded not only by his or her own political views but by practical politics. 
If our Prime Minister were to designate any international body as being terrorist on the basis of three things—how many innocent civilians it had killed with explosives how many people it had kidnapped and held for years and how many people it had tortured—then under any objective consideration the first body they would designate as being terrorist is the United States Government. But because of the economic and political power of the Bush administration our Prime Minister is unlikely to do that—although she might prove me wrong. 
The next way that anti-terrorist legislation undermines the rule of law is that the charges often involve secret classified information that those who are accused are not allowed to see. Sometimes under the Act they will get a summary of the evidence and the accusations against them but this is not guaranteed. In the immigration field Ahmed Zaoui had great difficulty in clearing his name after secret accusations of involvement with terrorism were laid against him. It took him nearly 5 years of legal struggle to get the Security Intelligence Service to come clean on what it had on him so that he could prove his innocence which he did. 
Anti-terrorist laws also encourage excessive surveillance of legitimate political dissenters and protesters and a general overreach of police powers. We have seen both in the latest raids. The police went beyond their legal rights when they ordered the Tuhoe people out of their cars and asked them to stand by numbered cards and be photographed. There may also have been excessive surveillance involved in the lead-up to the case. There are indications that this may have been the case in the many raids on the homes of political activists who were not charged. The surveillance net may have covered them. 
It is concerning that many people are now worried about what they might say in their texts and on their phones or what they might write on their computers. It is disturbing that several computers were taken away in the raids—one from a visiting Swedish lecturer who was staying at the home of two Ecoshow organisers whose computers were also taken. 
New Zealand is not on its own here. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative has just published a report called  
Stamping Out Rights 
 which shows that the police in virtually every Commonwealth country have overstepped the mark as they participate in the so-called war on terror—often seriously overstepping the mark. We saw a couple of days ago a police report on the shooting dead of the innocent Brazilian Mr de Menezes in the London Underground on the grounds that he might be a terrorist. 
Policing under terrorism laws is fraught with difficulty. If we had had these laws during the big civil disobedience protests in 1981 against the Springbok Tour then there could have been even more division bitterness and injustice than there was at the time. There is a much better way to go about things which is to have respect for political activists and not treat them as the enemy or as the breeding grounds of terrorism. 
People like me who have been involved in these movements for years know that they are made up in the overwhelming majority of very good people. If people step outside the bounds and go in the direction of violent or criminal activity then there are plenty of people to pull them back into order. If that has happened to some people in this case then there will be plenty of people who will counsel them. We do not need the heavy hand of the State. We do not need these repressive terrorism laws to achieve it and we do not need Prime Ministers prejudicing the evidence as Helen Clark did a couple of days ago or Michael Cullen did today by insinuating that there was serious evidence here that he will not disclose and that he says will never be disclosed. He should not prejudice those people’s future as well. Thank you.