Goff Phil: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12043. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill):Today the Committee is about to decide whether to vote $57 million to the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and to the security and intelligence agencies. I wish the Prime Minister was in the chair because we expect accountability from this man. This man on his own is meant to be holding the GCSB accountable and I have got to say that this Committee has no confidence that he is doing so. We are voting $57 million to an organisation that after the Kim Dotcom debacle was found in theKitteridge report to be incompetent and to have a poor culture and to have underperformers. It is not doing its job and what is more the Prime Minister comes to this Chamber with the legislation and says that he wants to extend the powers of the GCSB. He said in the true spirit of arrogance and of a leader who is becoming increasingly autocratic that the critics are misinformed and the critics are always wrong.Well let us look at who the critics are. According to TV3 40 percent of New Zealanders do not have confidence in this organisation—40 percent. Let us look at the submissions against extending this body’s power. The Law Society the Privacy Commissioner and the human rights commissioner all say that the legislation and the decision to extend the powers is wrong. If they are all misinformed perhaps David McDowell the former head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is also misinformed when he says that the surveillance is being extended and that potentially undermines the rights of New Zealanders. From his experience as the head of the Prime Minister’s department he is saying there is too much power the Prime Minister might not be being told everything and if he is we would not know because he does not tell anybody else. Mr McDowell says that there needs to be better oversight of the GCSB both within and outside this House. That is from the former head of the Prime Minister’s department.The Prime Minister wants to extend the power to include its right to spy on New Zealanders on behalf of groups like the New Zealand Defence Force. Well I have got to say that New Zealanders’ confidence in that took a real battering over the weekend. I have got in my hand here the New Zealand Defence Force security manual. I have never seen it before but I can tell you what it says. It describes subversion as releasing information that might bring the Government into disrepute. That is what New Zealanders are worried about. Any individual any organisation—for heaven’s sake even Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition—who says anything that brings the Government into disrepute can be subversive. Worse than that it says that investigative journalists are subversive. TheDominion Post  hardly a liberal outlet of the news said in this morning’s paper that it has changed its mind. It opposes the bill because any organisation like the New Zealand Defence Force heads who confuse any criticism of them as being subversion should not have that power.I want to know why it is that this organisation has been further degraded by a Prime Minister who does a dodgy process of appointing its head—a process that even the State Services Commissioner feels obliged to come out and oppose. How can we have confidence in that organisation? How can we have confidence in it when we see what the National Security Agency in the US in recent months and the Government Communications Headquarters in the United Kingdom in recent months have been doing? They have been overstepping the mark and abusing their powers. And this Government instead of taking those trends and those concerns on board wants to increase the power of the GCSB.John Key said he did not know about the Kim Dotcom debacle until September but we know that the bureau knew in February that it had acted illegally. Was the GCSB absolutely incompetent and negligent in not telling the Prime Minister or is the Prime Minister being dishonest with New Zealanders in saying that he did not know about it until September? Who was right in terms of the ministerial certificate to suppress what the GCSB had done? Bill English as the Acting Prime Minister signed it. John Key said he was never told. Here he is Bill English Acting Prime Minister using a unique power probably for the first time in this country’s history in the absence of John Key and he did not tell John Key?