Shearer DavidDAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): As the leader of the Labour Party Andrew Little mentioned the Labour Party will be supporting this bill to the select committee where it will as the Attorney-General has just said go through some fairly significant examination in terms of its suitability and its balance. I too would like to acknowledge the very different approaches that have been taken both to this bill and to the foreign fighters legislation in 2014 in terms of a collaborative approach. A bipartisan and collaborative approach on this sort of issue is absolutely essential—first of all so that the legislation is going to survive various parliaments into the future and needs to be futureproofed and secondly because it looks after and protects some of the most fundamental privileges that we have as New Zealanders and as citizens of this country. Essentially it protects our freedom to live peacefully to live in security and to lead prosperous lives alongside the freedom of our ability to have privacy and to a degree—certainly to a larger degree—the ability to operate within that privacy. I mention the collaborative approach that has been taken now because I think unfortunately 2 or 3 years ago when we first had the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) legislation that came up you will remember the farcical fiasco around Kim Dotcom at the time and the way that the Government pushed that piece of legislation through with the acquiescence or arm-twisting of Peter Dunne in order to get it through. I think we did an enormous amount of damage to the way that New Zealanders perceive our intelligence agencies and the confidence that they had in our ability to conduct those sorts of activities. The means and the process by which it is going through now have a very big bearing on the acceptance that the public will have in terms of the outcome of this bill. It was our argument back then in 2012-13 that we needed a comprehensive review. We looked across at Australia which had already had two comprehensive reviews by that stage and we still had four fragmented pieces of legislation. Much of it had come out of the Cold War completely unfit for purpose and not doing what it should have and was meant to have done. The Cullen and Reddy review was a very welcome step. They put out I think a very good and a very balanced report and it has stood us in good stead now in terms of taking that report and moving it into the legislation and the new bill. But as with legislation and with bills it puts a greater onus on getting it absolutely right absolutely accurate and robust—perhaps even more so than a review which can be at least slightly ambiguous or perhaps a little more loose than a piece of legislation. What we have now is a bill that from my first reading and look at it anyway looks good enough certainly to support but it certainly throws up a number of areas that we are going to have to take a better look at. That will mean a number of expert submissions from the Privacy Commissioner the Law Commission etc. who had spoken to us and came to us on the foreign fighters legislation to really look at what we have before us because we have some pretty thorny issues. Andrew Little mentioned the definition of national security. This is in a sense the essence of the bill—what is national security; what is this bill trying to achieve? If we do not get that right we could lean more towards leniency in terms of what the agencies are able to do or constrict them unfairly in terms of being able to provide the sorts of protections that we want. The second issue which has been mentioned and was predictable I suppose was the issue of the GCSB having the ability to spy on New Zealanders. There are a number of issues and problems around the GCSB's current role and the way that it operates. For example if we had a New Zealander who was taken hostage in another country and we heard a New Zealand telephone being used and emanating from that country and we wanted to know what was being said on that telephone because it might pertain to the plight of that hostage the GCSB would not be able to listen to that telephone conversation because it is the telephone of a New Zealander. Likewise if a New Zealander was overseas and became a foreign fighter and if we thought that that person might be using their telephone again we would not be able to listen into that particular call to give us information on that person or as in the previous example on the hostage because the GCSB is unable to access those records because they happen to be a New Zealander's. That is patently a ridiculous situation to be in. What the review has come up with and what is reflected across the bill is the fact that yes the GCSB can look at for example the phone records of New Zealanders but it has to be done in an exceptional way at what we now call a third-tier level of clearance which means the Attorney-General the Commissioner of Security Warrants an obligatory examination of that warrant by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and looking at the mechanism of that. It is not a large number but what we want you to do here is give our intelligence agencies in a sense the broadest ability to operate but with the tightest degree of scrutiny. This is so that they have the range of powers that they need but they can use them only under very specific and exceptional circumstances where our national security or somebody's personal security is dependent on it. I think that is the balance that this bill has to try to achieve when it goes through into the select committee. Andrew Little mentioned as well the role of the Intelligence and Security Committee. This is a particular issue that I have talked about several times in the past. If you look at the various degrees of oversight there is the operational oversight that happens within the agencies and there are the operational protocols that are in the agencies which have been very much tightened over the last few years. There is the judicial oversight which includes the Commissioner of Security Warrants and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security which is in a sense the second level; and there is the third level which is the political oversight which is contained in the Intelligence and Security Committee. It currently has five members and is chaired by the Prime Minister. In other jurisdictions that similar committee is not structured in that way but has senior members—former members perhaps of Government former Ministers members of the Opposition perhaps—on that committee. It is not chaired by the Prime Minister who has the casting vote and therefore in a sense has a conflict of interest because the agencies themselves report ultimately to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister then has the power of oversight. We do not have the health Minister for example sitting on the Health Committee looking at and passing judgment on what his health ministry happens to have done. So getting that balance right in the Intelligence and Security Committee will mean that we will want to look at overseas examples—the Australians the British and the Canadians in particular—to see how that works out. Likewise a fourth issue that perhaps I will raise as well is the access to databases. There should not be a general access to databases by agencies. It should be done on the basis of what they need to know for a specific purpose and that it protects the privacy of New Zealanders. When it comes down to it that is where we need to find the balance in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee before we refer this bill back to the House here. I am confident that this committee can do it. I think we have built in a sense the degree of collaboration and bipartisanship in the past. We will be looking at this bill very intently we will scrutinise it very very thoroughly as an Opposition should but at the end of the day I hope that this will end up being a piece of legislation that will stand New Zealand in good stead.