Cunliffe David: Search and Surveillance Bill — In Committee 
Cunliffe David: Search and Surveillance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:951] 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) 
: 
 I speak firstly in respect of the many legal specialists who have preceded me here and I aim only to provide a layperson’s view. It is a privilege to speak to the Search and Surveillance Bill because it is one of those bills that go to the heart of our democracy. There are a number of ways in which we have seen media freedoms and the rule of law curtailed in recent months. We have seen the Serious Fraud Office use production orders against the  
National Business Review 
. We have seen the calculated refusal of the Government to address the Serious Fraud Office powers and media protections as part of the negotiations around this bill despite media calls for protection and Opposition efforts. We have seen the Government’s attempt to overrule the Supreme Court decision in  
Hamed 
—that is the Tuhoe case—rather than the more limited fix agreed by Parliament after all other parties rebelled. Of course as my colleague Phil Goff has very eloquently put it we have seen the use of the police and the Solicitor-General by the Prime Minister over the teapot tapes after a campaign media stunt went wrong. Priorities are all out of whack. Priorities are all out of whack. 
Simon Bridges 
: You’d be complaining. 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: The perma-tanned member opposite argues that this is a legitimate power of Government but he flies in the face of the fact that 90 percent of New Zealanders would say that when only one in five burglaries is being closed by our boys and girls in blue— 
Hon Judith Collins 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I do not think it is appropriate for a member of this Committee to refer to a member who happens to be Maori as perma-tanned and frankly I think it is offensive. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: I nearly pulled the member up. It is out of order and I would ask him to desist from using that kind of referencing to another member. 
Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE 
: I withdraw and apologise and it was absolutely nothing to do with the member’s ethnicity of which I was henceforth unaware. So there we go. The appointment of the National Party electorate chairman of Helensville Mr Stephen McElrea to the board of NZ On Air—the Broadcasting Commission—is yet another consistent erosion of the freedoms of the media which this bill once again keeps eroding. 
Much of the debate so far has turned on the issue of the extension of the powers to the Serious Fraud Office. The importance of that has been seen in relation to South Canterbury Finance the largest corporate failure in New Zealand history. We have to strike a balance in this Committee between the protection of public freedoms and the discharge of the responsibilities of public office. South Canterbury Finance has been a litany of failure by the current Government to address in any sensible and strategic way the need to have placed that company into a statutory management regime well before the problem blew out to the multi-hundred-million-dollar problem that it has become. To use that as cover for giving the Serious Fraud Office licence to exercise powers more akin to those of the Security Intelligence Service without due checks and protections is frankly an abuse of process. It has long been a protection afforded to mum and dad New Zealanders that the less well-known but most powerful organs of the State such as the Security Intelligence Service have needed to use in all but the rarest exceptions a judge’s warrant to execute their responsibilities in respect of phone taps and the like. It is extremely important that no lesser protections are afforded through the provisions of this bill. 
Much of the bill is bipartisan much hard work has gone on between our legally qualified colleagues on both sides of the House and much of the bill is in conformity with those principles. But there are some remaining parts of the bill that are not and it is upon those parts such as those relating to the Serious Fraud Office that this debate is now engaged. The Minister sniggers. Why are we debating this now? Because this part of the bill relates to the purpose of the legislation—the purpose of the legislation—and the fact that this will be an Act to bind the Crown. It must therefore responsibly bind all arms of the Crown and there should be consistency of the public protections that are offered across all those arms. The average New Zealander wherever they are in the provinces or in the cities is more interested in paying their mortgage getting a job keeping—