Street Maryan: Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill — Referral to Law and Order Committee Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill — Referral to Law and Order Committee Second Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13858. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I also want to add my concerns to those that others have expressed on this Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill. Other people have talked about the content of the bill the flawed nature of the content and the damage that it is likely to do for an innovative and expanding industry in New Zealand. I share those concerns but they are not the concerns that I wish to elaborate on this afternoon.My concerns are around process. My concern is that what we have seen with this piece of legislation—which was introduced in a hurry which was referred to the Law and Order Committee for a truncated period of time and which the Government is now seeking to dispose of this week through its second reading and Committee stage—is a complete disdain for process and for lawmaking in this country. Why it is particularly important in this respect is that this piece of legislation is a companion piece of legislation to the Government Communications Security Bureau legislation that was passed by a slim margin earlier this year.The concerns around process are for me fundamental. We heard the start of a sermon a moment ago from a National Party speaker Ian McKelvie about the protection of democracy. I would say in addition to this that privacy is an important underpinning element of a democracy. What this bill does not do is get the balance right between the protection of security measures which we on the Labour Party side of the House absolutely understand and recognise and the need to protect privacy.Individuals have a right to have their privacy protected in a democracy because otherwise they will not speak up. They will not be able to speak up for fear of interception and retribution and punishment of one sort or another. Whether it is the Minister for Social Development making a beneficiary’s private records public for her own point—for her own sake—or whether it is the selling of legislation to big business interests this Government seems to have no regard for the protection of a democracy that is about individual liberties and responsibilities as well as collective ones.Let me just elaborate on that a bit further. The points that concern me in this in particular are that this legislation was another opportunity—another opportunity lost—for the Government to stimulate a public debate about what our security systems ought to look like in the modern age and how we can do that and still achieve a vibrant communications sector that could be allowed to contribute to the Government’s GDP.What we have in this bill is the worst of all worlds. We have a capitulation to big business because the Minister for Communications and Information Technology has come in with eleventh-hour Supplementary Order Paper 366—which is a defiance of process in itself—which deletes clause 39 the clause that was going to require overseas companies to comply with our legislation in a way that was not consistent with their own legislation.So not only has this been badly done but it has been done badly. The process has been flawed from beginning to end. This Government apparently has no regard for the democratic health of this country. The Government has sold our industrial laws to Warner Bros our gambling laws to Skycity our democratic right to protest to the oil and gas industry and this is just another capitulation in a hurry on a piece of legislation that ought to be protecting individual liberty and not restricting it.