When voters at next month's general election are confronted with a referendum on MMP, they might remember a bill passed in the last gasp of the Parliament that rises today. The Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill is as serious, and its passage is as hasty, as its name suggests. It involves police powers and citizens' privacy and it would have passed too easily if National had been governing alone.
Its partners, Act, United Future and the Maori Party, hesitated to grant police retrospective authority for the use of hidden cameras to gain evidence of criminal activity. Like the Greens, the smaller parties in the Government were not persuaded that the Supreme Court's ruling in the Urewera case required such drastic correction, and they were right.
The court had ruled that search warrants did not permit the police to use video surveillance on Tuhoe-owned land but the judges allowed the evidence to be used against four of the accused because they considered a charge the defendants faced was sufficiently serious to justify the surveillance.
If that sounds like a fine distinction, it is the sort of balance that often needs to be struck when the interests of law enforcement and civil liberties collide. Most people naturally side with law enforcement, as National did. The Prime Minister declared that unless the court's ruling was quickly over-ruled by legislation, numerous police investigations and prosecutions were in jeopardy and "some very, very serious criminals could go free".
In fact, the ruling left intact the law that permits judges to admit video evidence if the charges are serious enough. Nobody has argued that the law as it stands is satisfactory. The police deserve to know what the law permits them to do at the outset of an investigation, not depend on the discretion of a judge at the end. But clearer law must also make fair provision for the citizen's rights of privacy, freedom and dignity.
