Locke Keith: National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna MAtauranga o Aotearoa) Bill — Second Reading 
Locke Keith: National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna MAtauranga o Aotearoa) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:4735] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the Green Party to support this bill and I would like to pay tribute to the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library. Their performance and what they have achieved over the years is truly something we should all approve of. I support the idea of the Alexander Turnbull Library remaining a separate subdivision of the National Library system. I know that it has an identity that goes way back and that the various prominent citizens who have given their papers over to the Alexander Turnbull Library have done that on the understanding that those papers will be well protected. The library has that tradition has a good organisation looks after and indexes those papers very well and makes them available to a wide number of people. In fact when Dr Elsie Locke my mother died we had representations from different libraries about where her papers would go and it was quite clear to us after discussions among members of the family that they should go to the Alexander Turnbull Library. They have gone there and been well organised there. Its staff are in the process of completing that organisation and we are very satisfied with what they are doing. 
The thing that impresses me about the Alexander Turnbull Library too is not only the tradition but the support base—the volunteer base as it were—that has developed around that library in terms of the Friends of the Turnbull Library in the various functions they have which are well attended the publications they put out and their involvement with an important sector of the community in their ongoing work. It is good that under this bill guardians are being set up as a supportive body. I presume those guardians will be appointed from those people who are already very involved in the work of the library. It has a very important place in preserving our heritage and making it available to the public. 
There is a section there on oral histories and I know that the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library have paid much more attention to oral history and to collecting oral histories in the libraries over recent times. I think that is very important because a lot of our important people—people who are part of our history—do not get around to writing their autobiographies or to having other people write biographies about them and it is sometimes distressing when we know that their accumulated wisdom and experience will disappear if they die. It is good that there are now a lot of people around in the oral history area who are going out into the community and getting records of those people which are now being deposited in the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library and being well organised and made available. We can go and listen to those oral histories. That is a very good development and it is mentioned in this bill. 
There is also the question and Marian Hobbs referred to it about the exemptions that the Minister can make for certain categories of documents and Government documents. That is a question that relates to the National Library the Alexander Turnbull Library and Archives New Zealand. There are grounds for exemptions—no one is challenging that—but we have to be wary that those exemptions are not over-used or used just because the Government is a bit embarrassed about things or used to do the bidding of a particular Government department that wants to keep its papers unnecessarily secret or unnecessarily secret for too long a time. We have that problem a little bit with our intelligence services where in terms of Archives New Zealand they have been given exemptions for 25 years and then their exemptions have been renewed for 25 years so that virtually for a 50-year period we are not able to access any of those materials even though a lot of them—materials that the Security Intelligence Service for example collects—are public domain materials: publications leaflets and those sorts of materials that would be valuable in an archive. 
I am just referring to a problem that has been somewhat discussed by academics and by researchers. They are a bit worried about that and recently have made submissions to the Prime Minister on this question of making a freer public deposit system for those materials into the National Archives. I am just worried given the reference in this bill to the “Minister granting exemptions” and believe we have to be careful to keep an eye on that so that it is not used as a reason over a range of Government departments for having long-term and broad exemptions. They all should be properly justified in terms of genuine security interests or genuine protection of people who should be protected. With those qualifications I reiterate the Green Party’s support for this bill.