Shearer David: Passports Amendment Bill Customs and Excise Amendment Bill New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Passports Amendment Bill Customs and Excise Amendment Bill New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 09 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1256. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert):I thank the Minister Christopher Finlayson for those words of clarification and in particular for the commitment to look at the definition of terrorism when the review goes ahead.First I want to start with something that we have not done before which is to acknowledge the officials and other members of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. Certainly from this side of the House we appreciated your support and your hard work. It was a very intense effort and I think we came out and landed as well as we perhaps could have given the time constraints. This legislation was always a question of balance—of getting the balance right between on the one hand the ability of our security agencies to safeguard our livelihoods and at the same time to make sure that our basic freedoms our human rights and our rights of privacy are protected. That is how it was always presented and as I said in the second reading earlier today the issue for us was that the threat was a real one. The threat was increasing. The number of incidents that were occurring was growing.But at the same time we do not want to get too carried away and say that somehow on the streets of New Zealand in our towns and cities we are facing some sort of major threat. That is not the case. Our threat level has gone from “very low” to “low” but it is a trajectory that is on an upward movement. For that reason after hearing from the SIS and after having the chance to hear actual cases we believe that there are grounds for supporting this legislation because there was a very real issue of terrorism. But any law that comes into force should be narrow in its scope and focused on this problem and not anything broader than that.The safeguards around warrantless surveillance visual surveillance the extension of passports and access to the Customs Service database—the four main areas that we saw as being problematic—have been gone over thoroughly. We brought the SIS back to explain fully we brought the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to the select committee and we have benefited from the wisdom of the Law Society the Legislation Advisory Committee the Privacy Commissioner and many other people who actually gave submissions for the first time. There was not just the usual queue of individuals who normally appear before a select committee; there were a number of people who appeared for the first time because they were concerned about where things were going. I hope we listened to them as much as we could and that we got the balance about right.I am particularly grateful for the Minister’s comments about the Muslim community. I think it is a community that is at the front line—and we keep on saying this—of protecting New Zealanders as a whole. There are 46000-odd Muslims and as one of the submitters said to us: “We are not Muslims in New Zealand; we are Muslims of New Zealand. Twenty-five percent of us have been born in New Zealand. We are as worried about the safety of our children and our families as any other New Zealander is.” As any terrorism expert will tell you the best way to combat terrorism is to actually engage with the community that some of those extremists are going to come from. Nobody is more worried and as seized with the issue of ensuring that those people are identified and effectively that their threat is removed than the Muslim community. We need to do much better for them than what we are doing at the moment.The issue around the haste of this legislation is an important one. It is important not just because of the degree of time that we had in terms of hearing the various submissions and being able to deliberate. It is actually a bigger issue of the confidence that New Zealanders can have in this Parliament to put through laws that are not pushed and not hurried but actually do get the right degree of surveillance—if you like to use that word—and scrutiny that enable us to ensure that laws are good laws. We had the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) legislation last year which was frankly a debacle. It was passed through with some urgency as well and there was a brief select committee process around it. And now we have this bill. This does not give the public—the general public—the confidence that they want and deserve that we are looking after their best interests while at the same time weighing up their concerns and the issues we need to be grappling with. We need to do much better than we are doing at the moment and frankly I do not accept the Minister’s explanation that this was the only way to do it. A small review of even this legislation could have taken place during the period of the campaign before the election and we could have had legislation in the House the day that Parliament came back.That is to do with this legislation. Now we are moving forward into our review period. With regard to the way I see the threat that is out there I think we are well-catered-for in New Zealand in terms of our relationships with many of the minority groups in New Zealand. That means that we are not at the same threat level as the UK Australia and other countries. But I do not believe that we have the oversight right. I do believe that what we have had up to now both within the GCSB—the review that went through the GCSB which I believe was good—and increasingly within the SIS are the operational capabilities safeguards and checks which have probably been very much upgraded over the last few years. It is the sense that spies or whatever we want to call them do not go off and just do what they want to do—that there is a warranted process and that everything within the agencies follows a very professional way forward. That is at this level.The second level as I see it is the judicial level. This is the ability of the Commissioner of Security Warrants and the Minister to be able to oversee the warrant procedure to ensure that they fulfil the needs of the warrants that they are not overstepping the line and that the High Court judge who is appointed to be the Commissioner of Security Warrants is doing their job properly. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security impressed us by the way that she submitted her evidence in front of the select committee. As I said earlier she said that she has the ability to go into the SIS or the GCSB 24/7 with a pass and look at anything she wants to look at and oversee and check on anything that has gone and happened. She has the ability with information technology to follow and track the path by which somebody perhaps opened up a computer and took a look at it. I believe that the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has an extremely important role and the beefed-up role gives us a great deal of confidence but I do think there are some tweaks and improvements that can be made as a part of the review.Where we fall down however is at the political level. The Intelligence and Security Committee—I know Phil Goff knows; we have sat on that committee—is frankly a joke. It is a joke because the same person who heads the intelligence agencies of the SIS and the GCSB is ultimately the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister sits on the same committee that oversees the operations of those two ministries. There is certainly not a country that I know of in the Western World that has the person who is in charge of those agencies also chairing the oversight committee that looks into them—as well as having the additional vote which ensures that everything that is put up by the other side is immediately voted down. We need to look at that as a matter of urgency within this review. That cannot continue to happen. In the UK the chair of that committee is actually a backbencher of considerable standing who I think is voted on to that committee and chairs that committee—rather than being the person who is in charge of those agencies. That needs to happen here.The Intelligence and Security Committee needs to be given far more authority than it has at the moment and a far greater degree of power to be able to look into those agencies pull things out and if necessary make those issues public. Unfortunately what we have seen today with both the GCSB and the SIS—with the inspector-general’s report the other day—is that the only time we are looking into those agencies is when there has been some sort of stuff-up and that is not good enough. That should be looked at as a matter of course and it should be looked at in the context of the review that is coming. Thank you.