Goff Phil: Search and Surveillance Bill — In Committee 
Goff Phil: Search and Surveillance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:948] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 Frankly the last comment from the Minister in the chair the Hon Judith Collins is straight scaremongering. It is the same sort of scaremongering that led National in Government before the election to attempt to ram through this Parliament without even going to the select committee the legislation regarding covert surveillance. The Minister must now surely admit that the National Government then got it wrong. 
The Justice and Electoral Committee with a majority of National people on it explicitly said that the legislation was wrong and that the appropriate balance had not been found. If it was not for the Labour Party and other parties standing in the way of ramming the legislation through before the election without any consideration from the select committee then as the select committee itself has acknowledged—and Mr Borrows has acknowledged as chair—the Government would have got it wrong. The Government would have got it wrong because it would not have found that appropriate balance. 
Another red herring is that somehow we were accusing the Government of instructing or not instructing the police to do an investigation into the teapot affair. No member said that Minister. No member did—but use your common sense. Why were the police investigating a case they would not normally have wasted their time on? Because the Prime Minister of New Zealand laid a complaint. And are the police going to ignore a complaint from the Prime Minister of New Zealand? Of course they are not. 
Ask 90 percent of New Zealanders whether they think that when 21 percent of burglaries are resolved the police should be following up the teapot affair for the Prime Minister which was just a media stunt and they would say: “No the Government has its priorities wrong and the Government is asking the police to waste their time when they have far more important things to do.” 
So Minister do not come into this Chamber with that sort of nonsense—that somehow video surveillance is going to fall over tomorrow because we are saying you should apply the same laws to the Serious Fraud Office as are applied in this bill to the police. Of course the Government should be applying the laws uniformly. The Minister was once the Minister of Police. She knows that the cases that they deal with are at least as serious are at least as complex and are at least as important as those dealt with by the Serious Fraud Office. So what the Minister has just said is absolutely wrong. 
What we have had from the Labour Party tonight are three people who have spoken very eloquently from a legal background as to why we need to change this bill—backed up the Law Commission itself. And Minister please tell the Chamber why you think that we should ignore the recommendations of the Law Commission—that the Serious Fraud Office should be dealt with in exactly the same way as the police that it should be constrained in order to find that very important balance between it having appropriate powers and protecting individual liberties. The Law Commission after 6 or 7 years of looking at this came to the conclusion that that should happen but the Minister is saying that she knows best. The Minister is rejecting the opportunity to get the overwhelming majority of the Chamber to support an important but contentious piece of legislation because she will not change her mind. 
I urge the Minister to think seriously about what she said in her speech to think seriously about what harm would be done and what good would be done if the amendment being put forward by the Labour Party in Opposition were adopted. We would create one law across the agencies in an appropriate way. We would be dealing with the problems that the Law Commission itself emphasised of the overuse by the Serious Fraud Office of powers that are unprecedented in this country compared with any other agency including the police. 
Yes those powers may have been there for 22 years and yes they have been overused in recent times but being there for 22 years was never a good argument for not considering change. We are putting this bill through because some of that legislation Minister has been there for 50 years and it has been proven to be inadequate and so has that clause in terms of ensuring the proper rights of the media and not having another incident where the Serious Fraud Office can go in and demand the production of documents by an outlet from the news media in a way that challenges the role of the fourth estate.