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Space, spies, stalking, and extra sittings

Space, spies, stalking, and extra sittings

RNZ News2 days ago
National MP Judith Collins speaking during the initial Privileges Committee debate regarding the Te Pāti Māori protest haka.
Photo:
VNP/Phil Smith
The House took urgency on Tuesday evening which extended Tuesday's sitting until lunchtime Wednesday, then it returned on Thursday morning - that time as an extended sitting.
As a result, most select committees are not meeting this week. Some have had to cancel their plans or squeeze some work in at lunchtime. With a few exceptions - and excepting bills that committees are given special permission to consider outside normal rules - Select Committees and the House cannot sit at the same time.
Spare a thought for submitters and those who schedule them, who have had their plans upended again by urgency. The opposition did ask the Leader of the House last Thursday whether there would be urgency this week but was told to "wait and see". Last minute reveals of urgency are not unusual. Extended sittings (like Thursday morning) are signposted a week or two in advance, but usually little warning is given for urgency.
Tuesday's urgency was aimed at two bills - one relating to space and the other about international crime cooperation.
The Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Amendment Bill isn't so much about space as it is about the ground bases for satellites or other extra-terrestrial objects. The Minister for Space, Judith Collins was the bill's sponsor.
"This bill introduces a new authorisation regime for ground-based space infrastructure. Until now, these activities have not been subject to a dedicated regulatory framework."
The reason for the bill, revealed in the second reading debate, upped the interest.
"During the past five years, there have been several deceptive efforts by foreign actors to establish and/or use ground-based space infrastructure in New Zealand to harm our national security. They have deliberately disguised their affiliations to foreign militaries and misrepresented their intentions. To date, these risks have been managed through non-regulatory measures, including relying on the goodwill of ground-based infrastructure operators. These measures are no longer enough."
That sounds like the pitch for a thriller just begging to be written.
This was a bill that the parties largely agreed on. They even agreed that urgency was reasonable, but opposition speakers complained about the push-push pace of urgency after the Committee Stage, as governing-party MPs worked to abbreviate what Labour's Rachel Brooking called "very civil, thoughtful debates."
The pace really started to drag once the Budapest Convention and Related Matters Legislation Amendment Bill was the focus.
Its sponsor, Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith said the bill "aligns New Zealand's laws with the requirements of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, also known as the Budapest Convention. The Budapest Convention is the first binding international treaty on cyber-crime, and it aligns members' national laws relating to computer-related offences, improves investigative techniques, and streamlines evidence sharing."
Labour supported the bill but played hardball in the Committee Stage, concerned about the possibility of the convention leading to New Zealand accidentally helping countries that don't share our values control their citizens. Duncan Webb put it like this.
"We need to be vigilant that we are not being unwittingly used to further either political ends or to allow a foreign state to pursue a proceeding against something that might be a crime in a foreign nation, but it certainly isn't a crime in New Zealand and shouldn't be something for which criminal sanction follows."
The opposition made the Committee Stage of the Budapest bill last through most of the rest of Wednesday. The government's original plan was to pass it through all remaining stages, but late on Wednesday evening, they abandoned it after the Committee Stage and moved on to their other priorities. The Budapest Convention Bill was left with just a third reading to complete.
Those were not the only interesting bills under discussion this week. Three other bills are of particular interest, relating to Health, Secondary Legislation, and Stalking.
Tuesday saw the first reading of the Healthy Futures (Pae Ora) Amendment Bill which will now be considered by the Health Select Committee. Among its measures, that bill enacts health targets, and also alters or removes Māori consultation and obligations from the health administration. The Minister of Health, Simeon Brown described his bill succinctly.
"This bill is about cutting through bureaucracy, restoring accountability, and most importantly, putting patients first."
Opposition MPs had numerous gripes including this one from Dr. Tracey McLellan, regarding bringing Health New Zealand under the public service obligation for staff neutrality. "That is a chilling thing to do. Frontline health workers who have a professional obligation, an ethical and a legal obligation to call out things that they see in their professional practice. It is not political, it is professional, and they should not, in any way, shape, or form, have this hanging over them, this concept of-the misuse of-public service neutrality."
Also on Tuesday, the Legislation Amendment Bill had a first reading and now heads to the Justice Committee for public feedback. The Legislation Amendment Bill has been in development for a few years, and among its aims are making secondary legislation (e.g. regulations) more easily accessible and more likely to be pruned once obsolete. Secondary legislation includes all of the various kinds of laws that don't come directly from a piece of legislation but from power that legislation delegates to ministers, ministries, agencies, councils etc. There is much more secondary legislation than primary legislation but it isn't as easy to search or access. Primary legislation is all stored on a legislation website managed by the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO); currently secondary legislation is not.
In debate, Labour's Camilla Belich observed that, "the main big change will be the single point of access that it will allow to secondary legislation. The point of the work that we do is to try and make sure that when either primary legislation or secondary legislation has an impact on people's lives, they have access to that. It shouldn't be something which is hidden away and it shouldn't be something which is difficult to find."
Don't confuse the Legislation Amendment Bill with ACT's Regulatory Standards Bill which is also going through parliament and which appears to be trying to do something rather different. The Regulatory Standards Bill has influenced the shape of the Legislation Amendment Bill though, which Opposition MPs were unhappy with in debate, despite supporting the wider effort.
The Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Bill had its second reading late on Wednesday. It creates a new offence specific to stalking and harassment and the myriad forms that these can take. It includes indirect harassment like undermining reputation, opportunities or relationships. The bill itself is a fascinating read as an example of how much cleverness is required to effectively draft law for crime that is, by definition, quite nebulous. Policy staff at Justice and legal drafters at PCO may have taken to heart the idiom 'to catch a criminal, you have to think like one'.
National minister Erica Stanford outlined changes made to the bill as a result of public feedback to the Select Committee.
"To be convicted of the new offence, the prosecution will need to prove the person engaged in a pattern of behaviour towards their victim. The committee recommended a broader definition for the pattern of behaviour. The offence will now require two specified acts within two years, rather than three specified acts within one year. This broadens the pattern of behaviour by capturing fewer acts across a longer time frame. I agree that this change will better address strategies such as anniversary-based stalking..."
"A further recommendation made by the committee was to add doxing to the list of "specified act". Doxing is the publication of personal information such as addresses or contact details, including whether a stalker claims to be their victim. It encourages third parties to contact, threaten, and intimidate the victim…"
"The committee also added two further important amendments to the bill. Firstly, to allow the courts to order the destruction of intimate visual recordings...secondly, to allow a court to make restraining [orders], firearm prohibition [orders], and Harmful Digital Communications Act orders, where a defendant is discharged without convictions."
There are other bills of note on the Order Paper that the government would have hoped to progress, but progress this week has been slow. Opposition MPs have taken their time working through bills in the committee of the whole House, whether they support them or not. This will likely annoy the government, but thoroughly testing bills is the job of all MPs in the House.
That sluggish pace meant the second reading of the Parliament Bill also slipped down the Order Paper (along with the third reading of the Budapest Convention Bill).
One bill the House may reach is worth noting. The Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill would be a second espionage-related bill for the week. This one hopes to plug gaps in the law around things like treason, espionage and even incitement to mutiny.
*RNZ's The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament's Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.
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Explainer - The public likes to have their say. Tens of thousands of public submissions come in every year to bills before Parliament and to local government entities. With large-scale campaigns and website submission forms, the ability to speak out is easier than ever - but that's causing a problem on the other end of the system, where planners and politicians can struggle to keep up. Artificial intelligence has increasingly been drafted to go over public submissions. Some have applauded the technology's ability to process data quicker than humans, while others fear the human touch may be getting lost in the shuffle. What exactly does AI processing of public submissions mean, how does it work, and are everyone's views getting a fair shake in the process? Here's a breakdown of it all. First, how do public submissions work? It's a chance for people to get their voice heard in local and national government. People can make submissions to both their local councils and to Parliament. 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"If that is the sorts of volumes we're going to see on more and more bills, the days of human beings being able to deal with them in a sort of reasonable time will be past." When submissions come to Parliament, staff of the Office of the Clerk first process them to make sure they are relevant to the bill and not defamatory or insulting before they go on to select committees. Select committees then process and consider feedback before making possible changes to a bill ahead of a final vote on it. "It's great that the public want to engage with Parliament and see the value in making their thoughts known even in such volumes," Wilson said. "I think people understand that no individual MP could read 300,000 submissions. We can't create more time for MPs to read them." 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The Office of the Clerk does not use AI in processing submissions, but it's up to the individual committee overseeing the bill to decide whether to do so when the bills come to their end, Wilson said. For instance, it's been used along the way for the Regulatory Standards Bill. "Committees make their own individual decisions; they don't have any central guidelines around it at the moment." Wilson said the Office of the Clerk is looking at how it might use AI in the future, but is being cautious and "not rushing into it". "I still think ultimately we need to have human decision makers but AI has capacity to do things more quickly than people can - such as flagging submissions that are irrelevant or defamatory. Most submissions are absolutely fine." AI processing has been taken up by local councils, too. In Nelson, the city council worked with local firm the AI Factory to process submissions to their long term plan, Group Manager for Strategy and Communications Nicky McDonald said. "We used the tool to analyse views on issues, including numbers for/against, and to provide us with a summary of views which we then used when writing the first draft of our deliberations report to council. "This report went through multiple iterations as we edited it, but AI was able to give us a starting point which we then developed into a final draft." Xinyu Fu, a senior lecturer in environmental planning at the University of Waikato, organised a pilot project with Hamilton City Council analysing thousands of public submissions on planning proposals. "A lot of them are facing stresses on analysing public submissions," he said of local planners. "Planners spend a lot of time going through those public submissions and those are very laborious work." What exactly are they using AI to do? Prompts - instructions, questions and information put into generative AI - are used to direct it. 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"Our approach was carefully designed to reflect all submissions in the final analysis, noting there were many similar points made across most of the submissions," the ministry's deputy chief executive Andrew Royle told Newsroom. How much human scrutiny is applied to the process? Can the AI avoid a bias? "As a rule of thumb, having humans in the loop will be the best practice - humans in charge and AI as a co-pilot," Fu said. "The risk is very high if we completely rely on AI to do the work. To put simply, such biases are generally embedded in our institutions as well as the information humans generated, and these biases are then input into the model to train. Then they become inherent to the model. Because AI systems are black boxes, it is uncertain and unclear about the nature and degree of these biases." Nelson Council's McDonald said they were transparent about how they were using AI. "Every submission form included a statement saying we'd be trialling AI to help speed up submission processing and reduce the resource burden on staff. "We intentionally ensured there was always a (sceptical!) human in the loop sense checking the tool's outputs. Staff (and elected members) read every submission and we had processes to check AI responses." Fu said there are differences in how AI approaches looking at thousands of public submissions. "AI is really good at consistency (if instructed properly) whereas humans are likely to miss things due to fatigue, boredom, or bias towards particular viewpoints (humans are biased too). "AI can do things much faster than humans, and AI's work can be more transparent if designed well because you can ask AI to document its processes and responses for later review and replication. On the downside, humans excel in knowing about the contexts, while AI knows little about the local contexts and backgrounds." Is there a risk that people's voices aren't being heard? "I absolutely think that a regular practice of AI analysis of submissions risks undermining people's confidence in the democratic process and thus the legitimacy of government," Victoria University's Clark said. He said there was a need for more options for people to consult on legislation. He noted in the case of the Regulatory Standards Bill, the pre-legislative consultation was conducted mostly over the holiday period from mid-November to mid-January. This "leads to people seeing the Select Committee stage as their only real chance to comment, incentivising mass submissions expressing simple opposition or support", Clark said. "Giving people a chance to be heard throughout the process, not just at Select Committee, could help deal with the problem. There is a reason the legislative process is generally slow and deliberate, and derailing that good, democratic process has consequences. In my opinion the glut of submissions at the Select Committee stage is one of them." Labour MP Duncan Webb spoke out about the government's use of AI on the Regulatory Standards Bill submissions, writing on social media site BlueSky that it "turns out democracy under this government is real people making submissions and computers reading them". When contacted by RNZ, Webb said he is not opposed to the use of AI, but concerned about how it is used in the democratic process. "New Zealanders who take the time to share their views deserve more than a computer reading their submission. "AI can help with sorting large volumes of submissions, but it can't replace the value of reading someone's views, like the handwritten letter from an 85-year-old or a bundle of colourful drawings from school kids. These submissions often reflect deeply held experiences and emotions, and politicians need to read them." However, Fu said that in local government planning the use of AI in analysis could give staff more time to work with local and underrepresented communities. "Planning has become very reactive," he said. "If we can use AI planners then planners can actually do better work because otherwise they're overwhelmed." A lot of the submissions made on local planning tend to be by developers, Fu said. He said planners could use the time to reach out to communities whose voices aren't heard as often in public submissions, including Māori. What about privacy? When it comes to privacy, public submissions are already just that - public. All submissions sent to select committees become public and are posted on Parliament's website and become part of the permanent parliamentary record - they can only be removed in exceptional circumstances by the Clerk of the House. "They know their submission will become public," Wilson said of submissions. "Our staff are going to read it, officials will read it." "The main privacy concern is about people's contact details - they are always separated from submissions now." Contact information is removed from public submissions before they are posted publicly but Wilson said privacy is one reason to be cautious of the use of AI in analysing them. "We want to make sure we've got a key set of principles and some business rules in place," Wilson said. The government unveiled its first national AI strategy earlier this month mostly aimed at economic growth, "unlocking innovation, productivity, and smarter decision-making across New Zealand" and responsible AI guidance for businesses "to overcome concerns about ethics and complexity." In Nelson, McDonald said they also considered privacy issues. "The submissions, numbering 1505, were redacted of all personal data before they were processed to ensure there were no privacy issues - this is something we would do anyway, before all submissions are uploaded to the Council website for public view." Where should AI not be used? Most agree AI should never be making decisions on policy, however. "What I don't think I can do - and I wouldn't trust it to do anyway - is make judgements," Wilson said. "Nobody's going to predict what's going to happen next month in the AI space because it's evolving so rapidly," Fu said, noting that hyperbole over AI is everywhere at the moment. "We're still in that hype space ... I think we need to start thinking about the responsible use." And for some, there's still a question as to whether the technological advances of AI might be leaving something behind. "In short, democracy takes money and time," Clark said. "Trying to avoid the necessary costs of democratic infrastructure has consequences, and while I understand why the hard-working people in our underfunded and rushed systems might see AI as helpful in these circumstances, in my opinion it will not solve the underlying issue and could unintentionally undermine people's faith in a democracy that cares about their voices."

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