Locke Keith: Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Locke Keith: Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:676;Page:21815] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I will just continue explaining how the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill covers a whole lot of Government agencies that have search powers—well beyond what most New Zealanders think this bill is about: just the police. 
For instance fisheries officers have search powers. The chief executive according to the law can grant powers to an honorary fisheries officer—not even a full-time person it seems. This fisheries officer can wander along to a registrar or perhaps talk to a deputy registrar who probably is not an expert in the area of fisheries who just ticks off something. Then this fisheries officer can as part of a search enter a private dwelling and leave a covert video camera. That is what this law allows. 
The Department of Internal Affairs can get search warrants for a whole lot of things. The first one I came across was search warrants for people engaged in email spam. An officer of the department can go along to a registrar get a search warrant and go inside a building and leave a video camera looking presumably at the computer screen of an alleged offender etc. Gambling inspectors can go into presumably some gambling institution with a search warrant and leave a video camera there. Implementing liquor by-laws is another area of the law that allows for an officer to go inside a liquor establishment and leave a covert video camera there. 
The Commerce Commission has search powers under the Fair Trading Act. Its officers can go into a shop and leave a covert video camera there. The shop owner does not know about it. Of course other agencies concerned with white-collar crime could leave covert video cameras all over boardrooms. In fact when the Search and Surveillance Bill first came up it was actually the big company lawyers who really got stuck in because they themselves were worried about covert video cameras being put in boardrooms. There is also the Customs Service. Its officers have to get a District Court judge to give them a search warrant. They have quite significant search powers and they can put video cameras wherever they like so all of this is quite dangerous. 
I went through all the consideration of the Search and Surveillance Bill on the Justice and Electoral Committee representing the Greens. The whole thing started off with the 2007 Law Commission report which said in black and white that that form of surveillance was unlawful. It was all a bit unclear about video surveillance in general; the only thing that was clearly unlawful was trespassory covert video surveillance. The commission said to the Government—Labour at the time—to get its skates on and develop a bill. Labour did and presented it to Parliament in 2008. Then for 2 years the select committee under the fine chairpersonship of Chester Borrows really scrutinised it. There were two sets of public submissions and all sorts of changes. The Law Commission made submissions particularly Warren Young who came to the recent select committee process very critical of the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill—he played a huge role in the thing. So everyone knew that there was a big issue that it was unlawful and that there were not a lot of these so-called subsequent court cases. In fact there was only one subsequent court case the Court of Appeal case on Operation Eight. 
In these 2 years of select committee hearings the police were there. Presumably they were taking notes and were not just treating it as a day away from the office. They knew precisely that the Law Commission had said it was unlawful—the select committee was dealing with it partly and significantly because covert video surveillance involving trespass was unlawful—and there was all the interchange that went on. 
The select committee reported back last November and the whole thing has just been sitting there awaiting its second reading for all that time. The Government knew as early as May this year when according to Steven Price in one of his blog posts over the last day it got a bath—that is the term he used—in the Supreme Court hearings on this unlawfulness thing. The Government knew from May precisely that the Supreme Court was likely—or there was certainly a fair chance—to rule in its latest September ruling that covert video surveillance involving trespass was unlawful. So it was not as if people did not know what the hell was going on. 
It just surprises me now that previous to September people thought it was common law that anything was lawful etc. when we had all of that evidence and all of that argument over from 2007 a 4-year period. Even on the court cases it was really only a short period of time from the Court of Appeal ruling on I think 19 November 2010 until the Government was in Steven Price’s words given a bath at the Supreme Court in May 2011. It was only for that 6-month period that the Government thought it had a chance at all. All of the other evidence was the other way. 
There was a lot of confusion about what the police were actually doing. There was all this talk about 40 or 50 cases but when it came down to it at the select committee the police said there were 13 investigations under way involving covert video surveillance and the bulk of those were in public places. They were not even sure that any of them involved trespass and that any of them therefore were illegal. The Supreme Court had ruled that only covert video surveillance involving trespass was illegal. But there was no clear indication that there were any current police cases of that type. 
As I said this bill is legislation that has been looking for a problem and there is no reason at all why we could not have gone for another 6 months under the present system. The police would have been—should have been—happy. They could just continue on with what they were doing and go before the court on the reasonableness criterion under the Evidence Act. If they had a problem and if there were a serious P case they could use section 30 of the Evidence Act to rule in illegally obtained evidence etc. It just somewhat amazes me that we got as far as this on such a rushed bill. 
I said in my second reading speech that it was wonderful the way everyone responded at the select committee process. Lawyers all of a sudden stayed up all night and came hung-over with tiredness the next morning just to put the case. There does seem to be quite a consensus amongst all of the leading lights in the country in the legal community that showed up that there were so many things wrong with the bill. Some of them have been addressed and I thank the committee for that but several of them have not. Thank you.