Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Justice: I present a legislative statement on the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon JAMES MEAGER: I move, That the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the hard-working Justice Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by four months and one day after the bill receives its first reading and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, during any day on which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

This bill introduces a new offence into the Summary Offences Act 1981 for engaging in a targeted and disruptive demonstration outside of a residential premises. I’m sure this bill will be a welcome relief to many MPs, officials, and individuals who, themselves, have been targeted.

The bill targets a narrow range of behaviours that can unreasonably disrupt a resident’s quiet enjoyment of, or access to, their private property. The new provision would make it an offence to engage in a demonstration near a residential premises that is directed at a person regularly occupying the property and, importantly, where the demonstrator knows or ought to know that the demonstration is causing an unreasonable disruption in relation to this or another residential premises.

This Government is continuing our commitment to strengthening our democracy. The public’s ability to protest, which is protected by important rights like the freedoms of expression and of peaceful assembly contained in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, is a cornerstone of our free and democratic society. However, over the last few years, we have seen increased reports of demonstrations and protests that target private residences, especially of public persons such as MPs, judges, and other public officials. Such demonstrations can impinge on people’s privacy, disturb the quiet enjoyment of their homes, and create an environment of fear and intimidation for individuals, their families, and their neighbours. They also have the potential to deter elected officials from taking stands on contentious issues, which undermines our democracy.

Just as we value the right to protest, privacy is also a key value of our society. It reflects our respect for freedom and individuality. Unreasonable, disruptive intrusions into people’s private spaces are simply unacceptable. In particular, the home is the place where anyone should be able to retreat to, irrespective of who they are or what they do for a job. Current offences do not clearly reflect the importance of privacy in the context of demonstrations and protests that occur near private homes. This has led to difficulties for the police in applying existing offences such as the offence of disorderly behaviour in that situation, even when a demonstration is very disruptive to residents. This is the gap that the new law will fill.

The offence created by the bill is very tightly formulated to ensure that it reflects an appropriate balance of rights and freedoms. The ability to protest is protected under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, but all rights in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act are subject to such reasonable limitations that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. This new offence is such a reasonable limitation.

The new offence will not stop people from demonstrating or from expressing their views. What this new offence will do is provide reasonable boundaries about how people can demonstrate near private residences in order to better protect people’s rights to privacy and the quiet enjoyment of their own homes. The law will only apply to demonstrations that are directed at a person and that occur near a person’s private residence. This includes any place where that person regularly resides, even if it is not their main residence. Demonstrations that affect the enjoyment of, or access to, a property but are not directed at the person living there are not covered. This could be, for example, a march that passes by that residential premises. That wouldn’t be covered under the Act. The law will only cover unreasonable disruptions for residents.

The bill includes a list of considerations to assist police and the courts, as well as demonstrators themselves, in assessing what is unreasonable. That could include things like the time of day, the duration, the actions of the demonstrators, the level of noise, and the distance to the premises. The offence will protect all New Zealanders, not just MPs or elected officials. This recognises that a wide range of people could be and have been targeted by unreasonably disruptive demonstrations.

The bill itself includes a maximum penalty of three months in jail or a fine of up to $2,000. This aligns with offences of disorderly assembly and intimidation and other offences under the Summary Offences Act. Other laws provide for higher penalties for more severe forms of disruptive behaviour, such as criminal harassment or assault.

The protection of New Zealanders’ privacy is fundamentally important in our society, as is the ability to protest. The Government upholds both of these values. I encourage members of the public to have their say on the bill and the protection it introduces when the committee calls for submissions later on this month. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is not as straightforward as the Hon James Meager would have us think. Here we have what is, essentially, a privacy right of residents in a home rubbing up against a free speech right, and that is a challenge. There was the case, I think, of Brooker v Police where the Supreme Court found that protesting outside someone’s home by singing songs with a guitar was not disorderly behaviour, because the disorder was effected not in a public place but, in fact, in a private place.

If that’s your problem, the easy fix is actually to fix the offence of disorderly behaviour and make it clear that disorder that flows into private premises can, in fact, still amount to that offence. If we pass this law, we will stand apart as being one of the very few countries that claims to be a liberal democracy but is actually prohibiting a demonstration. This is targeted to suppress political action, and that’s not something that we can support in the Labour Party—certainly not in this form.

It’s surprising that the Government is bringing in a piece of legislation that chips away at free speech rights. I accept and I know that there are people in this House that have suffered from people acting inappropriately outside of their residences, and there are remedies for that. The police do have remedies for that already, but to have a targeted piece of legislation, notwithstanding the purported constraints that it has to be an unreasonable demonstration and that it has to be unreasonably disruptive—the point of political action is to disrupt. It is not to be nice. It’s not to be convenient. Protest is disruptive; that’s what a protest is. Now, there might be some quiet protests, but you don’t think the Springbok Tour was stopped by people being nice. You don’t think that apartheid was broken by people being nice. I know we don’t agree. There are people out there with whom we don’t agree. There are people with whom I fiercely disagree. We only have to think about some of the protests that we’ve seen.

For protests that cross the boundary—which are trespasses—and that engage in genuinely disruptive, disorderly behaviour, the police can intervene. They can do that already. To say that someone who is being unreasonably annoying can’t protest, can’t have their free speech rights, and can’t get their political view across, as much as I disagree with it, is a retrograde step. We in the Labour Party believe that when those two rights rub up against each other, when they knock into each other, the right of seclusion, the right to be peaceful in one’s home, has to be balanced against the right of political action. We don’t think that this Government has struck that balance right. In our view, as we see the law, there are tools there that the police can use already and do use already. The Associate Minister of Police can have her say any time she likes, and I look forward to listening to it.

The law currently before this House, the stalking bill, deals with harassing behaviour, and it is exactly directed at harassing and annoying behaviour that is intended to cause distress, so we have an additional tool that will be suitable here. What I won’t see is a law that says, “You cannot protest. You are being disruptive in such and such a way.” If we see this, what next? Where else can’t people express their views? I know the ACT Party stands firm on these values, so I’m fascinated to hear what they’re going to say on this bill as well, because free speech is an important right.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. First of all, I recognise that threats to people’s safety or their family’s safety are unacceptable, but I would agree with my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb that there are already processes and legislation and offences to address that. In the regulatory impact statement for the matter of addressing protests outside private residences, it says that this kind of protest has been a longstanding but minor part of protesting. It also says that there is a lack of complete data about how much of an issue this is—perhaps we should say there is an almost complete lack of data about how much of an issue this is.

The right to protest is a fundamental part of democracy. There are protests that I have been part of—for homosexual law reform, for protesting about the nuclear testing in Mururoa, and for a number of other things. Of course, there are protests that I do not choose to join in, because I don’t agree with them. Everybody has that right to protest. If some people do a silent vigil—I remember the vigil about climate change. It was just one man, Ollie Langridge, a lot of the time, standing there silently. Sometimes—though I don’t think my colleagues opposite always recognise it—silence is a very good form of protest; they should try it.

I am really proud of our New Zealand courts that have declined to balance the right of privacy against New Zealand Bill of Rights Act rights. I think that we should, in this case, take the lead from the courts and not introduce a new offence and particularly not introduce a new offence with disproportionate punishment—three months in prison, $2,000 fine. This is not a parking ticket!

Dr Vanessa Weenink: No, we’ll defund the police!

CELIA WADE-BROWN: It would be really good if some members in opposition actually read our policy and understood our policy, but there we are.

There are people who work night shifts, so does that mean that if they happen to be working night shifts, then we need to consider a daytime protest a problem, or is it for people who are working in the day and go home maybe after their long day supporting Parliament when we’re working under urgency until midnight? We may enjoy it, but I’m sure some of the staff don’t. Is it something that’s going to wake them up at 2 in the morning? Sometimes you need to be noisy to be heard to make your democratic point. This is not about threats to human safety. It is not about trespass. It’s about creating a new offence when you might be outside a residence.

There are words in here about the person knowing where someone lives and choosing to protest outside that place, or, as Mr Meager introduced, there are various definitions of “residence”, and so forth. You could almost take it to an extreme. There are a number of MPs who, I believe, live in some of the nearby apartments, like the Kate Sheppard Apartments, during the week, so if somebody’s coming and protesting at Parliament and they’re protesting about the actions of a particular party or a particular Minister, then they will be heard at Kate Sheppard. If you think of all of the banging on the drums and the banging on the pots the other day in a very unplanned but quite lively demonstration—a flash demonstration—you could see it being misused as well. The Green Party thinks this is disproportionate and punitive sentencing for protesting.

The member’s time has expired. Thank you.

I rise on behalf of ACT to speak on the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill. It’s been interesting, hearing some of the contributions so far. Look, yes, we completely accept that there are two competing rights here: the right to privacy and the right of freedom of speech or to protest and demonstrate. That’s very clearly set out in the documents before this House. What we’re seeking to do here is actually have a discussion about how you get that balance right and how we can ensure that this covers New Zealanders—some of them will be public officials, but as the Minister, in introducing the bill, correctly pointed out, this actually can cover all New Zealanders. Again, we’ve started to see, disturbingly actually, that, overseas, some CEOs and other company officials are being targeted in the way that this bill might seek to stop.

It’s going to go to a select committee, so New Zealanders out there will have their say, and rightly so, on whether this is an appropriate piece of law to put into place. I also note that all parties across the House had advanced notice of this legislation, so it hasn’t been sprung on anyone. They’ve actually been briefed about why it has come about.

It’s also clear in the legislative statement about why the police don’t think they have sufficient powers currently. It says, “Police are not clearly empowered to intervene in protest or other demonstration outside people’s houses, even when they are causing significant disruption or distress to residents.” I think it is worthwhile, at least going through the select committee process, to uncover what powers the police do or don’t have currently, but they’re saying they don’t have sufficient powers.

I don’t know where other people live, but I know in my main residence that if people were to start protesting loudly in the middle of the night outside of my house—maybe shining laser pointers into my windows—I would be disrupted. I don’t live on some farm where I can get away from people. They would literally be outside my house on public space, so they’d be quite entitled to do that, but they could actually be very disruptive. I live in a community where the neighbours are quite close, so they wouldn’t just be disrupting me; they’d be disrupting lots and lots of families with small children, etc. I do not think it’s necessarily unreasonable to look at whether that kind of intrusion into my privacy and the privacy of my neighbours and my community would be unreasonable.

Again, as has been pointed out, we are actually just adding to the summary offences. The penalties in the draft legislation align with other similar offences. Again, there are some safeguards about what is unreasonable. Actually, as the previous Green spokesperson Celia Wade-Brown mentioned, you do need to look at the time of day that the protest might be occurring and what the nature of the disruption is, etc. Again, there are some things in there.

Yes, we totally accept, in ACT, that we are balancing two competing rights, but let’s dive into that. It obviously has become necessary because of what’s been occurring in some parts of our community in recent times, so let’s look at that. Let’s do it in a kind of a methodical way and actually have a reasonable discussion. We commend this bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill. It is a sad, sad indictment on our democracy that we need to have this legislation, but the fact is that we know we have politically motivated groups who will purposely release private residential addresses of elected officials and business people in order to invoke an intimidatory approach to dealing with decisions.

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: It’s in the stalking bill. Doxxing is in the stalking bill.

Hon CASEY COSTELLO: This is the point: we have to balance legislation to ensure that the police, when they’re called to provide protection, have suitable powers and rights to intervene as necessary. This is not a limitation on protesting. This is not a limitation of having your voice heard. This is protection for people’s private residence, their children, and their families. If we do not do something to protect private residences, then, as we’ve seen occur recently, personal addresses of people, even people who have no role in decision making, are being put on public platforms to entice people to create this level of intimidation.

It is unacceptable that we have to pass legislation like this, but the reality is the reality, and my neighbours and my children and my mother did not sign up to be intimidated. Intimidation is someone simply standing at the end of your driveway, staring at you. That is intimidation. We have heard repeatedly in this House about members who are feeling unsafe and who have felt intimidated, abused, and threatened. Members across this House, on both sides, talk about feeling unsafe. Well, the very least we can do is provide some protections to your home and to your family and ensure that you have an absolute right to protest, that you have an absolute right to be heard, but that your home will be protected. It is absolutely reasonable to say that we will ensure that voices can be heard but that my children, my mother, and my family will not have to bear the price of my decisions or the public position that I hold.

I think there isn’t a member in this House that wouldn’t see that as reasonable, if they actually sat back and considered what this bill is proposing to do. To scaremonger by suggesting that a protest in Parliament would invoke somebody being arrested because MPs live in the Kate Sheppard building is absolutely ridiculous. The bill says that it’s targeted at the house. That’s what it will be used for. This is about presenting some powers so that, when we need protections put in place for private residences, there is a power that the police can use. We commend this bill to the House.

I think if the police aren’t doing their job, then they should check their enforcement rules already. Of course you should feel safe at your own home, around your own home, and within your gate, and so on. Of course, any reasonable-minded person in this House would get that. I certainly get that. In fact, I’ve been training and teaching aikido and a whole number of things for a very long time, so we have done what we can to look after those things for ourselves at the same time.

Obviously, there are some, possibly even in this House, who do feel at risk in their gateway or up their drive or whatever it is. I just want to tell them to ring the police. I’d just say that’s a 111 call. I would say that there are already systems in place that should just take care of that. They should, obviously, take care of that. That’s what I would do. Well, when one is feeling unsafe even now, who do you call? Ghostbusters? You call the police. That’s the point. There are things that are already in place.

If they’re not happening in the right way, then people need to check their practice and check their own systems, but don’t suddenly go and put another little bill in the place, because there might be five or six that are having some real feelings about this stuff. Just so you know, this stuff has been going on in homes and families that I know about and have witnessed for a very long time, so if you’re having feelings, get your stuff in order, I would say.

This is just a short call, and I don’t mean to be disparaging of all the feelings, but I’m taking this very short call on this because I do think it needs to be prosecuted in a better and more detailed way, but just short enough a call to show the regard for this, unlike some of the colleagues on the left, who show very little regard for the public’s worth in those actual, serious matters. Thank you. I completely oppose it, and others will too, so good evening.

I rise in this first reading of the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill in support of this bill. I find it very hard to believe that some members around this House think that if you disagree with someone politically, you can turn up at their house and harass their family. A lot of us in this House have young families, and it’s totally inappropriate that our children should be harassed for our doing our job. Therefore, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. At its heart, this bill is about restricting the right of New Zealanders to protest, and that right is a fundamental right to our democracy and one that is protected under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

Yes, protest sometimes is noisy, sometimes can be inconvenient, and sometimes can be really hard for those people who are nearby to deal with, but those are the very qualities also that make protests effective. Protest has always been the way that ordinary New Zealanders have held powerful people to account, and we are concerned that this ability is being curtailed by this legislation.

We recognise that demonstrations outside people’s homes can cross the line and there are times when they can be deeply intrusive to families. We take concerns about that incredibly seriously. The answer to that situation is not to just rush through legislation that erodes fundamental freedoms. Police already have the powers to deal with unreasonable behaviour. I have been a manager within a police policy team, and we have dealt with these issues, and we have looked at what existing legislation is there already. I’m sure that when police are asked, they would say, “We want additional powers.” Police always say that when they’re asked if they want additional powers. There’s often a process about disrupting the public peace and about causing unruly behaviour. There’s a series of existing provisions in there that can be utilised, if required, so we on this side are not quite convinced the existing legislation does not provide adequate protections for instances such as those.

What we see is that this bill proposes an unnecessary and somewhat blunt instrument that may well risk capturing legitimate protest activity, and we would not want to see that. We need to remember our history: when Pasifika were subjected to the cruelty of the Dawn Raids—and I think there’s a documentary coming out with some of the ancestors of the member opposite prevalent in it—it was protesters who took a stand by carrying out a reverse of the Dawn Raids on Ministers’ homes, shining spotlights, using loudspeakers, and demanding justice. Those actions helped to expose and to end a gross injustice that’s a part of New Zealand’s history. If this law had been in place, those brave voices might have been silenced, and that should give us pause to have a think about what we are doing here.

We know that the select committee process will bring some really interesting submissions, and I welcome those. All those community groups who want to have their voices heard should front up to the select committee and make sure that they have the opportunity. We’re lucky that this is one of the pieces of legislation that isn’t being passed under urgency, so New Zealanders do get to exercise their voice and have a say on this.

There are also practical issues. Some residences double as places where protest is expected and appropriate, such as embassies, where an ambassador often lives on site. Even here, in Parliament, the Speaker has an apartment within these grounds. This bill is unclear about how it would apply in those cases, and I’m sure the select committee will be asking those questions. We potentially risk creating confusion for both the courts and the police, who already sometimes struggle to interpret protest law consistently.

What makes this bill even more concerning is the broader context. New Zealanders are already finding it harder to get by. Under Christopher Luxon and this Government cutting women’s pay, making it harder to see a doctor, pushing up the cost of living, and pushing up the cost of local water bills, families are struggling to pay the bills while this Government looks after property speculators and fossil fuel companies. Now, rather than addressing the real issues facing middle New Zealand, they want to clamp down on the right of New Zealanders to make their voice heard. They’ve already taken away the right to partial strike, and there are inklings towards other issues as well. New Zealanders deserve to be able to voice their dissent against the actions of the Government.

We take a different view. We think we should be focusing on what matters: tackling the cost of living, making healthcare more affordable and accessible, ensuring people have access to warm, dry homes, and making sure that when they go to work and get paid, it’s enough money to be able to pay the bills. Those are the real issues. We know that New Zealand is strong when people are looked after, and we know that part of that strength comes from protecting our democratic rights here in New Zealand, and that includes our right to protest.

It was a quiet, cold Easter Sunday night at about 9.30 in 2023 when a whole bunch of people turned up on the pavement outside my house, banging on pots and pans, using loud hailers, screaming abuse at me, and trying to get my attention. All they did was get more of my attention, of course, but then they got the attention of all of my neighbours, who, luckily, were the ones who managed to come out and get rid of them. I didn’t in any way expect that my family and my neighbours would be put in that situation because of my choice to become a politician. I do not commend anybody across the House who would think that any action like that is in any way OK, and to hear them sit across there and say that that’s a legitimate way to protest and get action on things like that is absolutely abhorrent. I commend our bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. There’s a saying that many of us owe our human rights more to protest than we do to the goodwill of politicians. Perhaps it’s not the audience to put that statement to, but I think it’s undeniable that protest has, in so many ways, shaped the evolution of human rights and that we ought to be very cautious about deteriorating that right. In fact, we’ve seen that happen overseas, where in places like Russia, you’ve had people hold up a sign that says two words and be arrested for that. The attacks on freedom of expression don’t happen in full; they happen piece by piece.

I think what’s problematic about this—because I do acknowledge to the members opposite that there are times when you do need to limit the right to freedom of expression—is that it reduces the threshold of what would count as an arrestable offence from, effectively, disorderly or offensive behaviour, to unreasonable disruption, but it also increases the penalty. It’s not trying to match what a police officer could arrest for in a public space; it’s actually creating quite a new offence. The offence that exists under “disorderly” is an offence where the penalty is a $1,000 fine. This new offence lowers the threshold, and it also makes it an imprisonable offence. It is a very different framing against the right of freedom of expression.

Again, acknowledging that there are times when we do need to limit this right, the first question to ask isn’t whether this a reasonable limitation; it’s an assessment of the current legislative framework to see whether it adequately responds or not. We have two disorderly offences—[Interruption]

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Too much noise on my right.

VANUSHI WALTERS: —which sit under the Summary Offences Act, which the police do currently use. We do also have the stalking and harassment provisions that are coming through the House, which are drafted very, very broadly. My read of that legislation is that it could be possible for someone who has concerns to notify police so that they can provide a notice to the individual or individuals at the scene of a protest outside a house, once that legislation is through the pipeline. Now, arguably, if the police do that, then any continued presence on those grounds could potentially constitute a second offence as well. The question is always whether what we are doing is essential in terms of an additional limitation of the right to freedom of expression. We have other provisions in the summary offences—it’s actually two times over the course of two years. If you had someone who was staying there who was notified once, once they stayed after that, it could potentially be the second notification.

We have other offences, as well, that the police can use in circumstances like this, including section 28, “Being found in public place preparing to commit offence”. That’s a prior issue where if the police are on site, they’re able to then take action, peeping or peering into a dwelling house, where, again, you have someone who’s very proximate, so there is a legislative framework there. I would just say that we need to be very, very cautious about taking additional steps in this area, because of the chilling effect that that will create.

I have two more things before I close. I do have a concern about who gets prioritised in terms of protection against potential abuse. When we were in Government, we started work on hate speech law, which was then with the Law Commission. This Government has paused that work and, effectively, said, “No, we’re not going to look at the abuse that you are suffering.” Our Muslim community have said that they are not happy with that. I think it’s appalling to prioritise this work before that important work, which resulted as a result of the mosque attacks and the inquiry.

Finally, I have a deep concern about the layered erosion of rights. When I came back into the House, it was an attack on women’s rights to pay equity. In the last sitting block, it was, effectively, the attack on electoral rights, and, this week, we’re seeing a gentle erosion of the right to freedom to protest. I don’t think that this is the Government that its voters expected to see. I think New Zealanders should be very concerned, but, more than that, I think New Zealanders must ensure that they are registered to vote next year.

What a shameful display from a Labour Party that has lost its way so much—not one single policy idea. Instead, they just find themselves entrenched in this behaviour of opposing anything that comes up, no matter how logical. No one is removing anyone’s right to protest; we are protecting that, but we are also protecting people’s right to the quiet enjoyment of their home. Whether they are a councillor or a mayor or a business person or a public servant, they have the right. Living in community comes with rights, but they come from responsibilities. You can’t just do it if you want. You can’t set up a factory in your back lawn, and you can’t just turn up in the middle of the night outside the house of someone going about their business and harass their family. This is sensible, and the Labour Party need to take a good, hard look at themselves. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill be considered by the Justice Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Justice Committee.