Locke Keith: Immigration Bill — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Immigration Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:657;Page:6664] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Immigration Bill is a very big bill; as the Minister of Immigration Jonathan Coleman said there were 4000 submissions on it. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee spent a lot of time hearing those submissions. I was on that committee as the Green Party representative. Most of those submissions were critical of the bill. In the Committee stage the Green Party will essentially be putting forward amendments that are in line with substantial criticisms that have been made by reputable organisations like Amnesty International the Human Rights Commission etc. 
It is disappointing that on such an important bill we are dealing with the Committee stage which should really get to the heart of the bill in urgency and at a time when a lot of members want to go home or go off to see the reception for the All Blacks and the Wallabies at Parliament and what not. It is disappointing because this bill was reported back from the select committee about a year ago so there does not seem to be any real reason for it to be included in the urgency motion. 
The Green Party has four amendments on Part 1 and in my contributions on this part I want to outline the importance of those amendments. The first one amends clause 4(1) as regards the definition of “biometric information”. We propose to exclude iris scans from that definition. The current definition includes “(i) a photograph of all or part of the person’s head or shoulders: (ii) the person’s fingerprints: (iii) an iris scan;”. The Green Party is worried about the creep towards a surveillance society and part of that creep is the increasing use of biometric identifiers. We see that iris scans which are starting to come in around the world are an even more intrusive form of biometric identification. We are not convinced that they are needed for immigration purposes. 
In fact at the select committee there was some criticism on the question of biometrics. For example the Human Rights Commission in its written submission said: “the Commission is not convinced that there are compelling reasons for requiring biometric data to be collected from everyone who wishes to come to New Zealand. It is concerned that this could set a precedent for the compulsory collection of biometric information in other areas or lead to data being exchanged with other countries.” Then it goes on to say: “there is no indication in the Bill about how the information will be dealt with—for example how it will be stored or for how long.” There was a lot of discussion on biometric information which will be dealt with in consideration of Part 2 of the bill. The Privacy Commissioner who was also a bit worried about this issue effectively intervened in the discussion in the committee. Some changes were produced as to privacy assessments and when biometric information collecting systems are introduced. We will talk about that later but I ask members to at least exclude iris scans from the system that is being applied. 
The Minister mentioned speeding up travel to Australia. This will involve New Zealanders being photographed and their facial characteristics being compared against the chip in their passport. That is not a particularly wonderful step but certainly we do not want to go one step beyond that to iris scanning. I think there was a lot of concern among New Zealanders when the United States introduced fingerprinting for everyone going to America including people in transit. I was fingerprinted in Los Angeles International Airport where I sat in a transit lounge for an hour. I hopped off an Air New Zealand plane and hopped back on to it an hour later and in the meantime I was fingerprinted. It gets a bit over the top. Supposedly from the American point of view it is part of the war on terror but it tends to affect ordinary people a bit too much. Biometrics are also being introduced in terms of fingerprints for such things as people getting out library books. We are moving more and more down that track. So I thought that perhaps setting a base here by removing iris scans from the Immigration Bill would help in not letting it spread to the rest of society with people having to clock in at work using iris scans etc. 
The second amendment to clause 4 of Part 1 that I want to talk about changes the definition of “relevant agency”. These are relevant agencies for the purposes of having classified information for the purposes of immigration processing. Normally when we think of agencies with classified information we think of the Security Intelligence Service the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Police. The Green Party wants the definition to be restricted to those three agencies as it traditionally has been rather than adding a whole pile of other agencies. I will read out the other agencies: the Aviation Security Service the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand the Department of Corrections the Department of Internal Affairs the Department of Labour Maritime New Zealand the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry the Ministry of Fisheries the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade the New Zealand Customs Service and the New Zealand Defence Force. All of these agencies will now be able to say that particular bits of their information are classified. The chief executives of those organisations will have all sorts of rights—we will discuss them later on in the Committee stage—to withhold information and stop the Immigration and Protection Tribunal from making it public. We do not believe that is necessary particularly in immigration cases where we want maximum transparency so that people who are going before the New Zealand Immigration Service the tribunal or the Minister are able to properly see the case for or against their staying in or coming to New Zealand. So the nature of this amendment to clause 4 is to cut out all of those other organisations. Eleven of them should not be there; just the Police the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service should be left. 
I think this amendment is important because as we all know—and we discuss this in Parliament every day—departments like to hide things for various reasons. Sometimes it is just to avoid embarrassment if they have made a mistake and that is why we have the Official Information Act to try to get this information out. We spend a lot of time asking questions in Parliament to get out information that people are trying to hide. So why should we give these agencies the right to determine as classified all this stuff relating to individuals with immigration cases? It is also a bit problematic if all of these 11 other agencies become in effect mini - police agencies in terms of their classified information investigatory powers etc. We are creeping down that path a bit in the Search and Surveillance Bill that is before the House. That bill is creeping down that path in a parallel way. That is the Green Party’s motivation for putting up that particular amendment. 
Our next amendment is to clause 5(2)(a). This amendment is supported by Amnesty International. It also relates to classified information. Clause 5(2)(a) expands on the definition of “classified information” which it says is information that “might lead to the identification or provide details of the source of the information the nature content or scope of the information or the nature or the type of the assistance or operational methods available to the relevant agency;”. I remind members that “relevant agency” covers those 14 agencies not just the traditional security agencies. Amnesty International suggested—and the Greens support this—that rather than “classified information” being defined as information that “might” lead to a problem it should be defined as information that “will be likely to”. Otherwise any chief executive of an agency might say that if he or she discloses a particular bit of information it “might” lead to something else. It is very vague wording. We have all seen in our work as MPs how agencies chop out all sorts of things from Official Information Act requests and if we give them too great a scope saying that something is classified if it “might” lead to a problem we might not get the information that is required. 
The next amendment is to clause 5(3)(a).