Policing Amendment Bill

I move, That the Policing Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

The Government has committed to restore law and order as a priority by supporting Police to carry out its lawful duties, maintain public safety, and enable effective policing and enforcement. This bill provides clarity and consistency for front-line police, with the tools needed to effectively manage public safety, risks, and harms.

Part 1 of the bill confirms Police’s ability to record images and sounds in public places and in private places where police are lawfully present and to collect personal information for lawful purposes, including intelligence. Part 2 of the bill expands Police’s temporary road closure powers currently provided for in the Policing Act to include a broader range of accessible areas that may be subject to closure and enforcement powers.

I thank the Justice Committee for their consideration of the bill and their proposed amendments to it. I support these changes. The changes to the bill include new clause 4A, which introduces a post-implementation independent review of the amendments as a safeguard that was not included in the bill at introduction. This will provide an opportunity to assess whether the information-gathering authorities that are clarified in the bill remain appropriate, proportionate, and effective.

A revived section 54E in Part 1 of the bill expressly provides that personal information collection authorised by sections 45A to 45D remains subject to information privacy principles 1 to 4 of the Privacy Act 2020. The revision of the bill clarifies that the statutory authorities in the bill do not displace fundamental collection safeguards under privacy legislation, and it is included purely for the avoidance of doubt.

These arrangements include revised provisions that allow more time for implementation, including Police operational systems, guidance, and capability to be further developed before commencement. This extends to the commencement time for Part 1 provisions in the bill from one month to six months following Royal assent of the bill. Police may continue to take images and record sounds in police stations and premises, and Part 1 of the bill does not displace Search and Surveillance Act obligations for device use.

In particular, I thank the committee for proposing a future statutory review of the Part 1 provisions of this bill as a new clause. This review will be commenced under the Minister of Police’s stewardship and will present independent findings of the Part 1 reforms back to Parliament. Such an independent review would provide for more robust and evidence-based consideration of the impact of the bill over and above the submissions and advice that has been considered by select committee to date.

I look forward also to my ministerial colleague the Hon Paul Goldsmith presenting legislation to this House shortly to establish an independent Inspector-General of Police to assist, in part, with better independent consideration of Police’s information management practices and data and privacy protections.

It’s time for us to back Police. We need to accept a timely change to policing law. These changes are necessary and important, particularly as we face the complex law enforcement challenges that are confronting New Zealand as technologies advance. We need to protect people’s privacy rights, and the safeguards introduced in this bill are important, but to take no action would be to the detriment of effective law enforcement and public safety. If we took no action, there could well be insufficient information and evidence available to Police to charge many criminal offenders or to effectively disrupt or prevent some serious crime in the future. This Government wants a different future so that Parliament’s intention is clear and, when the courts interpret these rights and legal obligations, there is balance and clarity for New Zealand and New Zealanders rather than further legal uncertainty or confusion.

I note that there have been no material changes made to Part 2 of the bill since introduction. However, I also advise the House that some minor technical changes to Part 2 of the bill will be proposed in the committee of the whole House. These further amendments will make sure the bill will keep all existing temporary closure grounds from the Antisocial Road User Legislation Amendment Act 2026 and allow Police to bring the area closure powers into force on a single date. I acknowledge that the committee was unable to recommend either amendment in their report as the Antisocial Road User Legislation Amendment Act 2026 was not in law, but with the enactment of this transport law, the Government may now adjust the Policing Amendment Bill for consistency.

In closing, I state that the latest version of the Policing Amendment Bill retains the central policy objective of restoring certainty regarding Police information collection and strengthening temporary closure powers. Importantly, it also introduces a number of significant modifications, including an independent statutory review mechanism, clarification of privacy protections for the avoidance of doubt, additional clarification of constraints on information collection by Police employees, and extended commencement arrangements. Collectively, these changes have helped to improve the balance of the bill, clarify the intent and proportionality of the provisions of the bill, and better support practical implementation while preserving the bill’s original objective of supporting effective policing and public safety.

I again thank the committee for their work on this bill. The bill is yet another example of this Government’s strong focus on restoring law and order in New Zealand. The bill is a reminder that this Government’s focus is on detecting and reducing crime, maintaining public safety, and enabling effective policing. I commend this bill to the House.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just before I take the next call, I will just point out that the legislative statement presented by the Minister is published under the authority of the House. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a bill which in a form we could support, but in its current form we simply can’t. The reason for that is that it, essentially, gives the Police sweeping search and surveillance powers which are not connected to known offending. Now, this has been a practice—police have been taking photos and recordings—for some time. It was interesting in committee to hear the Police repeatedly say—and it was very frustrating—that this was confirming powers that they had rather than creating them.

This bill, particularly the intelligence-gathering powers, is a direct response to the decision of the Supreme Court in Tamiefuna v R in 2025. It’s always a challenge when someone’s evidence is excluded on appeal. That was a case where Mr Tamiefuna was stopped and his car was detained because it was not fit to be driven, I understand. So he had to get out and get his stuff out. As he was getting out and getting various items out of his car and waiting to be picked up by somebody else, the police officer, without any particular purpose—Mr Tamiefuna was known to the police, to put it in a polite way—took photographs. And those photographs of the items that he had with him became critical in a later conviction for a serious offence.

Now, the Supreme Court was very clear that what went on there was a warrantless search. It was a warrantless search, and the law of search is one where, yes, you are allowed to execute a search without a warrant in particular circumstances. The usual and appropriate trigger is that you know that an offence has been recently committed.

This new piece of legislation gives the police powers to execute a search by the taking of photographs and other footage without any knowledge or suspicion of particular offending. They simply have to think it might be useful for intelligence purposes. Obviously in committee stage, we’ll have a very careful look at this. That is the conceptual legal objection to this: that it’s an unwarranted incursion into the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It goes too far.

Now, we’ll talk later about the Privacy Commissioner’s work on this, and the Privacy Commissioner worked very closely with Police and the Justice Committee. I must say it was frustrating that the Police and Privacy Commissioner couldn’t seem to speak the same language in some ways. Whilst it did lead to some amendment, the Privacy Commissioner is still not satisfied that this bill will be compliant with privacy rights; that the balance has been struck.

Of course, the other point is that this documentation, if you like, this taking of photos, the photos are generally going to be taken simply on the police officer’s iPhone. We know that there have been real problems with police officers taking photos, in particular in the Wairarapa. They were taking photographs of young people they thought looked dodgy. Of course, we know what that means in terms of some of the systemic bias that exists—and that the police have admitted exists in the police—and they were taking photos of young rangatahi.

One of the problems of this, which we’ll come to in committee in some detail, is they were taking these photos and when it became clear that they were illegal—and there are many photos on many police devices that are illegal—they don’t delete them. There’s an independent report on the problem of all of this evidence being obtained—it’s not evidence, actually, because there’s no crime being committed—all of this information being gathered and then just being retained either on police devices or on the police system or—and here’s the kicker—on messaging apps. The police are messaging each other on Teams or Signal or whatever and saying, “Oh, you know, here’s a photo of that bloke I took last week”, and of course it sits on the messaging app. We’ve got this constant duplication of these photographs and no management of how to delete them when they’re no longer required.

Here’s something we’ll raise later as well: it’s absolutely critical that if information is recorded, but it turns out that it’s not needed, it should be deleted. Here’s the operational problem: the police have no effective control over this information, and the independent report that they commissioned—and which we questioned them on in committee—made it quite clear that whilst police officers are instructed to not duplicate images and to delete them when they’re uploaded to a central system, they simply don’t. If you do a check on their phones, you’ll see many officers will have numerous images. Now, there are lots of recommendations in that independent report—and I will forewarn the Minister of Police that in terms of the operationalisation of this legislation, I intend to ask how the police are going. There are devices that can be used—an electronic notebook—whereby you could upload the photographs to the system and delete them immediately rather than getting back to the office, downloading it on to the OneDrive apparently, and then uploading it to the national intelligence system. But this doesn’t appear to be the case.

One of the challenges is that we’re now going to have sweeping powers of intelligence gathering, and the real question is this: there’s a mismatch in the legislation. One of the privacy principles is that if your purpose is intelligence gathering, then it must be necessary to take this photo for that intelligence mission. You might be investigating the activities of XYZ gang. Well, this must be necessary—not just useful but it must be, essentially, the only feasible way—to gather the intelligence needed. Now, if we look at the test in the legislation, and we will come to it in detail, we’ll see that it’s a “might be useful”. It’s not even a “might be necessary”. It may be useful. It’s such a low threshold.

It’s easy to say the police need more tools. But one of the real hallmarks of a modern democratic society is that the balance is correctly struck between proper law enforcement activities—and Police’s general view is that they have a duty to detect crime and prevent crime, but they don’t have a surveillance-of-the-population function, and it’s getting alarmingly close to that under this legislation. We could have supported a well-drafted bill, but this isn’t it. Unless there are major changes—and I will table some amendments—we won’t be supporting it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of Te Pāti Kākāriki to speak to this bill, and we are very strongly opposed to this bill. It was quite enlightening going through the Justice Committee process of this bill, because what it really showed us is the tensions that exist between the interpretation of the Privacy Act and the privacy principles by which the police operate under, and also the operations of the police and how they understand and interpret those principles, and that ongoing tension between those two bodies of people who look after us in different ways.

Our stance is we think that this bill enables over-surveillance. We think it takes surveillance a step too far, particularly when you’re looking at speculative future purposes of collecting information and evidence. The main thing for us is: how do you know if somebody is going to go forward and commit a crime at some point in their life, and how long is that speculation and how far is that future? Police have these tools to gather intelligence and to and to surveil where crimes are happening or where they have reasonable grounds to suspect that something might unfold. Those provisions are in place and do have a requirement in terms of having those reasons, and we think that just busting the door open on that is not justified in this case.

We really strongly disagree with the sentiment that the Government talks about in terms of this bill simply reaffirming a right that always existed. We strongly disagree with that. We think that that was probably the most important finding within the Supreme Court ruling in Tamiefuna, where they found that it actually was not the Police’s right to collect intelligence in that manner and that this bill changes that interpretation or that judgment in order to make those actions lawful.

One of the main reasons that we are also opposed to this is we think that it’s an unreasonable interference on ordinary citizens’ privacy rights.

We think that it’s an unreasonable interference with the rights of children, and the interaction between Police intelligence gathering and children is really important to us, and I will talk to that later in this speech. The gathering of evidence, particularly around children, is one of the biggest reasons that this bill is before us in the first place. We think that ordinary law-abiding citizens should not be subject to this level of interference by anybody.

The reason that we’ve got this bill, and probably the biggest thing that I dedicated my first reading speech to, was this ongoing saga of people having their photo taken by police. At the time, I spoke about the articles by Phil Pennington and Te Aniwa Hurihanganui when they were within Radio New Zealand and they found out that there were young Māori kids who were being apprehended and stopped in the Wairarapa because police felt that they “looked out of place”. It is really important to remember that, in these cases, these kids were not committing any crimes. All they were guilty of was simply walking down the road.

There were a few people who spoke up about this experience of being apprehended by the police and having their photograph taken, and, of course, when the families and the parents of these children found out that their kids had been interrogated without their presence, it was really concerning, mostly because, as we know, adults don’t know the law back to front but definitely children don’t know the law back to front. What this did is it kind of blew the lid off something that was far greater than just a few isolated incidents. When this series of articles came out, suddenly more and more people came forward and said, “Hey, I actually had my photo taken by the police as well, despite the fact that I wasn’t doing anything wrong and hadn’t committed a crime.”

There was an overwhelming coming forward of people across the country who had been subject to that unlawful behaviour. Police do not have the right to simply pull somebody up without reasonable grounds to suspect that they’re in the middle of committing a crime or have committed a crime. Lots of people came forward and that ended up contributing to, in 2022, the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) and the Privacy Commissioner commencing a joint inquiry into whether this was a few isolated incidents or whether it’s happening more than was expected, and what they ended up finding was tens of thousands of unlawful photographs of people on police officers’ devices. The police do not have the right to do that.

One of the facts that I really emphasised in my first reading speech was that half of the photos—and we’ve got tens of thousands of photos—were of people who are Māori, and a large number of these were young Māori kids. I put that speech on social media and it did really well, but a lot of the people said in the comments, “Well, you know, those kids were probably being naughty. What were they doing? Don’t make a crime and you won’t be apprehended by police.” It is important to put on the record that this inquiry and those photographs are related to people who have not committed, were not committing, and did not commit any crimes. That’s really, really important.

What the inquiry also showed—and I want to acknowledge the IPCA and the Privacy Commissioner for undertaking the inquiry—was that officers were routinely taking, using, and retaining photographs when it was not lawful for them to do so. It also found that thousands of unlawful photographs were taken and kept even after Police were instructed by the Privacy Commissioner to delete them. It’s an ongoing saga, and observing that interaction between the Privacy Commissioner and the Police within the select committee showed me that there are still deep tensions between those two bodies, which is not ideal.

One of the other things that the joint inquiry found was that there was a general lack of understanding amongst front-line police officers about what the privacy principles and laws are within this country. I don’t see that as a failure of those individual officers. I see that as a competence gap in the leadership and training of our police officers. They are not adequately taught what those principles are. I don’t see that as an individual failing; I see that as a structural problem that needs to be addressed.

Finally, this was reinforced by the Supreme Court case with Tamiefuna in 2025, and the previous speaker, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb talked about this in depth. He talked about the Supreme Court ruling really well, but what this really reaffirmed is, I think, the findings within the joint inquiry and it really reaffirmed what our concerns were in the first place. We think that, when you’re considering the rights of individual citizens and also the need for proactive surveillance to keep communities safe where it’s necessary, you need to weigh up the benefit of that intelligence collection against the infringement that it might have upon people’s right to privacy. What the Supreme Court ruling declared is that private citizens and individuals do not waive their privacy rights when they go into a public place, which is incredibly important. What this bill does is it changes that fact, or that interpretation that exists within the law, which to us is extremely concerning.

We look forward to the upcoming committee of the whole House stage to just understand this bill a lot more, but the bill as it stands does not align with our values or our principles or our adherence to people’s human rights, so at this stage, we oppose the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the Policing Amendment Bill. I want to thank my colleagues on the Justice Committee. We have worked through this in some detail. I also want to thank the submitters. I think we had 27 submissions in relation to this. I also want to particularly thank Police and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, because they were heavily involved in our discussions on this.

I also want to be clear for anyone watching today that what we’re actually talking about is the ability for the police to collect information, primarily in public places, so, again, if the police need special warrants to undertake surveillance, etc., that is all still in place. What we’re talking about is a collection of photographs or maybe audio material in public places, and in very limited private places and circumstances. I don’t want anyone to be confused today: we are not creating warrantless search powers or warrantless surveillance powers or anything like that. What we are trying to do is make some clarifications, and, again, it’s now subject to the privacy principles.

I also want to thank the Minister. One of the things we will, obviously, talk about is the statutory review which is now built into this legislation, and I want to thank him for his positive engagement with ACT on that and also, obviously, for accepting that as a recommendation of the select committee. That means that this will be subject to a statutory review so that any issues can be looked into, including making sure that the Privacy Commissioner and the Police are working together on the authorisation.

I’m not going to say any more. I’m going commend the bill to the House, and we’ll get on with it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Policing Amendment Bill. This bill is very, very important to restore the legal certainty around police when they’re recording information, but there is also a second element to this bill which probably will not be discussed as much, and that is about managing anti-social behaviour in public spaces.

That was an important part of the bill, to give police temporary road-closure ability, especially around parks, beaches, and reserves in terms of different kinds of anti-social activity that is happening around certain roading networks in New Zealand. That was important, but what we’ve heard from many members tonight in the House was around the Tamiefuna case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. That case created a lot of uncertainty for our front-line police officers. In reality, it has left police officers with fewer rights than the general public.

If you think of an incident, and we see it so often online, or if we do see an incident happening, people pull out their cell phones, they film, and that social media goes quickly around the community, quickly with Facebook around the world.

But with our police officers, they’ve now got into a situation with this case of even taking a photo or being at a scene where that information makes it very, very difficult—so actually clarifying what police can do on our front line. I just do want to put it on the record that those over 10,000 front-line police officers we do have with the New Zealand First Party, with our ambitions to keep to increasing our police force numbers. It is important to give them the certainty in what they can do.

As we’ve heard too, we did have those 27 oral submissions, but we did have 225 submissions in total. We have, as a committee, made a number of changes. The independent review, that’s going to be in three years’ time; importantly, delaying the commencement from one month out to six months just so technology with the IT systems can be updated; and also making the changes are subject to the information privacy principles.

Also, I just want to say is we know it’s a changing world with technology. We’ve got to be able to keep up with technology changes and with our police force being able to take photos, store them correctly, and there needs to be the process behind that. New Zealand First understands that, but we’ve got to equip our police the best way we can. So, on that, I commend this bill to the House.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a split call. Steve Abel.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, I am new to this bill, but I’m quickly getting my head around it. There’s a couple of things that immediately leap out as concerning.

Principles of civil liberties and freedom of people to move around our society and our public spaces and our private spaces in terms of citizens in their own yards or what have you, to be free from a fear of being surveilled or being observed are very important, and particularly as we are in a time in history when there is a much greater rate of surveillance in general. Not only is there surveillance in our streets with closed-circuit television but, also, security cameras are much more readily available on private properties and on businesses, they are much lower cost; and the ability of anyone to take it upon themselves, because when I was a kid, you might have lugged the camera around with you, but nowadays everybody has a camera with them and everybody has a video device with them.

So the importance of us preserving the right of citizens to be without surveillance is a very important right. I would be concerned particularly—you would have liked to hope that right-wing members of the Parliament would be very committed to the principles of personal freedom and freedom to be not surveilled or observed without fitting jurisdiction on the part of the police.

I myself have been, unfortunately, subject to unwanted and secret surveillance—in this instance, by a private corporation employed by the oil and gas industry in New Zealand, a company called Thompson and Clark.

💬 Hon Mark Patterson: You should keep chaining yourself to helicopters, Steve.

I’m fine if someone’s taking photos of me chained to a helicopter, but, in this instance, we were able to acquire some of the images that had been taken, and they included me on a Saturday at the beach with my four-year-old son. Those photographs included pictures of him, and we were simply going about our weekend business as a family. Thompson and Clark took it upon themselves to take photographs and keep records of all of that activity, under the pretext of them protecting the interests of the company for whom they worked because I might be part of some sort of protest activity, and that was their justification for it.

The police have similarly in the past used justifications of protecting the public or public good or private property interests to extend their rights right into our general civil liberties to protest. Protest is a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act right that we all enjoy in a democratic and free society, and a very important one for us to protect.

I am concerned that some of this bill and the components of this bill, general intelligence gathering, the ability of the police to move people on under an assumption of—removal of people from temporary closed areas, that these could be used to actually suppress and impact on freedom of protest, for example. I think it would be important to examine that in the committee of the whole House.

We know that there are varying degrees of police surveillance and intervention in public activity, including in protests, In other parts of the world, we see much more aggressive behaviour from police against private citizens protesting, and in our own history, we have seen that. In my living memory, I remember attending the 1981 Springbok tour protests when the police were very aggressive and violent towards members of the public, and their own citizens. I think that caused us all as a nation to pause for a moment and think about whether that’s the sort of police activity that we want to see.

The privacy commission strongly opposed authorising police to record and keep personal information for an unknown use and has serious concerns about the potential impacts that these changes will have on the privacy of New Zealanders and, by extension, their democratic rights and freedoms. I concur with that very much, which is why the Green Party will be opposing this.

I note also that, in the regulatory impact statement, there was no public consultation on this, and that is equally concerning. I look forward to scrutinising this with the Minister in the committee of the whole House, but the Green Party will be voting against this legislation.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s real honour to stand in support of this bill. Men and women of the police service do fantastic work every day out there in the community. I want to acknowledge the Minister for bringing this bill through to the Parliament.

It can be easy in situations like this, where practice and common practice, particularly in and around the police, is found by the courts to not have the legal basis with which the service thought it did. There are possibly always temptations to rush through changes and not have a select committee and to try and retrospectively correct those understandings. But I think, in this instance, the care and thought and time taken to get this right, to acknowledge the balance between privacy of individuals out there in the public and the importance of supporting our police to do the work that they need to do to keep us safe is important.

I want to acknowledge the Minister for taking that challenge seriously and bringing to the House a bill which I think strikes the right balance and will go a long way to keeping New Zealanders safe long into the future. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, it’s no surprise that Labour will be opposing this bill at this second reading. As the Hon Dr Duncan Webb mentioned in his contribution, the reason for that is because of the search and surveillance powers that are connected to offending.

Like the vast majority of Kiwis, I 100 percent support our police. They do an incredibly difficult job, often in situations where many others would rather run away from. They investigate serious crime. They respond to family violence. They attend some terrible road crashes, and support victims and help keep our communities safe.

I might add that police officers deserve clear rules. They need to know what they can lawfully do, and the public need to know where the boundaries are. Nobody benefits when the law is confusing, least of all our front-line officers who have to make decisions, often in a matter of seconds.

I also understand why this bill has been brought before the House. The Tamiefuna decision created a lot of uncertainty around police photography and intelligence gathering. The Police Association made the case to the committee that officers need greater clarity about what they can and cannot do. They also argued that a photograph or recording collected today might become important evidence later and could help identify someone involved in serious offending.

I accept that there is a problem that needs to be worked through, but the answer cannot simply be to write the law as broadly as possible and then leave safeguards, essentially, to Police policy. The problem with this bill is that, while it provides greater certainty for Police, it provides very little certainty for the public. Throughout the select committee process, we heard that concern raised again and again.

Community Law Centres Aotearoa actually argued that the information-gathering powers are far too broad, important terms were left undefined, and safeguards that should sit in the law were either weak or they were missing. The bill allows police to collect information for an intelligence purpose. That all sounds official, and all that, but what does that actually mean? The bill does not properly define that. The bill also refers to information being collected in connection with a function or an activity of police. Police functions are broadly defined under the existing Act, but “police activities” are not defined in either the Act or this bill.

That might sound like lawyers arguing over wording, but it’s not. These words form part of the legal threshold for collecting information about people, as Steve Abel mentioned in his contribution. If Parliament’s going to give the State that power, Parliament should be able to tell New Zealanders in plain language what that power covers and actually where it stops. Instead, the bill says that a Police employee may collect information if they consider it may, or will, support police in performing a function or carrying out an activity. That’s an extremely wide net to cast, and it’s actually, I might add, very anti-libertarian, so it’s surprising that ACT is in favour of this bill.

What does “may support” actually mean in practice? Does there have to be a realistic and identifying policing need? Does there need to be a connection to suspected offending, or is it enough for someone to think that information might, essentially, be useful one day? Those are questions the public have a right to know. They go to the crux of this bill, essentially, and they are questions that I’ll be putting to the Minister of Police when we move to the committee of the whole House.

One of the most interesting submissions during the Justice Committee came from the Police Association itself, and they pointed out that New Zealand already has a large amount of surveillance technology. Their submission referred to CCTV, automatic number plate recognition, information gathered through public transport and airports and speed cameras, and body cameras worn by people like traffic wardens and checkout staff. There are a lot of cameras actually out there in the community. They estimated that New Zealand has approximately one CCTV camera for every 13 people in New Zealand.

Their basic point was that this technology is already part of modern life, and they’re absolutely right about that. You go about your ordinary day on a Saturday—maybe not us being in this House, but citizens go around—and you just think about the trail of information that you can leave behind. You drive into town, your number plate may be picked up by camera. You pay for a coffee using your phone and bank card, and there’s surveillance on you there. You scan loyalty cards, cameras there; you park in car parks, cameras there. There are cameras all over the show. Most people accept that, in modern life, it’s important to collect information, but I think they should also expect Parliament to put clear rules around what the State can do with that information.

The problem is not simply one photograph taken on one day. The biggest question is about what happens to that photograph afterwards. I suppose, in that intelligence space, for anyone that’s worked within the intelligence community, how is that information fused together to generate a larger intelligence picture, and also how long is it kept? Who can actually search the database for that information, and who can share it? Can it be linked with information from another system within another agency? And can it be analysed many years later using technology that actually didn’t exist at the time that the image or the bit of information was originally taken? Then, also, can information collected in one setting be used for a completely different purpose later on?

Submissions to the select committee described this wider issue as “data-veillance”. It’s not a word most people would use around the dinner table, but the idea behind it is relatively straightforward. It’s that collection and joining together of small pieces of information that creates that bigger picture of someone’s life. That’s where the real power lies, and those are our concerns around this bill: it doesn’t actually capture that in its entirety.

Community Law Centres Aotearoa actually warned about information being collected at protests, hui, funerals, and community gatherings and other lawful events and then retained and analysed later. Their concern was not that Police should be blind about potential risks in those areas; their concern was more around lawful participation in public and then creating that permanent intelligence record without a clear statutory limit.

These are all important things. We also talked about those inequalities within society as well. A teenager, for example, should be able to learn from a poor choice and move on without any unnecessary image following them through life. Thankfully, the age of a lot of us in this House, when we were young and making those mistakes, there was not that digital record like there is for young people today. We might be not as aware of it as our younger generations are.

At the end of the day, it’s not about hiding wrongdoing; it’s about whether ordinary people who are not suspected of any offence can become part of a growing intelligence net simply because someone considers that information may be useful later. I look forward to fleshing that out during the committee of the whole House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

National is committed to keeping communities safe across New Zealand. We do that through making investments like the new Whanganui police station, and we do that by making changes to intelligence gathering, such as is the case in this Act. I commend it to the House.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. I’ve been listening to the debate and wasn’t on the Justice Committee and didn’t participate, but have watched, through my colleagues, through reports in our different committees we have, as the Labour caucus, but also in some of the media as well. It is good to try to understand and delve into a bit of what this is about.

We need to be very clear, I think, that Police carry great power and, as the story goes, with great power comes great responsibility. It is even more so, I think, when it comes to not only vulnerable people but young people. A reason we’re here today is because of some actions that were taken, and rangatahi who were photographed and videoed. What do we actually do with that, and what is the right course of action in terms of how the data is stored, how it’s destroyed? Where do all those things go?

When I talk about the power imbalance, I know we understand it. It’s not until you’ve actually, I’d say, experienced it or have seen those moments when police have come into situations and are doing their job—I fully understand that.

I have a very vivid example from a number of years ago, with a young person, and the situation, again, is the young person had had some issues and had had some run-ins with the law, and we were working through that. I remember very clearly this Saturday afternoon, and I tell the story around the sort of power imbalance as an example of why we need to be very cautious and very careful about legislation like this. It was a Saturday afternoon. He was 13, maybe 14, at the time. Through circumstances at home—we all have teenagers in our homes. I’m sure that we’ve experienced it, where you’ve just had a gut’s full. I said, “Just get out, go away. I don’t want to see you. Go for a walk, calm down, do your thing.” About an hour later, I get a phone call from the police to say, “We’ve arrested this young man. Could you come to the station?” Of course, I was horrified and took full responsibility: “What have I done? Did I cause that?”

As the story unfolded, he had walked out to cool down; he had walked out on to the street, on to the side of the road, sat down on the kerb, on the grass. And, just at that point when he sat down and was minding his own business and calming down, a police car—as they do, and they should—was driving past and saw this young Māori boy sitting on the side of the road. Of course, he saw the cop coming. He knew he’d been disrespectful. He saw the police car. The police car pulled over to check in. They were doing their job, and rightly so. This young person put two and two together in his adolescent brain and ran for it, because, obviously, he thought they were out to get him. He ran, and, of course, the police did what they should do, because all of a sudden here was this kid that looked like he was up to no good. They chased him, and there was a pursuit on foot. They ended up cornering him in a bus stop. He resisted arrest, they arrested him, and he ended up in the cells at the police station.

The reason I bring it up is that, because of that young adolescent brain and because of the sum of the situations he’d been in in his life, it meant there was that fight or flight moment, where he actually made a choice. The good news about it is that actually there was resolution that came. The police were actually very good, and when they realised the situation, they went through a process and apologised to him because they realised it had been a bit more than it should have been, from their side. I think, actually, in terms of the trajectory of his life, that was a moment that made him appreciate the police in a different way and that, actually, they were doing their job and they were there to help.

The reason I bring up this story is because of that young adolescent brain. In those moments, and there are high-risk moments, when a police officer wants to capture an image or take a video, or whatever it is, there is not the understanding for many people in the community. How does a young adolescent whose brain isn’t fully formed understand that? How do we make sure that there are checks and balances, to make sure of how that information is stored and kept, and then how it is destroyed? We need to consider it very carefully.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill places more tools into the hands of law enforcement. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s good to be able to take a call on this bill. It is a rather complex matter. I don’t think I was there for the entire select committee process, but I was there for, I think, the majority of the select committee process when we’re considering the Policing Amendment Bill.

It a bit of a vexing issue to be honest, because there’s a few truths that can exist alongside each other. The first issue is that we had a situation, in the Tamiefuna case, where there was a ruling that the current practice of Police was not lawful and that there was no statutory authority for the types of evidence that they were collecting through these photographs. I don’t—and I don’t think it’s a position of the Labour Party—criticise the Government for taking that into account and providing a statutory response, but the nature of that statutory response is, I suppose, what we would take issue with.

This is something that we approached the select committee with in good faith, as well, to try and see if there was a way that the concerns that we had around overreach about over-surveillance could be addressed. I would like to commend the Justice Committee. I think it was the genuine intention of probably all members on the select committee to try and find a resolution to this. We did encourage our advisers to engage with the Privacy Commissioner. The Privacy Commissioner was, I think, very involved with this process. I suppose it’s regretful, then, that we haven’t been able to reach a situation where some of the aspects around the bill that we were concerned about remain. The Privacy Commissioner’s very clear advice to us was that they, the Privacy Commissioner and Office of the Privacy Commissioner, still had very strong and evidential-based concerns around the nature of this bill.

I do think there have been some improvements made by the select committee. I think all of the select committee amendments were unanimously agreed, so that is something, and I do note there will be a number of amendments on the Table at the committee stage. It might be that the Minister decides to accept some of those, but the remaining kinds of concerns we have—we’ll go through these.

Firstly, I say that this is not anything to do with being opposed to, or criticism of, the police. This is about our job as legislators, because we have to make the best law we can for the police to follow. It’s not for the police to look at the laws we have made and fix any issues with them, and it’s not for them to question the decisions we make. I think, in this particular bill, some of the powers that remain in here, although I’m sure the police will do the best they possibly can, could be used in a way which I think most members of the public would think would be overly—would make a breach of privacy lawful, which I don’t think many New Zealanders would find acceptable.

One of the key things that I brought up right at the very beginning of this bill was the type of surveillance that could be undertaken by police. This hasn’t been fundamentally changed. One thing that has happened is that we’ve had an assurance by the Police and clarification with the Privacy Commissioner that the privacy principles will still be in place and that they can still be read in conjunction with this bill. I think it’s important to put that on the record, because that is an important check on the police’s powers.

We still have a situation where the bill in front of us today states that a Police employee may—for, essentially, any lawful purpose; it’s a very wide purpose section—record anything that can be seen normally without a recording device; not something that requires the ability to zoom in. If it can be seen—say, from a berm or a footpath or something that’s a public place—under new section 45B, this law allows the police to continuously record what they can see. That could be something that’s in a private house. I think I made the comment, at the first reading of this, that that appeared quite Orwellian. That remains, and that’s a shame, I think. I think that, for most people, they wouldn’t find that acceptable even if there was a good reason for that continuous observation as possible under this bill—and that is concerning.

As I said, that’s not to say that I’m not sure that the police will do the best they can to make sure they record evidence only when it is necessary—I’m sure that the police will consider and won’t have the time to set up unnecessary continuous surveillance—but, at the same time, the right to undertake that type of surveillance remains in this bill, and there are also provisions in relation to when the police are on private property as well. So that is concerning.

Another concerning aspect of this bill is the fact that we do not yet have the assurances that there is sufficient budget and sufficient technology to allow for the correct storage of these images. We do have information to suggest that these images may be, to date, still held in temporary measures, like, for example, on constables’ phones. That’s not good enough, and I think the police know it’s not good enough. From the committee’s perspective, we were unable to obtain an assurance that the proper storage system was currently set up to be able to ensure that images that were recorded lawfully under this legislation were also stored lawfully and in a way which was secure, in a way which was well organised, in a way which would allow, if there was an issue around privacy, for those images to be easily collected, retained, or distributed if that was the correct process. There is a concern around that.

You’ll note that, in the bill, there are some delays around commencement. That is also an indication around the readiness of the Police to have this in place. I’m looking forward to being able to put those to the Minister at committee stage, and, hopefully, he will be able to assure us that the technology is in place. To date, we don’t have that assurance.

The other aspect of this bill which we probably will need to touch on is the second half of the bill, which was probably looked at a little bit less than the first half of the bill, but that is the section in relation to temporary road closures. This is an important part of the bill. The whole second half of the bill is in relation to temporary road closures, so this does form the other policy objective of this bill and it does go into a lot of detail about when the police can make those types of choices. We’ll also look at that at committee stage, and if there are any issues in relation to that, we’ll look forward to discussing those with the Minister.

I just wanted to touch on one more thing before I finish, which is last time, at first reading, I made a comment to one of my colleagues about one of my ancestors, who was actually the first police officer in New Zealand. I felt because it was mentioned by my colleague Glen Bennett, it would be worthwhile explaining to the House that story. I think, in 1886, when the first policing Act was put into place in New Zealand, my direct ancestor John Nash was the first police officer that—so every constable has a number. He was a sergeant, and he had No. 1. That’s my history with policing—not a very extensive one, but one that was probably quite important to my family at the time. I think he got a gold watch for his services, and it’s in the Police Museum. If you read some of his history, you can see that maybe he was intending to do the right thing at the time, but there are probably a few questionable decisions in terms of his service.

He did, after his retirement, not decide to retire peacefully, but he became the Inspector of Nuisances. You can see that sometimes there are police officers that can be quite enthusiastic about their work. The reason I bring that up is because that is the type of person that we have to think about when we’re looking at this legislation. Someone who, in lieu of a peaceful retirement in Nelson, decided to take up the position of Inspector of Nuisances is someone who might be overly enthusiastic with surveillance powers as well. We just think back to that little piece of history when we consider this bill as we move forward.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: It doesn’t sound like the member has any ambition to follow in his footsteps when it comes to that role.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I strongly commend this bill, put forward by my favourite police Minister ever, to the House. In select committee, we had extensive conversations with representatives from our amazing New Zealand Police, and I trust them. This bill is yet another way that the National Party continues to put victims first.

💬 David MacLeod: Madam Chair.

💬 Georgie Dansey: Madam Speaker—I said “Speaker”.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I think David MacLeod was the person who called first.

Point of order. Could I just ask for clarification here, because you said, “I think Mr MacLeod was first”, but—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, Mr MacLeod was first. I didn’t think—I heard his call first.

That’s not the point; my point is that there are a number of factors that you can take into account when awarding the call, and “firstness” isn’t one of them—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’ll take that thought into account, Dr Webb, but that is the way I’ve been doing it for this term of Parliament, and so I think with—

It’s somewhat frustrating when we are debating an important bill and a member has a significant contribution to make—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: If the member has a suggestion for, in future Parliaments, how we might run a different process for that process—but that’s what we’ve actually been doing for this term, so I stand by my call, and I call David MacLeod.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very happy to commend this Policing Amendment Bill to the House.

A party vote was called for on the question, That the Policing Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Ayes 67

New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 11; New Zealand First 8.

Noes 36

New Zealand Labour 22; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 9; Te Pāti Māori 4; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: This bill is set down for committee stage immediately.

Committee of the whole House

Part 1 Amendments relating to collection of information

CHAIRPERSON (Tom Rutherford): Members, the House is in committee on the Policing Amendment Bill. We come first to Part 1. This is the debate on clauses 4 and 4A, “Amendments relating to collection of information”. The question is that Part 1 stand part.