Shearer David: Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee[Sitting date: 09 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1212. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert):As has been said Labour will be supporting the second reading of this bill. The bill that is before us today is quite a bit different from what started out at the first reading and that is a result of a pretty painstaking process that people have spoken about and a reasonable amount of cooperation across the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. The issue for us was really to attain a balance—a balance between the safety and security of New Zealanders on the one hand and the protection of their privacy and their human rights on the other. I believe on balance that we have attained that balance in what we are presenting back to the House today.We were able to hear about some of the risks that New Zealand faces. We were able to have the SIS speak to us in secret and we called it back to get further clarification as well. I do not want to over-egg the pudding on the risks to New Zealand. There has been a lot of talk—I think wrongly—about beheadings in the street and that sort of thing but there is no doubt that the number of incidents and the threatening environment has changed. We have gone from a domestic threat level of very low to low so let us get it in context. That is not extreme as it is in the UK or high as it is in Australia—it has gone from very low to low. Nevertheless the risks that we heard about and the growth in those over the past few months are the underlying context in which this bill has come through.On the basis of that our approach in the Labour Party was very much to be narrow and conservative in terms of what we wanted to change. We did not have the luxury of a big review. We therefore had to confine ourselves to what we had heard in terms of a potential terrorist threat that may come to New Zealand. With that approach we looked at constraining the legislation as it stood in making the changes that we needed to make.Andrew Little has talked about the process. The process was farcical. That was one area that I do not agree with the other side on in terms of the way those members saw the process. We accelerated this bill through in 2 days. The people who wanted to make submissions—and there were 600 people who made submissions—had to do that in the space of 2 days. We knew that this threat was emerging well before the election and yet this Government did not do a review before the election that would have enabled the legislation to be put in place straight after the election. I think that was a mistake. Nevertheless we heard as many people as we could. We do not know how many people would have liked to make a submission but did not hear about it or could not. But nevertheless we worked right through the night on Thursday Friday and Saturday morning in order to be able to do that.I believe that there is an issue that still deserves a greater degree of focus and that is the plight of our Muslim community. We have about 46000 Muslims in New Zealand. They appeared in front of our select committee and made submissions. Their basic message was: “We are the people on the front line. We are the people within this Muslim community from which some of these threats might emerge. When we hear about these it is in our interests as New Zealanders and as New Zealand Muslims to ensure that they get picked up on.” and I think what they were saying was: “Yet we are not listened to sufficiently.”Sam Lotu-Iiga the Minister for Ethnic Communities and the Prime Minister have yet to meet the Muslim community or accept an invitation to actually meet with them. As the community said when it comes to halal butchery and slaughtering techniques which New Zealand earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year from they are feted and they are accepted and they are listened to but when it comes to something like this where their community is at possible threat they are not. I think that we need as a matter of urgency to acknowledge and bring those people in.It has been talked about that this is an ad hoc piece of legislation. It is on the books only from now until April 2017. I think that is appropriate. It was going to be there until 2018 but we brought that back to this term of Government. It is pending a much wider review in which we hope there will be—certainly it is envisaged and the Government has said this pretty clearly that it wants to have it—a much broader examination of the issues in front of us.There were three or four major areas where there was change. I want to mention a couple of these. The first was warrantless surveillance. This was a step on principle that all of us I think found objectionable—that you would have surveillance without a warrant even though the warrant would be being sought in parallel with the surveillance. The argument for it was on the basis that sometimes things have to move quickly and we were given two or three examples of where that might be used.I believe that what we have done with enabling that to go ahead is we have brought back the warrantless surveillance period from 48 hours to 24 hours. We have ensured that the Commissioner of Security Warrants and the Minister obviously get told about that immediately. We have brought the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security in on every single occasion where surveillance pending a warrant happens and even if that surveillance does not proceed through to a full warrant that information will still be passed to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The inspector-general will look into that and ensure that any information that was gathered is destroyed. Lastly the SIS is obligated to publicly report every 6 months on the number of occasions that warrantless surveillance occurs so that we ensure the public knows what is going on as well.The second issue was about visual surveillance. The police are able to conduct visual surveillance but their threshold is much more fixed and much more contained and it relates to very serious offences that carry a penalty of up to 16 years’ imprisonment. The SIS operates in a much much different way.We had a long period of debate around the ability to allow the SIS to do visual surveillance. In the end we brought it back to what we were doing with this bill which was to look at and counter the issue of terrorism and the threat of terrorism. We did not want this bill to be the back door by which the SIS was able to conduct surveillance more generally so now in the bill it is confined to where there might be terrorist activities and obviously still on the basis of a warrant. There is the ability for the SIS to access the Customs Service database. Again that is under very strict scrutiny. The access is to only the parts of the database that are appropriate and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has the ability to monitor where each of those selected individuals might be going.On the issue of extending the cancellation of a passport from 1 year to 3 years we disagreed with the Government. We did not understand why that needed to be extended out to 3 years. There are additional safeguards around somebody who has their passport withheld because they are believed to be a foreign fighter going off to fight in a terrorist organisation. That will give us more comfort that the bar that needs to be attained is a very high one.Lastly I want to thank the Minister for the clarification on the difference in definition between a freedom fighter and a terrorist. We wanted to ensure for instance that if you wanted to go off and fight in the Spanish Civil War you were still entitled to do that. What we sought and got from both the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the SIS was that the bill was going to constrain only those people who were going to carry out terrorist acts or fight with a terrorist organisation and as long as that is the case we are pleased about that.Lastly can I just say that all of us I think were very impressed with the role of inspector-general the powers she has and the way that she is approaching her job. I think that is something for the review in the future—that we look at that role and even enhance that role because I believe that that will give New Zealanders greater confidence about the way that our intelligence agencies operate and are able to be overseen.