Browning Steffan: Search and Surveillance Bill — Third Reading 
Browning Steffan: Search and Surveillance Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:678;Page:1263] 
STEFFAN BROWNING (Green) 
: 
 The Greens oppose the Search and Surveillance Bill for many of the reasons that have just been put forward. The Greens also followed what happened with the Urewera trials the ones known often as Operation Eight. Effectively this bill puts those same sorts of powers into the hands of many agencies but even in the hands of the police which you might say is a justifiable use of search and surveillance they can be taken too far. The extent of the bill—the evil of the bill in fact—goes to looking at people’s texts their voicemails chatrooms putting bugs in cars and taking videos and when it is set off one incident can actually affect thousands of people. Their communications can be caught up in it—thousands of people’s innocent communications. 
Using the Urewera case as an example I can tell members that Green Party members were caught up because some knew Val Morse one of the defendants. Some knew others. Keith Locke had his communications caught up in it and no doubt Gareth Hughes and others may have had their communications caught up. What reason and what right have the police or any agency got to go into the communications of such people who are relatively obscure to the actual fundamentals of those who are potentially charged? 
I would suggest we talk about Waihopai and the Government Communications Security Bureau. It has a load of powers in terms of intercepting communications to do with international issues and serious security issues—although it appears to be misusing those as well. It has the ability to intercept electronics in a way that you cannot intercept or deal with a person. Electronics—communications—do not have a passport. This bill goes into that same area. Texts another area are often abbreviated and the language in them can be misconstrued theoretically giving powers to the police because they suggest there might be some sort of crime. The police as we have shown and as has just been discussed can get very carried away in their work when they think there is something there that actually is not. But we have got here other agencies being given similar powers. We have people who have not had the training or the experience of the police being given similar powers. 
I will use as another example of some of the excesses of the bill the fact that how many times a person carries out strip-searches rub-down searches and so on does not actually have to be reported in the annual report. Another one is some of the exclusions that are carried out in the bill in terms of the Food Bill which will soon be the Food Act. The person who exercises the power to seize items as a result of a search does not even have to leave an inventory with the people who are affected. The person can take produce away take material away and it is gone and there is not even an inventory for those affected. 
But that is almost minor relative to the level of invasion of human rights that this bill puts in. Human rights and civil liberties are out of the window. This is a police State type of bill. This is a Big Brother bill. I am looking forward to a day when it can be repealed and we can have more sense made out of it. The Greens will continue to oppose this bill.