Locke Keith: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:643;Page:12809] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I would just like to respond to some of Murray McCully’s comments. He rightly points out that there is disagreement over whether we should give the Prime Minister extra powers in this respect and he uses a security argument but I think that argument tends to fall down because we have seen—particularly over the last few years in the Ahmed Zaoui case—that when we give the executive branch too much power to determine a person’s fate in secret using so-called classified information that is very broadly defined the political agendas of the Government of the day tend to predominate and people suffer. This is the case be it Ahmed Zaoui be it Dr Haneef in Australia or be it any of the many examples in Canada and in other Western countries. 
Just about every other advanced Western country with a good system of democracy and a good judicial system has suffered through giving to the executive those powers to determine someone’s future through using secret information and it need not be so. We can defend ourselves by keeping the judicial process as it is and by keeping the situation where a person can be sent down be imprisoned only if they know the accusations against them and if they can properly defend themselves. We can see the problem. Murray McCully said that we should have all these other designations and he ranged across a whole lot of nationalist groups. It is a characteristic of some of those nationalistic groups that at the edges they do engage in terrorist activity which we all condemn. 
There are wild elements and wrong tracks may be taken that we are all against as a democratic community. But if we want to get from A to B in order to improve the situation—as we found in the Northern Ireland peace process—we have to engage in those situations with those people who want to move towards a democratic resolution. We have to engage with the Gerry Adamses to use the example of Northern Ireland. When we go about just designating entities willy-nilly we cannot do that. The person I referred to before Mr S P Tamilselvan who was assassinated last Friday was a person whom I met and discussed the peace process in Sri Lanka with in 2003. It is very much a fact that the Western countries that designated the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organisation cut themselves out of the peace process which was going very well in 2002 2003 and 2004 and the ceasefire was holding. But because Australia Britain America and later the European Union designated the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organisation they cut themselves out of that peace process and it opened it up to a resumption of the warfare rather than to a peaceful resolution. They left countries like Norway stranded in trying to hold the peace process together. 
We must take a different course. It is so damaging to just categorise people as “terrorist” as was discussed before by speakers from the Maori Party. The image of someone being related to terrorism and being raided over potential terrorism charges and terrorism matters is just so damaging to the proper consideration of the issues involved—the community issues the political issues—in bringing people together bringing justice to the situation trying to get at people’s gripes and trying to understand why they go off the rails a bit or do things that we all condemn. 
We have to get at the basis of it to be able to lead to a resolution. The terrorism suppression legislation whether it applies to the designation of international organisations—which Murray McCully talked about—or to people in New Zealand is very dangerous. It is much better to stick to the criminal law rather than to label people and punish people more just because they have political views and are involved in a political movement.