Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Can I begin by thanking the Attorney-General for the process that he has run. I think it concerns a lot of people in Western democracies that we see faith in democratic institutions eroding in part because we have got a very polarised form of politics developing in many parts of the Western world. We have seen it most obviously in the last year in the likes of the United Kingdom around Brexit and in the United Kingdom leading to the election of Trump.Tim Macindoe: The United States.Hon DAVID PARKER: Yes sorry the United States—of course—in respect of President Trump. We are also seeing it in Australia where the polarisation of its politics particularly on the right wing over there is quite concerning. [Interruption] Oh it is. You have got Pauline Hanson; you have got people after 46-degrees-Celsius summers denying that they have got a problem with climate change; and suggestions that one of the wealthiest countries in the world cannot clean up its power systems. So we have actually got this threat to the public confidence in democratic institutions when the criticisms from politicians get over the top. The media of course likes a good controversial story and so it amplifies the disagreements. People who do not follow these issues closely end up thinking: Well jeez this system is broken. I don't really have much faith in my democracy."As a parliamentarian I think democracy is incredibly important. I think that the old saying that the only thing worse than a democracy is the alternative is a back-handed compliment to democracy and is about how wonderful democracy is.Now at times like this democracy is called upon to sort through some very difficult issues. On the one hand everyone in this party acknowledges that the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB) are here to stay and that we need them. I think the Greens are slightly more ambiguous about that and would perhaps like to see those organisations' remits narrowed a little but even the Greens acknowledge that the GCSB particularly around cyber-security is necessary and it sees a role for the SIS. If we all accept that there is a need for those agencies then the next question is how you properly regulate them given that they have got these powers that they exercise mainly in secret that include powers of search and surveillance mainly on people from overseas but also in limited circumstances upon New Zealanders.It is the task of this Parliament to get this balance right between the powers that those agencies need for the protection of New Zealand and New Zealanders and the oversight that is needed to make sure that they do not abuse those powers. I think we have pulled it off in this piece of legislation and I think we have done it in a manner that shows that—you know although our system lacks some of the checks and balances that you find in jurisdictions where there is a division of powers between a president and the parliament or between more than one House of Parliament even if you do not have a president. In our unicameral system although we do have a lot of power vested in our smaller number of institutions we also seem to operate in a way that gets these things right over time. I think that is a wonderful testament to our country—that here we are this little country at the bottom of the South Pacific that has got this wonderful history of getting this balance right and therefore sustaining our democracy in a way that very few countries in the world have.I say this when I am out speaking to school groups; I say that there are virtually no other countries or very few other countries in the world that have got the length of unbroken democracy that we have got. There is no one in South America no one in the whole of Africa no one in Asia virtually no one in Europe—because of course they have been disrupted by world wars—and you are left with a few countries like Switzerland which did not give the vote to women until the 1970s as it happens and Great Britain Australia Canada New Zealand for example. We really have been the carriers I think of really good examples of democracy in action and this is one of them.So that is the positive. What led to this was actually we got closer to the brink of poor practice than we should have in this country. We had a number of things that had gone wrong. I am going to list them again partly because I named the wrong agency last time. Of course I think the worst example was Warren Tucker then head of the SIS—and I apologise for besmirching the GCSB when I spoke about this in an earlier reading. He enabled a political attack against Phil Goff during an election. He gave effectively a misleading release of information to Whale Oil which we know at the time was acting in league with the Prime Minister's department. By that I do not mean the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC). When I said that in an earlier contribution some people said I was criticising the DPMC. I was not. I was talking about the Prime Minister's own internal office.Anyway there was collusion with Whale Oil and the SIS knew that this position had been misrepresented but did not correct the record and therefore there was a political attack which was brought by the then Prime Minister John Key against Phil Goff and Warren Tucker did not correct the record. It only came to the light of day some years later when the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn showed what had happened. I think that came up in a time sense after the Nicky Hager book had been published. So that is the first and probably most egregious example.The other example was the Dotcom raids and the litigation that followed which showed that the GCSB misunderstood its legal powers. Not only did it get it wrong but apart from getting it wrong there was also ambiguity about some of its other powers and that needed to be sorted out. We passed some interim legislation in this House and that interim legislation caused protest meetings up and down the country because people said that it was expanding the powers of the GCSB to spy upon New Zealanders. That was denied by the Government until right at the third reading when the Prime Minister under pressure from civil society and also from the Opposition was forced to concede that actually as drafted it did allow quite broad spying on New Zealanders. He said that he would not operationalise those powers which of course meant that although they were permitted at law he said: "Trust me I'm not going to use them." Well that is less than desirable. You should have those powers properly constrained in legislation.The third example is in the UK—and I have previously spoken about this—where for many years neither the Parliament nor the security oversight committee there knew that data was being collected from the telecommunications companies which included locational information about where people were actually physically situated including in respect of UK residents and given to the security agencies; no warrants no oversight. The only person who knew it was a Minister in the Government and again that had been hidden from the Parliament and from the oversight committee for years and that was wrong too.We have a piece of legislation that I think is fit for purpose. It gets the balance right. There are many people to thank. I want to add my thanks to the staff from DPMC. I have been around this place for 15 years now. I have never seen a better process. The only process that is comparable was also a very good group of officials including from the Prime Minister's department in respect of omissions pricing—another very complex piece of work. I was really proud to be part of that and to see how good our Public Service can be.It was only possible because we have a Minister who is on the top of his game. The Prime Minister saw that there had been some mistakes made here and so rightly delegated this to the Attorney-General and he is a man who knows that when you are given authority from Parliament to go forth and do something a bit like what the Cullen-Reddy report says you are actually not slavishly bound by the first draft of the bill. Less competent Ministers—and we see them in Parliament—do not feel that they have the authority or the room to move and they are less reasonable in their response.Because of the Minister's confidence and his desire to reach out across Parliament for I suspect the same reasons that I have talked about in terms of the importance of democratic integrity around these important settings he was determined to let the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee do its work. The chair of the select committee at the time who saw it just about all the way through the Hon Mark Mitchell did a good job and we had great submissions from the Privacy Commissioner from the Law Society from civil liberty groups from the unions from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn—who I think is an absolutely star public servant; I suspect one of the best in the world actually—as well as many other individuals and I probably missed out some of the people like Sir Bruce Robertson who came to us.The other select committee members who have already been named and I will not go through them all—I thought everyone contributed very very well and as a consequence we knocked out purpose-based warrants. We got the definitions around "Type 1 intelligence warrants" with the higher-level "national security" term left undefined but there are real limits to how far you can go in respect of economic matters and really focusing in on things like terrorism and espionage.I think we now have amongst the best oversight legislation in the world. We have got transparency with all of the things that have to be behind the scenes and able to be inspected by the inspector-general that were not until this period necessarily available to her and as a consequence this bill has my unconditional support. I look forward to it being passed into law."