Hodgson Pete: New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hodgson Pete: New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 I am sorry that National is not choosing to contribute to the debate on a piece of legislation that matters. 
Hon Paula Bennett 
: What was that? You and your other two members in the House? 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: I wonder whether the Minister for Social Development and Employment would like to pull in what is left of her head and I will continue with my contribution to the House. I do think that National should contribute to the debate on the legislation. The fact that it is doing what is called “whips’ calls” which means that members opposite get up say something sit down and that counts as having made a speech—and therefore counts as having got one-twelfth of the way through to the end point of the legislation—is not a very good look. 
Labour will be supporting this legislation. We do so with some mixture of views and with some hesitation that always attends legislation of this ilk. Those who understand legislation of this ilk far better than I will say that it seeks to achieve a balance between the protection of society on the one hand from bad people and attention to human rights on the other hand from an over-excitable State sector. Labour’s position on the legislation is that getting that balance right will take a bit of time. Over the years the one thing that has helped has been an increase in the degree of transparency that applies to SIS activities and SIS legislation. 
For example there used to be no ability to examine the SIS at a committee level. There was no ability to do that. There was an obligation on the SIS to tell the Prime Minister of the day how many people’s phones had been tapped. The Prime Minister of the day would table that number on the floor of the House once a year; and that was that. These days we have more openness than that. In other words the SIS has certain powers that no one else has but is obliged to explain what it does with them more openly than it ever has before. So one of the things that society can do as it is trying to match this balance between what is perceived to be the need for closer public safety or more attention to public security on the one hand and attention to human rights on the other hand is to reach for transparency. There are various ways of doing so. 
Of course things can go wrong. I can remember being a member of Cabinet during the Ahmed Zaoui case. That was a very difficult time to be in Government because the law could not be changed mid-stream. We did however indicate that we would change the law at the end of the course of that process and we did. That is an example of what can happen when things go wrong and people decide that a person has a certain profile that it turns out they may not have. Keith Locke who is sitting not so far away from me now is another example of someone who perhaps somewhat to his considerable surprise has been under the watch of the SIS because he is such a beastly terrorist-inspired sort of a coot! He has found himself until recent times under the examination of the spooks. That is simply bizarre. 
When it comes to the select committee hearings for this legislation the idea that the hearings would be all held in secret is itself intolerable. The way that the committee is put together as I understand it is that any one person on the committee can veto the hearing of evidence in public. In other words the rules around it are tilted such that one needs unanimity to get openness. Any one person can require hearings to be closed. I think I have got that right. I think I saw the Prime Minister of the land who is a member of that committee tell the House the day before yesterday or it may have even been yesterday that he was of the view that things would need to be held in secret and therefore as he alone held that view they would be held in secret. We are learning today that maybe the Prime Minister is changing his mind. I would simply say to the Prime Minister that it is not OK to be beholden to the wisdom or at least the advice of SIS folk who of course will say: “We want to be heard in secret.” Of course they will say they do not want any hearings to be made public. Of course they will not want transparency on their watch because that is not their style it is not their history it is not where they have come from. That is why they are called spooks. 
That does not make it good. If we are to have the SIS getting into the Prime Minister’s ear getting him excited giving him “Boys’ Own Story” stuff about how we really should not allow the bright lights of transparency to shine on the processes of this legislation and the Prime Minister uses his veto right to ensure that the rest of the country does not get to see what goes on in the select committee that is bad style. We know that the Prime Minister is subject to that sort of “boys’ own” excitable story stuff because he travels with an enormous number of Diplomatic Protection Squad personnel around him. He has people striding around him. Even when he is about to walk into this Chamber he comes with an armed guard. It is unbelievable. I do not know of any Prime Minister in the history of this country and certainly none that I have had anything to do with who would walk around this building with armed guards—with lumpy armpits—either side of him. Who would trammel the dignity of the Prime Minister in this place? I really do think he is vulnerable to that excitable “boys’ own” stuff. 
I think that is a shame. If the Prime Minister is of that nature if that is his personality then maybe it has affected his approach to the openness of the select committee hearings. If that is the case then we have a situation where one person alone gets to say that the rest of the 4 million of us are not entitled to have an open process for this legislation. That is not good. The ideal would be to have a default position that was open except that there will be some instances at some stage where the select committee members should be the only ones to know some level of evidence. I can imagine that being the case and I would be comfortable with that even though I am not myself on the Intelligence and Security Committee. But the default position has to be “let’s have it in the open unless” and at the moment the default position occasioned by the Prime Minister alone seems to be “Let’s have it all locked up unless I change my mind.” I ask the Prime Minister to please change his mind because he is about to make a big mistake if he does not. It is really important as we try to balance on the one hand the dignity and importance of human rights and on the other hand the protection of society that we use transparency as a way to get that balance right. The Prime Minister is of an opposite view.