Tabuteau Fletcher: Intelligence and Security Committee — MembershipText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTabuteau Fletcher: Intelligence and Security Committee — Membership[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1714. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]FLETCHER TABUTEAU (NZ First): I am pleased to take this call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Government motions. I take this opportunity to congratulate the Hon Chris Finlayson the Hon Amy Adams and David Shearer on their appointment to the Intelligence and Security Committee.This committee was established by the Intelligence and Security Committee Act to increase the level of oversight and review of our SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The Act requires that the committee has a membership of five which includes the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Two of the remaining three members are to be appointed by the Prime Minister and one by the Leader of the Opposition.In the past the Leader of the Opposition has offered the nomination to a fellow Opposition member in consultation with other Opposition party leaders. So can I say that our party is somewhat surprised that a former foreign Minister in the form of the Rt Hon Winston Peters was not offered a position nor even consulted as is required by law. It is of course the prerogative of the Leader of the Opposition to make this appointment but in terms of bringing people inside the tent it is perhaps a missed opportunity. A problem shared is a problem halved. I am sure Mr Shearer would have worked just as diligently to support his new leader in this role.Within our party the security agencies could have worked in the knowledge that the issues and the conversations that would have taken place would not be leaked. We have to seriously wonder how a National Party vassal who has leaked like a sieve in the past from this committee could continue to be rewarded at the taxpayers’ expense.Last night this House debated the third reading of Energy (Fuels Levies and References) Amendment Bill. It was ironic to see Labour and the Greens line up behind the Government to add yet another tax on to the New Zealand motorist. My point is that only New Zealand First grasped the fact that our fuel stocks are held offshore in tickets under this legislation. These are promissory notes that say we need these stocks and we will get them. Apparently they will be shipped to us if a ship turns up to collect them and bring them down to New Zealand. It seems—and I noted this last night—an incredibly naive position when the only reason that we may have a shortage of oil supply to this country is if there is some kind of global crisis.It highlights the acute vulnerability internationally and the vulnerability of our own infrastructure. Aside from Auckland’s well-publicised power outages over the past few years a little over 1 year ago there was a shortage of diesel in the South Island when a planned outage at the Marsden Point oil refinery in Whangarei overran. You could say we face threats both external and internal and we have choke points where infrastructure and even our banking system could be assailed physically and electronically. The cyber-attack on Sony and the theft from international banks just this past week is a warning that the focus of our security agencies is currently askew. Instead of warrantless surveillance on New Zealanders and the politicisation of our security services our security agencies need to build capacity and responsiveness and focus on real threats.The role of the Intelligence and Security Committee is an absolutely critical one and it must be a self-critical one. It needs to challenge assumptions. But above all it needs to ensure the actions of our agencies and the people working within these agencies are legal and can be held to account by an independent authority—one whose primary role is not to work for the pleasure of the Minister in charge which our current legislation defines; one whose job security is not determined by the Minister she is auditing who in fact is her employer.The objective of terrorism is to create fear where people feel safest. This was at the heart of the plan in Sydney to behead a member of the public. This can be seen in the organised attacks in London Madrid Paris Copenhagen Bali and New York. Closer to home the attack in Sydney was a truly chilling reminder about a lone wolf not on a watch list and with a security service funded infinitely better than our own. It was an object lesson that we cannot watch everyone and nor should we. Instead we saw heroic men and women respond to a real threat with numbers and resources. Police sending out debt collectors is not an answer to a 5-year budget freeze.New Zealand as we know is at the far end of the world. We are seen to be a genuinely safe country. I would venture that this makes us an ideal target. To strike at the safest country on earth would strike a discordant note throughout the world. If you can hit at New Zealand you can hit at anyone in any community anywhere on earth.So we in this party look to the members of this Intelligence and Security Committee to take this challenge seriously. I make a plea on behalf of every person who made a submission to the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee regarding the countering terrorism legislation and I make this plea further on behalf of every New Zealander. Our newly appointed members cannot allow this Government to continue to corrupt our political system for supposed political expediency. New Zealanders need to know what we are doing—not the operational matters; there are security issues—and they need to have a voice and a say into how this country meets its organisation and its obligations.We live in an imperfect and often evil world—evidenced by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in Syria and Iraq and its new franchise in Libya. There is also Boko Haram in Africa and in our backyard Abu Sayyaf as well as the Islamic insurgency in southern Thailand. We need security agencies such as the GCSB and the SIS. They need to be adequately resourced. We need good leadership on issues of national security and leaders whom we can trust.New Zealand needs to be a good leader internationally. The club that this Government does belong to is the United Nations and we are now in that critical inner circle—the Security Council. How can we be taken seriously when this Prime Minister is slowly but surely manipulating the New Zealand public into another club—a club that will work more for his own personal retirement plan rather than New Zealand’s national interests? The official club is the UN Security Council—a council that New Zealand helped to form—and New Zealand must now be seen as a world leader on that council. This country belongs to it now and we must be seen as setting international standards. This Government’s actions are currently and absolutely counter to that necessity.Trust has been in very short supply in recent years as our security agencies have become politicised—not just our security agencies but our military as evidenced by the script prepared by Defence Force public relations for the captain of HMNZS Wellington to read out on her return to Port Chalmers. To ensure we get that trust we first need the members of this committee to do the hard yards and to win that trust back. It also means that political oversight unfortunately is now a duopoly of Labour and National. I am sure that the people of New Zealand now wonder who benefits more and I personally feel it is not the Labour Party nor the people of New Zealand.New Zealand First wants a secure New Zealand. The challenge to the Intelligence and Security Committee is to ensure unbridled power does not erode hard-fought civil liberties. Power corrupts but we must never forget that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thank you.