Franks Stephen: Third Readings 
Franks Stephen: Third Readings 
[Volume:612;Page:9385] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party in the third reading debate of the counter-terrorism legislation. This legislation has useful provisions. It addresses matters that any Government of any stripe anywhere in the world should be concerned about: deliberately infecting animals deliberating terrorising people with bombs or threats to bomb sending diseases through the mail threatening the economies of whole countries and frightening away tourists. Those are all things that of course the law should be concerned about. 
ACT’s difficulty with this bill is that existing law covers some of those issues. The existing law needed to be reformed supplemented and added to. But what we have instead are poorly drafted provisions. In some cases they could turn innocuous behaviour into what is deemed to be terrorism in a way that will attack essential liberties. Though I do not share the foreign policy ideas of the Greens—in fact I deplore what I think is their wilful ignorance of evil in many areas and their support of people who are evil—I do share their concern that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. If we think as New Zealanders of the various causes we have supported and the peoples we have been worried about just in recent history we do not need to go too far back to find examples of people who could have been categorised under some of the definitions in our legislation. We can think about the people of East Timor the people now in Aceh those who might have tried to oppose the regime in North Korea and those who have struggled against cruel domination in Tibet and Rwanda and about the struggle of some Iraqis against Saddam Hussein. All those people could have been categorised as terrorists under some of the definitions in the Terrorism Suppression Act which this legislation is a supplement to and in the terms of this legislation. 
New Zealand should not be putting itself into a position where it may have to hand over under extradition treaties to regimes that we share no values with people who are accused of activity that would not be an offence in New Zealand. This legislation does not as far as I can tell have the proper protection that a year-on review of our counter-terrorism effort should have. We should be making sure that nothing in this law could require a New Zealand citizen to be handed over to any other body for activity that New Zealanders generally would consider not to be an offence. This legislation has no overriding protection of the sort of idealism that sent some New Zealanders to Spain before the war in 1939. General Franco as I read this legislation could have invoked provisions that we have put into our law to get people handed over who raised funds for the International Brigades. That is quite wrong. It does not do as Mr Alexander for United Future has done to simply recite a list of objectives and a list of horrors to tie the objectives and the horrors together and to say it is invalid for parliamentarians thereafter to question the wording of the legislation. 
Unfortunately this legislation is typical of the sort of law we get from Mr Phil Goff. This is absolutely typical of the stuff that comes out after he has made a vein-popping speech about a mischief or an evil. Then we get technically poorly drafted stuff without regard for the unintended consequences. In this case the legislation is open to misuse. This is a “trust us” law. If we look at what the Government is actually doing about countering terrorism we see that it is a paper change. That is hypocrisy. It takes us in some areas in the wrong direction. As Ron Mark from New Zealand First said there is no real commitment to genuine defence. There is a huge commitment to trotting around to every commemoration of a previous generation’s efforts. There is a huge commitment to showing up and trying to curry political favour with the military by giving medals and speeches. But when it comes to real commitment to the sort of investment that is required for a country that wants to be able to defend itself we are not there. We are reneging on our arrangements reneging on treaties and relying—bludging—on our neighbours. 
I draw no comfort whatsoever from the requirement as a defence against wrongful prosecution that the Attorney-General’s consent be obtained. The Attorney-General under clause 5 does have a role in preventing misuse of this law. That in itself is an admission that this law can be misused. Leaving that in the hands of an Attorney-General who has shown herself unable to recognise where she should be standing up for the rule of law against her colleagues means that I take no comfort from that as a protective device whatsoever. 
This is a Government that in response to my written parliamentary questions about immigration told me there is no security criterion in determining immigration policy. I wrote to the Minister of Police asking whether the police had provided any advice or information and got no material in response. I wrote to the Minister of Immigration and asked if we are so committed to counter-terrorism what the Minister of Immigration was doing in terms of immigration policy to ensure there was not a population sea for terrorist fish to swim in. I was told that that was not one of the relevant immigration criteria. I wrote to the Minister of Justice to see whether there had been any policy work done on that issue. I was told no. Once again this Government is so politically correct that it is jumping to the order of the United Nations. There are twelve conventions that Mr Goff is so proudly complying with. They will put into our law provisions that can be misused and the only protection we have is that a prosecution may be stayed by the Attorney-General. The Government is so politically correct that sovereignty means nothing when it comes to the United Nations although it meant everything of course when justifying the Attorney-General’s ending of our Privy Council appeal rights. 
This Government thinks so little of genuine threats to sovereignty that we accept people from any country in the world without regard to the security risk that that population might create. It appears that there has been no attempt by the New Zealand Government to address the real issues that the counter-terrorism legislation should have been addressing which is how to deal with populations that do not share our values that despise our tradition of law and order and that think it is wimpish to be worried about civil liberties. This Government has no policy whatsoever to restrict the entry of people with those values. 
We voted with the Greens on a number of features of this bill and one of them was a concern about the tracking device code. We voted as we did because that code goes absolutely against the Minister’s rhetoric. That code restricts the use of tracking devices by security personnel and makes it more difficult to track terrorists. That code does nothing about the kind of tracking that the Green member was concerned about—that is the tracking of people by putting a device on their property or on their cars without their consent by people other than the authorities. In other words it handicaps the authorities and does nothing about other kinds of illegality. But at the same time it does not allow the police to cooperate with property owners. The tracking device code appears to prevent someone—a policeman—from using a pair of binoculars without a court order. That is pathetic. Without a court order it would prevent the police from sticking labels on their own suitcases to identify them when picking them off the baggage carousel. It would prevent the police from tracking their own vehicles without a court order. That is just typical of what happens when we have a Minister who is so determined to curry favour with his United Nations masters that he will copy something from Canada something from a convention and give no attention to what is really required: a law to ensure that tracking devices can be used by anyone who wants to on his or her property.