Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. We—all of us—would like to live in a world without violence and without hatred. That is terrorism. The Green Party has stood for non-violence and has stood for equality from the inception of our movement. Non-violence is one of our four charter principles so we take seriously the responsibility to protect marginalised groups and us all against the threat of terror. This law it has to be noticed comes to this House in the context of New Zealand's worst act of terror in living memory which happened on 15 March at the mosques in Christchurch. It comes to us in the context of the now eight-year bloody war being waged in Syria. It comes after decades of terrorism on the rise that includes the likes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria but it also now increasingly includes the rise of white nationalist terrorism. We know that that has included in terms of Syria—and that's what the focus of the context of this bill has been—New Zealanders travelling over to commit acts of terror and untold harm against communities over there who have asked us together with the United Nations to bring our own so-called foreign terrorist fighters" to justice because they don't have the resource and frankly they don't feel safe. So we do have a responsibility. But this bill also comes to this House in the context of decades-long harmful prejudice-filled rhetoric of the war on terror that has justified illegal wars in the Middle East and that has justified violence and degradation of refugee communities of Middle Easterners and of the Muslim community living in their own homelands and abroad. We know all too well the threat of that harm. We've seen it from Guantanamo Bay to Trump's so-called Muslim ban and then in Christchurch this year so the Green Party takes seriously the responsibility to get this right. New Zealanders have put this House on notice that they will not stand for the kind of knee-jerk lawmaking or the kind of political rhetoric that places us at more risk because it's based on fearmongering not fairness. So in that context this bill proposes to introduce control orders that will apply to those over 18 years old and these are civil orders. So we're not talking about anybody that has been proven beyond reasonable doubt to be a terrorist—nothing like that and I remind the Opposition of that—because that's why we need to be so careful. These orders would include surveillance monitoring. They will include in certain cases limited access to firearms and limited access to electronic devices and online spaces that may place us at harm in those particular cases. It will also include with consent—and that's the only part that is requiring of consent—mental health care and rehabilitation programmes. These all include rights issues and breaches of rights that if we don't get right could have unintended harmful consequences and it is no secret that the Green Party opposed this bill in its original Government form when it was introduced. We were loud about that and we welcomed public debate. Our opposition was primarily based on the definition of terror included in the original bill that we saw as potentially risking political activists and dissidents coming back from overseas and the lack of due process—in particular around the use of secret classified information. I do want to again remind the Opposition that due process is where we determine whether someone is actually a risk to us because we don't want to catch people who aren't. We want that process to be safe. So that was the basis of our original opposition and then very quickly it was made clear to us that that Government bill was not in fact what was at stake. The National Party in a callous and irresponsible move held the Government to ransom introducing new Draconian measures that would include catching children under order—Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. I'm sure you heard the unparliamentary allegation that was made there. The National Party held no one to ransom. That's completely rubbish. If we had held them to ransom then quite clearly we wouldn't be here discussing this bill now with a load of tripe that we're getting from the Green Party. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I'm not sure that that's the most helpful way of ending a point of order. The member has taken offence at the phrase that Golriz Ghahraman used and I'd ask her to withdraw and apologise. GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Madam Speaker it was meant as a figure of speech—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): I've asked you to withdraw and apologise. GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: —but I do withdraw and apologise. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Thank you. GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Their provisions upon which their support was conditional—after having said that they would support the Government's bill—included holding children under order included imposing indefinite orders and included detention without due process. They would hold children under order for life. That was what was at stake and it was made clear to us that it would not be the Government bill that would go ahead if we did not improve it; it was that bill. But even then we didn't blindly support the Government bill that we didn't want; in fact we held tight to every single one of our bottom lines and we got them. Then we didn't stop fighting through the select committee process and we got a suite of new changes. The Green Party for the first time in our long history was at the decision-making table on anti-terror law and the changes we got were described by the Human Rights Commission's senior lawyer John Hancock as substantially improving the human rights compliance of this bill. That was the first lot of changes. Our first bottom line was changing the definition of terror to exclude anything that's coming from an overseas jurisdiction that might go beyond our own terrorism definition—that might catch feminists rainbow activists and environmentalists and we know that we have caught those people under dodgy anti-terror laws before—and so that the definition wouldn't be imposed based on any convictions or deportations from jurisdictions that don't have our fair trial standards and I'm reminded of the Ahmed Zaoui case. Ahmed Zaoui was convicted in absentia. He didn't even know he was being tried and he wasn't there and we—our security agencies—relied on those convictions. That wouldn't happen under this bill. We know that our own security agencies are not without prejudice. We know that they looked more closely at the Muslim community and at Māori activists in the past rather than at white supremacists so we knew that was important. Our second bottom line—and this was something that was very close to my heart as a baby Amnesty International intern at the time of the Zaoui case—is that secret classified information will not be used in a blanket form whenever security agencies want to introduce it to hold anyone under control orders under this bill. So if secret information is to be introduced a court has to first be satisfied that there is an actual security risk to a person or an actual national security risk in that case in relation to that information being disclosed to that particular person. That was not in place under the Zaoui case and it would have set him free. But even then under the process we've introduced—even then—there will always be a defence lawyer who can see the information and can advocate for the person affected. That is the highest standard of due process anywhere in New Zealand law. It was recommended by our Law Commission and it is the best practice recognised in international law. Then in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee—and I do want to stop and I want to thank everyone who came to select committee. It was such a truncated process. It was so difficult to get those submissions in and you still did it: the Law Society and the Chief Justice wrote to us individuals came Amnesty International wrote to us the Human Rights Commission the Privacy Commissioner. All of the constructive changes that were suggested to us I fought for and—as Gerry Brownlee has so kindly acknowledged and others in the Opposition—we got so many of them passed. I do want to focus because two of the most important changes we got through in select committee were that in all cases appropriate allocation of legal aid will be made for those who control orders may apply to. Also a huge win—especially given the truncated select committee process—is that we will have mandatory independent review of this law in two years' time including a review of whether or not the law itself is at all necessary. So we are very pleased that we stopped the National Party Draconian changes. We are very pleased that we've protected children from having their rights breached. We are very happy to have protected New Zealand from going down the route of Guantanamo Bay—of arresting people for the crime of having travelled to places like the Middle East. Lawmaking is not a game by which politicians can make themselves look tough on crime or terror. So again I want to thank everyone who came who was loud who submitted who talked about human rights who talked about justice and who held us to account because the improvements that we got to this bill—although we must always be careful when we're talking about civil orders in this context—have made it better. They have made it fairer and they have upheld the rule of law in New Zealand so we can be proud at least of that. Thank you."