Locke Keith: Third Readings 
Locke Keith: Third Readings 
[Volume:612;Page:9382] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 It is unfortunate that this legislation seems to be going through with only the Greens opposed to it although ACT supported some amendments to reduce its undermining of our civil liberties implications. It has been easier to put this legislation through Parliament because of the original title the Counter-Terrorism Bill when in fact there should have been two bills one called the Counter-Terrorism Bill amending those bits of the Terrorism Suppression Act relating specifically to terrorism and the other something else—the “Crimes Amendment Bill” probably because it amends general criminal legislation. The Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee at one point was thinking of dividing the bill into two bills but unfortunately at the end only the Greens supported that course. 
It is important that we realise that most of the material in these bills is in the nature of amending criminal legislation and would have had greater scrutiny from the public—and I think from Parliament—if the legislation had not been down as an anti-terrorism measure. The context today is that there is a very strong push particularly from the Bush administration in the United States to put everything in the framework of counter-terrorism and to undermine a lot of our civil liberties. Of course that goes to the very extreme in the US base at Guantanamo Bay where people have been held for a couple of years without any charges or trials and not having access to lawyers their families or anything else. We have seen this phenomenon just this past week at the APEC conference where there was the big Bush administration push to turn APEC into some big counter-terrorist organisation. 
There was some resistance from many ASEAN countries to that. They wanted APEC maintained as it has been devoted to trade and other issues. In most countries in the world and I think South-east Asian Governments are reflecting this people see the prime issues confronting them not as the danger of non-State terrorism—even though there is that problem in parts of the world particularly the Islamic world—but as poverty the right to a roof over their heads the right to enough food and clean water and the right to have a decent education and basic human and political rights. 
In some ways the manner in which this anti-terrorist campaign is being conducted internationally makes these situations worse. If we look at Bali where we have just commemorated the very tragic deaths of so many people in the terrorist bombing a year ago we see that the economy in Bali has declined 40 percent. Helen Clark says that that is an illustration of how terrorism can affect the economy but how has it actually done that? 
One of the problems is that Bali is not one of the parts of Indonesia with a history of terrorist bombings although well before September 11 there had been the odd bombings in Indonesia over a long period in Java in particular—often promoted as it turns out by the Indonesian military and agencies they support like Laska Jihad but Bali had been immune from terrorism. So there has been only this one incident. Unfortunately we have Governments like New Zealand’s through their travel advisories saying: “Don’t go to Bali. Don’t go to Indonesia.” That has been what has pushed the economy of Bali of other parts of Indonesia and of other countries downwards. If we are serious about supporting these countries’ development to overcome their problems we should not be adding insult to injury by allowing those travel advisories pushing New Zealanders not to go there. 
What is happening is an exaggeration. It is not putting in a proper context the terrorist threat that does exist. It exaggerates it and takes a uni-dimensional approach to terrorism simply a law-enforcement approach rather than seeing what underlies it and trying to remove the social causes. 
 This results in tragedies such as we have seen in the case of Ahmed Zaoui whereby State institutions in New Zealand—like the Immigration Service the police the SIS and the Customs Service—are geared up to fight terrorism because they have emails coming in from their counterparts internationally particularly from the United States saying that there are terrorists everywhere and under every bed. Then they say they have not been able to find any terrorists because there has not been a terrorist in New Zealand since French secret service agents came and bombed the  
Rainbow Warrior 
. A chap called Ahmed Zaoui arrived in New Zealand as an asylum seeker under his own name and there was something on the computer from the Algerian secret service or the French secret service— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Would the member please come to the thirds reading of the legislation. 
KEITH LOCKE 
: This is relevant because this legislation contains amendments to the Terrorism Suppression Act and the whole question of how we approach terrorism is very relevant to it. Mr Zaoui arrived in his own name our authorities thought we had a real live terrorist because there was something on a computer somewhere and they put him into solitary confinement for 10 months and imposed a security risk certificate on him. 
We are left with a situation—and this is the problem with the Terrorism Suppression Act that we are amending today—whereby a secret process ensues. In the case of the Terrorism Suppression Act it is the secret process of designating a terrorist without a great deal of legal recourse. There is an appeal procedure to the Court of Appeal on points of law but basically it is a “trust us” situation which is the same situation that applies to Ahmed Zaoui. We are asked to trust the SIS to get it right in secret the Minister of Immigration to get it right in secret and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to get it right in secret. That is not really good enough if we are to protect human rights. We know that the Refugee Status Appeals Authority—which is a more public body that did its own determination over many months and wrote a 223-page report—said that this guy had a completely clean bill of health that he was a democrat and an elected member of Parliament and that he should be allowed to stay here as a refugee. 
The problem arising in the Terrorism Suppression Act—which this bill amends and reinforces with “harbouring” provisions etc.—is that this process in relation to designating terrorists relies primarily on classified information. The same thing applies under this Act as applied in the Ahmed Zaoui case in that we are told that we and Ahmed Zaoui and any person who might be designated a terrorist under the Terrorism Suppression Act cannot have access to this classified information in any shape or form. The prime reason given is that the overseas agencies that provide this information would not provide it if any of it were made public. So we do not even have a process to interrogate from our own values and our own legal process whether this information could be kept secret. It is being determined according to that definition by the overseas agencies. 
Even if the classified information stated that the person—Mr Zaoui or whoever it was—played soccer last week if the overseas agency said that the information is classified then it has to be kept classified under this definition. We cannot go down this track. One of the problems is that under this terrorism legislation there are not the checks and balances in the system. The debate in relation to the intelligence services in America and Britain over the weapons of mass destruction shows that. These institutions of the State tend to reinforce each other’s erroneous determinations in this climate of anti-terrorism rather than correct them. 
Unfortunately this bill gives the Customs Service—which is not supposed to be a police agency—greater powers in this respect to detain material it thinks might belong to some person or group that may be designated terrorist at some time in the future. That can have very harmful effects on the person or body whose materials are seized. If the information gets out that someone is a suspected terrorist there can be very damaging consequences. That came up in the Zaoui case too where the Customs Service interviewed Zaoui at the border—not the Immigration Service not the police but the Customs Service—and got it all wrong as the Refugee Status Appeals Authority found. The Customs Service said that Mr Zaoui had admitted he was a member of the Armed Islamic Group when in fact that was completely wrong as the Refugee Status Appeals Authority found out. 
The problem—and this bill reinforces it—is that we are seeing something like the homeland security push by the Bush administration to link up the immigration police and customs agencies in this anti-terrorism drive in a way that is undermining our civil liberties in legislation and in practice. We are now seeing examples of this.