Goff Phil: Urgent Debates — Government Communications Security Bureau—Review of ComplianceText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Urgent Debates — Government Communications Security Bureau—Review of Compliance[Sitting date: 10 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9229. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): There are two problems with the Kitteridge report. The first is that the Kitteridge report does not examine the critical issue which was the role of John Key in exercising his ministerial responsibility to have oversight of the Government Communications Security Bureau. It cannot do that. It was unfair to expect Rebecca Kitteridge to do that. She is Secretary of the Cabinet. She is having day-to-day meetings with the Prime Minister. Is that why the Prime Minister chose a person who could not go to the heart of this problem and say: “Why was the Minister responsible for the GCSB unable to do his job of exercising adequate and proper oversight of this agency?”You know we give our spy agencies incredible power. We need them—people have talked about cyber-attacks and that is quite right—but they have incredible power and they exercise that power with total secrecy. We therefore rely on the Minister responsible for the GCSB to make sure that safeguards checks and balances are in place to ensure that that agency behaves legitimately under the law and in a proper way. I have to say this: John Key failed absolutely in that responsibility.Hon Anne Tolley: Rubbish!Hon PHIL GOFF: I remember John Key as Prime Minister in 2009 Anne Tolley coming into this House and saying that he would expect higher standards of his Ministers. Those higher standards surely need to involve competence they need to involve a readiness to exercise proper oversight and they need to involve a readiness to be open and transparent. On every one of those criteria John Key failed. By his own standards he should have sacked himself as Minister responsible for the GCSB. He failed on every one of those fronts.But there is a second thing that the Kitteridge report fails to do. The Kitteridge report fails to go to the heart of where this affair began which was the raid on Kim Dotcom’s house. The first thing we know about that is that we went in with a combination of the Keystone Cops and Rambo—I do not know which is more appropriate as a description—with helicopters and the Special Tactics Group—Hon Chester Borrows: You Labour guys love the police eh?Hon PHIL GOFF: —full use of force and for what Mr Borrows? And for what? To issue an extradition warrant for copyright infringement!Can anybody in the world believe that the New Zealand Minister of Police allowed her police to go in fully armed with helicopters as if it was an attack on Hanoi during the Viet Nam War all to serve an extradition warrant and to seize a couple of computers? It was bizarre. You know probably the police and the Government Communications Security Bureau wanted to impress their colleagues in the United States the FBI. Far from impressing them sadly they showed their utter incompetence in the way they carried out that role and I hold the Government Ministers responsible for their failure of oversight.Secondly they went in in this dramatic way without the legal authority to do so. A High Court judge in this country Justice Helen Winkelmann found that they had no right of search or seizure and they had an invalid warrant. So when Chris Finlayson as the Attorney-General gets up to spout in this House I want to know why there was so much incompetence and how you could conduct a raid that will make New Zealand liable for tens of millions of dollars in legal suits from Kim Dotcom. I want to know why there was so much incompetence and why there is not an inquiry into that facet.Then there is the third aspect of that raid and that is that Kim Dotcom and a number of other people were subjected to a month of covert surveillance without there being the legal right to conduct that surveillance. That is correct Mr Brownlee is it not? There was no legal right to conduct that surveillance. They said they did it on the basis Mr Brownlee that they did not know that he was a New Zealand resident. But theImmigration Service had told them that very shortly afterwards and your Government concealed it from the public—it told them that they had acted illegally but your Government concealed it from the public.But John Key concealed something much worse than that. For the first time a Minister in charge of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service was told that there had been spying for a significant period of time in a comprehensive way and that the legal authority to do that was in doubt. John Key was told that in July.Hon Gerry Brownlee: 19th of March.Hon PHIL GOFF: How do I know he was told that in July? Because he said so yesterday in his press statement. He was told that in July. Then for 9 long months he sat on that. He did not just sit on it—when he was asked in September whether this was an isolated incident he said yes it was an isolated incident. John Key knew he was not telling the truth. He knew that he was not telling the truth. He had known since July that there had been a pattern of activity that was illegal. And did he tell the New Zealand public? Not a word for 9 months. For 9 months he kept that from the public.John Key has a parliamentary committee the Intelligence and Security Committee which should have the right to know that sort of information. During that 9 months did he call the committee together to give the parliamentary oversight that that committee was set up to provide and tell it the truth? No he did not. So John Key needs to come into this House and say why he would not front up to the New Zealand public and why he would not front up to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee and tell them the truth about what the agency that he as a Minister is responsible for was actually doing.But there is more to it than that. Can we really believe that John Key did not know anything about what was happening in the biggest operation that New Zealand has mounted in association with the United States on New Zealand soil involving the Ministry of Justice involving the Crown Law Office involving the Police involving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and involving the Government Communications Security Bureau? Can we really believe that as being credible?Can we then believe that the Government Communications Security Bureau for months and months and months never told him the truth about the illegality of the actions? Well you know there are a couple of explanations. One is dishonesty and incompetence and an arrogant disregard for the rights of New Zealanders to know. Sir Bruce Ferguson came up with another explanation and he said it publicly. That is very unusual for a top civil servant. He loyally served the country for four decades. He said: “When I dealt with John Key he wasn’t interested in what we were doing.” But that does not explain why he was never told by Ian Fletcher because Ian Fletcher was the man whom he had personally hand-picked in breach of the normal procedures of the State Services Commission to put in—Hon Gerry Brownlee: It’s not true.Hon PHIL GOFF: It is true and Iain Rennie made it clear that it was highly unusual for him to do that. That isYes Minister talk for: “I was astonished and I was shocked that he did it.” He went in and he hand-picked his own person to head the Government Communications Security Bureau. He did not just hand-pick the person. There was only one interview—one interview—and they chose the person who interviewed best. One interview—that really smells.The Prime Minister is meant to be the Minister in charge of that agency. He is meant to know what is going on and he is meant to hold it accountable and he failed on every front. But can we believe this too? Bill English signed a ministerial warrant covering up the role of the Government Communications Security Bureau in this affair. That has never been done in New Zealand’s history before—Hon Christopher Finlayson: Tell us about Bruce Ferguson.Hon PHIL GOFF: —Chris Finlayson. It has never been done. Can you really believe that Bill English took an unprecedented step acting as Prime Minister and never told John Key when he came back to New Zealand that he had signed this warrant covering the matter up? It has never been done in history and he did not bother to tell John Key? Hey pull the other arm. Nobody believes that.The fact is that this affair smells. It smells in every aspect. There have been too many brain fades. There have been too many lies by omission. There have been too many times when the Government has not been prepared to be open and transparent. As Chris Finlayson quoted before Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” and what we need is a full and independent inquiry to allow the sun to shine in on this murky affair.