Hide Rodney: Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill — First Reading 
Hide Rodney: Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:676;Page:21458] 
Hon RODNEY HIDE (Minister of Local Government) 
: 
 I thank the Attorney-General for agreeing to send this very important bill the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill to a select committee for a few days in order for the public to have a say and for this Parliament to hear from experts. 
We have a simple parliamentary system here. It has been called “unbridled power” before. There are very few checks and balances on the power of this Parliament. One of the checks is select committee scrutiny which allows ordinary citizens to have their say and for official advice to be contested. Now one of the checks is that usually not one party can muster the numbers on its own to ram through legislation. That is as it was in this case because it is very clear that National wanted to move this bill straight through under urgency and to pass it into law. The ACT Party believes that that would have been a very serious mistake. 
There is a lot at stake. Let me walk people through it. The first thing is that people say it is very odd for ACT to be the law and order party and to be standing up on behalf of the rights of shall we say suspected criminals or criminals. That is because if we are to have law and order the critical bit is that the police operate within the law. If the police do not operate within the law then there will not be any order. That is why we require and hold our police to operate within the laws that this Parliament makes. It is a very serious issue indeed if the police when going about their business and with a good purpose to put away bad people are not worrying about operating outside the law. We would not actually have a lawful society and we would not have the order that we expect in a civil society. That is why we set the bar so high for our police and justly so. 
The second thing is that this bill deals with a very very important issue: covert surveillance by the police. In other jurisdictions the police as arms of the State can surveil who they like covertly and they routinely do that for all sorts of untoward purposes. We correctly call such States police States and New Zealanders do not want anything to do with them. We want our police operating within the rules set by the people’s representatives voted here by the people in this Parliament. We do not want our police to go about secretly surveilling law-abiding citizens without the proper checks and balances that a civil society has. We have to say that this is a very very important issue; it is not a technicality indeed. 
In fact it surprised me to learn that the procedures were set up in 1957 before we had the technical ability to do covert surveillance I guess. This law is so outdated that the police have found themselves in this predicament. The police officer in charge of this inquiry told the High Court that he knew they were operating outside the law with their covert surveillance. Rather than the Police Association ringing around MPs to try to get them to support this legislation under urgency—retrospectively—why was the Police Association not running around this Parliament to get the proper laws updated and passed so that the police could do their job within the law rather than operating as they knew they were outside the law? Covert surveillance by the police is a big deal for any civil society. 
The other point is that we are dealing with a Supreme Court decision. It should not escape members in this House that the Supreme Court is the highest court in New Zealand. We say that Parliament is the highest court— 
Hon Shane Jones 
: Rodney Parliament is the highest court. 
Hon RODNEY HIDE 
: Look we say that Parliament is the highest court but it is not. Parliament is not a court. Parliament is the highest court in the sense that it is the place where we have the debate and we make the laws. It is the court’s job to decide and to interpret those laws. We keep in a civil society in which we bridle power a clear distinction between the courts and this Parliament and rightly so. We should ask ourselves what sort of banana republic is it if the Government of the day comes along and says: “Oh we don’t like that decision of the courts. Let’s change the law.” Well that is OK! “But let’s change the law retrospectively because we don’t agree with the implications of that decision on what it means for New Zealand.” That is the definition of a banana republic. Why would we invest in a country where if we end up taking the Crown to court and it does not like the result it just changes the law backwards? We saw that with the foreshore and seabed and we knew then it was a mistake. This is likewise potentially a similar mistake which needs very careful examination. 
The next thing we can say is this: we are attempting a so-called fix of the Supreme Court decision under urgency. The proposal was to do so without the bill going to a select committee. We would have had this: the Government of the day getting official advice—the only advice it would get; there would be no contest— 
Hon David Parker 
: From the police. 
Hon RODNEY HIDE 
: —from the police and from the Solicitor-General who was advising them in the court case that they lost to say: “Oh the Supreme Court got it wrong. Change it. We will just pretend the Supreme Court did not make that decision. In fact we will scrub it out of the books—scrub it out of the books.” To do that under urgency makes it worse. So at the very least we have the bill going to a select committee. Then not only that but to do so retrospectively! What that would be doing is making lawful what the police knew back in the day was unlawful. Parliament is the only place that can do that. Something was done unlawfully some years ago and this Parliament will come along and say: “Oh that’s OK. The police were operating unlawfully. They knew they were operating unlawfully. We knew that they were doing covert surveillance unlawfully. We’ll come along and make lawful what was unlawful.” That is Alice-in-Wonderland stuff. I do not mean to pick on Labour but it made a similar mistake with the foreshore and seabed. The best thing this Parliament can do is hold its fire listen to what the courts have to say and make the law not become the court of this country. 
We are going off to a select committee. I can tell members of this House that I do not know what the answer is. I will be very interested in the submissions the select committee hears on this bill and what suggestions we hear on this bill. I am very interested in what Labour has offered. But here are the things: first of all it seems to me that we do want the police to be able to undertake covert surveillance but we want them to do it under the law with proper checks and balances. I do not see that in this bill. I do not see it in this bill. It cannot be beyond the wit of us to produce it. Second of all I have a grave concern about retrospectivity. We have been told about all the cases before the courts that will fail. I asked the Solicitor-General about that. He said: “Well actually I don’t really know. I just emailed all the Crown solicitors and said ‘How many cases have you got that could be affected?’.” He said that it worked out to about 40. Let us get to the bottom of how many cases are affected before we run off and commit what is a constitutional outrage. We would need a pretty good reason for committing such a constitutional outrage. 
Let us also do this. The argument is that there are all these bad people locked up and now we have the Supreme Court’s decision. Actually it is not the Supreme Court’s decision; it is the failure of this Parliament and successive Governments that is the issue. It is our failure to update our search and surveillance laws and our laws for search and seizure so that the police can act in a way that people think is reasonable. It is not the failure of the Supreme Court it is the failure of this Parliament. Let us test the evidence and find out how many people now inside are truly at risk of being let out and having an appeal under the law as the Supreme Court has it. I suspect there will not be very many.