Policing Amendment Bill

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

I am pleased to stand here before House today for the third reading of the Policing Amendment Bill. I would firstly like to say, once again, thank you to all the submitters on the bill and to the Justice Committee for their detailed consideration of this bill. I would also like to thank all members for their contributions as this bill has progressed through the House.

This Government has made restoring law and order a priority. A key part of that commitment is ensuring that police have a clear, effective and fit-for-purpose legislative framework to carry out their lawful duties, protect the public, and keep our communities safe. This bill delivers on that commitment. The changes made through this bill will strengthen operational effectiveness, support consistent decision-making, and help police officers carry out their duties with confidence. In turn, this will enhance public safety, reinforce public confidence in policing, and support the broader objective of creating safer communities across New Zealand.

This is a practical and necessary piece of legislation that will better provide police with the tools to meet the challenges of modern policing while continuing to uphold the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders.

Part 1 of the bill confirms the ability of police 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 for the police their temporary road-closure powers currently provided for in the Policing Act to enable a broader range of accessible areas to be subject to closure and enforcement powers. The Attorney-General has concluded that both parts of the bill are consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

Part 1 of the bill responds to the legal uncertainty following a Supreme Court decision and findings from a joint inquiry—by the Independent Police Conduct Authority and the Privacy Commissioner—into police photographing members of the public.

Part 1 of the bill provides further certainty and confirms that police have clear lawful authority to collect information for the purposes of performing their policing functions and duties. It specifies lawful purposes for collecting information, it authorises recording and images and sounds in public places, and it authorises recording of what police can see and hear while lawfully present on private property. It establishes limitations on continuous recording for intelligence purposes, and it clarifies the relationship between the new provisions, privacy law, common-law powers, and other statutory authorities.

Part 1 also inserts new section 100A to require an independent statutory review to be carried out on Part 1 of the bill as soon as practicable after the third anniversary of the commencement.

Part 2 of the bill replaces existing road closure powers with powers to temporarily close accessible areas, permits police to direct persons to leave or not enter closed areas, creates powers to stop vehicles for this purpose, creates infringement offences and enforcement mechanisms, introduces powers to obtain identifying information for infringement enforcement, and creates new offences for failing to stop or failing to provide biographical details. Part 2 of the bill builds on the enforcement of the temporary area closure powers in the Antisocial Road Use Legislation Amendment Act 2026 that my colleague the Hon Chris Bishop recently progressed through this House. This part will deliver a clear and proportionate enforcement response depending on the circumstances.

The bill is another example of this Government’s focus on law and order, and it supports police officers to undertake their functions effectively and as the public would expect them to, including detecting, reducing crime, and maintaining public safety. I want to acknowledge the Police officials that have worked tirelessly with the committee and supported me and the work that’s been done on this bill. This is going to have a significant, positive impact on public safety and keeping Kiwis safe. I’m pleased to commend this bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Tangi Utikere): The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thanks for the opportunity to contribute at this third reading of the Policing Amendment Bill. There has been a lot of work done on this bill, and I don’t think the need for the work is disputed by any party in the House.

Of course, we’ve just heard from the Minister of Police about the background for it. We’ve talked a wee bit about the Tamiefuna case today and certainly at the Justice Committee. And I think it’s important to note that this bill does also respond to the joint inquiry into police photographing of members of the public. These are both situations where the Police powers were not being exercised in accordance with the law, and there were adverse findings from the Privacy Commissioner and from the Supreme Court in relation to how the police had exercised their powers in that case and so we did need a response to that.

I suppose the disappointment from the Labour Party and this side of the House is that this was not done in a way that led us to fully appreciate and have confidence that the lessons that led to the cases of Tamiefuna and the police photographing members of the public had fully been addressed. That’s a shame, because I think there isn’t a dispute that the police need to be able to collect evidence. There isn’t a dispute that, 99.9 percent of the time that they do that, they obviously do that for all the right reasons and to do their job. Members of the House have commended the work of the police, and I do so now as well.

This is not an issue with how the police behave; it’s an issue with us being able to provide the police, as a legislature and as a Parliament, with the best version of legislation that most effectively allows them to do their job. They will always, I suspect, want to keep within the rules, but we have to make sure that the rules that we provide to them are clear and also that the support that we provide to them is sufficient.

We’ve talked about the IT systems and we’ve talked about the guidance, and I think there’s more work that we can do there. Certainly, it was a big concern of the select committee and of submitters to the committee that the IT systems and the way of the police collecting information and storing that information would be sufficient to mitigate some of the concerns that were raised and that led to this particular bill.

We won’t be supporting it for those reasons, but I want to thank the Justice Committee for the work that they did do. I think the Justice Committee worked really hard to improve the bill, and, actually, I think it’s another example of the Justice Committee actually making some significant changes to the bill that did improve it. We were proud to support the amendments that were made at select committee. I do think that those amendments did make the bill better.

I had large concerns around surveillance. I still have a concern around that, but I do think some of the changes that were made at select committee hopefully will mitigate some of the extreme forms of surveillance that I think would have been possible under the first drafting of the bill. I do think that it would be good to have greater clarity, especially because of the wide surveillance provisions that were provided for in the bill. That’s not just a political party saying that; that was a message that we had a lot from submitters.

I wanted to just quote from the Law Association submission and their recommendation which was to establish a statutory framework for governing retention, use, deletion, and oversight of collected information. Now, we haven’t quite got to that stage with this bill, and it may be that this can be addressed at an operational level. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult when the only role that you have in making sure that a bill is sufficiently ready to be implemented is through the legislative path. We just don’t have the knowledge or the information to know that it’s actually going to be implemented in that way. I think that that’s an important thing to note.

The Privacy Commissioner was very sceptical of this bill. The Privacy Commissioner did work very constructively, I thought, with both the committee and with the Police to try and improve this bill, and I think there are certainly some improvements which have been made to this bill as a result of that work. I want to thank the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for their availability, for their work with the committee, and for being very proactive with their advice. I think it has led to an improved bill.

The main change that I think will ensure that, if some of the fears that we have on the Opposition are played out, in terms of the practical implementation of this—the review will happen in three years. It was good to ask the Minister about the review and to have the fact that the review will be taken in good faith, and if there are any improvements that need to be made as a result of the review, under that Minister’s leadership, that would be implemented and improved on. I certainly hope that, if there’s a future Minister of Police in the next three years who is sitting in the House at the moment, they also would take that review in good faith and implement any changes, like the Minister in the chair was able to commit to today. I think that that is really positive, and it certainly shows the benefit of the select committee process to where we are at the moment.

I did want to also touch on some of the issues around Part 2 and the changes that have been made in that part. We did have a bit of a discussion, and it was really good to get some assurances from the Minister that this bill is not meant to be something that interferes with lawful protest or with lawful industrial action. It was good to have those assurances. I think we would have preferred, on this side of the House, to have one of our amendments on that matter accepted just for clarity, but it was good to have that stated by the Minister for the Hansard, and also to have that assurance that it wasn’t meant to be focused on that.

I suppose this is another area where there have been examples where legislation, although it may not have been intended to affect lawful protest, has affected lawful protest, and we do have some examples of that. That is what we’re concerned about—that potentially, even though that’s not the intention, if we don’t word it properly, we may not be able to ensure that that doesn’t occur.

I think the other thing that I just wanted to talk to is just another concern that I know our spokesperson for Police, Ginny Andersen, has been concerned about. It’s the lack of budget availability for things like IT projects. That is another kind of outstanding matter that hopefully can be addressed with the passage of this bill, but, if not, certainly that will be something where we would look to the review to see if there are any other changes that need to be made in terms of that funding moving forward as well.

We did have some concerns that there might still be photos of an evidential use being on phones rather than on the police Digital Notebook, which I think is the new technology that they want to use. Obviously, we would like to have an assurance that that is not the case and that that is all stored correctly. We did seek some information on that matter through the select committee process, but, yet again, we’re unable to get over that final barrier there.

It was helpful having the Police as advisers, and I want to thank them for the work that they did. We didn’t agree with where the bill landed in the end, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I know that officials worked very hard. Also their openness to work with the Privacy Commissioner, I think, was very helpful as well. I think, in the end, we had two submissions from the Privacy Commissioner, which was really good.

The final point that I wanted to touch on was that we did have a legitimate concern raised, and it was raised within the regulatory impact statement and by Te Puni Kōkiri, that there were concerns about the likely impact on Māori and the fact that there hadn’t been enough consultation with Māori. That is not just something to say because it sounds good or it’s a thing that people should do in best practice; it’s actually because when we had the joint inquiry into the photography of members of the public, Māori people were specifically impacted by that. That is something that I think is important to identify. It’s an issue that raised an element of unfairness, and it’s an important issue in making sure that surveillance isn’t unfair and isn’t particularly targeted at certain ethnicities, and something that I certainly hope—in the implementation of this bill—that Police can note and look to do better on in the future, because certainly that type of surveillance that unfairly targets Māori is not acceptable.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. I just want to begin by addressing the Minister. This is potentially the last policing bill that’s going to go through this term, and I wanted to recognise his engagement in the chair during the committee of the whole House phase and, throughout, in terms of being forthcoming, answering questions. We really do appreciate that, and because this might the last bill he passes as the police Minister, I do want to—

💬 Hon Simon Watts: You wish.

—thank him. I actually do want to thank him. I’m going to say something nice now. I do want to thank him for working with us where there is potential to work together, and I’m talking specifically about provisions inserted into the stalking law, which make sure that Police and victims are working together as best as possible. I recognise him for his collaboration where possible, for his genuine consideration of our Amendment Papers at the committee stage of this bill, and for his willingness to have conversations around, also, the duty of care provisions within the move-on orders. I hope that, should he remain as the Minister of Police, or should the Government remain—which, knock on wood, it won’t—I hope that he’ll remain open to that idea because it could be really good one that does help a lot of people.

I think it is important that he is a Minister that engages in good faith, because not all people in this room, necessarily, have the same experiences with Police, and I hope that’s something that we can all work towards together in terms of addressing that, which is really where our work today came from, in terms of the 16 amendments that we brought forward to try and narrow the scope of the bill and provide a bit more certainty and clarity for those who, perhaps, are on the fence when it comes to outright trust and confidence in the Police, which there is a segment of population who are, as reported in the annual surveying, of those attitudes. I just wanted to acknowledge you briefly, Minister. Thank you for your engagement this evening.

We really did want to try and get this bill to a place where we could potentially look towards supporting it, because we do understand that there are, of course, legitimate reasons—I mean, there’s always legitimate reasons for everything—for the collection of intelligence, in order to pre-empt things from happening. If you can stop something bad from happening before it happens—I mean that is our kind of premise of all of the advocacy that we do in the justice space, as we think prevention is so incredibly important. If provisions in this bill lead to that, in those circumstances, then that is absolutely a win, if it protects people and saves lives. However, we could not overcome what we think are the fundamental flaws in this bill, which are broadly that we just think it is too broad. We just don’t think that the bill’s justification justified the potential overreach, particularly in regards to citizens’ privacy rights, and in particular in regards to section 21 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, which is around unreasonable search and seizure, and article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is about no one being subject to arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, home, correspondence, nor unlawful attacks to their honour and reputation.

We were concerned at the first reading of this bill because we do not agree with the Minister and with the Government that what this bill is seeking to do is merely affirming a right that always existed. We believe that the evidence and the findings from the joint inquiry between the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, as well as the Supreme Court ruling in Tamiefuna made this clear—that this was Police not acting in accordance with the law. I repeat my sentiment from the first reading that we believe it is of the utmost importance that the people who are charged with enforcing the law are held to the highest standards of they themselves acting within the law.

We continue to be concerned about the way in which these powers will be used disproportionately against Māori, and that is because of the findings of the joint inquiry and those tens of thousands of photos. What that really demonstrated, with half of those tens of thousands of photos being Māori—many of which were Māori kids—is that there is a problem of systemic bias within the Police as reflected in the Understanding Policing Delivery report. I’ve brought that—I’m not the only one actually. A few members in the House—Rawiri Waititi, Tākuta Ferris, myself—have brought up this report, not as a weapon against the Police to say, “You’re racist. Go and look at this report. Racist. Racist.” What we are saying is that that report did genuinely uncover some systemic patterns within the Police, and that report happened also with the full cooperation of the Police.

Those reports mean a lot to us, actually, because our dear colleague Efeso Collins, who passed away two years ago, helped work on that report, so it does mean a lot to us. To speak of our brother Efeso, he also did a lot of work and research into the interaction between the justice system and young Pacific people in South Auckland. The Understanding Policing Delivery report is very important to us, because it is partially a product of our brother Efeso, but also it was a research project in good faith where it says in the preamble of those reports that Police were totally forthcoming and “opened the hood” when it came to policing operations and delivery and were 100 percent cooperative.

What I think the report shows us is not a pointing fingers blame game, but it identifies some areas that need genuine work. It won’t just be in relation to race. No workforce is perfect, and no organisational body of people is perfect, but I think if we can look at which areas we need to improve on, we can make those better things for our society. It’s not just in terms of the way that, say, Māori or Pacific or low-income people interact with the Police; it is also around improving the rates of reporting sexual violence to Police, and family violence, because we know that those rates of reporting are historically low. The reason I mention those in relation to this bill is because we’re concerned that without addressing some of those trends and some of those discoveries, which were found in cooperation with the Police, we are worried that because this is such a wide remit and such a broad power, it might disproportionately impact particular parts of our population negatively. So those are the main reasons why we are not supporting this bill.

We think that the ability to proactively collect intelligence for future or prospective future use is dangerous, because how does one determine who will go on to commit crimes? Obviously, there is research that shows what the kind of determinants of crime might be, so we can make some predictions, but if someone is just walking down the road, no matter if they’re dressed in a suit or no matter if they’re dressed in a hoodie with the hood pulled up, we believe that you can’t make assumption of intent based on, I guess, profiling alone or what they look like or making an assessment. We just think that if there are safeguards in place throughout our legislation, we might be able to address some of those biases.

This evening, we attempted to put some of those pragmatic safeguards in place. Again, we do really appreciate the Minister of Police’s good-faith engagement in that, but because those were not able to be accepted, we’re not able to accept or support this bill this evening. But we do thank the officials for their work. We do see that there might be a need of not repair but a bit more collaboration between the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the police, and we look forward to continuing to support that relationship, because the two really do go hand in hand.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT to continue to support the Policing Amendment Bill—a very engaging committee of the whole House stage. Again, like other members, I want to thank the Minister of Police—a lot of information there on the record.

One aspect which I didn’t talk about in my second reading speech, which I’m just going to briefly touch on, is the temporary road closure powers. I mean, on this side of the House, this Government has been focused on making sure that we have the right tools to address crime. We saw a lot of antisocial road user behaviour—boy racers, I suppose you might say—and they really can disrupt people going about their business, whether it’s going to the supermarket, sports, church, Sunday school; really, just people going about their normal business. So, again, that’s a power that may not have got too much attention tonight that is contained in this bill, and we continue to support it. I commend it to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of the Policing Amendment Bill. Fundamentally, this legislation is a triumph for common sense and for every law-abiding Kiwi who expects our police to have the tools they need to keep us safe. We have an amazing police force who do diligently hard work every day, and giving them the tools they need is critically important at this time. I commend the bill to the House.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Tom Rutherford): This is a five-minute split call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Yeah, I want to pick up on a couple of things. I do echo my colleagues’ expressions of appreciation of the engagement of the Minister of Police, particularly in the conversation we had, along with Camilla Belich, on the questions around the impact on protest rights of this bill. I think, though we didn’t get an amendment across, the conclusion was that the Minister made it very clear that there was not an intention that it impact protest rights, the road closure stuff and so forth, which is useful to have on the record, I believe.

Our concerns primarily are around the use of recording equipment, both audio and visual, and the accessing of people’s private details for intelligence gathering purposes, and how to ensure that we do not lose that right of private citizens to not be surveilled, to not be recorded, to not be visually filmed. Unfortunately, we have not gained confidence that there are sufficient protections in place to protect people’s private images and audio when they e been acquired by authorities—of course, the case that has precipitated this legislation being but a case in point. We would urge the Minister and the Government, and, indeed, the police, to take great care with appropriate use of that power, because it is a significant power, and to take great care with destruction of images once their purpose has ended, because the accumulation of those images is also a concern.

I note a couple of other points. The disabled people in the regulatory impact statement (RIS) on page 66 “may be disproportionately affected by expanding existing temporary area closures if they rely on specific routes, accessible infrastructure, or support services that may subsequently [be] unavailable due to [the] area closure.” So, again, an urging of the police to protect those members of our society who are disabled and may be disproportionately impacted by these rights and abilities of the police.

My colleague Tamatha Paul mentioned the systemic challenges with the police disproportionately impact on Māori, and I notice also on page 66 the regulatory impact statement points out that “Māori are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system, in part due to the higher rate of Police proceedings initiated against Māori individuals.” I appreciate that very simple, bald acknowledgment of that fact of our justice system. There needs to be intentional action taken on the part of police and on the part of politicians to address those systemic imbalances and injustices.

The RIS also points out that “Police is committed to being responsive to Māori as tangata whenua and understands the value and importance of the Māori Crown relationship and honouring the Treaty of Waitangi as New Zealand’s founding document.” That is good language to hear articulated by the police, and I certainly hope that it is sincerely upheld and striven towards—more so than I feel like this Government has done at times; obviously, we’ve expressed our view on that.

The freedom of peaceful assembly, the right to protest, and the right, when the time arises, to express acts of civil disobedience are actually really vital democratic rights and rights that we should fiercely protect and be very reticent to allow any legal intrusion upon that is unreasonable. I’m glad we were able to have that conversation, and we will be very eagle eyed as to our observation of the institution of the Act following these amendments to make sure that, indeed, the police don’t overstep the mark and infringe on that fundamental democratic right of protest and peaceful assembly and expression of dissent and civil disobedience, which is a vital part of a free and healthy society. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to take the opportunity just to reiterate the Minister of Police’s acknowledgment this evening of our police officials who have worked on this bill through the process that we took it through in the Justice Committee, and also take the opportunity to acknowledge all of our police across New Zealand, who ensure that our communities are kept safe. I commend this bill to the House.

Throughout this debate, this side of the House has been clear: you know, we support police, we support them having the tools they need to keep New Zealanders safe; no one in this House is arguing otherwise. We accept the Supreme Court’s decision in Tamiefuna. We know that created uncertainty, and we accept that Parliament has a responsibility to provide clarity. Front-line officers do deserve to know what powers they have and where those boundaries sit, and communities also deserve confidence that police can do their job effectively. That’s never really been the point of disagreement.

But the real question before us at this third reading is whether Parliament has got the balance right between effective policing and protecting the privacy rights of ordinary New Zealanders, and in Labour’s view we’re not quite there yet.

Now, to be fair, the bill leaves this House today stronger than the bill that did arrive here initially, and the Justice Committee did improve it. The relationship with the Privacy Act was strengthened, and it was made clear that existing surveillance warrant requirements still apply. Commencement was delayed to give police time to prepare, and a statutory review was added after three years. In my view, those are solid changes. Those improvements did not happen by accident. They came about as a result of submitters taking the time to engage with the process, because concerns were raised and because the committee listened. Labour supported those improvements, because they made the bill better than what it came into the committee as.

Improving this bill—yep, as other contributions have mentioned, it’s made it better, but not as good as it could have been. The central concern Labour raised at the first reading, at the second reading, and then in select committee, as well, was that a lot of this stuff remains unresolved. One example is this bill grants police broad powers to collect information for intelligence purposes, yet Parliament has chosen not to provide equally strong safeguards governing how that information is retained, audited, used, shared, and ultimately deleted, sometimes a long time down the track. That concern hasn’t just come from Labour. It’s been raised by submitters, it’s been raised by civil liberties organisations, and it was also raised by the Privacy Commissioner. Despite all the debate that we’ve had on this legislation, those concerns largely remain.

One thing that struck me throughout this process was how often members were asked to trust that future operational policies would solve these issues. We were told that guidance will be developed. We were told that procedures will be strengthened. We were told that the systems would improve over time. Now, I have no reason to doubt the good faith of New Zealand police, and I genuinely believe that they are trying to get this right. But Parliament’s role is not to write guidance documents. Its role is to write laws, and good legislation should not depend on future policy documents to provide protections that could have been included in legislation in the first place—because policies change, we have commissioners change, and, of course, Governments change and it’s going to change on 7 November, and technology changes, as well. Legislation is where Parliament sets the minimum standards that apply, regardless of who happens to be in charge.

That’s why those safeguards absolutely matter. In my view, Parliament has actually missed an opportunity here. The reality is that technology is moving faster than the law. When many of our privacy laws were first drafted, nobody was walking around carrying a smartphone in their pocket 24 hours a day, like they are now. No one imagined the scale of data being generated today. Nobody, certainly, imagined how easily information could be stored, searched and cross-referenced, and analysed many years later. You think about a normal day and how that technology is all around us.

We also talked, during the committee of the whole House stage, around CCTV. Interestingly, the New Zealand Police Association have said that New Zealand, in particular, is quite heavily surveilled as it is. We have about one surveillance camera for every 13 people. That’s quite high in a democracy, and every one of those surveillance cameras can generate information. Most New Zealanders understand that that is part of modern life, but I think they would also expect Parliament to seek clear rules about what happens when that information is gathered and held by the State, because it isn’t simply whether information is collected; it’s what happens afterwards. Those are the sorts of questions that ordinary New Zealanders would ask about the information that’s being collected about them.

That goes directly to public confidence, because, as we know, public confidence in policing is not built simply by giving police more powers. It’s built when people know that those powers sit alongside clear limits and independent oversight and meaningful accountability. During the committee of the whole House stage, Labour tried to address some of those concerns. We put forward amendments designed to strengthen the bill. One amendment sought clearer or greater certainty around what constitutes an intelligence purpose, and another would have required personal information to be deleted when it’s no longer required for a normal policing purpose.

Now, let’s be honest about what those amendments were and what they were not. They were not attempts to stop police investigating crime, they weren’t attempts to prevent police gathering evidence, and they weren’t attempts to tie the hands of front-line officers. What they were designed to do is provide clear guardrails around how those powers would operate, and, in my view, they were sensible amendments. I think they would have improved the bill. If the Government chooses not to support them—well, they chose not to support them and I do feel that that is definitely a mistake, because, as we all know, good safeguards don’t weaken policing. They strengthen public confidence in policing, and that’s important for social licence. When people know there are clear rules around retention, deletion, and accountability, they’re more likely to support the powers being exercised in the first place. That’s not being soft on crime; it’s recognising that effective policing and civil liberties have always gone hand in hand. In fact, I would argue that the strongest policing systems are the ones that enjoy the trust and confidence of the public that they serve. That’s not created solely by powers. Trust is created by powers that are exercised responsibly.

As I’ve said before, I acknowledge that a review is better than no review at all. That was touched on in the committee of the whole House stage, and Labour supported including that into the bill. But let’s be honest about what that review also represents. It’s an acknowledgement that questions do still remain, and it’s an acknowledgement that Parliament does not yet—or the Government does not yet—exactly know how these powers will operate in practice. It’s effectively saying, “Yeah, let’s come back in three years’ time and see how it’s worked.”

So, yeah, it’s a better bill going out the door than what it was when it came in the door, but we still have a lot of concerns. Thank you.

I rise in support of the Policing Amendment Bill. This bill supports the police; we support the police. That’s why I commend this bill to the House.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker, and it’s—yeah, we’re here on a Saturday night discussing the police and the role they play in our society to protect, to reassure, but also to, I guess, to build trust within communities. That’s a key element to this piece of legislation, because we always need to think about the power balances, and the fact that the police have a critical role to play in our society and we should welcome the role they play, but, also, with that power, being very cautious and careful to make sure that they are using their powers for the right reasons and have the right tools in place to do that.

As has been traversed over the evening, there are two key parts to this legislation. There is, of course, the collecting of records and information which would change the Police’s ability to record images and sounds in public and private places and to collect personal information for lawful purposes, including intelligence. Of course, Part 2 is around temporary road closures and antisocial behaviour and law enforcement when it comes to that. We need safeguards in place, when it is something like this, and this is a very major piece of legislation.

It might just seem like a few photos here and a few videos there and some recording, but we live in a world where, in fact, you walk out the doors of this Chamber, and you will be recorded. You walk down Lambton Quay, as you walk home from Parliament tonight, and there will be recordings. There will be cameras throughout the city in cities throughout New Zealand. That’s OK by me. That’s something around safety and protection, but also, again, what do the safeguards look like when it comes to the Police gathering information? How do we make sure that the power they have is used wisely? I think being thoughtful and try to add value to this—and my understanding is that I’ve heard from colleagues that the Justice Committee did a lot of work and worked across the Parliament to try to make this legislation better and fit for purpose.

I do want to acknowledge the Privacy Commissioner and their concerns around this. I note that the Minister has considered that and, obviously, has weighed things up and made decisions, which is his right to make. It’s not easy, because the laws that pass today or tomorrow have implications for our communities. As I spoke about in the second reading, often we have to think about young people particularly and the way that police approach many of our young people. There are times when they must intervene. There are times when they must arrest, they must talk to, they must engage in ways that can be really tough and hard to handle. But, like I said earlier, for a young person and the brain development and the understanding of what is going on and the fact that a police officer has far more information generally and knowledge of the situation—and often a young person particularly can be compliant without knowing the consequences of what it means when their image is captured or that video is taken.

We won’t support this bill tonight—

💬 Hon Member: Oh!

—as has been said. I’m sure there’s no shock, even though there obviously is; people haven’t been listening for the last six hours, but that’s OK. We won’t support this bill, because we do think it doesn’t quite meet the threshold for us in terms of the ensuring that the ways and means are in place to protect our communities and make sure that the Police don’t overstretch and overdo things. There was a piece about, obviously, how it is stored and the funding that will go into that, which, again, are concerns for us. I’m glad that there’s been thoughtful debate on this, but we in the Labour Party cannot support this legislation.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a privilege to be able to participate in giving the Police more tools to do the invaluable work that they do for New Zealand, and it’s a privilege to stand and commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I just want to traverse the concerns that we have with this bill. Essentially, they boil down to significant and intrusive powers being not sufficiently constrained. I guess the first is, if you look at new section 45A, “Purposes for which Police may collect information”, we agree that the Police should be able to collect information regarding people by taking photos and recordings, but you should be able to, by reading the purpose, clearly articulate what will fall within it and what will fall outside of it.

Obviously, the centrepiece here is the intelligence purpose. We put up—and I believe the Greens did too—some pretty meaningful amendments to say an intelligence purpose means this. The concern is that intelligence simply is another word for the gathering of information in a subject area, the area of general policing, and these are one or more of the following purposes, so any intelligence purpose is enough, and it doesn’t have to be attached to any particular inquiry or any particular known activity, and that’s really concerning. That’s the narrow one; new paragraph (d) has “any other lawful purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police.” There seems to be nothing excluded.

Now, I have little doubt that this will be considered by the courts and the courts will—as they have done in other legislation—assume that this is consistent both with the Privacy Act and, of course, with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the right to be free from arbitrary search in particular. It may well be that there’s an overlay that the courts will put over this because Parliament, frankly, hasn’t done its job. It was invited to, and we invited it to, but it chose not to.

I guess the second aspect of this is one that I raised with the Minister. To be honest, he made a response but didn’t give a reply. When I talked about recording by Police in private property—and the Police do enter private property, and I’m particularly thinking homes, for a raft of reasons, and quite rightly so. There might have been a report of family harm, so a police officer will come in knowing that the one person who resides there, not the person they’re going to talk to but somebody else, is a person of interest in some regard. But they haven’t been invited in to gather information. They haven’t been invited in to conduct a search. It’s actually, in terms of that invitation when they say, “We want to talk about this incident. Can we sit down and have a yarn?”, the purpose of that invitation is to have that discussion, not so that they can scan the room for information. You’ve got to remember that this isn’t scanning the room for information about the assault that took place for blood stains on the wall; this is scanning the room for intelligence information or, to go back to the other ones, any information to be used for any other lawful purpose connected with a function or activity of the Police. It’s extremely broad in its range and extremely intrusive in terms of where that may occur. It can occur in any private place where the police officer is lawfully there, anywhere where they have entered in a way which isn’t illegal.

Of course, the other question I put, and I didn’t really get a good answer, was whether you can take footage or photographs or whatever from outside the property but on a public place. Now, taking a photograph of a car up a drive from the footpath is one thing, but we know that the Police are a little more resourceful than that. They have been known to, in a public place, find themselves in very advantageous positions, whether that is standing on their car roof or climbing on a ladder. It’s simple as that—climb on a ladder to look over a fence. That is a breach of privacy and seclusion rights, and that is really problematic.

I get that it’s hard. This is a hard area of law because you’ve got the interplay of this legislation with the Privacy Act 2020, and in this legislation itself, it uses the words, I think, “subject to”. In this legislation, the collection of personal information authorised by new sections 45A to 45D is subject to the Information Privacy Principles and we’ve got the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and exactly how those three things interact is actually far from straightforward. The Privacy Act says that you can only collect information from an individual if it’s “necessary” for a lawful purpose, and “necessary” is a high threshold. In committee, I noted that the test for when you collect information in this bill is that it is as low as it “may support” the police in performing a function, whereas in the Privacy Act, it is “necessary”, and so you’ve got a real mismatch there. That kind of far reach of the police’s power of surveillance for a very broad purpose and very deep into the private sphere is really why we are concerned.

Then I will mention the road closure legislation. Again, it’s a test of any constable: “if a constable believes on reasonable grounds that 1 or more of the following apply … public disorder exists or is imminent”, and so it hasn’t happened, but it might happen in the future. I suppose, if you see it on a Facebook post—all well and good. But, again, this is a limit of a of a New Zealand Bill of Rights right, and that is freedom of movement and also, to an extent, freedom of expression, because if the movement is a protest or whatever, then it’s freedom of expression, as well. We shouldn’t leave rights questions to be kind of inferred from section 5, I think it is, of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—or is it section 4—which says that if there are two interpretations, the one consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act should be adopted.

It should be here in the legislation to say that what’s reasonable is subject to or is coloured by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, because, with the closing off of areas, one of the problems of legislators is that they look at the problem—they look at the siren wars, or whatever it was, and the doing of burnouts in West Auckland—and they say, “This will stop that.”, but they don’t turn their mind to the question of what else it might stop. I get it that perhaps we’re at opposite ends of the spectrum and we need to meet in the middle somewhere, but we need to ask what could go wrong here. What rights of people whom we might not agree with but who are not breaking the law in that sense—what rights might be infringed there?

It’s clear here that if you intend to drive your tractor down the main street, then you are going to cause public disorder. So you could get the road closed, but you shouldn’t if doing that isn’t just for fun but it’s to make a political point, because political speech is really, really important.

We would like to be able to support some of these pieces of legislation, and one of the things that did consume me in committee was that the police have repeatedly and the Minister of Police has repeatedly said that this isn’t changing the law, which is clearly wrong because the Supreme Court said that gathering information for intelligence purposes and not for any specific reason is an unlawful search of that person. This now makes it a lawful search, and so there is a distinction here. So we can’t support this bill, which is a pity, because we should try and cooperate on these kinds of things.

Mr Assistant Speaker Rutherford, it’s a pleasure to see you in the Speaker’s Chair for the first time—congratulations. The National Party and I strongly commend this bill to the House—strongly—because all I think about is victims first, and that’s been the kaupapa behind almost every bill we’ve passed with through the Justice Committee. Thank you to the best police Minister ever in the history of New Zealand.

I’m going to focus my comments tonight about the thing I find most concerning about this bill, and that is the amplifier effect of the vulnerabilities that the bill will create for children. I say this as a family member of somebody in our extended family who has had their photo taken by the police—somebody who quite possibly was racially profiled when that happened—and it is a mission of my extended family to find out where that photograph is sitting and what it will mean for the future of this young person.

Everything that has been said tonight from this side of the House, I think, ratchets it up a notch when it comes to our children because they are going to be around on this earth for a very long time, and yet there are already images taken. The bill has spoken a lot about how those images are acquired, but very, very little about how they’re stored and what they can be used for, and the tone of that concerns me—the tone of this bill. Yes, we all want to have more effective policing and we all want to be able to use available technologies, but if I think about where we’re moving around constitutional rights as a democracy and I think about the impending immigration bill that we will maybe discuss this evening or maybe before the end of Parliament, there is an underlining tone around increasing police power with very little vigilance about how we are going to manage that and what it means for those individuals who are caught very early in their lives sometimes—like this young person from my extended family—and how that can be used against them and what it might mean for their trajectory.

We know, despite the protestations of people from across the House or from other parts of society, that there is systemic bias, and when somebody gets into a government system where they can be labelled—whether it is around a young person being vulnerable, perhaps at risk, or perhaps likely to have a trajectory through the criminal justice system—it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m really, really concerned about that because we don’t have any answers to the questions like how long the images will be retained, who will get access to them, and whether they can be linked with other databases—and, if not now, when that will be an inevitability. That is not something—with all the best will in the world and the good faith from the police, who do a fantastic job—to leave to chance or to leave to operational structures. It is something that must be embedded in legislation, and yet it is absent.

What about where the images are used for one purpose, and then later used for another purpose because the legislation has not been sufficiently clear to define what is meant by the purpose that is in the Act? Those are questions not only for ordinary New Zealanders but they’re questions for parents. I’m very concerned, as a parent, and if I was a parent at home watching this, I’d be really concerned. But as a parent who has a family member from our extended family in that system—and there are many other families in that position in New Zealand at the moment—that is even more concerning.

After the election, when things are quieter, our family is going to do some due diligence and find out where that photo is and what we can do to get it out of the system, and I would urge any other family that believes that they have a young person who has an image that has been taken—we’ve seen it in the headlines. There has not been adequate explanation of what will happen to them. I urge those families to use the Official Information Act to find out where that image is and to find out whether the image will be destroyed, and, if not, why not, because the more that those images are gathered, the harder it is for there to be a cull of the images. It’s all very well for someone to say “Oh, it’s just lying there dormant.”, but, at some point in an unknown future, that image could be used for any purpose.

I lived in Fiji, where I saw the fragility of democracy. I saw coup d’état, and I saw how quickly the best-intentioned empowerment of uniformed people can be used against citizens at large. We do not ever want to be in that situation, and for that reason, the safeguarding that is being put to an operational level must be put into legislation. Without it, this legislation breaches the protections for our children and cannot be support in good conscience. We do not commend this bill to the House.

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

Ayes 67

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

Noes 30

New Zealand Labour 21; Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand 8; Kapa-Kingi.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

Corrections (Management of Prisoners, and Prisoners’ Property) Amendment Bill

Legislative Statement