Media Release: Shut out of Oral Submissions on Search and Surveillance Bill
From: Campaign to Stop the Search and Surveillance Bill
Date: 22 September 2010

‘The Justice and Electoral Select Committee is due to being hearing oral submissions on the contentious Search and Surveillance Bill starting Thursday, 23 September at 10:45. The Committee has shut out some people who asked to give oral submissions and instead has hand-picked a few organisations who they want to hear from,’ said Search and Surveillance Campaign member Valerie Morse

‘I have been personally subjected to illegal Police surveillance and I wish to address those matters to the Committee specifically and in person. I am deeply concerned that the Committee seeks to deny myself and others an opportunity to speak. The selective submission process illustrates that they are not interested in hearing from people who have actually found themselves under unlawful surveillance by the state. Further, they are clearly unwilling to face the reality that the police regularly abuse the powers that they currently have, and they are now preparing to give them vast new powers of search and surveillance including video surveillance inside people’s homes, warrantless searches and production orders.’

‘Chester Borrows, select committee chairman, admitted at a public meeting that there had been no attempt to consult the public about the state’s powers of search and surveillance before the law was drafted – despite a lengthy project by the Law Commission. Rather, the 70 state agencies referenced in the Bill were consulted and a new law giving them vast new powers was written up.’

‘The Campaign to Stop the Search and Surveillance Bill has done far more to educate the public about both current powers and proposed new ones than the Law Commission or Select Committee ever bothered to do. The revised draft of the Bill now before the Committee contains only minor, cosmetic changes from the original, to which there was strenuous objection. It is outrageous that the only opportunity that people have to give input into the drastic erosion of basic freedoms comes at the very end of that process – and now we are even being short-changed on that!’

‘The Campaign to Stop the Search and Surveillance Bill encourages people to join with other concerned New Zealanders on the national day of action against the Bill on Saturday, 9 October. If the parliamentarians aren’t going to listen to the people, the only means we have left is to take action on the streets to stop this draconian bill.’

ENDS

www.stopthebillnow.blogspot.com

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