Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Kaipara ki Mahurangi): Thank you Madam Speaker. I also wish to thank the Minister for setting out the detail of the bill in so far as is possible with an initial contribution. Of course the legislative statement is I think a helpful innovation that this House has adopted relatively recently for setting out detail in a matter such as this where there is considerable implications for national security but also the rights of individuals. The detail is hugely important. It will be appropriate to consider at select committee and so for now we necessarily take at the first reading a reasonably broad-brush approach.For National I can confirm that we will support the bill at least at the first reading and I don't say that in a way to imply that we wouldn't support it going forward but the caveat there is that there is a considerable amount of detail. It's a weighty bill both literally for those watching on Parliament TV they can see it's literally a weighty bill but also more metaphorically in terms of the seriousness of the matter. So certainly happy to state up front that we support the intent of the bill and in so far as we've had an opportunity to consider the detail it appears to us pretty well constructed. I'd like to actually acknowledge a point that the Minister made around the fact that we are here in Parliament the legislative branch at the urging of the executive the Government of the day making rules for the judicial branch the courts. So the Minister rightly referenced the need for comity. So that's a mutual respect and understanding and separation between those branches of Government. In more colloquial terms and in less pointy-headed fashion I suppose I could observe that we are not telling the judges how to do their job—it is their job and it's appropriate for us not to seek to interfere obviously with the operation of any individual court case nor unduly constrain the way that they conduct trials—but at the same time it is appropriate for us to provide some guidelines for the protection of citizens' rights and of course national security as well. Part of the theme of what the Government is seeking to do here is around consistency and clarity. So to the extent that we are taking an overall view of the judicial system and saying to courts that they must each adopt a certain set of procedures because then there's consistency across those I think it's appropriate for us to tune our mind to that and to provide some direction and dare I say it leadership in that space.I've mentioned that tension between the branches of Government and I don't use the word tension in any ugly sense; I think it's healthy that we consider the way that they interact but there's also a tension in terms of the rights of individual citizens and of course the power of the State. You can approach that from a civil liberties or human rights perspective and that's totally appropriate. You could also consider the power imbalance between the respective parties—and again that's a perfectly appropriate analysis—or one could think about the fact of a citizen in a State having a relationship not only in a general criminal law setting but also here in a national security context and just trying to understand how we can balance those as best we can so that we don't sell New Zealand short in terms of defence of the Realm internally and externally but also we do not wish to be impinging on the fair trial rights of people accused of involvement in some pretty unsavoury activities. So the whole bill and everything in this area is necessarily geared towards trying to weigh up those different competing demands and of course we'll do the best that we can in this House along those lines. I look forward to the Justice Committee taking that role very seriously—and no doubt they will—and I acknowledge that the chair of the Justice Committee is in the House and she might well make a contribution in this debate and certainly she and her colleagues of various parties in that committee will take that task seriously along with the advisers I have no doubt.In relation to the national security imperatives I think it's worth taking a step back as well and acknowledging that our friends and allies those with whom we secure such sensitive information will be interested in our stance on these matters. We would not wish to preclude our ability to cooperate internationally by being too loose within our domestic procedures because that wouldn't be in our national interests either; not only—and this is the point I'm really trying to make here—from the point of view of each individual case and each individual matter and each individual piece of intelligence but also that relationship more generally is important for New Zealand to maintain whether it's Five Eyes or other arrangements in terms of information sharing that we have already in place. How the bill seeks to achieve its various objectives is really in the category of three different settings or jurisdictions. The Minister's explained these in some detail already leaning on the legislative statement as well—as the Minister clearly did as he's entitled to. I'd note that there's civil proceedings there are criminal proceedings and there are administrative decisions which themselves could end up in a court context. But these are different spaces and for those not well versed with the law it's probably worth noting that these are quite different settings. Certainly in the criminal context we already have a dynamic where the State is taking an interest. It's the State who prosecutes a citizen rather than a fellow citizen so there's an extra level of State versus individual interest dynamic at play with those ones. If I can actually start with the civil proceedings though first of all what we've got here is the standard closed court procedure that the Minister's referred to and the standardisation is part of that general rationalisation that seeking of consistency across these kind of proceedings. In the way that case law but also court procedures develop over time of course it's been somewhat ad hoc until this point and that has been a reaction in each individual case. For various matters that are often high profile and matters of considerable public interest as well as being interesting to the public the procedures have developed over time and it's appropriate to come up with some standard procedures and one of those would be the closed court procedure. So this is where we have special procedure orders able to be made. The suggestion from the Government is that a special advocate who has a security clearance would be representing the interests of the individual. This is obviously a compromise whereby ordinarily the starting point would be that a person would be able to choose their own legal representation but to have a lawyer who isn't able to receive the national security information whether it's that top secret level or perhaps lower is problematic in this case. On the one hand we want people to be aware of charges that are against them and give them the ability to defend themselves but we don't want our security agencies and police and others who are in a position to have to provide this information to be doing so in a way that would jeopardise others or the system more generally. So the role of the special advocate is a really crucial one and we'd be leaning heavily and relying heavily on the professional ethics of such people and I don't doubt that they would seek to discharge those duties very carefully. I suppose we can take some comfort from the fact that every lawyer already has an obligation not only to their client but also to the court as an officer of the court and to the rule of law more generally. So while on the face of it it might seem as though a lawyer will be placed in a difficult position by knowing information about their client that they can't necessarily disclose to their client that they know—if I've understood the legislation correctly—at the same time we already do have in place a higher duty even to one's own client that a lawyer has and that might not be obvious to those not in the profession or not versed in these matters. But while it is a compromise and even perhaps arguably an uneasy compromise it is one I think that reflects the desire of all parliamentarians I would hope to balance these competing rights. I do have a question that's probably more along the technical lines and it will no doubt be answered in due course through the select committee and perhaps submissions: whether a person has not only the right to have a special advocate but perhaps the responsibility. I don't know and the answer might well be in the legislation already—whether a person can choose to self-represent—whereas obviously we're taking off the table the ability of a person to have a non - security-cleared lawyer. So that's detail that I think would be worth discussing and I look forward to that in future stages of the debate. So just to wrap up as my time comes to an end I've mostly focused on that particular bit but that is actually across the civil and criminal realms in terms of administrative decisions standardising provisions that allow for judicial review of and appeals against those administrative decisions and again just relying on general principles it's fair to allow someone to have the right of appeal particularly on a point of law as opposed to a factual matter. So it's good to see that there is at least some provision made for that. We'll look forward to that detail further down the track. So on that note I wish the Justice Committee all the best in its consideration and confirm that National at this the first reading does support the Security Information in Proceedings Legislation Bill.