Mallard Trevor: Urgent Debates — Dotcom Case—Inquiry into Government Communications Security Bureau Actions 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mallard Trevor: Urgent Debates — Dotcom Case—Inquiry into Government Communications Security Bureau Actions 
[Sitting date: 27 September 2012. Volume:684;Page:5770. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I note that the Prime Minister has this afternoon apologised to Kim Dotcom for the basic errors of his agency. What he has not apologised for is what is really the core of this debate and that is his slackness in his oversight of that agency. 
I would like to give many members of the House a little bit of a history lesson going back to 1977 when I had a notable appearance in this House and was in fact arrested during debate on the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill. The reason that I was arrested then was that I believed that there was too much power being centralised in the hands of one person—at that stage it was Sir Robert Muldoon—and I did not believe that there were systems around them to ensure that there was proper supervision of the Prime Minister. 
Since that time there have been some changes made that have improved the legislation slightly but more important ever since that time there have been Prime Ministers who have treated their role in this area diligently. They have worked diligently. They have been briefed. They have read their papers. They have asked the questions that needed to be asked. I can remember one occasion when I was with Helen Clark in her car early in her prime ministerial time and both the driver and I got booted out of her car. She borrowed my phone because I had a Vodafone phone that was properly secure and she only had a Telecom phone so that she could be properly briefed on an urgent matter. It was so important that she did not want to wait for half an hour to get to a secure landline; she wanted to do that. 
The question I have got is whether this Prime Minister interests himself at all in the work of his security agencies or is he prepared to say “OK boys just go and do what you want. OK boys just go and do what you want. I’m not going to ask because if I ask I might know. And if I know that you’re doing something wrong I’ll be in even worse trouble.”? That is what the situation is here. The Prime Minister was not prepared to apologise to this House for what he knew happened. He was not prepared to go into the detail in Parliament the place where he is meant to be held accountable. He runs away. He does not front up. He does not front up in this House and apologise for the fact that he is not doing his job properly. He is meant to uphold ministerial standards. That is his job. He is the Prime Minister. He is meant to be above all others. 
And in this case his plea of ignorance is just not good enough. Ignorance is not an excuse when you are the Prime Minister who is meant to be supervising an agency an agency where the relationship is much closer and the supervision necessarily much closer than for example with the police or any other Government agency. This stuff very rarely gets anywhere near a court. There is very rarely a check or a balance on the power of the Prime Minister and these agencies. Our entire democracy depends on his agency doing its job properly and for that to happen the Prime Minister must supervise it. To say that he cannot know anything about the operations is just horse shit. It is just absolute nonsense. The Prime Minister must know about the areas where there are operations going on. The Prime Minister has to know that there are matters that he should be looking at. 
We have given this Prime Minister a lot of support in this area. There is an enormous amount of trust that goes to every— 
Scott Simpson 
: Better than that. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I agree with that member there. The Prime Minister should be better than that. I agree with that member. Every other Prime Minister going right back in my entire time in Parliament has been better than that. Which member is that? 
Dr Megan Woods 
: I’m not sure. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: The one with glasses next to— 
Dr Megan Woods 
: Scott Simpson. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: It was Scott Simpson I am told. Scott Simpson says we deserve better than that and I totally agree with him. We deserve a Prime Minister who reads his documents a Prime Minister who gets briefed. What we have seen here is a debacle an absolute failure of a Prime Minister to run a spy agency with integrity. It is his job to run it with integrity. It is his job to look carefully at what it is doing because he is the democratic check on the system. And when he does not do his job properly as he clearly has not done now then the democratic check that should be there is absent. The agency runs amuck it breaks the law and it spies on people it is not meant to be spying on. 
There is another question. There is another question that needs to be asked. We know that the information has been flowing. We know that the assistance has been flowing to the United States. Is it correct—is it correct—that US agencies were also involved in covert surveillance within New Zealand with the full knowledge of the Prime Minister’s agency? Did a foreign agency act contrary to New Zealand law? Did a foreign agency act contrary to New Zealand law with the connivance of an agency for which the Prime Minister is responsible? If that is the case then I expect that any Prime Minister with integrity will be a position where they cannot survive—where they cannot survive—because it is the role of the Prime Minister to make sure that these “boy’s own” 
tricks do not occur. It is his job to make sure that the spies do not run amuck. They have an enormous amount of power and if the suggestion is that overseas agencies—as well as our own Government Communications Security Bureau—were acting covertly in New Zealand with the connivance with the assistance with the knowledge of our security agencies if that was occurring then that is even worse than what has occurred here. 
The other question that we still have not heard any confirmation of is whether as was alleged in the  
Dominion Post  
this morning the immigration file for Kim Dotcom was in fact given to the police before the raid—well before the raid—by the Immigration Service. It is a pretty basic question: was it given or was it not given? And if it was given—the Immigration Service says that it was—what we want to know is whether anyone bothered to read it. Did anyone bother reading the file that was supplied? Did Maurice Williamson? Maurice is here. Maurice knows a bit about land information and that sort of area. Jonathan Coleman knows a bit about that area. Simon Power knows a bit about that area. I will just tell you what used to happen. In the old Government if two Ministers disagreed and one overruled the other then you made a file note and the Prime Minister had a look. When you had a difference when you had a Minister overruling another Minister and it was something that was important to the Government you wrote it down. You wrote it down. Maurice Williamson is nodding. You know what I think happened? I think the Prime Minister did not read it. I think the Prime Minister did not read it. Well he did not read the police report wilfully— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member but his time has expired.