Locke Keith: General Debate 
Locke Keith: General Debate 
[Volume:671;Page:17766] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 There is no justification for the Intelligence and Security Committee to hold secret hearings on the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Amendment Bill. The whole process around this bill has been a mockery of open government. The first bit of the process was similar to many bills. On 18 December a small advert was put in the newspaper public notices calling for submissions by 18 February. But most people do not follow the public notices every day. They rely on finding out from the parliamentary Internet what is happening to bills and when submissions are due. However nothing was on the parliamentary Internet. Some very frustrated people phoned me and I informed them that they could make submissions by 18 February. I presume some did but when I asked today who had submitted I was told by the committee that “This is a secret.” 
There is no need for this secrecy and it departs from the normal practice of select committees which is for the media to be notified which submissions are coming up the next day so that they can plan which sessions to attend along with the general public. Of course this time nobody other than the submitter will be allowed to attend and even the submitter is not allowed to know who else has submitted on the bill. If submitters want their submission known they have to go to the effort of promoting it to the media as the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions did today and as I will also be doing. However as anyone who has ever attended a select committee knows a lot of the value in submissions lies in the exchanges between the submitter and committee members where the submitter’s points are elucidated and are often taken by the committee which is convinced to amend the bill accordingly. 
When asked to provide a reason why the hearings were to be in secret John Key said yesterday: “Bluntly the reason for it is there are holes in the current legislation—now we can have that debate in the public about what those holes are or we can take submissions from people and we can fix them.” The obvious answer is to ask why not do both—have a public debate and have hearings which should be in public—or is the Prime Minister advancing some strange argument that there is currently some limitation on the SIS powers that is not publicly known and that if this became known in committee hearings terrorists might use the knowledge of those limitations to escape detection between now and the third reading of this bill in Parliament? It all sounds weird but this whole process of avoiding public hearings is very weird. 
In my opinion the real reason is that the SIS and the Minister in charge want to avoid any serious public scrutiny of SIS activities and the laws that govern their operation and any real debate in Parliament. The Intelligence and Security Committee can get away with this because it is not a select committee of this Parliament but a statutory committee made up of the Prime Minister the Leader of the Opposition and their appointees. There is no evidence that the committee’s scrutiny of the SIS is anything but perfunctory. Its report on last year’s SIS financial review was simply that it had no matters to bring to the attention of the House. 
The committee under its legislation is quite capable of meeting in public by agreement amongst its members as it certainly should in this case. By imposing secrecy on the hearing of submissions on the bill the committee is reinforcing the major point in the Green Party’s submission that we should not be giving the SIS more powers to intrude into the private lives of citizens when it is such an unaccountable organisation in virtually every respect. This contrasts with the police—the agency responsible for detecting all kinds of crime including politically motivated crime. We would not dream of holding all the hearings on a police amendment bill in secret. This raises the question of why we need the SIS when the police are quite capable of catching terrorists saboteurs or anyone who might be a danger to our national security. The police are much more accountable to Parliament and the people.