Robertson Grant: Intelligence and Security Committee — MembershipText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Intelligence and Security Committee — Membership[Sitting date: 13 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11134. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour):If Tony Ryall is the answer it must be a pretty silly question. That is what I think.I want to cover a number of issues on the question of the proposed appointment of Tony Ryall to the Intelligence and Security Committee. I do want to acknowledge—as the Minister Gerry Brownlee has—that Mr Ryall is a reasonably long-serving member of this Parliament coming into the House in 1990 as stated. He has been through ups and downs in that time—ins and outs and ups and downs in that time. He has certainly had a few issues that we have discovered we might have found a basis for which is that unknown to many members of the House Mr Ryall is one-eighth Jamaican—one-eighth Jamaican. As my colleague Clayton Cosgrove unkindly suggested he is the limbo member. How low can you go Tony Ryall? I do want to acknowledge Mr Ryall as a person who has been in the House for a long time.The fact that we are today debating this vacancy itself is a matter that members on this side of the House are greatly concerned about. The first point I want to make is that when John Key announced that Tony Ryall would be nominated for this position he said that he was forced into that position because Peter Dunne who was then a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee was no longer a Minister. He was no longer a Minister and therefore he could not serve on the committee. Well the Prime Minister is wrong and the Prime Minister has failed to correct the misleading impression that hehas left with the New Zealand public that Peter Dunne had to be replaced on the committee—that he had to be replaced—because he is no longer a Minister.Section 7(1)(c) of the Intelligence and Security Committee Act 1996 makes clear that the Prime Minister can appoint any member of Parliament—any member of Parliament—after consultation with parties in the Government. So any member could be appointed. In fact Peter Dunne according to the Government currently remains the leader of a party within the Government. So for the Prime Minister to try to justify to New Zealanders that Peter Dunne is going off the Intelligence and Security Committee because he is no longer a Minister is quite simply false. What that leads us to is that the Prime Minister is quite clearly telling New Zealanders that he does not trust Peter Dunne to be on the Intelligence and Security Committee. Presumably he is doing that because he believes that Peter Dunne is the person who leaked the Kitteridge report.The problem that members on this side of the House have and the problem that members of the public have is that that was not the finding of David Henry’s investigation into the leaking of the Kitteridge report. David Henry says that he cannot say who leaked the Kitteridge report. John Key—who ordered the investigation who said he wanted to get to the bottom of who leaked the Kitteridge report—cannot tell New Zealanders today definitively who that was. Instead we have a situation where Mr Dunne insists that he did not leak the Kitteridge report and Mr Key is asking us just to turn a blind eye to the fact that he has not got to the bottom of who leaked the sensitive report and to accept that we can brush the whole episode under the carpet and that he can get on and appoint Mr Ryall to this committee in Mr Dunne’s place. Well that is not good enough. New Zealanders deserve significantly better from their Prime Minister on intelligence and security matters and unfortunately this—his sweeping under the carpet of definitively identifying who leaked the Kitteridge report—is typical of this Prime Minister’s approach to intelligence and security issues.From day one this Prime Minister has not been upfront with this House about the activities of the Government Communications Security Bureau. We have gone through question time after question time trying to get to the bottom of what the Prime Minister knew about the Kim Dotcom raid and what the Prime Minister’s role was in the appointment of his childhood friend Ian Fletcher to run the Government Communications Security Bureau. We discovered via the Kitteridge report that John Key actually knew from as far back as February 2012 or May 2012 that there had been illegal spying on New Zealanders and he did nothing about it until the Kim Dotcom case broke. This Prime Minister’s lax and in some cases deliberately misleading information and advice about the activities of our intelligence community lead us on this side of the House to be deeply suspicious of any appointment he might choose to make to this kind of committee because this Prime Minister does not have the interests of ordinary New Zealanders at heart. This Prime Minister John Key has the interests of his mates at heart. That was never better emphasised than by appointing his childhood friend to run the Government Communications Security Bureau without anyone else being interviewed off the back of a phone call that he made. He was riding roughshod over that process.The activities of our intelligence agencies which are monitored by this committee are currently being questioned by many New Zealanders. New Zealanders have lost their faith in the intelligence and security agencies of this country and I believe that that is a direct result of the way that the Prime Minister has undertaken his duties as the person whom we as New Zealanders have on our behalf in charge of those agencies. He has got that oversight and he is not performing properly.The Intelligence and Security Committee currently has in front of it legislation to expand the powers of the Government Communications Security Bureau. Some of mycolleagues I think will speak more on that legislation. What is quite clear is that this Intelligence and Security Committee should have a pivotal role in our Parliament. It should be a watchdog over the activities of our intelligence and security agencies and it is toothless at the moment. It is a toothless committee because it is unable to actually get to the bottom of issues that New Zealanders are concerned about when it comes to intelligence and security.The Labour Party believes that there needs to be a full and independent inquiry into the activities of our intelligence agencies. It is not good enough for this Government to bring to the House legislation to extend the powers of those intelligence agencies when there is such a cloud hanging over them and when there is activity in the international community in terms of cyber-crime which is increasingly a worry to people in New Zealand. New Zealanders are worried about their privacy they are worried about whether their details are available to Governments overseas and this Government wants to ram legislation through this committee in a way that I do not believe many New Zealanders would accept.We need better oversight of our intelligence agencies. One of the matters the Labour Party would like to see discussed in a full review of our intelligence agencies is what the best kind of parliamentary oversight that we can get is. As we stand today the Intelligence and Security Committee cannot give New Zealanders the confidence that they need about our intelligence agencies. I believe that as part of that review we need to include what level of parliamentary oversight is appropriate and how we ensure that it is not just that we have to trust Mr John Key when it comes to the activities of our intelligence agencies but that as a Parliament we can own those. As we stand today the privacy of New Zealanders is at risk. We do not have a Prime Minister in John Key who seems to care about that and who seems to take his job as the watchdog over our intelligence agencies seriously and he comes to the House today to appoint Tony Ryall to this committee.The committee itself is flawed. The process by which Peter Dunne lost his position on the committee has been fudged by the Prime Minister and today we have a situation where our intelligence agencies are not trusted by New Zealanders. This appointment of Tony Ryall today will do absolutely nothing to increase that confidence. We need a full and independent inquiry into our intelligence agencies and the National Government should agree to that today.