Little AndrewINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY (REVIEW) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister Responsible for the NZSIS) on behalf of the Minister for National Security and Intelligence: I present to the House a legislative statement on the Intelligence and Security (Review) Amendment Bill. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website. Hon ANDREW LITTLE: I move That the Intelligence and Security (Review) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. The bill has been reported back from the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee with the recommendation that it be passed without amendment. As members of the House will know this was a very brief and succinct bill. All it did was change the date in the bill that required the review of the legislation as well as the security and intelligence agencies. It received two submissions in the truncated process that the select committee applied for consideration of the bill and both were by and large supportive of the change. The reason as we know is the change was prompted by the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques as part of a package of recommendations that the royal commission made. It has called for a number of things about a better debate about counter-terrorism and a better debate about our security stance our security posture and security settings but it also called for examination of the powers that our security and intelligence agencies have and it therefore suggested that the review otherwise scheduled to have taken place next year should be brought forward. On issues like this when it comes to substantive review I think that across this House all members grapple with the balance that has to be struck between the powers that we expect our security and intelligence agencies to have to do their job of gathering intelligence to keep New Zealanders safe and what might otherwise constitute undue intrusion on the privacy and the liberties of citizens. The royal commission examined the way the intelligence agencies operated and it heard from the agencies and a report was commissioned by one of the agencies and it raised questions about whether what is in the Intelligence and Security Act at the moment goes far enough to enable the agencies to do the job. That is a legitimate point of debate at any time in our history but it is timely now to bring forward the review that would otherwise have taken place next year so that we can have that examination with the benefit of the findings of the royal commission. So we will now do that. It's a very short and a very straightforward bill as members in the House will know. It will allow us to get on with considering whether the legislation still meets the objectives that we expect of it and it allows our intelligence and security agencies to operate in the way we would expect in the 21st century. I think that for members of the public who will be looking on it should be made very clear that the review process as you would expect will be an open process. There will be a call for submissions and contributions from members of the public and from specified stakeholders so that opportunity will be made available and once we've clarified terms of reference for that those obviously will be publicised and will be the basis of the review. In the end we do this in recognition of and out of respect for the shuhada—the victims—of the terrorist attack and their families the wider Christchurch community and the wider Muslim community across New Zealand. In the end we do this because this is what we needed to do for the safety and security of all New Zealanders. I commend the bill to the House.