Maritime Powers Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Maritime Powers Bill. I move that the Maritime Powers Bill be now read a third time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Maritime Powers Bill be now read a third time.

The bill is designed to close gaps in New Zealand’s domestic law which create uncertainty when enforcing our criminal law in international waters, being the oceans and seas beyond 12 nautical miles from our coast, including our exclusive economic zone. Addressing these gaps and keeping our maritime enforcement secure is critical to Aotearoa New Zealand’s national security and prosperity. We are an island nation with an extensive maritime domain. Once upon a time, our geographic isolation may have provided protection from maritime security threats; today, transnational organised crime, including smuggling people, illicit drugs, arms, and wildlife by sea, is increasing. This threatens our health and wellbeing and threatens our security and livelihoods. The Maritime Powers Bill is designed to ensure that New Zealand can respond to these threats, providing a clear statutory basis for New Zealand to enforce New Zealand’s criminal law in international waters.

Because the bill covers a range of offending, include drug trafficking and wildlife smuggling, it provides powers to Police, Customs officers, the New Zealand Defence Force, Department of Conservation rangers, warranted officers, and endangered species officers. This recognises the importance of including agencies with particular technical expertise in operations pursuant to this law. The bill is consistent with existing New Zealand law in this respect. All of these agencies already have comparable powers in New Zealand’s territorial sea.

The bill does not require warrants for the exercise of enforcement powers. This is also consistent with the approach of existing domestic legislation which confers comparable powers in international waters that are able to be exercised without warrant, including the Fisheries Act, the Maritime Crimes Act, and the Customs and Excise Act. It also recognises that exercising enforcement powers in the maritime environment, often at considerable distance from New Zealand, is complex and entails specific risks and challenges in relation to safety of life at sea, the preservation of evidence, and the identification of vessels. It also requires warrants for foreign ships would not be compatible with international law.

Now, while the bill does not require warrants, it includes a number of important safeguard measures to ensure that its powers are exercised in a fair, reasonable, and proportionate way that is consistent with our human rights obligations. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act applies to the exercise of any powers in this bill. Consistent with the Search and Surveillance Act, the bill provides a clear, evidential threshold, before any powers in the bill can be exercised, of reasonable grounds, to suspect offending, and reasonable grounds to believe there is evidence of offending. The powers in the bill may only be used for serious criminal offences, which are those punishable by imprisonment for life or two or more years. The bill requires enforcement officers to report on the use of any maritime powers to the Commissioner of Police or chief executive of the relevant agency, and the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

In line with existing New Zealand law, the bill requires the consent of the Attorney-General to bring proceedings in relation to the extra territorial offences created by clause 34 of the bill. But it allows enforcement powers to be exercised before such consent is received. This is an important balance. In the operation pursuant to the bill, it may be necessary to urgently arrest a person and remand them in custody before the Attorney-General’s consent is received—for example, if a person is a flight risk or a danger to the public.

The bill also deals with the limited range of situations where, pursuant to international law, the consent of the flag State is not required to exercise enforcement powers in respect of a foreign ship. One of those is where a ship reasonably is suspected of committing an offence within New Zealand’s maritime zones is pursued without interruption. Consistent with international law, the bill recognises that New Zealand can use the ship and/or an aircraft to pursue an offending vessel in such a scenario.

Finally, the bill includes specific provisions allowing a medical practitioner to conduct an internal search of a person in specific and very limited circumstances where a person is prepared to permit such a search. In doing so, the bill does not impact or constrain the ability of a medical practitioner to respond to any medical emergency, in accordance with their professional and ethical obligations. This ultimately means that the care and wellbeing of an individual is paramount in the consideration of a medical practitioner undertaking their task under the Act.

I would like to thank the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, also, for your detailed consideration of this bill and for the technical amendments that the committee has recommended, which have improved the bill significantly. I’d also like to thank the organisations and individuals who submitted on the bill, as well as the officials that were involved in developing those changes, including Anais Kedgley Laidlaw, and Sophie Ironside from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and also Jacqueline Derby from the Parliamentary Counsel Office. Thank you all very much for your professional and thoughtful advice to the committee.

The bill is a positive development which will better secure our extensive maritime domain from increasing threats, in a fair, reasonable, and proportionate way that is consistent with international law and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. This will support the wellbeing of our communities and advance our security and shared prosperity. On that basis, I commend the bill to the House.

Nō reira tēnā koutou katoa i roto i ngā mahi nunui o te komiti motuhake otirā ngā mahi o te Whare.

[Therefore I acknowledge you all with respect to the significant work of the special committee and the work carried out in the House.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and it’s a great pleasure to rise and say a few words on the Maritime Powers Bill this afternoon, at our third reading. And can I acknowledge, at the outset, the considered response from the Minister in her legislative statement outlining, I think, a fair assessment of the points of contention that existed around the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee as they reflected on the detail of this bill. I did not sit in the committee but have had conversations with those who have, and it became very clear that there was pretty strong support around the table for the changes that were suggested in the first reading, particularly creating a jurisdiction over any ship in international or foreign waters and allowing, essentially, New Zealand to apply its territorial law in its exclusive economic zone. Where it became pretty easy to agree was the role of enforcement officers such as police and customs officers. Where it became more difficult was in the space of the Department of Conservation rangers and endangered species officers.

So, as I’m sure a number of my colleagues will talk to in more detail shortly, the National Party members on that committee sought assurances, essentially on the use of those powers, from officials, and there were a number of technical amendments that were made. And I think it is useful just to reflect on some of the Minister’s very explicit comments in the legislative statement with respect to safeguards—that they need to be fair and reasonable and proportional—that the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act needed to apply, as you would expect; that there needed to be a clear evidential threshold for any action from New Zealand law enforcement authorities in this context; that there needed to be, at its core, a test of reasonableness; and what was important for us is that there was a transparent obligation on enforcement agencies around the use of their powers in terms of reporting each time that they did to relevant individuals, such as the Commissioner of Police and, of course, the consent of the Attorney-General should any further action, in terms of those arrests, be pursued.

So, overall, we are in a position now to support this. It clearly provides an opportunity for our law enforcement agents to protect New Zealand’s interests in our exclusive economic zone more effectively. Of course, this is just one part of the story. The other part is the actual technical capacity of law enforcement to actually be out in the appropriately spec’d vessels to be able to keep pace with and actually apprehend those that they have concerns about, and that is the part of this which is a critical test of the Government—their commitment to ensuring that, actually, there is the appropriate personnel and vessel capability to be able to ensure that these powers can actually be applied in any meaningful sense. So I look forward, of course, to the contributions of other colleagues who sat through the committee to, perhaps, speak in more detail of those technical amendments that give us the comfort, now, to support this legislation at the third reading stage. Thank you.

It is a pleasure to take a call on this as a member of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee who did sit through the submissions on this bill. And I can tell this House and you, Madam Speaker, that we shared the same interest in looking at the powers around search, stopping, seizure, detaining without warrant, and also, actually, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. I think there was a deal of consensus on the select committee about wanting to get assurances on those elements, and I can assure you that we are in agreement that those assurances are there and that the legislation is safe in those respects.

So just recapping really about what this legislation is, which is about ensuring that New Zealand can act to disrupt criminal activity before it reaches our shores. Looking at the other legislation where powers to stop, search, seize, and detain are present, that is the Maritime Crimes Act, Customs and Excise Act, Fisheries Act, Wildlife Act, Trade in Endangered Species Act, and in particular the Customs and Excise Act Schedule 5A that went through this House in 2018. So that’s an example of recent legislation where detaining and so on without warrant has been found to be acceptable, and it recognises that there are risks at sea around personal safety, around particularly the presentation of evidence and the ability of somebody on board a ship to be able to simply throw it overboard and get rid of the evidence. Also what was told to us in the select committee was that in these types of situations often it’s not just one enforcement agency that’s acting; it can be several in concert, and that’s what we would expect.

In terms of the oversight, the courts will play a significant role as well in oversight, because these powers will be used, presumably, to prosecute cases, and so the enforcement agencies will want to get that right. They are not cheap operations to execute, and they will want to ensure that their evidence is accepted. Also, all the enforcement officers who use these powers will be required to report to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

So on that note, I can assure you that we shared a similar concern for human rights for making sure that the legislation is within what is acceptable when warrants are not required. We feel very strongly that this piece of legislation does meet that threshold, and therefore I commend it to the House.

This bill is supported by the National Party. As the previous speaker Ingrid Leary said, the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee was pretty much in unison when it came to the questions that were raised by the bill, but also in accepting and promoting the intent of it.

The committee, of course, very ably chaired by the Hon Jenny Salesa, a member who has quite clearly got an interest in New Zealand’s maritime jurisdiction because of her heritage and commitment to the Pacific. But it is a committee that generally tries to work as cooperatively as possible. Look, the idea that New Zealand should have a law that enables us to extend our laws extra-territorially into the Pacific is something that on hindsight and in consideration of the process we’ve been through, seems so very obvious. The previous two speakers and the Minister herself have mentioned a number of things that were of concern to us, and I don’t necessarily want to go through all of those again. We had an exhaustive committee stage for the bill here in the House over the past couple of weeks, and the Minister answered certainly all the questions that I had asked. And while there’ll be a couple of things we might disagree on, the general principles of the bill are very sound.

The bit that we are most concerned about, and I’ll state it again, is the extension of arrest powers to rangers, Department of Conversation (DOC) officers and various other people who are not necessarily sworn law enforcement officers in New Zealand. Now, it was pointed out that there are—within the Acts that those various rangers and DOC officers will be familiar with, there is New Zealand law that could well be being breached on the territorial sea, the extra-territorial sea, the open sea. And it’s therefore important to have someone there who is able to exercise a degree of knowledge, I guess, of the crime that’s being committed. It is worth noting that those authorities stop the moment the person gets back on to the terra firma here in New Zealand and then it is taken over by police, quite obviously.

The other bit that was a little bit confusing for a start was the idea that if our enforcement agencies were in pursuit of perhaps a vessel that was engaged in any range of activity that would be a breach of New Zealand law, before it could be boarded or stopped then the permission of the flagged State or the State whose flag was being flown on that ship would need to be granted. I think the answer to that is that it indicates simply the extent to which there is international cooperation, to ensure that there is a high degree of sound policing directed at illegal activities on the sea. Some of that would be straight piracy, drug movements, people movements, endangered species movements. When I said piracy, I mean also all range of illicit goods that could be involved in that sort of activity, as well as, of course, the drug trade.

So the select committee did look at every aspect that looked to be a little bit different around this bill and came to the conclusion that it was good legislation for New Zealand to have. It lines up with other countries, it enables that international cooperation and for New Zealand to do its bit on what is one of the biggest territorial seas—and therefore surrounded by extra-territorial sea—of any country in the world. As I said at the start, we support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on the Maritime Powers Bill in its third reading. The Labour Party has a proud history of promoting independent foreign policy, with a focus on multilateralism, human rights, and international rule of law. This is clearly set in our manifesto. And these values are then consolidated.

We are living in the era of globalisation, where people and goods move around quite easily, and this often causes a lot of damage and poses a significant threat to the national security of the nations. New Zealand is not immune to this. So we are a trading nation with a significant growing marine economy and a domestic market increasingly reliant on the connectivity that the sea provides for global supply and the value change through the shipping routes.

Therefore, this bill will allow New Zealand to respond to criminal activities on our shores and our oceans and beyond the New Zealand territory, including our exclusive economic zone, such as, for example, the smuggling of people, illicit drugs and arms, wildlife trafficking, including trafficking of our taonga, which is our native reptiles, and human trafficking. We see from the police reports that millions of dollars of drugs are being seized from criminals. So this bill couldn’t come in the right time. So to be able to do their job, obviously our law enforcement agencies such as police, the New Zealand Defence Force, and Customs need the proper tools to be able to do their job properly and to protect our maritime territory.

So the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee received seven submissions on the bill, including one from the Privacy Commissioner and the New Zealand Law Society and the New Zealand Council of Civil Liberties as well. The four submitters expressed their support for the bill through their evidence. So obviously this bill is consistent with our rights and obligations under the international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and international human rights obligations. So I’d like to thank the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee for the good work that they have done scrutinising this bill, and I’d like to thank the Minister for bringing this bill into the House. It’s a good bill. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. And thank you for being chair of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee that heard this, by the way. We don’t often get legislation come through the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, so I think it’s obvious the excitement that we all had going forward.

This bill is one that seeks to address some important issues, or to address some important problems, that we see happen on the high seas. I think most New Zealanders would actually be surprised but should know that New Zealand is responsible for monitoring a fifth of the world’s oceans. So it makes sense that we would want to have the right tools to identify serious criminal activity, and to give them to our people who are responsible for that monitoring, to address them appropriately.

So we monitor a fifth of the world’s oceans for environmental degradation, for disaster relief, and criminal activities like what this bill seeks to address. The types of activities—and everyone has referred to them—are serious: it’s people trafficking, it’s human slavery, and—for the Green Party, obviously, very importantly—the trafficking of rare species. Illegal trafficking of either New Zealand’s taonga species or other rare and endangered species into New Zealand for profit. We know that drug trafficking in an uncontrolled way is happening increasingly and that’s a huge problem for our small island nation, as well as for the island nations in our Pacific community.

But it’s not enough, in terms of lawmaking, to identify a problem and to seek to stop it—that is the criminal justice system, by the way. There’s an agreement by society, more or less, that things like murder, violent offending, and property crimes are bad. But the way that we address them—in applying the rule of law, in applying a sanctions regime, in applying a search and surveillance regime that abides by our other values and upholds the rule of law—is a different thing altogether. That’s where this bill fails.

So, yes, we did hear from the Law Society. We heard from naval law experts. We heard from experts who supported the spirit of this bill but did raise serious issues with the way it sought to address them in terms of the search powers. So this bill replicates the search and surveillance powers of the Search and Surveillance Act. That was a law that came in under the previous National Government. We’ve now had years and years of looking at the way that the warrantless search powers in that law have, in practice, been used to degrade our right to be free from arbitrary search and seizure. They’ve been replicated in the Misuse of Drugs Act and in the Arms Act. Similarly, the courts have found that it has meant that without judicial oversight, without an obligation to seek a warrant, lo and behold, there is more chance that the basic New Zealand Bill of Rights Act rights—rights to be free from unlawful search and seizure, and unreasonable search and seizure—will be degraded.

Now, this bill actually goes further than that in that it doesn’t allow, in any circumstances, for there to be judicial oversight of searches. So whilst the police have to exercise the power to search without a warrant in cases where there isn’t time to seek one, this bill specifically excludes even that possibility. This was pointed out to us repeatedly by the Law Society, and by a naval legal expert that came long and said there are actually a lot of types of circumstances on the high seas where you can know that you’re going to want to search a vessel, and it is always best practice to be able to say there will be accountability, and oversight, and rule of law when that is about to happen. This bill excludes that.

So, yes, the ministry that put it together says that it abides by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. But we know that, in practice, these types of search powers do lessen the likelihood of compliance with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act rights, and, in this case, even beyond that. We don’t have a case for even applying judicial oversight or abiding by rights if there is time and capacity to do so. As the Hon Gerry Brownlee has pointed out, it even extends the powers to groups of people who are not normally using search and surveillance powers. So, again, the risk is multiplied.

I think, as lawmakers, we have a responsibility here to identify serious problems and endeavour to address them. But to have a knee-jerk reaction that weakens the rule of law, weakens our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in practice, is not good lawmaking. So, for those reasons, the Green Party will not be supporting this bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of the third reading of the Maritime Powers Bill. The purpose of this bill is to put in place clear powers for the enforcement of New Zealand’s laws in international waters, and we need to be quite clear about what this law is not doing. We’re not expanding our laws or creating new criminal offences. We’re simply allowing the New Zealand Government and the police and our enforcement agencies the ability to enforce our laws in international waters. It’s about ensuring that we have the power to enforce our current laws, not create new ones. I think that’s an important point to make.

This bill, though, as we see when we look through it, provides a range of mechanisms to help with the enforcement of New Zealand’s laws in international waters by allowing things like search and surveillance of a ship, requiring a ship to stop, boarding the ship, and searching the ship for a person that might be suspected to have broken the law in New Zealand or broken the law in our international waters, and we’re able to detain that ship and arrest a person. I think that’s very important, and it’s quite striking that we haven’t had this clearly written out in law before. I think it points to a real issue that we are seeing in New Zealand, which is that we have far too much criminal activity and not enough enforcement to stop criminal activity.

It doesn’t matter where I go in New Zealand—I am met with people in our communities who say that we need healthier and safer communities, and we need to have a stronger enforcement of our laws. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a woman in Auckland Central who says that she’s moving out of town because she doesn’t feel safe there because it’s not safe on the streets, or whether it’s people saying they don’t feel safe even walking around their neighbourhoods at night, because they know that there are so many people on meth and they just don’t feel safe. We need to have safer communities and that means enforcing the law, letting people know that they can be safe because the police will be there for them. The same thing needs to apply to criminal activity when it’s coming to New Zealand, because we have to ask a very obvious question: where are all those illegal firearms coming from? Where is all that meth that’s being dealt on our streets coming from? Well, part of it is coming from ships entering New Zealand waters and distributing those goods into our communities and making them less safe.

We want to have healthier communities that are thriving, and that means taking illegal firearms out of the hands of gangs—because that’s where they end up—and taking meth away from the gangs—because that’s where it goes. Those illegal firearms and those drugs on the streets destroy our communities. So we have to stop it where we see it, and having these laws in place allows us to keep those illegal firearms and that meth off our streets. It also means that where an offence has been committed in New Zealand and the ship leaves our waters, we have the ability to enforce those laws, find that ship, find the people who have made our communities less safe, detain them, and search the ship for other illegal activity that might have been occurring there. That’s a very, very important law to pass, because it will make our communities safer. We want fewer illegal guns on the street and we want less meth in our communities and in the hands of our children.

I think it’s really important in particular when it comes to drug smuggling, migrant smuggling, firearms trafficking and wildlife smuggling, because we are an island nation—these goods have to come from somewhere, and most of our transport is shipping routes. We need to have the ability to extend our criminal jurisdiction outside of New Zealand waters and into our international waters. That’s already recognised in the law, and this bill passing will solidify that in the law.

We already have some bespoke laws—things like the Fisheries Act, the Maritime Crimes Act, and the Customs and Excise Act, where we accept that our criminal law needs to go into those international waters. But what this bill does is recognise that we need to have simple laws that all New Zealanders can read and understand instead of having separated provisions within different parts of law. This makes it all it one place and it makes it easier so that when you end up in a situation, for example, where you have a ship that you know has broken the law and is leaving our waters and you have a search warrant for a particular good—you might think it’s for drug smuggling and you end up on that ship and you realise that they have illegal firearms—it allows you the privilege to go for a search and seizure for both of those goods, not just the drugs. So it allows for that ability to search and seize on a range of issues—not just wildlife, not just people smuggling, not just guns. It’s very important to have it bespoke, set down in the law, and enforceable in our New Zealand laws. So I commend this bill to the House because I believe it will make our communities safer. We’ll have fewer illegal firearms on our streets, and we’ll have less meth in our community.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. In some human rights circles when we talk about the law of the sea, we talk about the law in the shadows. The reality is that it’s the law in the shadows because in many parts of the world, that’s where human rights abuses often occur. We read about it when in 2018 Greenpeace published a report about those employed on fishing vessels off the coast of Taiwan. And the truth is that the shadows exist here in New Zealand as well, because we simply lack the ability to exercise all our enforcement powers at sea.

I do think that a lot of people assume that offences don’t happen in New Zealand’s waters, but in my first reading speech on this bill, I referenced the case of the Shin Ji and Oyang, where crew members alleged in New Zealand courts that they were subject to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, and that they were subject to inhumane treatment. That case led to the passing of the fisheries amendment Act in 2014, and changes to our courts’ jurisdiction over crew members of foreign vessels. And there are other examples of serious offences occurring at sea. I note that in 2020, the Ministry for Primary Industries conducted a report into the treatment of observers—those with observer status—and the potential unlawful conduct against them.

So we know this is a gap, we know this is an issue, and I would like to thank the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee for their work. I understand that there were a modest number of submissions in relation to this bill, but they contain some meat to them, including the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties’ submission and the New Zealand Law Society submission, both of which concerned the treatment of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. And where I land is similar to where the select committee landed in regards to those New Zealand Bill of Rights Act issues—that the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act governs its own application into other pieces of legislation, so there is no need for it to explicitly be there, and by doing so, it would call into question the applications of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to other pieces of legislation as well.

So just, again, I say that I do believe this is a critical bill. It is wonderful to see it after its substantial journey through the House, and being, hopefully, passed today. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of the National Party to support the Maritime Powers Bill. The Maritime Powers Bill provides New Zealand law enforcement agencies with powers to enforce New Zealand’s criminal law in international waters, the oceans and seas beyond New Zealand’s territorial sea, including New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone. The bill does this in a manner that will be consistent with New Zealand’s rights and obligations under international law, in particular the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and international human rights law.

It reflects the fundamental importance of maritime security for New Zealand as an island nation with an extensive maritime domain. New Zealand has the fourth-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering a little over 4 million square kilometres, approximately 15 times the land area of New Zealand itself. New Zealand also has rights to an area of the continental shelf beyond our exclusive economic zone, covering approximately 1.7 million square kilometres. So it’s a very significant area, and then, of course, New Zealand has responsibilities further out in terms of the Pacific.

The Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand is also responsible for coordinating all major maritime and aviation search and rescue missions within New Zealand search and rescue regions, which is one of the world’s largest at 30 million square kilometres, extending from the mid Tasman Sea, halfway to Chile, and from the South Pole almost up to the Equator. So New Zealand has a very big role to play in the world’s maritime environment.

This bill provides powers to respond to a range of criminal offending against New Zealand law in international waters, including offences that take place on board a New Zealand vessel in international waters, offences that take place on board a foreign vessel in international waters, and situations where an alleged offender or evidence of criminal offending is located on a New Zealand or foreign vessel in international waters. The bill does not create any new substantive offences or expand the jurisdiction of any existing offences. It only creates powers exercisable in respect of serious criminal offending against New Zealand law, which the bill defines as offences “punishable by 2 or more years’ imprisonment”. This threshold reflects that the bill is intended to respond to serious criminal offending at sea, particularly transnational organised crime.

The bill provides powers to enforcement officers who are defined as constables, customs officers, members of the armed forces, Department of Conservation rangers, and Endangered Species Officers. This will enable the powers to be used to address a range of offending, including trafficking of humans, drugs, arms, and wildlife.

It is important to know that New Zealand has adequate powers to enforce our criminal law in a constantly evolving and increasingly challenging maritime security environment as resources become more and more important, and particularly food security, to the world.

There is a concern the National Party has with this bill in that it proposed to give powers of arrest, search, and seizure to rangers and conservation and endangered species officers, which are the same as those given to police and customs officers. This is an expansion of powers that National-led Governments have resisted in the past. The National Party members of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee sought assurance on the use of those powers, and were assured that they will be limited and used judiciously. National will continue to scrutinise the use of these powers as the bill comes into force.

I’d note, as the MP for Southland, I can tell the House about some exciting work coming straight out of Alexandra and Central Otago from the Xerra Earth Observation Institute, which is pertinent to this conversation this afternoon. Xerra is building science-based software using satellite data to help tackle some of the challenges involved in maritime security. The Starboard Maritime Intelligence programme helps the analysts and decision makers by detecting non-reporting dark vessels. This software can provide valuable insight into illegal fishing practices, identify potential COVID-19 transmission vectors by vessel history analysis, and identify biosecurity threats before they even enter New Zealand waters. Xerra’s work in this area recently earned them the top honours in the latest New Zealand Biosecurity Awards and is only the beginning of how this technology can benefit New Zealand.

This is an example of some of the great work that is being done in New Zealand, and even in this case in Central Otago, which is a reasonably long way away from the ocean, but I can say, even for my electorate, the ocean is very important. It covers a huge area, but I have a significant part of the Catlins and a very significant part of Fiordland in my electorate and we are deeply interested in what happens both on our coastlines and also what happens further afield, and want to ensure the security of our resources and also ensure that harmful substances and other things are not brought into our country. So this is a positive bill. It is one that I am pleased to support as it’s sensible.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take this short call on the Maritime Powers Bill. What an afternoon it’s been. With the different speeches today, we’ve heard from the Minister—she used the phrase “pursue offending vessel”—and then we heard from Vanushi Walters about the “law in the shadows”, and then, just now, we’ve heard from Joseph Mooney about “non-reporting dark vessels”.

This is an interesting topic about enforcing criminal law on international waters. This is described in the purpose in clause 3 to “(a) provide clear powers for the enforcement of New Zealand’s criminal law in international waters; and (b) uphold New Zealand’s rights and obligations under international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, consistent with international human rights”. So this law applies to both New Zealand boats in international waters and international boats within waters where New Zealand has jurisdiction.

An interesting feature of this bill is that the consent of the Attorney-General is needed for prosecution. We’ve heard that the bill is consistent with both international law and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

It’s always pleasing to speak on a bill where the select committee has been unanimous in its changes to the bill. So, for those reasons, I’d like to commend this bill, this new law that enables the enforcement of existing laws, to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I loved the analogies around the House that my colleague Rachel Brooking mentioned this afternoon, in particular to the Maritime Powers Bill that we are discussing this afternoon.

What has become most apparent to me this afternoon is how much what happens out on our waters impacts our lives here in New Zealand, here on land. But this particular bill that we’re discussing talks about the provision to New Zealand law enforcement agencies of powers to enforce elements of New Zealand’s criminal law in international waters. And what’s very, very important in that, it stands out to me that it provides powers to respond to a range of criminal offending in international waters and some of those dark things that we mentioned earlier on are such things as the offences that take place on board a New Zealand - flagged vessel in international waters and the offences that take place on board a foreign-flagged vessel or Stateless vessel in international waters, for which New Zealand has extraterritorial jurisdiction, and situations where an alleged offender or evidence of criminal offending is located on a New Zealand, foreign, or Stateless vessel in international waters. Those things, obviously, are very, very important to the protection of people in this country and our local communities.

We have a proud tradition of an independent foreign policy with a focus on promoting multilateralism, human rights, and the international rule of law. And can I take a moment just to acknowledge the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, the Minister who is responsible for this particular bill, and to extend my gratitude for the thorough work that has been done by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I have enjoyed all the speeches that we’ve had this afternoon on this topic, and also at previous different stages. We’ve had some excellent speeches in the first reading, second reading, and so on, not all of which were by me, but some of which may have been by me. That’s for others to say, but I do share the enthusiasm of others in this House for the subject. If you’ll indulge me for a moment, Madam Speaker, if you can imagine to yourself a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles: one is maritime things, another is parliamentary process, and another is law enforcement and sort of legal processes in general. This bill’s right at the intersection of those, so you can understand my excitement. And I can tell that it’s shared by many who are still awake!

So the Maritime Powers Bill does important things that others have already referred to. Lest we fail to appreciate its significance, I think we’ve had really good comments made on both sides of the House, actually, about the seriousness from the shadowy existence of misconduct and, indeed, the abuse of conduct that can take place beyond the horizon. That which is out of sight should not be out of mind for our law enforcement agencies, or indeed us as a Parliament, which is why it’s important to legislate in this space.

The way that the bill operates has been well traversed. At previous stages we’ve heard about the different “zones”, for want of a better phrase, to encapsulate it all in terms of New Zealand’s territorial waters, exclusive economic zone, and even—actually, as the very learned colleague and friend of mine, Joseph Mooney, pointed out—the continental shelf delineation as well, and New Zealand’s rights and responsibilities extend even out that far. And, of course, if the exclusive economic zone is to be exclusive in anything more than just name, then it’s important that New Zealand has the ability to enforce that exclusivity. And, of course, there are offences that may be conducted, I suppose, but obviously we seek to deter those or at least to detect them, and then to enforce the laws in so far as they may have been breached. And it’s by allowing our law enforcement officers the ability to carry out searches, seizures, and so forth that that will enable that to be so.

Others have talked about the extent to which this provides powers to what are described as enforcement officers. And Joseph Mooney has highlighted, I think, pretty well the National Party’s concerns—I think it’s fair to characterise our concerns as such—but also noting that we paid heed to the discussions at select committee and advice of officials and so on to seek assurance in relation actually more so to the warrantless search aspect; that this is a power that will not be abused. And, of course, you will expect, no doubt, Madam Speaker, that we will be carefully scrutinising the way in which the powers are exercised going forward.

The bill also has a number of different provisions that make it clear that to some extent the law remains the same. So the offences themselves remain the same. There isn’t expanded jurisdiction in the case of what we would regard as criminal or unacceptable behaviour. So the expansion of jurisdiction is actually more so clarifying that the offences that currently exist can be regarded as such even in new territory. I use the word territory perhaps a bit loosely, because traditionally it refers to land. Indeed, that’s the etymology of territory, of course. But as others have pointed out, New Zealand is highly reliant on that which comes from the sea and goes out, actually, from our nation via the sea offshore as well. And, of course, we should be interested and concerned with what happens on the sea, whether or not it’s directly connected with our own trading interests, for example.

And so I think that probably says enough from the National Party’s perspective. So on that basis, we commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be the 12th speaker in the third reading debate of the Maritime Powers Bill. First of all, of course—as the person bringing all the threads of the previous speakers together—I’d like to acknowledge the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, who received seven submissions on this bill, including from the Privacy Commissioner, the New Zealand Law Society, and the New Zealand Council of Civil Liberties. We heard my colleague Vanushi Walters discuss some of those human rights and New Zealand Bill of Rights Act aspects that the committee considered in those submissions.

I wasn’t a member of this committee but it’s obvious that, from the previous speeches, the whole committee has done a very good job in addressing some of the concerns and coming to a good consensus on this bill. As my colleague Chris Penk, the previous speaker, already said, the details of this bill have been well traversed, and then he went over them all again—ha, ha!—which I won’t do because I think it’s been pretty obvious that the core of this bill, really, is that it’s very important that New Zealand is able to respond to those criminal activities that have been spoken about with regards to smuggling of people; and illicit drugs, arms, and wildlife trafficking. And my colleague Vanushi Walters mentioned the “law in the shadows” which is the first time I heard that term used.

So that is exactly what this bill achieves. At the same time, it adopts a very well-established clear standards of criminal procedure from New Zealand law. So as the Minister already said, this bill and the way that it’s drafted is fair, reasonable, and proportionate. Therefore, I commend it to the House. Thank you.