Hipkins Chris: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9690. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): “Hipkins” I believe is the word you were looking for then Mr Deputy Speaker—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry I do apologise.CHRIS HIPKINS: —but I will forgive you. I will forgive you. I am mortally wounded!There are two procedural aspects to this debate which are kind of new for the House because of the changes to the Standing Orders that were made by the Standing Orders Committee of the last Parliament. One is that we are debating this matter under urgency—and I will deal with that one in a minute—but the second is that in what has now become a relatively rare occurrence we are debating a referral motion that gives the committee a shortened time frame and a whole lot of additional powers. It was standard practice in the House that Ministers for quite a long period of time would be able to move all sorts of additional powers for the committee in their referral motions. There would be no debate on those; it was just standard practice. It would happen all the time. The Standing Orders Committee considered that issue along with a range of other potential amendments to the Standing Orders when the Standing Orders were reviewed at the end of the last Parliament. This new provision which has been enacted now and which allows this motion to be debatable was part of a whole package of amendments made to the Standing Orders and it was part of the trade-offs.The changes to the Standing Orders made by the last Parliament actually gave the Government a number of additional powers to expedite business before the Government without the need to do the sort of thing it is doing within this referral motion. It gives the Government powers to use extended sittings for example so that it does not have to use urgency so much. We are considering this under urgency which in itself is unnecessary because there are a whole lot of additional ways that the Government could gain the additional time it needs in the House to consider this matter without having to resort to urgency. We are debating a much-reduced time frame for the bill and I think it is a good advance that these motions are now debated and therefore have become much more rare in their occurrence.The question that the House has to turn itself to in these sorts of debates is whether the justification for shortening the time frame is sufficient. I want to talk through a little bit about the process of what happens to the bill from here. There are certain time lags within the process when the bill gets referred to a committee that draw into question whether the bill could be adequately considered within the 8 weeks that we have given in this House. I would hope that the committee that this bill is referred to will advertise and call for public submissions. In order to do that they have to have a meeting. The committee comprises the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition among others. Therefore getting them together to have the first meeting in order to call for submissions will probably take a little bit of time and if we pass it today it may not even happen this week.The Prime Minister traditionally is not in the House on Thursdays. I do not think I am supposed to say that but on Thursdays we do not necessarily expect the party leaders to be here and therefore they may not be here tomorrow. So the meeting may not happen this week and it might not happen until next week. At that point there is then a process to lodge the advertisement with the newspapers. That normally takes a couple of days by the time the advertisement actually makes it into the paper. You have then got to give people a reasonable amount of time to read the advertisement and prepare their submission. So the question then becomes well who are the sorts of people whoare going to be interested in making a submission on this? It will be civil liberties groups lawyers people with expertise in this particular area and they will also typically be quite busy people.I would imagine given the subject nature that there will be members of the fourth estate of the media who are going to be very interested in the extension of powers to the Government Communications Security Bureau and they may also want to make submissions. The fact is that the bureau’s powers have been used against the media by the current Government over the teapot tapes so the media are going to have an interest in an extension of the bureau’s powers and are likely to want to make a submission. We need to allow sufficient time for them to consider the nature of the bill the contents of the bill and make informed and educated decisions around what sort of input they want to have into that process and the time frame that we are allowing does not do that. It is another attack on the freedom of the press.This bill is another attack on the freedom of the press because we know that the Government we have now is very happy to use the bureau’s powers to attack the media and therefore we have to make sure because the media are a very important safeguard in our democratic process that they are given sufficient time and opportunity to make submissions and to have their voices heard in this process. The truncated time frame simply does not allow that to happen.So why the urgency? Why are we even trying—it is not “we” because the Opposition is firmly opposed to the shortened time frame—why is the Government even trying to push this bill through with such haste? Given that it has known about these activities that this bill relates to for over a year why is it that all of a sudden now the whole thing has to be fixed within 8 weeks? It is completely unnecessary. In fact what the Labour Party has said is that the process should be a longer one and a much more extensive one—one that considers the wide-ranging ramifications of the concerns around the way the Government Communications Security Bureau is operated and pushing this through simply thwarts what should be a very constructive debate around how the bureau uses its powers.Let us be very clear about the nature of the bill that the Government is trying to push through. It is around illegal activity by the Government spy agency spying on New Zealanders and it seeks to make that legal. I have mentioned in my speech so far some of the organisations that may be interested in making a submission on this bill such as civil liberties groups lawyers and the media. But actually this being the people’s House any New Zealander should have the right to be able to consider this legislation and make a submission on it. The bill gives the Government Communications Security Bureau the power to spy on any New Zealander. Any mum or dad as John Key refers to them could be spied on by the Government under this legislation. Will they have an opportunity to make a submission on this bill within the time frame that is proposed? I do not think that the Government is doing anything more than paying lip-service to the democratic process because in fact if the Government was genuinely committed to providing an opportunity for people to make their submissions and to have a say it would not be trying to push this through in 8 weeks.The regular time frame for a select committee consideration is somewhere between 4 to 6 months so the default setting really is about 6 months. There is another provision and it is non-debatable. This debate would not happen if it was 4 months or longer. So the Government can shorten it by 2 months without having to have the debate. But there is another way that the Government could shorten the time frame for the committee and that is to take a recommendation to the Business Committee which is comprised of all of the parties in the House and get agreement on a shortened time frame. Even if a shortened time frame was deemed to be desirable and it was deemed to be desirableacross the House—so it was not being done for political purposes but there was some genuine need for urgency—there is a provision in there for this whole debate to be avoided. The Business Committee could agree to a shortened time frame.The records of the Business Committee—[Interruption] No the records of the Business Committee will record that no such proposal has been received. The minutes of the Business Committee I think are public—certainly the determinations of the Business Committee are public—and no such proposal was received. The Government did not even attempt to gain cross-party agreement for this shortened time frame. So that is a matter of concern because what it means is that the Government is using a wafer-thin majority in the House—a wafer-thin majority in the House and getting thinner by the day—to try to push through legislation that is incredibly controversial that gives the Government Communications Security Bureau the power to spy on New Zealanders and dramatically reduces the opportunity for the people who will be the subjects of this legislation i.e. every single New Zealand citizen and resident—very important and resident—to fully participate in this process.That is fundamentally wrong. This bill should go through a full regular select committee process but in fact even that is premature because what should happen first is there should be a full review into how we got to this position so that the New Zealand public can have confidence that this Government is protecting their rights to privacy among other things. This bill does not do that. It is in fact a violation of that principle and the process around passing it is a further violation of our democratic principles in this House. It is an affront to our democratic process.