Rurawhe Adrian; McKee NicoleWEDNESDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 2021(continued on Thursday 30 September 2021)COUNTER-TERRORISM LEGISLATION BILLThird ReadingDebate resumed.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mōrena mai tātou katoa i runga i te tukunga iho o rātou mā te wāhi ngaro tēnā koutou.[Good morning everyone under the guidance from above greetings.]The House is resumed. Members when we rose last night we were on the third reading of the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill. We'd just completed call No. 6 now it's call No.7.NICOLE McKEE (ACT): Mōrena Mr Speaker. Thank you. I stand to speak on the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill the third reading. Before I start I'd like to acknowledge the victims of the Christchurch massacre in 2019 as well as those that were affected by the LynnMall terrorist attack at the beginning of this month. I think it is important that we do look to change our terrorism laws. There were some gaps in there that had been needing to be fixed and the ACT Party were definitely wanting to get in behind and support that. But what we don't agree with is the time frame being brought forward and this is why we are opposing supporting this bill. We believe—actually feel—that the movement of this bill at speed is virtue signalling and it's virtue signalling off the back of these terror attacks. Now we had that happen back in March and the effects of rushed legislation are still being felt by many to the point where some of our administrators are struggling to administer the law that was rushed so quickly. So we think that when it comes to terrorism we need to ensure that we have the ability to be able to go through a good lawmaking process and make sure individuals minorities and ethnic communities are not caught up in the speed with which we legislate.Members opposite have said that we went through a thorough process. Well we did and thank you to the Ministry of Justice and the Parliamentary Counsel Office for coming up with some of the changes that were needed. But it wasn't in my opinion thorough enough. The bill itself was meant to be reported back to the House on 5 November—quite fitting really when you think of terror attacks and Guy Fawkes. Maybe they didn't want to have it on that day and brought it forward but actually it just comes back to virtue signalling.I asked the Minister whether or not there were aspects in this bill that were going to make New Zealand safe and to stop a LynnMall terror attack—in fact I asked the Minister Is any chance that the aspects that we've changed in this bill would have prevented the LynnMall terror attack?" He effectively said he couldn't answer that. So we're asking again: why did we have to rush this through when in actual fact it wasn't going to or couldn't make a change to what happened on 3 September?We are quite worried—the ACT Party—about the disruption to civil liberties. We have that with the increase in the ability to use the search and surveillance laws—surveillance we see quite often of people just going about their normal everyday business. While we are glad that we did reach agreement across the Justice Committee on changing the word "fear" to "intimidation"—that came out of a good robust debate—I still wonder at lowering that threshold from terror to intimidation and how it will affect those civil liberties of the people that we are trying to protect.There is obviously quite a number of concerns that have been raised across this House. We talk about the speed. We talk about the impediment on civil liberties and freedoms. Our Green Party colleagues also raised a number of issues and I think that those issues could have been thought out discussed and debated if we had the opportunity to go through to 5 November and see this bill without it being rushed through Parliament.The last time that we spoke with legal experts on the bill they were not convinced. They were worried that we had impeded on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—and this was the human rights commissioner the Privacy Commissioner and the New Zealand Law Society. So we've had organisations that did raise some concerns as well as two parties here.Now ACT was prepared to streamline this bill so that we could get some of those gaps that had been identified fixed and then continue to work on the areas that both the Green Party and ACT had concerns with. But we were not able to do that and that's why we are objecting to the process of pushing this bill through so quickly. It would have been about making sure that we could keep the country safe by filling in those gaps but still allowing the democratic process of addressing the concerns that other parties have had.This bill is so vast in its scope that when we look at recommendation 18 made after the royal commission inquiry we see that this bill goes further—a lot further—than recommendation 18. That's why we feel that it actually warranted a better longer and fuller discussion. We feel that we may not have been able to find that fine balance between protecting the community and that community losing some of their civil liberties just because the process was ultimately rushed. The line has been crossed and this Government has deemed it to be justified and we don't think that that's justifiable. Virtue signalling is not good lawmaking and the people of New Zealand deserve better from us as lawmakers. We oppose this bill in its third reading. Thank you."