Lawyers, civil liberties groups and a Wellington high school student have lined up at the Justice Select Committee to warn that the government’s Policing Amendment Bill creates serious risks of New Zealanders’ personal data being scooped into United States databases under the Patriot Act, with very few protections against police over-reach at home.
The Bill, which would extend police powers to gather intelligence on people in public and private places and give officers expanded powers to close down public areas during actual or anticipated disorder, drew a long queue of critical submissions on Monday. Most submitters told MPs the legislation is too vague, sets almost no limits on what data police can collect or how long they can keep it, and risks undermining public trust in policing, especially among Māori, Pasifika and Muslim communities.
Lloyd Gallagher of the Law Association’s technology and law committee told the committee that the spread of artificial intelligence and the depth of New Zealand’s intelligence-sharing arrangements with overseas agencies meant data gathered here could quickly end up outside our jurisdiction. “With the collaboration that we’re now doing with the FBI etc internationally, we run a risk of that information no longer being able to be within our control,” Gallagher said, as reported by RNZ. “Once it’s in the US’s hands under the Patriot Act etc, there’s a massive amount of risk of that data being put into databases and miscommunicated.”
The government has argued the Bill simply restores police powers that existed before a 2020 to 2022 investigation found the routine photographing of members of the public, particularly rangatahi Māori, was unlawful. But submitters drawn from across the legal profession told MPs the Bill goes well beyond restoration and creates entirely new risks.
Nick Chisnall KC of the Law Society said the Bill’s intelligence-gathering powers would have a far greater impact on the privacy interests of the wider community than any other information-gathering power currently available to police. Thomas Beagle of the Council for Civil Liberties listed technologies he said police would deploy far more aggressively if the Bill passed, including facial recognition, automated number plate recognition, drones, live surveillance and gait analytics. “There are really no limits,” Beagle said, adding that there was no oversight and no appeal rights for people targeted. “The Bill embodies the view police will never misuse or abuse their powers.”
Not every submitter was opposed. Retail NZ, citing rising violence inside stores, supported the Bill. So did the Police Association, whose Steve Watt said the legislation gave officers clarity and the right tools. “Police will actually have a firmer idea of what and where they can do things as we progress into the future,” Watt said. He argued the second part of the Bill, which would introduce infringements and arrest powers when public places are declared off-limits, would help keep people safe.
That second part drew its own warnings. John Gregson of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists called for an across-government assessment of how the new closure and move-on powers would affect the most vulnerable people. Mentally ill people, he said, could be picked up by officers who interpreted their behaviour as resisting an order, then have their biometric data cemented into a state system that has no rules requiring it be deleted. The Bill as drafted, he said, contained “zero protections for tamariki”.
Prison reformer Cosmo Jeffrey told the committee a recent encounter on a quiet stretch of road in Twizel illustrated his concerns. A patrol officer who pulled him over for a routine check on his Ducati was, within seconds, talking about an event 25 years in his past. “Haven’t I done time, shouldn’t I be allowed to get on with my life,” Jeffrey said he had thought standing on the roadside. “And I’m just wary of collecting information on people that can be called up in seconds and used against them.”
Several submitters questioned why the Bill leaves so much undefined. The “functions” and “activities” police can rely on to justify taking photos and video, or to gather intelligence in a private place for a reason unrelated to why they entered it, are not spelt out. Craig Clarke of Community Law Centres Aotearoa called it “just bad law” to leave it up to junior officers to decide for themselves whether the intelligence they were gathering might come in useful one day.
Shaymaa Arif of the BIPOC Legal Collective Aotearoa warned that the Bill’s intelligence powers and its new closure powers, used together, would let police turn public gatherings into surveillance areas operating facial recognition. “The people that are most impacted and affected by this bill are not in this room with us,” Arif said. “They are Māori teenagers, they are children of colour, they are whānau at Friday prayers.” Anjum Rahman added that the over-securitisation of New Zealand mosques after the 15 March 2019 attack had not made worshippers any safer because a shooter could simply target people as they left, and the “powers in this Bill will make that worse” by also targeting political protesters.
A striking moment came when Year 13 Wellington High student Miro Thomas Ireson asked MPs to at least require police to use dedicated surveillance devices instead of their personal Apple iPhones, which he believed could expose New Zealanders’ data to United States cloud infrastructure and the Patriot Act.
The Bill was put together under time pressure and without public consultation. The advisory papers attached to it show that the Justice Ministry and Te Puni Kōkiri both suggested more safeguards, and that Māori were not consulted at all, despite the legislation being specifically designed to restore a practice that had disproportionately targeted them.
With less than five months until the 2026 general election, how parties vote on the Bill will form part of a broader picture voters are starting to assemble on civil liberties, policing and digital privacy. New Zealanders can compare party positions on policing, surveillance and Treaty matters using the Newswire voting tool.
What do you think? Should the Policing Amendment Bill be sent back to the drawing board with stronger limits on facial recognition, overseas data sharing and intelligence gathering, or is the government right that police need these powers restored to do their job? Leave a comment below and join the discussion.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply