Moroney Sue: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — Referral to Government Administration Committee In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — Referral to Government Administration Committee In Committee[Sitting date: 08 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12552. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):This is my first opportunity to take a call on the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill. In speaking on Part 2 which is supposed to be about transparency and oversight I do want to remind the Committee of the context in which we are debating transparency and oversight. I want to make it clear from the outset that although there are some improvements in Part 2 nothing is going to satisfy the Opposition’s call for a full inquiry into the reasons why we need this bill in this shape and form at all. So that needs to be said at the outset. Nothing in Part 2 is going to take away from the very valid call coming from the Labour Party to ensure that there is a review and that we actually havea full inquiry—a full inquiry—into the reasons so that we know why we are doing what we are doing.Why we are so nervous about this—why New Zealanders are so nervous about this bill—and why Part 2 needs to get it right is that the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) unlike the SIS is an intelligence security agency that actually communicates with other countries’ intelligence security agencies. I think that that is a point that has sometimes been lost in the debate. This is different from the SIS. It is different from the way in which the police operate. It is different from the way in which other entities operate. New Zealanders are particularly nervous about it because it communicates with other countries’ intelligence agencies as well.I think New Zealanders are right to be nervous about that because they are still reeling from seeing our country’s laws being sold off to Warner Bros. They are concerned about the influence of big corporations and other countries on this Government’s performance and on this Government’s decisions and on our national security. So I think they are right to be concerned about it in that context.What Part 2 does is attempt to give some assurances to the public of some independence some oversight and some transparency of what has been to date a completelyuntransparent process—if there is such a word—in a situation where New Zealanders and the Opposition have had to drag every single piece of information out of the Prime Minister while he has kicked and screamed and tried to stop us from knowing what has been going on. It is in that context that Part 2 becomes so important.So the Minister in charge who is in most instances the Prime Minister himself or herself gets to actually choose the Inspector-General and the Deputy Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and that is right and that is proper. But I think as my colleague the Hon Phil Goff just traversed in his speech in this debate New Zealanders have lost faith in the ability of this particular Prime Minister to make independent appointments and to make appointments that are in the best interests of the nation and in the best interests of the country rather than in the best interests of whom he happens to be chummy with or who he has been chummy with in the past.I think probably that if we look at the current Prime Minister one of the most difficult choices he might have is whether to appoint a childhood friend to this role whether to choose a former member of Parliament from the National Party for this role or whether to choose Amy Adams’ sister or HekiaParata’s husband. He will have to choose one person only for the important role of Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. I think that is something that New Zealanders are becoming increasingly worried about. What is being seen is appointments made particularly to positions that ought to be independent such as families commissioner roles—those types of roles that are actually designed to keep the Government and call it to account—and those most recent appointments by that Government opposite have been completely without transparency and without independence. I think that is a major concern.One of the ways in which Part 2 attempts to overcome that concern is to appoint an advisory panel but I agree with some of my colleagues who have spoken already on this particular part that it seems as though the advisory panel might be quite toothless. I also note that there is the ability for the Inspector-General and the Deputy Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to consult some of the other bodies that I have actually just recently referred to. So they can consult the Controller and Auditor-General and they can consult the Ombudsmen the Privacy Commissioner a human rights commissioner and the Independent Police Conduct Authority. They can consult those people but I am interested in knowing whether those people who have got particular roles within our country’s administration as well have a role of alerting theInspector-General and the Deputy Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security about any concerns that they might have.I am particularly interested in whether in Part 2—and I would be interested if the Minister in the chair would respond to this—the Privacy Commissioner in particular can raise concerns the other way. What we know is that the inspector-general can talk with can consult with can raise issues with and can get advice from the Privacy Commissioner but I would want to know whether if the Privacy Commissioner has concerns of her own she can actually have a direct line of communication with the inspector-general and raise those concerns.I do want to just address briefly the membership of the advisory panel. As I said before unfortunately we have a Government in place at the moment that does have a track record of appointing its friends and its colleagues and its relatives in fact to roles that should be independent. So the three-member advisory panel will have the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security on there as of right and just two other people one of whom has to be a lawyer. People have already speculated on this but there are people who would fit in that category within the Government’s own ranks at the moment. It seems particularly fond of appointing its own to these types of positions and you know we may well end up with a family member of a sitting member of Parliament on that advisory panel as well.If we were to end up with what sounds like quite a preposterous situation but one sadly that is actually happening as part of this Government’s track record on a whole series of other appointments that it has made would there be a way of contesting the independence of family members of current members of the Government who are appointed to an advisory panel? Would there be a way of contesting and overturning a decision to have perhaps a just very recently retired member of the Government benches on that advisory panel?If that was at all a possibility—and the way I read Part 2 there is nothing at all in this legislation to prevent the Government from going down exactly that same track—then I think that is another major issue that New Zealanders should be concerned about. Although this all looks like this might give a little bit of accountability and a little bit of transparency to a situation that otherwise we have got very little knowledge and information about if that were to happen and if the wrong people or people who were not independent were appointed to the advisory panel—it would be laughable actually to try to pretend that they were at all independent of the Prime Minister and of the Minister in charge—then I think that that brings the whole of Part 2 into disrepute and means that we would not have transparency and oversight at all over the GCSB.I just want to reiterate again that the reason the oversight and the transparency in Part 2 is so important is that unlike any of the other intelligence and security agencies—the ones actually by the way that were prevented from coming before the Intelligence and Security Committee and making their submissions and that worries me too because I would want to know what the SIS would have to say about Part 2. I would want to know what the New Zealand Police would have to say about Part 2 but we will never know because the Prime Minister himself actually used his right of veto to stop them from coming forward and telling us what they think about Part 2 so we will never know what they think about it.But the point I really want to make and that I want to come back to is that this is so vitally important because the GCSB is the only intelligence and security agency in New Zealand that by right is in communication with intelligence and security agencies from other countries. That is the reason why—