Faafoi KrisKRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Can I just begin by acknowledging the men and women of our Customs Service. As an Opposition MP I do not think there has been a Government department or service that has been more willing to let members of Parliament tour their facilities. I had a tour of the Christchurch airport earlier this year. A number of our MPs went and visited Northland and met some of the chaps at the port just out of Paihia. Also a select committee that I was on about 2 or 3 years ago had the pleasure of visiting one of the operations centres in Auckland. I think it is one of the most open Government departments that we have been able to get access to in our term in Opposition as that comes to an end.But there are a number of issues within this piece of legislation that we do want to highlight and that I think are going to get some serious scrutiny during select committee. I do note that the Minister Nicky Wagner in her contribution to this debate said the powers around the ability for customs officers to search devices are being scaled back. I do also point towards the contribution by the Green MP Barry Coates around its concerns because we do hold some similar concerns as well. If you listen to the Minister I think you would hear or you would think that nearly all of the powers to be able to search devices have been rolled back and are nowhere near the powers that the Customs Service currently has—but you only have to look at the clause that pertains to the access to devices and the powers that customs officers may have to see that they are still there.We are really going to relish the opportunity to grill officials at the select committee around what kind of powers customs officers still do have. If you do look at Part 4 clause 207(2)(c) it states in plain English that customs officers will have the power to require a user of the device to provide access information and other information or assistance that is reasonable and necessary to allow a person exercising a power … to access the device:". In plain English that is saying that if a customs officer is suspicious and a number of other things are ticked off they can ask anyone for their PIN number or their passcode to that device.I think some clarification is needed—and I am sure that the Privacy Commissioner will be called in to the select committee—about what actually that allows those customs officers to do. Is it access to just the device itself so any information held on that device could be accessed—that might be stored on that device—or does it give them the ability to say: "Well now we've got access to your device we also want access to any account that you may have on that device."? I think that is a really important question for this Parliament to ask of the officials and of the Privacy Commissioner because although we want the integrity of our borders to be as strong as possible we also have to be aware of the civil liberties issues that we have when people who may be suspected of things that they may not even be guilty of will have to give Customs access to their personal devices and potentially the accounts that they have on them whether it be an email account or something else.I think there are some serious issues and I think the Government may be trying to downplay this issue by saying that the customs officers do not have as much power as they currently do. But the powers that they will still retain in this piece of legislation are still significant. I think most people would feel that getting access to someone's phone or someone's device is an encroachment on privacy. I am sure the Government members at the moment—given some of the stuff that is happening over there—would not want their devices to be encroached on because of the nature of some of the messages that are going round the National Party caucus at the moment. I do not know. It is just a guess that there might be a bit of interest in a few messages flowing between three particular people to the other 56 members of the National Party caucus. So the privacy of those messages I am sure is important to them.There is seriously though another issue that I want to talk about and that is the biometric information that Customs is currently using and some question marks about how it can use it and how that can be stored. Anyone who uses Facebook these days will be kind of either happy or a little bit worried that when a photo of you goes up on Facebook it automatically recognises somebody's face—and that is the kind of technology that is being used at our borders currently to make sure that people who should not be coming into our country do not get past the border.In the past information contained within a passport has been our main check to check someone's identity. I think that is date of birth country of origin what citizenship you have—obviously—where you were born your full name and all of those details. They have been the main checks to make sure that people who should not come into New Zealand are not there. But anyone who has been through SmartGate in the last 7 years would know that if you go through the border now it is just a simple look down the camera and the system recognises you.There have been I understand from my reading of the regulatory impact statement—and I would like to thank Lianne Dalziel for giving me that tip of always reading the regulatory impact statement—some issues around how that information can be used and retained by Customs. I do want to note to the previous speaker Jonathan Young who spoke before me that times are different: it has been 20 years since the parent legislation was put in place technology has come a long way and the ways used by the people who are trying to get around the integrity of our borders have also changed. The simple visual check of a customs officer holding the passport up these days is not good enough any more and so that is why we are having the biometric checks. There are issues that Customs has had I think with some of the use and some of the sharing of information and some of the storage of biometric information and the updates within this legislation are good.In conclusion Labour will support this bill going to a select committee. We do believe that it takes some very wise and necessary steps in the area of keeping the integrity of our borders. We do want to put on the record again and we do want to stress that we still have some concerns about the ability of customs officers to access information. That is not to say that we do not believe there are situations where that is valid but it is to say we want to make sure that there are safeguards in place so those powers are not so broad that those powers can be used inappropriately by agencies—whether that be Customs or anyone else working with Customs—and also whether that information could be shared. Those are the kinds of issues that we want to see and will be raising questions about at the select committee. We note that they have been raised by other parties and we just want to mark it with the Government that we do not think that it has put enough safeguards in there and there are still some questions to be answered."