McCully Murray: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — In Committee 
McCully Murray: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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Hon MURRAY McCULLY (National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 I will agree with the speakers from the Maori Party and the Green Party on one matter. The Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill that we are debating today will substitute the judgment of the executive branch and particularly the most senior member of the executive branch of the Government for the judgment of the judiciary in determining who will have the toolkit of the Terrorism Suppression Act applied to them. I agree with those members that that is essentially what is at issue here. They advance various reasons why they are unhappy about that development taking place. I do not want to say to them that I have no difficulty at all in supporting this bill for a very simple reason. You see there are some very very bad people out there in the world today. Those people will do some very very bad things to some other people unless the authorities have a toolkit that enables them to deal with those people. 
They are people who fly planes into buildings. They are people who put car bombs into cars and drive them into nightclubs. They are people who kill in cold blood. They are people who do not care about the misery they cause or about the harm they do. They do not play by any rulebook. They play by foul means inevitably so our authorities must have a toolkit that enables them to deal with a threat that is as serious and as complex as that. That is what the Terrorism Suppression Act was passed to deal with in 2002 and that threat is every bit as serious today not just in the wider world we live in but also in this country. 
I have no problem at all in substituting the judgment of the executive for that of the courts in dealing with this matter because we have two UN resolutions that this bill gives some force to. First of all we have UN Resolution 1267 which states that we should pick up the list of terrorist entities the United Nations Security Council designates and designate those entities in this country. I do not think we should have any difficulty with doing that and the New Zealand Government has so far followed faithfully its obligations to do that. What this bill will do as my colleague Dr Mapp pointed out previously is to ensure that as those designations cease to have effect we will not have the courts but the Prime Minister decide on the information available to him or her as to whether those designations should be rolled over. I have no difficulty with doing that because to rely on the courts is to ask the courts to determine matters on which they simply cannot have the information before them to be able to determine them and I think that this is why we should pass this component of the bill. 
But I remind the Committee that we also have UN Resolution 1373 which calls upon Governments to designate other terrorist entities that are a threat in their region. I take this opportunity to again remind the Committee that in that respect the New Zealand Government has been negligent in my view. Australia has designated under UN Resolution 1373 some 88 organisations that are a threat to the people of Australia in the view of their Government and not one—not one—of those entities has been designated in this country under UN Resolution 1373. 
Although we might pass this legislation and give this toolkit to the Prime Minister to use we have no guarantee that the Prime Minister will use it. In Australia organisations like the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade the Basque separatist movement certain wings of Hezbollah and Hamas and the Tamil Tigers are all designated as terrorist entities under Australian legislation yet in this country we have no such designations for those organisations. We have an open border with Australia and relative freedom of movement yet we are singing from a completely different song sheet when it comes to the designation of those terrorist entities. 
I simply say to the Government and to the Prime Minister that we are happy to pass this amendment to the Act. It makes sense. We are happy for the Prime Minister to have this toolkit to deal with a threat that we on this side of the Chamber regard as serious—very serious indeed. I say to the Prime Minister that if she does not use this toolkit and we do not see New Zealand move on to the same page as Australia with the designation of terrorist entities under UN Resolution 1373 then she and her Government run the risk that they will be found out and I hope that is not something we see in this country.