Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I will begin by acknowledging you as the chair of our Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee the committee that considered this bill the Inspector-General of Defence Bill at great length and with a lot of diligence I would say. As others have said—including the deputy chair the Hon Gerry Brownlee—I think we did all come together with a lot of good will in terms of improving this bill based on its purpose although some members are of course tonight voting against it and I think that's sad.I do also want to congratulate the Minister. I think that although we've heard that perhaps this isn't the most urgent of bills in fact there isn't a moment more apt for a bill like this to come to the House. It is urgent in the context of global events for us as a nation to send a message that we stand for the rule-of-law system in not only times of peace but in terms of international humanitarian law—or the so-called laws of war—when prejudice is high and national security is at stake and that we stand for those precious rules that have protected our rules-based system and our like-minded nations in the toughest of times since World War II when we first started to apply them. So this does come as we've heard again and again out of the inquiry into Operation Burnham. So it is apt to also draw on some of the themes of that operation and the types of shortfalls that led to this bill being introduced. Operation Burnham was of course about events that happened on the ground but the most concerning of the findings were not in fact about the operation on the ground perhaps and those were not necessarily the events or the actions that have led to this bill. What Operation Burnham highlighted was a pattern of disrespect and inappropriate behaviour by members of the Defence Force right up to three different heads of the New Zealand Defence Force in terms of failures in transparency and accountability and the relationship between the civilian oversight mechanism which is right now the Minister and the military system—the information lines and the processes.So that is part of the reason we see this bill and the office of the inspector-general as being necessary. It's not only to address the very very rare cases when something like a harrowing war crime happens but to know ahead of time where our systems processes accountability mechanisms transparency—as far as it is necessary even in the context of the military—are falling short of what New Zealand would expect.So to those ends the committee focused on improving the bill in terms of transparency public access journalistic access the judicial-review mechanism that would kick in for anyone that wanted whether as part of proceedings or another affected party to challenge the decisions of the inspector-general including on transparency decisions. That idea of justice being done is as important as justice being seen to be done.So to that end having a civilian or an independent mechanism to investigate not only individual cases but also patterns and systems is taking us quite far as a nation into the modern expectation that we will follow international humanitarian law and actually international criminal law as well where those more serious incidents might occur. We are recognising that we have an obligation to investigate prosecute and punish but we also have an obligation to build systems that are fit for purpose and that are like those of our allies. In some of these combat operations we heard that Australia for example has a system that would potentially go much further than ours and so we may fall behind. To that end the committee's report sits in a little bit of contrast to the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) introduced by the Minister so we won't be supporting that SOP. The ACT Party member Dr James McDowall outlined opposition that—although we don't often agree so closely with the ACT Party—I would say reflects quite directly what the Green Party's concerns are: the certification of information that may be withheld by a Minister. The committee did discuss and analyse that issue in terms of whether or not politicisation may come into it. If something has happened a Government may not want to reveal whether there were considerations of that kind. That may be later and this will obviously apply to successive Governments and may come up.The Official Information Act's (OIA) applying. Operation Burnham was obviously an investigative journalistic revelation that came about and so to have the OIA apply is an important mechanism to have processes assumed to be held in public unless there are named sensitivities. This is something that courts really abide by and the inspector-general's office would always be sensitive to so we felt that that presumption was helpful to calming public anxiety about secrecy around defence mechanisms like this. For me the idea that that judicial review issue would be protected was one where I at least was led to press harder for transparency being put into the bill which I think is rolled back somewhat by the Minister's SOP.But nonetheless this is a watershed moment I would say in terms of bringing back trust accountability and transparency and restoring the idea that the New Zealand Defence Force will operate in line with the values of Aotearoa New Zealand and that the public will have some access and some way of knowing that that is in fact the case without there needing to be journalistic investigations like in Operation Burnham.So we do commend the bill to the House and I do congratulate the Minister for bringing it in urgency because we do need to set those standards right now. We need to draw that line in the sand.