Graham Kennedy: Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGraham Kennedy: Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee[Sitting date: 09 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1247. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green):I just want to pick up on some of the comments really add to what I said before about the clarity or the lack thereof in the legislation before us and pick up from the Hon Phil Goff. In his comments he explored the issue of section 5 of the Terrorism Suppression Act. That indeed is critical. He was good enough to acknowledge its shortcomings and let the Committee—Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM: What I was wanting to do before the dinner break was to essentially reinforce my earlier comments in the Committee about what we in the Green Party see as the need for greater clarity in the terminology of the bill based on the understanding that this is a hugely important piece of legislation that is addressing constitutional rights to personal privacy and dignity of the individual and to pick up on the issue of the definitions and have regard to what the Hon Phil Goff was talking about in the sense of a definition of terrorism.If we look at the passage of the political narrative leading up to the bill and the initial legislation itself we see there is a kind of mutation. The Prime Minister on 5 November spoke about national security which of course is entirely valid but when the legislation itself came into the House it did not use the phrase “national security”. In fact that does not appear apparently in New Zealand law anyway; the term “security” does. The initial bill focused understandably on the definition of security coming out of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Act. In the course of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee consideration we narrowed that down to terrorism and I think that was well informed.But when we look at the somewhat tortured relationship between the definition of “security” and the definition of “terrorism” we find that there is almost an inflationary interaction between those two definitions. Let me give an example of the difficulty we can get into. We are talking about countering foreign terrorist fighters and other violent extremists and we are still struggling to understand what they are. The definition of the first concept is in Resolution 2178. It needs to be in the bill and also violent extremists. But even if it is narrowed down to the definition of terrorism let us look at what that could conceivably mean.It is one thing to have a violent act of physical violence in New Zealand against New Zealanders; that indisputably is an act of terrorism. But the definition of terrorism in the 2002 Act goes way beyond that. If you look at section 5 of the Terrorism Suppression Act there are five subsections and section 5(1) the first subsection identifies three alternative actions. That then leads into the definition in section 5(2) which is an elaboration of section 5(1)(a) and it contains two actions. Then section 5(2) requires outcomes that are identified in section 5(3) and those are five outcomes and any one of those outcomes can obtain. So you have a permutation of five four and three outcomes. I am not a mathematician—no doubt there are some possibly scattered randomly around these benches—but my sixth-form imperfect mathematics would have that equalling somewhere around 120 potential actions coming out of the definition in section 5.Let me just give you one of those 120. If I understand the bill correctly based on an originating source of threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the Middle East the intrusive powers of covert warrantless 24-hour surveillance by the SIS in the bedroom of a New Zealander could be undertaken if there is a suspicion that that New Zealander is facilitating an action that is motivated by an ideological cause intended to exert undue compulsion on the Government to abstain from doing something that will result in major environmental damage. That as I understand it is one of the 120 or so possible acts of terrorism. If I have an ideological cause an undue compulsion on the Government to abstain from doing something and incur major environmental damage that makes me a terrorist and that warrants a camera in my bedroom.