Mitchell Mark: Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Mark: Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee[Sitting date: 09 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1236. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MARK MITCHELL (National—Rodney):I just want to respond to a couple of the issues that have been raised. The first one that I want to talk to is the issue that Mr Goff raised because we did have quite a lengthy discussion about this in the select committee.Firstly I just want to say that in relation to a Kiwi wanting to leave New Zealand in order to go and engage in a conflict somewhere else in the world the actual legislation is very specific when it refers to a terrorist act. Of course we have got the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 section 5—and I will come back to some of these points. We have got a very specific guideline that outlines for us very clearly what actions need to be met for an act to be deemed a terrorist act. Mr Goff raised a very good point. I think there is a wider issue that we should think about and reflect upon as a nation and that is do we want to be encouraging or allowing Kiwis to leave New Zealand to go and engage in any type of conflict regardless of which side they may choose to participate on? I think he used Peshmerga in Kurdistan as an example.One thing that I can safely say having spent some time in the region myself—in fact a decade—is that it is a very complicated situation that we are having to face. If there are 10 layers of complexity to it then after a decade of having been up there I can safely say that I probably understand one of those layers. So a situation that you think on the face of it may present a certain set of circumstances is liable to change and can change either quickly or more slowly over time.I think a far better and safer position for us to take as a country is to discourage and try to stop any Kiwis leaving New Zealand to go and take up arms and participate in a foreign conflict. But if they do then we have got very clear guidelines available to us under the Terrorism Suppression Act which clearly show us what ingredients need to be met or what threshold needs to be met for us to understand clearly what a terrorist act is. I will mention maybe just a couple of them.Under section 5(1)(c) of the Terrorism Suppression Act: “the act is a terrorist act in armed conflict (as defined by section 4(1)).” It is intended under subsection (2)(a) and (b): “to induce terror in a civilian population; or (b) to unduly compel or to force a government or an international organisation to do or abstain from doing any act.” Subsection (3) states: “the death of or other serious bodily injury to one or more persons (other than the person carrying out the act): (b) a serious risk to the health or safety of a population: [or] (c) the destruction of or serious damage to property of great value or importance or major economic loss”—and that is actually a very important one. There is a fair bit of debate around that as well because I am pretty sure that here in New Zealand if we were to suffer a major terrorist act at say the Port of Auckland or the Port of Tauranga then it is going to have a pretty significant negative impact on our economy and well-being not to mention the general huge negative impact it would have on our psyche as a country. Subsection (3)(d) states: “serious interference with or serious disruption to an infrastructure facility if likely to endanger human life:”.That is about half of the criteria. So it is actually very very clear if you refer to the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 in terms of the threshold that has to be met to define someone as a terrorist. This bill is about stopping people leaving New Zealand to engage in acts of terrorism as a terrorist.The other point that I want to make very quickly is that we talked about the visual surveillance powers—the warrantless powers—that have been given to the SIS. Maybe to give a practical example of what could possibly occur would be a terrorist fighter who has been active and for whatever reason has been able to buy themselves a ticket on a flight out of the Middle East and arrives in New Zealand. We have to be able to watch that person for the first 12 to 24 hours when they arrive in the country. [Bell rung] If we did not have that ability—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!MARK MITCHELL: Sorry sorry. Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): You must go for the call.MARK MITCHELL: Thank you Mr Chair. If we did not have that ability then effectively we could have someone who was in New Zealand—we did not know the full intent of their visit or their reason for coming to the country and we had no ability actually to monitor them properly or try to gather the intelligence that we required to make that determination.I think this brings me back to the difference between the Search and Surveillance Act that the police have available to them and the visual surveillance powers that the SIS has. The SIS and the police have got very different roles. The police have to get a warrant through a High Court judge with the view to gathering evidence with the view to taking a prosecution into our court system whereas the SIS role is to gather information and gather intelligence to try to work out what the intent of that person is. At no time through that process are they intending to or can they prosecute that person in our court.If during the course of that process it becomes apparent that the person is committing a crime then of course there are abilities under the legislation to be able to engage the services of the police and they would probably take over and then use their powers under the Search and Surveillance Act or the Crimes Act or whatever they needed to do. I just wanted to be clear about the fact there are two very different roles here for our police service and for our SIS service.Finally I just want to reiterate that I have listened very carefully to New Zealand First and their leader the Rt Hon Winston Peters. To be honest with you I was surprised. I thought that New Zealand First would have supported this bill. I do not know whether raising an old piece of legislation around sedition which was removed back in 2007 is a good reason to ignore the situation that we have to deal with presently but that was the reason put up. I am surprised because now we are faced with New Zealand First and the Green Party not supporting this bill. Thank you very much.