Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green): It's great to hear around the House the word balance"—the need to balance the rights of individuals and the right for all of us to be safe here in Aotearoa New Zealand. The background of this bill is that it regulates how national security information is used as evidence in court. These rules will come into effect when the Government needs to prosecute someone for alleged criminal wrongdoing based on highly secure national security information (NSI) that the Government cannot share within the public sphere. For example the Government may receive information through the Five Eyes alliance which they are sworn to protect and at the same time they want to act on the information provided to prosecute a terrorist allegedly planning an attack.Some jurisdictions have completely closed court proceedings where they prosecute someone in relative secrecy and without telling the defendant the evidence that they have against them in order to protect the national security information. This would breach the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act which affirms that every person has the right for courts tribunals and Government decision-makers to observe the principles of natural justice. These principles involve procedural fairness so that the Crown has no unfair advantage. They include the right to full information and the reasons for decisions being present at hearings having legal representation and being able to challenge evidence. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act also sets out minimum standards of criminal procedure including the right to know the prosecution's case to be present at the trial and to present an effective defence.Aotearoa has a very ad hoc approach as there has only been a small number of cases where national security information has had to be used. One of these cases is the case of Ahmed Zaoui an asylum seeker who was imprisoned for two years including 10 months in solitary confinement after the SIS deemed him a security threat all the while refusing to say why. The Refugee Status Appeals Authority eventually found the State did not have any evidence against him that he had directed or participated in any act of violence or terrorism. An admission from Sir Michael Cullen the Deputy Prime Minister during the saga in 2016 said "I think at the time we in government were too willing to accept what we were told instead of probing behind the true nature of the source of the information and therefore its inherent unreliability." This bill is based on a good comprehensive Law Commission report from 2015 and I note it's taken a while to get here. It tries to strike a balance between protecting national security information but without completely stomping on the rights of everybody. What it will do in summary is create a framework to better define national security information and govern how it is used in any court proceedings. It will replace frameworks under the Passports Act the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act and the Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Act. The Immigration Act will retain a separate regime and this is tailored to the immigration tribunal. This is of course better than the status quo because it gives the courts a narrow but better-defined role in determining what evidence is NSI and if and how it can be used and this will help courts more legitimately understand when a Government may be using illegitimate information.The following changes are proposed for criminal procedure. There will be a pre-trial closed court session where the judge will review NSI. The court will consider what is necessary to protect the information and a security-cleared special advocate will be present at the pre-trial to represent the non-Crown party. There is a new pre-trial admissibility hearing for the court to determine how national security information should be protected at trial in criminal proceedings. There will be judicial discretion to allow use of national security information in a modified form and there will be confirmation that a closed court procedure excluding the defendant is not available at the main trial and criminal proceedings.The following proposals are proposed for civil proceedings. There will be a new legislative regime to cover the disclosure and management of security information in civil proceedings and a process for the Crown to make a security information application in relation to a proceeding asking for the court to make orders protecting confidentiality and security information. The Attorney-General and the Minister of Foreign Affairs are to jointly issue an NSI certificate that certifies that the information is national security information. There is—in my understanding—no ability for the court to override this. However this decision would be judicially reviewable.The court will have the authority to decide whether information subject to a certificate is to be excluded from the proceedings or provided to a special advocate. A closed court procedure would be available in all civil cases and there will be a discretion for the court to dispose of or otherwise deal with a civil proceeding that cannot be fairly determined by all of the options available to the court to manage the security information.There's a lot there and I will reflect on just a few points. The Law Commission recommended that the court should be the final decision maker as to whether something is national security information rather than this being decided by the Attorney-General and the Minister of Foreign Affairs through a certificate. This is something that the Greens agree on. In terms of the impact on tangata whenua it says that it is unlikely that these proposals will be used to limit expressions of tino rangatiratanga or to override the Crown's obligation to actively protect Māori interests and rights but that historical events indicate this remains a possibility in the future.We only have to look back relatively recently to the Urewera raids which is the most prominent of the court actions to date under the Terrorism Suppression Act. The raids there related to the assertion of tino rangatiratanga and involved the use of search and surveillance warrants through the information involved at the time. It was not national security information. I think it is really mindful to recognise and remember and I hope that we do take this energy into the select committee process as well—that historically the Crown has been highly reactive to perceived threats against its sovereignty. We only have to look back to the history of the New Zealand Land Wars the history of Parihaka and the raid and subsequent arrest of Rua Kēnana at Maungapōhatu. It always tends historically to be skewed against tangata whenua so I would encourage the select committee when they do this very important balancing act of the right to protect individuals and the right to protect our communities to make sure that that is a prominent in their minds when making that determination. On that summary I support the bill."