Parker David: New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Parker David: New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:673;Page:19631] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 One of the issues that Part 1 of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill addresses is updating the powers of the Security Intelligence Service in respect of new electronic technologies. The one I will spend a moment on is the inclusion of the power for electronic tracking. Clause 5 of the bill states: “ ‘electronic tracking’ means the use of electronic means for the purpose of ascertaining the location or tracking the movement of a person or thing”. 
I am interested in the opinion of the Minister in the chair the Attorney-General as to whether he agrees with the Law Commission that in terms of the degree of intrusion upon civil liberties we should be less concerned about electronic tracking than about surveillance techniques like cameras and recording devices. I sat on the Justice and Electoral Committee that considered the Search and Surveillance Bill and we heard a submission presented by Warren Young on behalf of the Law Commission. He expressed the view that as a society we should be less concerned about electronic tracking devices than we should be about other surveillance techniques in that electronic tracking devices are less intrusive into the personal life or the personal business of the person under surveillance. That seemed right to me but I was not completely convinced in that if for example a person was regularly going to the place of another person who was not their wife then electronic tracking of that person would be intrusive into the details of that person’s personal life in a way that might concern them given that they might think they had a right to live their life privately. 
That is a little issue that I would not mind some clarification from the Minister on. If there is a difference in the intrusiveness of different methods of search and surveillance or different techniques then maybe there is a need to have some different threshold applying to the different sorts of surveillance techniques that might be utilised. It may well be that the Minister thinks that if the police have these powers then the Security Intelligence Service should be qualified to have them too and that the proper oversight of the use or misuse of those powers is provided for by the Commissioner of Security Warrants and the Prime Minister. 
I would be interested in the Attorney-General’s view on that also because it seems to me that we are lucky in New Zealand that we have a trustworthy judiciary. In fact I do not know of another jurisdiction in the world that has a more trustworthy judiciary than New Zealand. That is not to say that overseas countries’ judiciaries are not trustworthy but I am very trusting of the independence of our higher courts especially. I think we have a tradition of impartiality lack of bias and thoughtfulness amongst our higher judicial officers in New Zealand that is a very very important part of the constitutional safeguard of our civil liberties. 
For example I prefer New Zealand’s system to the American system where there is more political involvement in the appointment of judges in an overtly political way. I know that in the end someone has to appoint a judge and in the end it has to be done by another branch of Government and therefore it is generally a politician—and in our case the Attorney-General—but we have a strong tradition in New Zealand of making non-partisan appointments to courts. As a consequence we have non-partisan courts generally to the extent that that is possible and we therefore have the benefit of a long tradition of judicial independence and a judiciary that we can rightly trust I think to be guardians of civil liberties and therefore guardians against inappropriate use of Security Intelligence Service powers. I would like to hear from the Minister whether he agrees that the controls we have that underlie the way in which we prevent the Security Intelligence Service from misusing the powers we have—