King AnnetteHon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): I rise to speak in support of this bill and to first of all acknowledge that the security of New Zealanders and the balance of that security with human rights and freedoms is often a hard balancing act. We often spend a lot of time debating how we get that balance right. Such is the case of this bill that we are having our second reading on today the New Zealand Intelligence and Security Bill.I was fortunate to be able to sit in on some of the very early—look at if you like the inquiry that was undertaken by Sir Michael Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy at the review they were doing and the issues that were coming up. During their deliberations they did meet with Andrew Little and me to go over the sorts of issues that they could see and the changes that needed to be made. What reassured me about that review was the quality and the experience of those two people who were undertaking it.That was the first thing that gave me some confidence—that if the Government was to listen to that review we were likely to get some very good legislation from it. The second was that I spoke briefly with the then Prime Minister who said that he would not proceed with such a bill unless there was consensus particularly from the main parties in this Parliament. So important was it to have this sort of legislation—legislation that goes to security but also to human rights and freedoms of New Zealanders—that it was important to have a majority of support for such legislation.Then we got to the bill itself. You have heard today from my colleague David Parker and you will hear from David Cunliffe that we believe a fantastic job was done at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. I want to pay tribute to David Parker but also to David Shearer from our side and the members of the National Government side of the committee who put together and looked at the changes that we now feel comfortable with. We know that there are other issues that we will pursue and we will talk about those at the Committee stage.We believe it has been a very very good process. I want to commend the Attorney-General and his role in this bill. Chris Finlayson has done a superb job; that is according to David Parker—I was not on the committee—and I am sure David Cunliffe will be able to affirm that. He has handled this in a very sensitive and sensible way to get as much buy-in and agreement on a piece of legislation as you could ever get. I just want to make sure that we commend him for that.I think that really when you go back to why we needed some change you can go right back to something that David Parker talked about and that went back to the issue of Warren Tucker. Warren Tucker in fact as is well-known—I will not go through the whole thing—was not truthful in what he said in a meeting with Phil Goff. Arising from that we had no confidence in his ability to tell us what was going on. From that moment on we never met with him unless there were two of us together with him and I became one of those who did meet with him. We did not have the confidence that you ought to have in the main agencies that are so important in New Zealand. But with the change of leadership—when you change the leadership of the NZ Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau—and with the Inspector-General Cheryl Gwyn we started to get confidence that those people themselves were going to ensure that any changes that were made were going to be ones that were in the best interests of New Zealand at the same time ensuring that our human rights and freedoms were not taken away from us unnecessarily.There are many things that I could talk about in this bill but with only 5 minutes I am going to wait until the Committee stage. I just want to conclude by saying that we would be mad to think that New Zealand would be free of terrorist activity. We would be mad. We already know that there are people in New Zealand who would do New Zealanders harm. Our first responsibility as politicians and parliamentarians is to ensure the safety of New Zealanders and this bill goes a long way to doing that.