By Lloyd Burr
The Labour Party says it will back the Government’s retrospective surveillance legislation to suspend a Supreme Court decision but only if it is referred to a select committee and not passed under urgency.
Prime Minister John Key announced yesterday that “almost all use of covert video surveillance by the police is rendered unlawful” after the Supreme Court ruled that evidence from secret video surveillance on Maori land in the Ureweras was illegally obtained.
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The ruling meant police dropped charges against 13 of the 17 people accused from the raids on supposed ‘military training camps’ in 2007.
The court did allow the illegally obtained evidence to be used for the remaining four defendants because their charges were serious enough.
National will take a piece of legislation to Parliament next week that temporarily suspends the decision and reinstates secret filming by the police.
Labour leader Phil Goff says his party supports the idea of the legislation but refused to support National’s proposal because they haven’t been given a copy.
“We haven’t seen the law yet, we haven’t seen the bill and I’m not going to support anything that I haven’t seen,” he says.
“We know the law has to be fixed and we believe the law should be fixed. We are not going to let criminals out of jail, we are not going to have people having big compensation cases because the law isn’t as it should have been.
“But I want to do it right and you are not going to do it right if you rush something through without evidence yet that it needs to be rushed through and without any select committee process.
“The bottom line is that it must go through a select committee process,” Mr Goff says, “I have seen too much urgency in this House where Parliament rushes stuff through, doesn’t think it through, creates more problems than it solves so let’s do it as properly as we can”.
Mr Goff says he wants consultation of the legislation from experts including the law commission, the law society and “other players in this game”.
He says if National thought the legislation was so urgent, they should have given all the parties a copy of it already.
“We need to have all of the information that the Government has if they have any expectation at all that we will support this legislation.
“We will make a decision based on the evidence we see and the acceptability of the legislation… I’m not going to speculate and comment on something I haven’t yet seen,” he says.
“With a proper warrant process, so there is no abuse of powers, there should be the power of video surveillance where a proper threshold is met. I have no problem with that, no New Zealanders would either,” Mr Goff says.
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