Groser Tim: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Groser Tim: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 October 2007. Volume:643;Page:12686. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
TIM GROSER (National) 
: 
 Life even parliamentary life can be full of surprises. Like other members of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee who put a lot of time into this bill I thought until the events of last week that this would be pretty much a slam dunk politically—pretty much a routine piece of parliamentary politics because of the very large measure of agreement between the two major parties on what the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill sets out to do. But through a piece of spectacularly bad timing entirely fortuitous and entirely coincidental we find that it has become a matter of some real controversy in our country. 
I am not going to rehearse National’s position on the events of last week. I think Mr McCully in his intervention put our position in very very clear terms. We are withholding our judgment and there is every good reason to do so. But although I did not write down Mr McCully’s precise words at the time there was also contained there an implicit challenge. That challenge is this. If the legal process is now to unfold as it should in a country of our type and we find it was not done in terms of the letter and spirit of the law we will expect to hold people accountable for it. That is the way the system works and that is the way it should work. So we just want to park that issue on the side and come back here in this debate to the real substance of the issue. Because when the events of last week have played out—however they play out—I suspect this will become in the long run a relatively small political footnote in the history of New Zealand. What will remain is a much much bigger issue of international terrorism. 
I have to say that I am simply astonished at some comments that have been made not just in the House but outside the House at the way and the speed with which people have forgotten exactly what is the nature of international terrorism. The defence of the realm in classical political literature is meant to be the No. 1 responsibility of any State and I believe that is still the fundamental bedrock reality behind this legislation. Like many I have no doubt that for New Zealand in the 21st century the defence of the realm is threatened more by this issue of international terrorism than any other conceivable direct strategic threat. So although I talked about this being a piece of routine legislation until it got knocked off the rails by the events of last week I did not mean that I thought this was not an important issue. No I think this is a very very important issue and it is very important to get this right for precisely the reason that Mr Dunne has just reminded us. There will be no takers politically or in any terms of human reaction for any politician in any political party that could be held accountable after the event for not having taken this issue seriously. 
Listening to some of the comments of people I sort of wondered whether these people think that Osama bin Laden follows the Marquess of Queensberry Rules here; I mean giving them all the evidence so that they can sift through it in a reasonable way. This is simply naivety of the highest order. What we have here is a situation that actually has been around for centuries and centuries. For centuries there have been obscure bandits and warlords like Osama bin Laden and they have carried out their terror inside a localised community for obscure reasons which we and our predecessors were totally unaware of. But married to the modern technology of globalisation these hate merchants have been able to project their message of hate into a nightclub in Bali and into the twin towers of New York and they will do it again. Of that I am absolutely certain. 
This is not war conducted by the rules of the Marquess of Queensberry and I am sorry a State needs to defend itself with coercive power to survive. That is the ultimate responsibility of a State. That is why the Labour members and the National members of the select committee took this issue very seriously indeed while always having a discussion about where the balance between preserving the coercive powers of the State to preserve itself including the security of New Zealanders and civil liberties lay. This is actually a very fragile balance and when it breaks down it can break down unexpectedly markedly and I believe in any society. We saw it in Los Angeles in 1965 with the Watts riots. We saw it in Paris in 1968. I have actually seen something not as dramatic but of a similar process in a street called Jalan Diponogoro where the New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta lies. The moment the Suharto regime started to lose control I saw the process of people running amok and let me tell members that there is only one word to describe it. It is scary. It is seriously scary to see it up front. 
This issue of preserving the ultimate security of the State requires coercive power but in a society like ours it has to be disciplined by a very high test to preserve the civil liberties on which our system rests. If we look at the submissions we received we see that they were overwhelmingly from good people who were looking at the issue legitimately in terms of only the civil liberties side of the equation. That is exactly what one would expect. Standard political theory tells us that when the public interest is so diffuse we will not find lobbies that come together necessarily except in times of real crisis to put forward the general public interest in maintaining the security of the State and the security of the people who live in this country. So it was really up to the politicians to provide the counterbalancing arguments. As a conversation essentially developed across the table of the select committee it was very clear that there was a very high degree of concern that we absolutely get the balance right between the coercive power of the State on the one hand and the need to deal with this extraordinary threat of international terrorism using the powers of globalisation and civil liberties on the other hand. 
I think it is a commonplace thing to say that terrorism like water always seeks the weakest link in the chain. There are only so many things we can do to stop a terrorist act. Ultimately if somebody with a suicide bomb walks into a certain place in New Zealand I do not suppose that there is anything we can do about it. But what the theory of counter-terrorism rests on is prevention and trying to send a very clear message that one—in this case our country—is not the weakest link in that chain. What we know about international terrorism is that it is a borderless activity. It pays no respect to borders. It pays no respect to human liberties. It will use the existing legal frameworks and processes that societies like ours have built up over centuries for their own advantage and naive people in some of our communities will no doubt lend political support completely unwittingly to these people. We must make sure that this country is not the weakest link in the chain. This bill is a part of that process. 
There has been a lot of confusion in my opinion in this discussion over the issue of the designation of terrorist organisations. Let me just give members my own particular take on it. We have these two resolutions. One resolution came out of the political history of September 11. It used the political impetus of a crisis to get international agreement on a particular set of terrorist organisations and some international cooperation around the politics of the moment. The idea that New Zealand would not be part of that is to me almost inconceivable. So what this bill has done is remove possibly a theoretical possibility but in situations like this we have to look at things in extremis—the extreme possibility that the procedure agreed on at the time and in the haste of that appalling event could have led New Zealand to be in breach of a Security Council resolution. I find it inconceivable that people have problems with that. So that is the fundamental purpose of this bill. That is what this bill is tidying up and I am absolutely certain that we are doing the right thing.