Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on this piece of legislation. It is an important piece of legislation because it is part of a suite of anti-terrorism legislation that joins other statutes on our book and I think that we in this House always have to exercise caution when we are putting in place legislation that targets crimes of a political nature. As such the terms have to be carefully defined and carefully drafted to avoid potentially criminalising forms of political activism especially those that involve protest or non-violent direct action.I think that this piece of legislation we have sitting in front of us in the House today has benefited very much from the work of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I would like to acknowledge that the speaker before me Shane Reti did make that point. We received over 150 submissions on this piece of legislation many of them incredibly detailed. The submitters had worked through this bill with a great deal of care and diligence as to the seriousness of the legislation that we were putting in place. One hundred and forty-five of the submissions that we heard at the select committee did not support the legislation in the form it was in at the committee. The concerns were remarkably similar amongst the submitters from grassroots activists through to the Law Society. Their concerns were around the issue of whether or not we would capture legitimate political protest or industrial action under a piece of legislation that was never intended to capture those activities and I think that the work we have been able to do through the committee has improved that for the better.Sitting alongside this need for us as legislators to exercise absolute care in drafting so that we did not delegitimise legitimate activity were our international obligations under the Rome protocols which previous speakers have outlined. The issue that we had to look at was how the bill aligned with other pieces of legislation that have been reasonably recently enacted in this House and are around the suppression and control of terrorism in this country. The suggestion that many submitters made—that we align the definition of terrorism" with that in some of those other pieces of legislation—was not going to fit in this case. Although it seemed on face value like a very good suggestion from many of the submitters when we looked at the detail of what we needed to do around this under the Rome protocol it was not something that was going to be able to fit. What we were able to do—and I am sure this will be debated more fully when we come to the Committee stage of this bill—was actually remove some of the words that were problematic and instead of using just the word "terrorism" be a bit more detailed around what is actually meant by it.But fundamentally the biggest change that we were able to make as a committee—and what for submitters was absolutely a bottom line that had to happen in this legislation and what for us in the Labour Party too was a bottom line that needed to be cleared up—was around the avoidance of doubt. We needed to make sure that we were not going to capture legitimate activity. There was a very clear line that needed to be drawn: we needed to make sure that legitimate protest action was still allowed. We needed to ensure that we could still have the flotillas of the 1980s which many in this country are rightly proud of in terms of what our national identity is about—that that kind of activity was not going to be supressed by this legislation. That was something that many of the submitters who came to the select committee shared their experiences about: being part of the flotillas of the 1980s that protested and made sure we could become a nuclear-free New Zealand. I think that for me as someone sitting there listening to people who had been involved in that it was something we had to listen to very carefully.Personally for me having that avoidance of doubt was incredibly important as was setting the threshold for what constituted an offence under this Act. That is because as well as defining that threshold powers are given under this piece of legislation in terms of seizure and the right to board a ship. Many powers are triggered and we needed to decide exactly what the threshold was over which these powers should be triggered. When should we treat something as an act of terrorism? Is it when any damage is caused or is there a different threshold? When is it that what is normally used in the statute book around damage or the civil kind of law that we would normally apply—when would that stop and the provisions of a much more pronounced regime come into effect?These were really interesting questions for the select committee to consider. I would actually like to thank the members of the select committee from right across the House who did take the time to think through what were quite difficult concepts so that we could come through with some solutions to those questions so that we could ensure that we put in place a piece of legislation that did not capture things that were never intended to be captured under this legislation.I think that when we come to the Committee stage we need to look at some of the consequential amendments that come through too. It is a very technical piece of legislation around definitions but embedded in it is a fundamental piece of our national identity that is something we and legislators in this House always have to hold true to: our citizens in our country have the right to protest. Citizens in our country have rights to protest in industrial action disputes and we should not be legislating away those rights when we put in place anti-terrorism legislation.I am happy to take a call to say that Labour is satisfied that we have managed to make enough changes at the select committee so that we are not going to do those very fundamental things that we would never want our anti-terrorism legislation to do and at the same time we have managed to put in place protections against legitimate terrorist threats. That is something that everyone in this House also wants to do and we need to ensure that that is there and that we are fulfilling our obligations under international treaties. I am happy to commend this bill to the House."