Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (Attorney-General) Link to this

I move, That the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill be now read a third time. I endorse what Mr Hide said; I think this bill is the result of political parties working together to find a solution to a problem. It is not the result of any one individual, it is not the result of any one party; it is the work of Parliament. The sequence of events leading to this third reading goes something like this. On 2 September the Supreme Court gave its judgment in the Hamed case. It was suppressed, so applications needed to be made so that suppression orders could be varied. The decision to lift suppression on most of the judgment was finally issued on Thursday 15 September, 3 weeks ago today. From that point the Government worked as fast as possible to find a solution to the problem. After a week of consultation by me when the House was in adjournment, a paper went to Cabinet on Monday 26 September. The bill was introduced on 27 September, and was reported back on 3 October. This afternoon this Parliament will hopefully have solved the problem in the 3 weeks since the judgment was unsuppressed.

Some have suggested that the Government has moved too fast to fix the problem. I reject the submissions of some of those who said that this Parliament is “the fastest lawmaker in the West.” If members want an example of fast lawmaking, they need only look at the Westminster Parliament, which in July this year passed the Police (Detention and Bail) Act 2011. That bill was a legislative response to a problem presented by a court decision that changed a longstanding law concerning aspects of bail. The legislation reversed the judgment. It started and completed its Commons stages on Thursday 7 July. It also had its first reading in the House of Lords on 7 July. It passed all these stages with the support of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats. Its effect was fully retrospective; it was not a temporary measure. That is not what is happening here; this is a temporary measure. I believe it is an example of Parliament working well, and I endorse the excellent editorial in the New Zealand Herald today in that regard. From the time the judgment was unsuppressed, we have approached this situation with an open mind. I have tried to include the other political parties and groups in discussions. I acknowledge the assistance of the Acting Leader of the House, who gave me tremendous assistance to ensure that this bill could finally go to a select committee.

There are a number of members in this House who deserve credit for getting us to the point we are at this afternoon. First, I acknowledge my colleague Chester Borrows and thank him for his chairmanship of the Justice and Electoral Committee. I also acknowledge Keith Locke and Te Ururoa Flavell, two members for whom I have enormous personal respect. Both Mr Locke and Mr Flavell have been troubled by this bill, and it is apparent that their parties will not vote for it today. They are both principled members of this House who have engaged in arguments on policy. Neither is interested in self-promotion, and I say to Mr Locke that I shall miss his contribution in this House very much. I thank my colleague the Hon Peter Dunne, the member for Ōhariu. As it turns out, I met him a number of times after the decision was released. I valued his advice and contribution, particularly on the sunset provisions.

I also thank my colleague the Hon Rodney Hide. He is another principled member of this House. From the outset it was clear he had problems with the bill. He was prepared to support it to a select committee. His first reading speech, I thought, was very sincere and eloquent, and it rightly received a lot of praise. He played a very constructive role in the select committee, and I thank him for it. Like the Criminal Procedure Bill, which passed the other day, the bill we are debating is testament to his tenacity and his intellectual input. I acknowledge and endorse his generous comments about the Law Society, and other individual submitters like Associate Professor Andrew Geddis of Otago University.

I thank the Hon David Parker who, in all my dealings with him, for example on legislation concerning the foreshore and seabed, and on this sort of bill, shows himself to be entirely trustworthy. I think he is a genuine parliamentarian. At an early stage he recognised the importance of the situation that faced the Government and this Parliament. I believe that Mr Parker is a tough, principled opponent, who always maintains personal confidences and observes parliamentary conventions. I think he is wrong on section 7, but, as he said, on the section 7 report, that task was assigned to my colleague Kate Wilkinson, and the report concluded that section 21 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act was not engaged.

The bill we debate today is, to all intents and purposes, the bill sent to the select committee. The difference is that certain elements of retrospectivity have been removed. I say “elements”, because I do not see how the barring of appeals from people already convicted can be anything other than having a retrospective element, although I do say to Mr Locke that it could also be categorised as a legislative stay of proceedings for a period. The Search and Surveillance Bill does not contain those provisions, so it will have to be looked at again when the new Parliament is convened; that may give him some comfort. The important point is that this is not a new bill, as I emphasise; it is not a victory for any one political party. As I said, I agree with Mr Hide that it is a bill that is a product of this Parliament—it is a credit to this House. I was pleased that the evidence submitted supported the Government’s original contention that elements of the Search and Surveillance Bill could not be plucked out in some kind of hotchpotch fashion and rearranged into some new scheme. That idea was never going to fly. I think everyone now recognises that those complexities were too large.

In conclusion, I thank all those officials for their hard work on the bill. I particularly acknowledge John Pike, general counsel at Crown Law, and Elizabeth Grant at the Parliamentary Counsel Office, for their hard work and effort on the bill. I believe that they are examples of the first-class public servants we have, and it is right and proper that their efforts are recorded in Hansard. As is now tolerably clear—and, again, I am sure this will give Mr Locke some comfort—it will be the task of the new Parliament to pass the search and surveillance legislation into law. I commend the bill to the House.

CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) Link to this

We are where we are in respect of this Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill. I am somewhat disappointed that despite the attempt of the Attorney-General just now to reach a degree of graciousness, he could not simply have picked up the phone and sought a bit of cross-party consensus on the legislation itself. It was very difficult to get a copy of the original bill that was considered by the House in first reading speeches, in order to analyse the changes that had occurred between the publication of the consultation draft and the introduction of the legislation.

None the less, as I said in my earlier speech, I am very pleased that Labour, working on this occasion with the ACT Party, was able to force the Attorney-General into agreeing to a select committee process. It would have been completely unacceptable if this legislation had not at least had some public input into it, and it is pleasing that it was possible to override his instincts against the rule of law and the Standing Orders on that count.

It is incumbent, I think, on me to thank the Office of the Clerk for the drafting assistance I had from its staff, and in particular from Tim Workman. We have heard a reference to a “hotchpotch” solution concerning warrants that “was never going to fly”. Well, the Office of the Clerk and I did our best to do the Attorney-General’s job for him on that point. Unfortunately, he is right in the sense that in the time available to the House—and this is not a matter in which anybody should take pleasure; it is a matter for regret—it was not possible to put in proper controls around the sorts of powers the police ought to have.

That tells us all that it is absolutely a matter of priority that the next Parliament should pass the Search and Surveillance Bill, so that enforcement agencies have clear powers, and also clear controls on those powers. As I have said previously, it is a terrible indictment on members opposite that that legislation has languished on the Order Paper for a year, in the face of a bipartisan offer of support, because those National members have preferred to pursue window-dressing options in the law and order and justice sphere, rather than get on and protect New Zealanders in the way they ought to protect them.

Having said those necessary preliminary words, I turn to one or two things that were said in the Committee stage of the debate. I think the first thing I am bound to address is the contention by Mr Locke, a member for whom I have great respect, that Labour and National simply have the same position on the lawfulness of trespassory search and surveillance. I have to say to Mr Locke that that suggestion is beneath him. He knows it is not right, and he knows that, because Labour set out, in the minority report, what our position on trespassory search and surveillance was. It was not clear as to the lawfulness, or otherwise, of such surveillance. We said: “There has been much discussion about whether covert video camera surveillance is lawful. Labour members think the fairest summary of the position is that, while it had generally been considered permissible, an influential body of opinion had been growing prior to the Hamed decision that covert video camera surveillance had an unsatisfactory legal footing. This is because in many cases it was not positively authorised by any statute or rule of law—it was simply not prohibited. This view is reinforced by the Law Commission report and its call for a statutory basis for the activity, which we hope will be provided as soon as possible with the prompt passage in acceptable form of the Search and Surveillance Bill.” That is very clearly, and on the record, Labour’s position on this matter.

We heard David Parker describe earlier the evidence that was heard at the Justice and Electoral Committee as to why some form of temporary fix was required in the interests of justice, in order to go forward. He referred to the position where some quite serious offending around the drug-dealing activities of organised crime has to be dealt with by trespassory video surveillance, despite Mr Locke’s contention.

That position is that very sophisticated criminals have got into the habit of not using telephones or talking to one another about what they are doing. They write what they are doing and what needs to be done on whiteboards for one another, and that is how they communicate messages. Well, I guess they do that with the curtains drawn, I tell Mr Locke, which is why there is—I agree with him—not a wide case, but a case none the less, subject to section 21, and subject to section 30, for some of this type of activity to be required in rare cases.

That is why Labour has taken what we think is the responsible position: do not prohibit it outright, do not leave a legal lacuna, lend some credibility and some legal authority to activity in the most serious cases, and try to put checks and balances in, while restricting the whole temporary fix to 6 months. I am very satisfied that that is the responsible position to have taken.

I just want to say one other word on the speeches that we heard in the Committee stage. I listened carefully, as I always do, to Rahui Katene, and I was embarrassed to hear her speech, because she was speaking quite clearly on an earlier draft of the bill, not the bill that has come back from the select committee. If she actually read the bill—and she is legally trained—she would realise that significant changes have been made to it that answer the criticisms that she dealt with in her speech.

Again, Hone Harawira, who is somebody for whom I have a lot of respect, just got it wrong in his speech. He said, for example, that the lawyers had all come along and made criticisms of the bill. Well, he needs to realise that the Law Society and Mr Knight, for example, have both said that the changes the select committee made to the legislation are very positive, and actually satisfy most of the concerns that were raised. Let us just remember that those changes were made at the behest of the select committee and in the face of what would have been opposition to a select committee process by Christopher Finlayson.

My two final words are these: it is quite right that this activity is disrespectful of the Supreme Court of New Zealand. This Parliament in a future session will have to address that issue. We have a Supreme Court now. We do not have judges in England to run to if we get things wrong. But we have to accept that a corollary of that is that, generally speaking, the law as it is declared by the Supreme Court is the law. It is not for us to pick and choose how the law should work.

So we have to look at equipping the Supreme Court with appropriate powers for the exercise of its authority. In Canada, for example, the Supreme Court can declare the law to be a certain way, and then it can suspend the law for a certain period of time to allow the executive or the legislature to bring the necessary legal technicalities into line. We have never given the Supreme Court that particular express authority.

I personally believe that it has that authority at common law, and I am sad that the Attorney-General is not willing to send Crown lawyers over the road into the Supreme Court to ask them to exercise authority in that way, because he is concerned about what other parts of Pandora’s box he might open. But if we are not to invite the Supreme Court to find inherent jurisdiction, and to be more flexible about the way it applies remedies, we have to legislate to give it those powers.

My final word is this: it has to be time for us to think about entrenching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We cannot continue to go through these exercises that just discredit the way in which the rule of law is respected in New Zealand. Certainly, for my part and the part of my colleagues on this side of the House, we are very clear that that needs to be very firmly on the legislative agenda.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) Link to this

Before I call the next member, I wish to correct the record. The votes on the amendment in the name of Keith Locke and that the provisions of the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill be agreed to were incorrectly announced as Ayes 115, Noes 15, and Ayes 105, Noes 15 respectively. The correct result on the Locke amendment is Ayes 14, Noes 105, and on the main question Ayes 105, Noes 14. The record will be corrected in both cases.

KEITH LOCKE (Green) Link to this

I am very sad; I seem to have lost one vote in that correction. I will go home very sad.

I think this has been a very intelligent debate on the third reading of the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill and I commend all the members for speaking and addressing the issues in a very good way. I thank Chester Borrows, Rodney Hide, Chris Finlayson, and Charles Chauvel for their comments about me and this being my last afternoon in Parliament. I also agree with the New Zealand Herald editorial; even though I did not entirely disagree, it was a bit too positive about the resulting bill. But I think it did highlight a point about the importance of MMP in resolving issues in this House and the role that smaller parties play in resolving those issues. I think that all of the parties represented, including the Green Party, made some contribution to the positive changes that happened in relation to the bill.

I did a bit of arithmetic about how the 12 months could be changed to 6 months. I might not have been the only one doing arithmetic but I think it will help to shorten the time frame of this particular bill. I thank Christopher Finlayson for reminding me and us here that the bill lasts for 6 months, so the issue of appeal rights being not available during that period because of clause 5A—which unfortunately remains in the bill despite my amendment to omit it; it went down in the vote—lasts only for 6 months.

I will make one or two more general points. I made some points about what could happen with agencies—the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Commerce Commission, the New Zealand Customs Service, etc., etc.—leaving covert video cameras as a result of exercising search warrants on private property, and Hone Harawira talked about the possibility of video cameras in marae and all the rest of it. That might seem a bit extreme and one might think that would never happen, but I think it reflects a problem we have in some of the debate in this Parliament in terms of two things.

First, I say that a lot of MPs get emails from people who are quite paranoid already and think that people are spying on them, following them, and all the rest of it. I think that response, in terms of the number of such emails, would increase if we give State agencies the power to put covert video cameras in private houses or private offices, so that would be a downside.

The other side to it is that often we think in terms of our current Government and the political character of our current Government. When Labour was in Government I often used to get: “Oh, Helen Clark would never do that.” in response to my criticisms of increase in State powers. I said that the issue was not whether Helen Clark would do it; the issue was whether a more repressive Government, say a Muldoon-type Government, would do it. Similarly, it is not a question of whether a John Key Government would do it; it is a question of whether a more repressive Government might do it. So we always must frame laws with the idea that some nastier Government might come into office and use these laws in a more repressive way.

I think one of the reasons why in Europe there is quite a consciousness—possibly a stronger consciousness—of civil liberties is that they have been through some quite repressive government situations and they hold on jealously to their human rights, have European human rights courts, and all kinds of things. I take Chris Finlayson’s point that stuff can go through the British Parliament pretty quick as well, but I think we have to bear that in mind much more. Tony Ellis talked about international law and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the human rights cases he had taken and won there. When he said that a case relating to this bill could go before the United Nations Human Rights Committee on the basis of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, he was trying to look at the law—and I think that is useful; Tony Ellis is a respected lawyer—in an international context.

This relates to what Charles Chauvel said: it may be true that there are some criminals who write things on whiteboards and escape the attention of the law because of it, and they might be serious criminals, but the fundamental issue that we have to always bear in mind is that the protection of civil liberties—and keeping the State out of peoples’ bedrooms and offices with its video cameras is part of it—does mean some guilty people, some criminals, and some serious criminals go free. But it is a balance. It is a balance of the rights one applies to the total population, which might diminish to some extent the powers the police and other State agencies have, but that is the balance we should have in a free and democratic society. I appeal to future Parliaments to really look closely at that balance and where it should lie.

There was a reference by Charles Chauvel about entrenching the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I constructed a member’s bill, with the help of various members of this House from other parties—I am very pleased they engaged in that process with me—to try to strengthen the section 7 process of checking legislation, and really strengthening up the application of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in the judicial system. The bill has languished because there have not been many members’ bill ballots, if any, for several months, so my bill did not come out into the public space to the extent that I would have liked. I invite any other member of this House to pick it up and carry it in either its present or an amended form in the next Parliament.

I think the fact that we have had such a discussion of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act around this bill is very valuable. I appreciate what Chris Finlayson said about there being a bill of rights clause in this particular bill. I look forward to the next Parliament really taking up these issues in a serious way. Thank you.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Labour—Hauraki-Waikato) Link to this

I am pleased to take a third reading call on the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill, and to have been a member on the Justice and Electoral Committee. The contributions to this debate, from the first reading to now, have been thoughtful, and a lot of issues of principle have been brought to the House to consider.

That is not to mention, at the outset, the issue of retrospective law change. When this bill was introduced I said in this House that as a parliamentarian I found it difficult to entertain retrospective law changes, because I believed that the threshold was quite high, and that we should err on the side of caution when we make any consideration of that sort. When this bill was introduced with the wider ambit of retrospective law change I had a big pause and thought, no, we need to think further about this.

My colleagues Charles Chauvel and David Parker have both outlined the Search and Surveillance Bill as being the broader framework by which search and surveillance powers could be better addressed in an ideal world. That bill has been delayed for far too long in this House.

I say, from my perspective in the time I was Minister of Customs in the last Government, that the search and surveillance powers of border agencies need to be far more sophisticated than many lay people will ever know. It is not about just domestic crime; it is about the international crime networks that New Zealand must be in a position to respond to. When we were considering the prospective powers of police to utilise covert video surveillance, we were very clear on the Labour benches that they need those types of powers going forward to ensure that they can enforce the law as it is intended to be in order to keep our communities and our citizens safe. We were very clear about the prospective powers of the police going forward.

Again, at the first reading we raised the issues of civil liberties. Whenever one ascribes powers to the police, they must be balanced with protections for the public. We were very mindful that the bill was somewhat lopsided, ascribing powers to the police without adequate protections for the public. That matter had to be considered somewhat through the select committee process. I am glad that we had that process.

The other issue we needed to question was the Government’s claim at the time it introduced this bill that 40 or 50 cases would simply lapse or have to be released as a result of these changes not going through. Well, in fact, when we got to the select committee and heard submissions from the New Zealand Law Society, the police, and some legal experts, what they were saying was that provisions within the existing law could deal with those types of issues. They all urged us to reconsider retrospective changes, which did not need to be applied to these particular cases.

One of the benefits that I had from the expertise that came to the select committee was to understand the nature of the difference for those people who have already been convicted and are currently serving time. We gained greater clarity as a result of the select committee process, to make clear that those cases should be left alone and that they should remain untouched and be treated as the law was understood to have applied prior to 2 September.

This is a temporary fix. I am glad that the time has been shortened from 12 months to 6 months. It does put urgency on the next Parliament to pass the Search and Surveillance Bill. No matter who is on the Government benches, the general public needs to know that that bill has already gone through a full and comprehensive select committee process. It has some support across the House, and it addresses this issue of balance of interest between the public good and powers ascribed to enforcement agencies, but also it is very prescriptive as to which enforcement agencies should have certain powers. I regret that in the solution that has been agreed to by the House today the warranting method of ascribing powers to the police for covert video surveillance was not able to be achieved, but this was somewhat offset against shortening the time for this temporary measure to go forward.

There was nothing more compelling for me in the select committee than two lots of evidence. The first bit of evidence was from the legal profession, and it affirmed, in my view, the view that Labour took at the very outset with this bill that there must be a strong balance between the rights of citizens and the rights of the police, that that balance must be made clear, and that retrospective law change is not a solution in this particular instance. The second compelling bit of evidence was from a member of the public who was caught up as a third party to covert video surveillance. She spoke quite evocatively about the emotional stress and pressure of being in that situation. Again, that reaffirmed to me the caution that we as parliamentarians should have when we are considering these types of measures, and that we need to consider the civil liberties of individuals and society at large whenever we are addressing the question of more powers for those who are required to enforce the law in order to keep our communities and society safe.

I thank the clerk of the committee, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, Crown Law, and my colleagues Charles Chauvel and David Parker for the thoughtful contributions they made at the select committee. I certainly thank all those submitters who in a short time frame made submissions to the select committee.

My last comment is really to the Māori Party. Given the legal expertise the Māori Party has, I urge its members to look at the changes to the bill and at some of the recommendations of the select committee, which I think got to a reasonable way forward to ensure that we have a safe society, that the police can carry out lawful activities, and that we have been very clear as legislators to ascribe the types of powers that the police should have for the short period before we pass the Search and Surveillance Bill. Kia ora koutou.

RAHUI KATENE (Māori Party—Te Tai Tonga) Link to this

The Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill cuts to the core of some deeply held concerns within our community around transparency, accountability, trust, and corruption. This legislation has been put forward by the National Government with Labour and ACT’s support. It asks us to suspend the law temporarily, to condone an unlawful act by the police, and then to add fuel to the fire by introducing legislation to make the unlawful lawful. We believe that there has been politicking by both larger parties to create a perception for voters that they are tackling the tough issues, that they will not be soft on crime, and that they are making their mark. If they thought it was such a problem, they would have dealt with it earlier when the Law Commission raised it and when the courts previously raised it. Why wait 3 months, or even less, before the election to raise it? Why wait until the last week that Parliament is sitting to bring in this bill to deal with that issue? The question we have to ask is what sort of justice system we have if the upholder of the law is allowed to break the law and get away with it. If the police want to forge relationships with the community, then breaking the law—and the Government then introducing new law to make those breaches lawful—is not the way to achieve public trust and confidence.

I cannot help but think that when we are thinking about public trust and confidence in the police, we are walking through some very treacherous waters at this time. Although the Government has been at pains to say that this bill is not about Tūhoe, the people of Tūhoe are the silent ones sitting through this debate. Their experiences cannot and must not be forgotten.

In this third reading I will focus on one thing and one thing only: corruption. The Māori Party wants to sound out a loud warning against corruption. In doing so, my colleague Dr Pita Sharples has already announced that the Māori Party will be taking a stand against corruption in the upcoming election. As a Parliament we cannot allow for corruption in our police, no matter how loud the Police Association screams for it. The police are supposed to be protecting our citizens, not running roughshod over the law. They are supposed to be stopping criminals, not acting like criminals. Make no mistake, as much as some want to deny it, the trust that New Zealanders have in the police is tenuous at best; more accurately, it is fragile. Yes, some want to hide that fact. Well, it is time to call out the open secret, not because we want to undermine the police—quite the opposite—but because we want to be able to expect a lot more from them.

It is time to say that there is an elephant in the room, and that elephant’s name is a police force that is at the tipping point of corruption. We ignore it at our peril. Look beyond the spin; look at their own documents. What we will find is that full trust and confidence in the police is at an all-time low. Only 28 percent of New Zealanders have full trust and confidence in the New Zealand police. We also find that for those people who have contact with the police, not criminals but victims, the confidence rating declines. That is right. We all want to believe that the police are a force for good, but when we actually need them and have experience of them, we are confronted with the reality that causes our confidence to decline.

If we want more evidence, we can look at the most recent crime survey, the New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey 2009, which reminds us again that only one out of every three victims reports a crime to the police. Why is that? The survey says it is because victims are too ashamed or embarrassed to go to the police. That is right; the worst sorts of criminals—sexual predators—are going free because according to the Government’s own survey the police could not or would not do anything to help. If the police are not embarrassed by that, then they should be embarrassed by the fact that the women who were brave enough to speak to Dame Margaret Bazley about police cover-ups in relation to sexual assault allegations have not been apologised to by this Government and have not received any compensation.

We cannot let declining trust and confidence in the police impact any more on the social fabric of New Zealand society than it already has. Whether it is the women who spoke up against police sexual aggression and cover-ups, whether it is the 500-odd cases of child abuse in the Wellington region alone that were not investigated, whether it is the few bad apples and the people who cover for them that erodes the public’s trust and confidence, or whether it is the people of Tūhoe who were terrorised by the State on that fearful and dark day, the Māori Party will not be party to any legislation that further compromises the fragile trust and confidence that New Zealanders have in their police force. We will be part of the solution; not the problem.

The starting point for us is that the Supreme Court cannot be bent or dictated to by expediency. Absolute vigilance must be taken and a proper, informed debate needs to happen, unless there is a truly exceptional reason to do so. All criminal law must protect the rights of an individual against the State, lest the individual becomes oppressed. That is why one does not allow Parliament to take away a person’s rights lightly, and it is why there are real restrictions on the police in the way of search warrants. The Hamed decision made it clear that covert video surveillance that involves trespass is unlawful. We are a rule-of-law society and we cannot retrospectively criminalise what is not criminal. Let the courts decide. They have much more experience and more ability than Parliament to decide these things.

We do, of course, appreciate the move that the Minister has made to remove the retrospective application that was introduced in the original form of the bill. We were utterly opposed to the initial intention to make the law retrospective. It is an outright constitutional challenge, a mechanism to flout our constitutional rights and ignore the responsibilities of Government to protect and uphold the law. The judicial process itself already has sufficient checks and balances in place to determine the lawfulness of evidence obtained by the use of covert video camera surveillance, under section 30 of the Evidence Act.

I come back to the focus of my kōrero. Corruption constitutes a major obstacle to democracy and the rule of law. The police lose their legitimacy when they misuse power for organisational advantage. For those members in this House who may think we are overstating the facts, let me finish by drawing their attention to the most recent global survey by Transparency International. In that survey 73 percent of New Zealanders said that corruption had increased over the past 3 years. Those same New Zealanders regarded political parties as the most corrupt. The least corrupt were the military, then teachers, then judges, then the non-governmental organisation sector, then the police. A close reading of the data says something that should worry us all. Only 10 percent of people surveyed did not think that the New Zealand police were corrupt. Everyone else thought the New Zealand police came between somewhat corrupt and extremely corrupt.

The Māori Party will not support any legislation that further undermines people’s trust in the political or judicial system, its institutions, and its leadership. We do not support this bill.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) Link to this

I think that some of the misrepresentations of the legislation by the last speaker, Rahui Katene, are regrettable. With respect to her, she should know better. Her irresponsible conduct is one of the things that undermines public confidence in our important democratic institutions. Labour is already on record, and, in fact, I am on record in the first reading of the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill as saying that I too was dissatisfied with some of the police conduct in respect of the Tūhoe raids. They were wrong. I still think there is a need for us to scrutinise whether it was right to have black-suited men with high-powered rifles crawling over school buses. I thought that was an overreaction by the State.

Hon RODNEY HIDE (Minister of Local Government) Link to this

I will take just a short call, hopefully, on the third reading of the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill. If the bill did what Ms Katene said and Mr Locke alleged, I, for one, would not be voting for it. In fact, the bill does no such thing. Previous to 1996 it will be remembered that MPs were not allowed to read speeches, and I think that was a much better system. Those speeches have clearly been prepared before the Justice and Electoral Committee did its work and changed the bill; it is a substantially different bill we are talking about.

Let me make just a couple of things clear. Firstly, there is no retrospectivity in this legislation, which is actually what was so upsetting to everyone, bar for one point—that no one who currently has a conviction can use R v Hamed as the basis of an appeal. I think that is a bit egregious, but we made that decision on the basis that the submitters were very clear it would not affect anyone, and in a way we were trying to quieten down our caucuses who were alarmed that that was the case. So, in a way, no harm has been done and we actually had a bit of comfort. I would make the point also that the legislation is for 6 months only.

Secondly, and this is the critical bit, there is no retrospectivity for anyone in the system. I think that is a very, very important achievement of this Parliament, and, indeed, for the Attorney-General and for the executive. It would be shocking, if we think about it, to be before the courts, the Supreme Court makes a decision, and then Parliament comes along and retrospectively denies someone their rights and, in fact, their defence of criminal charges. Parliament has done no such thing with this legislation. Thirdly, it is only going forward that this legislation applies to, beyond that point made about those with a conviction. So it is entirely prospective and the Supreme Court decision stands.

It is perfectly correct that Parliament makes the law. What it has done with this law is make a fix. The reason for that was there were a lot of dangers in running around trying to produce a warrantable procedure in a couple of days. We were likely to make more mischief than we actually saved. So, essentially, what we have done is codify the practice that was in place and allow it to go forward—confident, by the way, that no cases that are before the courts will fall over. If one or two do, actually that is correct because the evidence was obtained unlawfully and improperly. And those cases should fall over, because that was the law at the time the evidence was collected—clearly.

Going forward, we have to thank Chester Borrows for this. We were quite happy, I believe, that the police could get an ordinary search warrant and have video surveillance powers under that warrant for 6 months. I am going to lay this on Chester: it was Chester Borrows, ex-policeman, prominent lawyer, and fantastic MP for Wanganui, who suggested—and I was not up on the practicalities and I ask members to understand that this was moving pretty fast—that if the police were going to carry out surveillance they would need to put it in their application for a warrant and it would be noted on the warrant. That is a huge advance over our situation.

It is not the case, as I think Mr Locke suggested, that people can just go along and get an everyday warrant and then undertake covert surveillance. They will not be able to do that in their application to the District Court. They will have to say they are applying for a search warrant, and that they will be doing video surveillance. I think that is a very, very important feature, and I thank Chester Borrows for that suggestion.

On over-the-wall surveillance—and I think Keith Locke accepts this—subject to section 21 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, people can actually do over-the-wall surveillance, because if they are out on the street they can film, and that is what will continue. Crown Law wrote to all of the agencies and said people could not do that. This law makes clear that people can do that, but members should understand—and again, this is Parliament—that it is only for 6 months, because there is not one member of this Parliament who thinks the present situation is satisfactory. We have a patch, we have a fix-up, it is there for 6 months, and in 6 months this Parliament will have to come back and fix it. I think that is a great result, and I am a bit sorry that Mr Locke and the Māori Party—and I understand that Māori Party members were not at the select committee—have actually given speeches on an earlier version of the bill. Thank you very much.