Parker David: Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Parker David: Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:658;Page:7158] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I find part of this legislation quite difficult—not difficult to understand but I find it hard to know what side of the grey line I stand on. I readily concede that DNA technology is a wonderful advance in solving crime. It helps us to solve crimes that would otherwise not be solved and accordingly it brings to justice people who would otherwise not be brought to justice for sometimes very serious crimes. 
In some senses I can hear what people say when they say that DNA matching is a scientific advance that we should be taking advantage of. Some people go so far as to say it is modern fingerprinting. They say that we have always taken the fingerprints of people when they are arrested matched them against the fingerprinting database or fingerprints taken at scenes of burglary or other violent crimes to help establish proof or indeed to disprove that someone might be the alleged criminal. I can see the argument that DNA matching is in some ways very similar except that it is better because it is more accurate. 
I then look at what is being said around the world and what is happening in Europe. Europe is well aware of the usefulness of DNA technology to try to prove the guilt of criminals and bring them to justice yet the Europeans courts have said that the British have gone too far. They have gone to the extent that New Zealand is proposing to go. Britain already has a law that says that anyone who has been arrested can have his or her DNA taken that it can be stored in a database for a long period of time and that it can be matched against DNA from earlier crimes or subsequent crimes. The guardians of civil liberties in the European Community have told Great Britain that it has to change the law. The Europeans think that it is too great an invasion of civil liberties and that there are too many risks to people as a consequence of the DNA being stored. Those risks arise in part from the mistakes that could be made in its storage. DNA could be mislabelled as being from somebody else. That seems to me to be a problem that can be overcome because if a mistake is made and I am accused of a crime I was not guilty of I could always say “No that is not me. Please take another test of my DNA.” and the new test would show that my DNA was not the same as the one on record. So I am not sure that that is a sound basis for refusing to allow the technology used to collect DNA. 
None the less this is a time of science racing ahead. It is very hard for us to envisage all of the situations in which use of this technology in the widest possible frame could be wrong. On that basis I am more comfortable with the proposition that my colleague Charles Chauvel put forward. He said that rather than taking DNA from people upon their arrest as of right they could either supply it voluntarily or it could be taken from them compulsorily on the order of a judicial officer. It is a bit like getting a search warrant. A search warrant is needed to go into a house and search for evidence. What is wrong with saying that there should be the equivalent of that sort of judicial oversight before someone is allowed to take a DNA sample compulsorily? The first of the two amendments proposed by Charles Chauvel addresses that issue and in my view it is the more important of his two amendments. I encourage the Government to take that step. Why do we have to go the whole hog to go to the great extent that the British Government has gone to? It is now being forced by the European Parliament to wind back that measure. Why should we in New Zealand take that extra step now? Why do we not go to the halfway house that Charles Chauvel is proposing? That would be consistent with what the Europeans say is appropriate.