I will follow the shadow Attorney-General’s remarks by supporting the tenor of what he has just had to say. It was helpful to have the Attorney-General outline the legislation as it has come back to the House. It is regrettable on a matter of this import that it appears we will not have any more Government calls in the debate. None the less, I think it is appropriate to use the rare opportunity that we have to discuss in this Chamber security matters to express the qualified support that the Opposition brings to this third reading debate.

As has been said, the Labour Party has decided that it will support the amendment legislation. But just as the shadow Attorney-General entered a couple of reservations to that support, and, perhaps, looked forward to some ways in which we might do things differently in this area, I would like to expand on some of those thoughts. It is first of all a matter of real regret that the legislation had its first reading under urgency. There is too much resort to urgency in this term of this Parliament, and urgency is an abuse of the procedures that exist in the Standing Orders. They exist for a good reason; they exist because we do not have a second Chamber. All we have by way of reviewing what the executive brings into the House by way of legislation is the committee system—both the select committees and the Committee of the whole House.

If there is excessive resort to urgency, the danger is that those few safeguards that we have to properly scrutinise the laws that we are making are set aside. We should take all this a lot more seriously than we do. If we see further abuses of urgency, then we will also see a loss of confidence by the people in this place, and that is in the interests of nobody sitting anywhere in this Chamber.

I think what ought to be signalled first off is that certainly for my part, and, I think, for a number of my colleagues, it is appropriate to start thinking about ways in which we can better entrench the Standing Orders so that it is much harder to have resort to urgency, particularly where urgency involves the avoidance of committee procedure, or circumscribing the committee procedure, so that we cannot do our job—the job the public expect of us—which is to have a look at the content of legislation in a proper fashion.

The second reservation that needs to be expressed about the process concerning this legislation is that the committee hearings as far as the Intelligence and Security Committee was concerned were essentially, at the behest of the Government, heard behind closed doors. I want to echo exactly what David Parker said on this point. There is no need for secrecy to be a default procedure to be adopted in any committee of this House. There are sufficient provisions in the Standing Orders for evidence to be heard either in secret or in private so that any concerns about security or the identity of persons involved in the security apparatus or any other sensitive matter of national security can be adequately dealt with.

The fact that we did not have the opportunity to have those provisions used as they should have been during this process is lamentable. As David Parker says, that sort of process gives rise to what is no doubt unnecessary suspicion amongst the public that something is being done behind closed doors that ought to be being done with the disinfectant of sunlight instead. When we default to a private or a secret way of proceeding in the name of national security, we give rise to those fears and we feed them. We should not; we need not. There are, as I say, procedures in place to allow those matters to be sufficiently taken care of. Regard should have been given to them in this circumstance, and it was not.

Everybody on this side of the House concedes that the subject matter of this legislation is important. It involves a balancing act between the powers of the security agency to protect New Zealand interests on the one hand with the rights, particularly the human rights and the privacy interests, of those whom the service investigates and whom it protects. It is certainly obvious that the principal Act, given that it dates back to 1969—it is 42 years old—was enacted long before the advent of cellphones, the internet, portable devices, and social networking. So clearly there is a need to bring this sort of legislation constantly up to date to take account of modern technology.

It is obviously also important to have regard to the security environment in which we live. Another matter of regret I have is that it was thought necessary to rush through this legislation in time for the Rugby World Cup. We should not do that sort of thing. This sort of legislation is too important to make it contingent on passage by a particular date because of a particular event. It should contain enduring principles that represent getting that balance that I have just referred to right rather than saying we have to get this legislation through before the Rugby World Cup. That is just not appropriate. It is not a principled way to legislate on security matters.

The other thing that is appropriate to recall is that we are now 10 years on from the tragic events of 9/11. It is fair to say that, as a result of 10 years having passed, we can be more dispassionate about threats on the one hand and the civil liberties we are prepared to give up as a society on the other, in order to protect ourselves from those threats. Most people would acknowledge that in the shadow of those tragic events we were all much too willing to give up the civil liberties side of the ledger and not have proper regard to the balancing exercise that ought to have been taken. It is appropriate to take time after those sorts of events to think about the balance, and I wish there had been more time and a more open process by which that could have occurred in this situation.

The most important change to the bill that I want to commend to the House, which was made during the committee process and was one that I have already said I do not think was a perfect or ideal one, was the insertion of a series of working principles in the legislation by which the work of the Security Intelligence Service should be carried out. It is significant that those principles have been inserted and that they were inserted at the behest of the human rights watchdog in New Zealand, the Human Rights Commission. That is something to be pleased about.

The bill updates existing powers. For that reason it will receive support from members on this side. But it should be remembered that those powers are extensive. There is some oversight, as we have heard. There is the Intelligence and Security Committee itself; there is the requirement that warrants for domestic interception be granted jointly by the Prime Minister and the Commissioner of Security Warrants. We have had two very fine retired High Court judges serve in that capacity—Justice Neazor and Justice Jeffries. We should always be asking whether we have sufficient oversight. We have a combined agency here responsible for both domestic and foreign security matters. In Australia the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is responsible only for the domestic side, and it is supervised by the Attorney-General in a nod to an attempt to get better oversight and better control by the rule of law into the process. We should clearly be thinking at all times about that balance to which I referred: our security on the one hand and our rights on the other. We should always be asking whether we get that balance right. For the reasons I have referred to, I am concerned that in this process we have not. We should always be mindful of the need to keep the principles by which we oversee security legislation relevant, not determine them by self-imposed deadlines relating to upcoming events. That is the wrong way to do it and I hope we have not legislated in haste here in order to regret at leisure.