The House will already know that the Labour Party supports sending the Search and Surveillance Bill to a select committee for public submissions. Perhaps what I should do is foreshadow an area where the party is quite keen to see discussion of some potential amendments. The first amendment that we feel it would be in order for consideration is around whether the bill should have a sunset clause stating a time by which a review of its provisions should be conducted by an independent agency. Given that there is a degree of novelty around the powers that are to be enacted by the legislation and given that we are in this bill standardising what are, after all, intrusive powers of the State, it does seem to be a useful exercise for this House to put in place that sort of safeguard so that we can have a look at how the unified search and surveillance powers have been carried out in practice by the police and other enforcement agencies after a reasonable period of time. It does seem appropriate during the bill’s first reading to foreshadow the desirability, in our view, of that exercise.

As other speakers have noted, this legislation began life out of a Law Commission report in 2007. The present bill has had an interesting history. It is a new bill, rather than the original legislation, which was based on the Law Commission report and was introduced by the previous Government. That legislation, the Search and Surveillance Powers Bill, was withdrawn. Notwithstanding the fact that it was reinstated in the forty-ninth Parliament, it was discharged on 2 July and replaced with the current measure under the name of the Minister of Justice, Simon Power.

My colleague Lianne Dalziel has spoken a bit about the differences, at least on our initial analysis, that appear to exist between the Labour Government’s bill and the present bill. As far as I can see, the major differences relate to the ability to procure warrants electronically. That seems to be a relatively sensible provision, given the availability of technology these days. There is a proposal to extend the powers of the bill to a whole host of administrative provisions: the Biosecurity Act, the Commodity Levies Act, the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act, the Driftnet Prohibition Act, the Fisheries Act, the Health and Safety in Employment Act, the Major Events Management Act, the Meat Board Act, the Pork Industry Board Act, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act, the Social Security Act, and the Tax Administration Act. It would be, I think, useful to have a good look at whether it is justifiable to extend the uniform provisions of this legislation to that host of administrative provisions, and we would expect that to occur during the select committee process.

I want to say a couple of general words about measures that originated as Law Commission recommendations. When I was a new member of Parliament, 2 or 3 years ago a conference about law reform in general was held in the Legislative Council Chamber. One of the very interesting presentations came from, as he now is, retired Justice Kirby of the High Court of Australia; at that point he was a sitting member of the court. He started his judicial career as the inaugural president of the Australian Law Reform Commission, so he does know a bit about law reform. One of the phenomena he commented on at that conference was the propensity for reports of law reform commissions to gather dust on the shelves when legislatures such as ours and those of the states of Australia, the Commonwealth, and the territories turned their minds to more exciting and populist ventures, as we are sometimes wont to do.

It is true that at that time there was a bit of a backlog of reports from the Law Reform Commission awaiting action, and I think that one of the good things that came out of that conference was that the Government of the day recognised that that was not a desirable state of affairs. So it searched for some mechanism by which to make sure that the very good work of the Law Commission—there is no doubt, I think, in the minds of anyone in this House that it is an excellent body that produces very useful and desirable work—is not ignored by Parliament. It was announced some months after the conference that a default procedure, effectively, would be incorporated into the Cabinet Manual whereby when the commission produced a report, unless there was some violent objection to the recommendations of the report by the Minister responsible for the area that the report touched on, drafting instructions based on the report would be issued and followed in the event that legislation was not already proposed as an appendix to the report, and that would go through the official process and effectively come to the House as legislation. I am paraphrasing the terms of the Cabinet Manual.

Given that this afternoon we have debated the first reading of the Limitation Bill and we are now concerned with the Search and Surveillance Bill, and I see that there are other measures originating from the Law Commission on the Order Paper, it would be useful, I think, for the House to learn in a formal sense from the Attorney-General, the Leader of the House, or some other responsible Minister whether that is still the procedure that is followed by the current Government, because it does seem to be a very sensible procedure, and it is one that worked well under the previous administration. My friend David Parker referred in his speech on the Limitation Bill to the very good progress that was made in the last triennium on getting Law Commission bills through the process. That progress does owe a lot to the fact that the Cabinet Manual was reformed in the way I have described. It would be useful to know whether, as I say, that procedure still exists. It would also be useful, I think, for the House to hear why on this occasion it was thought that rather than simply amending the bill introduced by the previous Government, and heavily based on the Law Commission report, it was thought necessary to withdraw the legislation and then reintroduce the bill that we are currently debating, given that, as I have said, the particular differences, at least on the analysis we have been able to conduct on a preliminary basis, do not seem to be terribly significant.

The Labour Party supports the referral of the Search and Surveillance Bill to a select committee, as it normally supports bills based on Law Commission work. The Labour Party is keen to see some sort of review mechanism built into the legislation so that we can have a mechanism by which Parliament can have a look at whether this venture has been successful after a period of time. Subject to those comments, I commend the legislation to the House.