Issues and Events

The new government’s laws

The dominant political news in New Zealand this year has been the new government bringing in a new policy agenda.

From a civil liberties point of view a lot of the “tough on crime” legislation has been particularly disappointing. The Gangs Legislation Amendment Bill was shocking for the way it arbitrarily defined a sub-group of New Zealanders and significantly limited their rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of peaceful assembly. Most importantly this wasn’t a punishment for people who had broken the law, rather they lost their rights because of what we fear they might do.

Related to this was a similar type of measure in the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Amendment Bill, which creates a class of people who can be searched at any time and without cause by police. Even worse, this rights-free zone travels with them allowing police to search any vehicle or property that they enter.

The law-making process has also been problematic. We’ve always taken issue with governments using urgency and their dominance of select committees to ram legislation through without significant consultation. A new and concerning trend in this government is the practice of making significant changes to a bill after it’s been through the select committee process, with examples of both the gang patch bill and the three strikes bill. These bills were not urgent and there was no good reason for abuse of the normal legislative process.

We continue to put forward an alternative rights-respecting view in our submissions, and so do many other groups and individuals, but it seems that this government isn’t listening.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi

We’ve grappled with what it means to support civil liberties while also acknowledging the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as New Zealand’s founding document. In the nearly fifty years since the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act in 1975 a consensus has been evolving, supported by the major political parties, of how to integrate New Zealand’s colonially inspired governing arrangements with Te Ao Māori. 

However, it seems that this government wants to take a sharp turn away from this consensus, removing references to the Treaty from law and undoing other initiatives such as the Māori health authority. We already live in a society where the civil liberties of Māori are weakened by over-policing and a racially biased justice system, and worry about what the direction of these changes might mean for both civil liberties and New Zealand’s unwritten constitution.

Hate speech laws and content regulation stalled

Two of the biggest potential threats to freedom of expression in New Zealand in recent years have been the review of our hate speech laws and content regulation (aka censorship). While neither was necessarily bad, both had potential to go very badly wrong and unreasonably limit our rights. With the hate speech review kicked off to the Law Commission and the content regulation review cancelled it seems they are now dead in the water.

Facial recognition technology

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner continues to work on the Biometric Code in an attempt to limit the harms from the widespread deployment of facial recognition technology (FRT) and other forms of remote biometric identification (RBI). There’s been a big change in the direction of policy with the draft Code allowing for widespread deployment of facial recognition technology, something which we have publicly opposed in this opinion piece. We expect to be doing a lot more work on this over the next year.

Open government

It seems to me that this government is showing even less interest in the Open Government Partnership than the last one. What should be an opportunity to push for better and more open government is being ignored. I would not be surprised to see the government abandon it completely with nothing to replace it.

At the same time we see a continued use of secrecy clauses in bills, as exemplified by the Fast Track Approvals Act which imposes an unprecedented level of secrecy on government decision making, expressly to stop public participation and protest. This both ousts the Official Information Act and runs contrary to New Zealand’s commitment to open government.

International

I continue to watch the political trends overseas with concern. It seems that authoritarianism and fascism are on the rise, with war and the oppression of civilian populations quick to follow. The slide of the USA into demagoguery and division shows that even countries with a historically strong commitment to democracy and the rule of law aren’t safe.

It’s something we’d hate to see in New Zealand. This possibility is exactly one of the reasons why we push back against the excesses of the state. Not only is government power against the individual prone to being misused, but its use reinforces the attitude that force is the answer to everything. Civil liberties and the protections of the NZ Bill of Rights Act are vital to maintaining a proper balance of power between the state and the people.

In memoriam

In 2024 we sadly said farewell to Keith Locke and Douglas Ewen. Both contributed directly to the NZ Council for Civil Liberties over the years as well as making significant contributions on their own. They will be missed.

Victoria University of Wellington Law School Essay prize

We were delighted to announce that the winner of the NZ Council for Civil Liberties essay prize for 2023 was fifth-year law student Anna Smart for her research paper: Physical Privacy In Prison: Why Dignity Is an Inalienable Right and How the Intrusion Tort Can Protect It.

Anna was kind enough to present a webinar explaining and discussing her work. This was recorded and you can watch it here.

We look forward to seeing this year’s entrants soon.

Council activities

Some of the activities the Council was involved in this year include:

• Contributing to the Aotearoa Justice Watch report about people’s negative experiences of prisons and police. We also met separately with Mark Mitchell, the Minister of Corrections/Police, and with members of the Justice Select Committee to discuss the report. Thanks to our partners Amnesty International, JustSpeak, and PAPA for all of their efforts.
• We talked to the Humanist Society of New Zealand about what we do (and possibly tried to recruit them).
• We’re continuing to engage with Statistics NZ about both the future of the census and the inherent privacy problems with the IDI (integrated data infrastructure).
• We’ve appeared in the media discussing a wide range of topics over the year.
• Advising people who are having problems with unfair government actions. In most cases this means referring them to the appropriate organisation for help, others are helped by listening to them. A few are obviously unwell and we advise them to speak to their doctor.

Webinars

We have hosted three webinars this year as part of our outreach to people interested in civil liberties topics.

The first was for the VUW Law School essay prize as mentioned above. The other two were in collaboration with the NZ Police Technical Assurance team – the people responsible for helping the Police make ethical and legal decisions around using new technology for policing. We’ve always said that the NZ Police need to do a better job of this and the establishment of this team is a good start.

• Watch the Police and FRT (facial recognition technology) webinar.
• Watch the Police and ANPR (automated number plate recognition) webinar.

We’re very happy with the success of these webinars and intend to continue with more next year. Please feel free to make suggestions of topics you’d like to hear about and people you’d like to hear from.

Submissions

We made numerous submissions on the following bills and other matters (all submissions are available on our website):

• We followed up our written submission on the Ram Raids Bill with an oral submission. We noted that the Attorney-General’s section 7 report had already said that the Bill could not be justified in a free and democratic society. We noted that the Bill transgresses against the rights of children, freedom of expression, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
• We noted the very obvious problems with the Firearms Prohibition Orders Legislation Amendment Bill. It is unacceptable to create an underclass of people who can be searched by the police at any time without need for a reason.
• The civil liberties hits kept coming with the Gangs Legislation Amendment Bill, which attacks freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of peaceful assembly. Like the FPOLA, it continues the policy of creating a sub-class of New Zealanders who enjoy fewer freedoms than everyone else, not because of what they have done, but because of what we fear they might do. We spoke strongly against it.
• It appears that we were one of many submitters who were concerned at the latest changes to the Draft Voluntary Code of Conduct for Lobbyists. It seems ludicrous that the Code has been extended to catch everyone who “aims to influence government policy, process, or law”. Ironically it may be an excellent example of how lobbyists corrupt the lawmaking process.
• We pointed out that the Ministry of Justice’s limited consultation process concerning OIA-ousting clauses in legislation is deeply problematic and totally contrary to the principles of open government that led to the work in the first place!
• Many organisations are concerned about issues with the Fast Track Approvals Bill and we limited our submission to the issues of public participation in decision making and open government. We said that the process should be subject to the Ombudsman Act and the Official Information Act, and in our oral submission we went further and suggested that, to avoid accusations of cronyism and corruption, all fast track applications and documentation should be published proactively.
• Our very short submission on the Restoring Citizenship Removed by Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill said that we opposed the original law in 1982, and therefore supported the undoing of it.
• We opposed the Local Government (Electoral Legislation and Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Bill as a cynical and anti-democratic waste of time, while also pointing out that it was being rushed through even though there was no urgency.
• We critiqued Statistics NZ’s rather odd consultation on the Future Census which seemed to have already made all the decisions before the consultation paper was even written. It seems that cost is driving the decision towards the use of admin data over a census, regardless of the quality of the results.
• We noted that the government’s last minute changes to the Gangs Legislation Amendment Bill (see our submission) has taken a bad law and made it even worse, by banning people accused of being gang members from even having a patch inside their house. It seems that this is merely an excuse to give the police the power to search houses even when they have no reason or warrant.
• We strongly opposed the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Act, where even the people introducing the measures admit that roadside drug testing is deeply flawed and there is no way to measure impairment as different from consumption. We also noted freedom of information concerns in how damning evidence in the Regulatory Impact Statement was redacted for no good reason.
• We did a brief submission to the Law Commission’s Ia Tanagta review, supporting adding explicit protection for transgender and non-binary people to the Human Rights Act. 
• While not keen on preventive detention we reluctantly agree that in some cases it may be necessary, and made a number of recommendations to the Law Commission’s Here Ora paper. 
• We opposed the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill as a threat to justice by removing the discretion that judges have over sentencing, as well as expressing concern that the new aggravating circumstance of filming might also catch protest and political civil disobedience. 
• Finally we made a submission to the Ministry of Justice about their proposal to severely limit access to jury trials by pushing out the qualifying sentence to three, five or even seven years! It was only in 2013 that it was raised from three months to two years, and this proposal seems like another step on the way to extinguishing the right completely.

Internal Council matters

Exec Committee renewal

The Exec Committee is the core of the Council’s efforts. We’ve been working well together meeting every month to discuss events and make plans. However it seems likely that one or two members will not be standing for re-election so I’d like to ask you to consider whether it’s time for you to step up to defend civil liberties in New Zealand.

You’ll be committing to one online meeting per month, plus you’ll be given opportunities to work on submissions, articles, webinars, events, and interacting with other organisations. We all had to start somewhere and are happy to help get others up to speed. Email Thomas at thomas@nzccl.org.nz or message/call on 021-805040 to have a chat.

Communications

Our website at nzccl.org.nz is still the core of our communications efforts, with all of our material published there. We now maintain a social media presence on Mastodon at @civillibertynz@mastodon.social and on Bluesky at @nzccl.org.nz We have also established a presence on LinkedIn.

We hope you have found our quarterly email newsletters interesting. Feel free to share the sign-up link with friends!

We are also working on some plans for our website and hope to announce a useful new service early next year.

Plans for the future

It will be interesting to see what 2025 brings, with international events possibly being far more interesting than any of us will appreciate.

We’ll continue to focus on advances in digital surveillance. We’re entering a time where there are no technical limits on surveillance, so we have to choose between living in a panopticon or imposing limits through regulation.

Last year we mentioned the rise of artificial intelligence and we already see the government taking first steps to incorporate the technology into government processes. There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong and we’re concerned that there isn’t any significant technology watchdog to hold the government to account.

Maybe we’ll even finally get a new Ombudsman in 2025!

We will continue with the work we have been doing. However there is always room for improvement and, of course, we could always do with more help. Please contact me at thomas@nzccl.org.nz if you can contribute on one or more of our issues. 

Regards, 

Thomas Beagle 

Chairperson, NZ Council for Civil Liberties