CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : National will support the first reading of this bill. As the Minister said, it meets various obligations that are required before New Zealand can accede to the first and second protocols to the 1954 Hague convention, and, as the Minister said, we ratified the convention on 24 July 2008.
The convention was adopted in the wake of massive destruction of cultural heritage in World War II. It is the first international treaty that focuses exclusively on protection of cultural heritage in the event of armed conflict. As can be seen by the bill, the convention covers not only movable but also immovable property, and this includes monuments of architecture, art, or history, archaeological sites, works of art, manuscripts, books, and other objects of artistic, historical, or architectural interest, as well as scientific collections of all kinds, regardless of their origin or ownership.
Indeed the issue of how to protect property in a time of war could be said to be as old war itself. Consider the Punic Wars and Cato the Elder’s famous clarion call: “Carthago delenda est.” The attitude of total warfare toward Carthage resulted in its complete destruction at the end of the third Punic War. The fields were sown with salt and the city was ploughed over. Many years ago I visited St Petersburg, formerly known as Leningrad, then Petrograd. Someone pointed out to me various markers, which were actually not far from the Winter Palace. They showed just how close the Wehrmacht came to the centre of that magnificent city. Places like Tsarskoye Selo, now known as Puskhin, were practically destroyed by the Germans, and the damage done in St Petersburg was also enormous. Think, too, of Stalingrad, Coventry, London, and, of course, what happened to Dresden in the closing months of the Second World War. The beautiful Saxon heritage of the city was laid waste, and, indeed, some buildings, like the Frauenkirche, have only recently been finally restored.
As the Minister mentioned, the theft of paintings, for example, from the Louvre by the Nazis in the Second World War is another illustration of what happens to cultural property in a time of conflict. Goering and others looted museums and art galleries and took their ill-gotten gains back to Germany with them. That is why the issue raised by this bill and the convention is such an important one, and why it behoves this Parliament to deal with this issue. It is a very, very important issue.
One issue we will want to look at very carefully in the select committee is the all-important defintion of “cultural property”. It could be said that one of our biggest cultural treasures is our unwritten, uncodified Westminster constitution, and one may well ask about the damage to our constitution in an intensive period of warfare, namely this election year. Of course, our constitution is the property of the people, not the Government, but this administration treats it as its plaything and as something it can meddle with for its own advantage. I need only mention the Electoral Finance Act, which is possibly the worst legislation ever passed by this Parliament. With breathtaking arrogance, the Government rammed this legislation though the House at the end of 2007, despite opposition from every newspaper, the Human Rights Commission, the Law Society, and thousands of citizens. The Act makes it nearly impossible for those opposed to the Government to campaign against it. It undermines freedom of speech, and, in fact, it is so difficult to interpret that there have even been complaints recently to the Electoral Commission about the Film Archive showing the dancing Cossacks advertisement, which was first screened by the National Party during the 1975 general election. Apparently, some Labour stooge is alleging that it breaches section 5 of the Electoral Finance Act.
If the Act is retained—and let me assure the House that one of the first things a National Government will do is ditch it—one out of three New Zealanders will find his or her speech severely curtailed, all because the Government believes in conspiracy theories and cannot bear the thought of losing an election. So that is a very important issue of constitutional cultural property that we will need to consider during the course of the Government Administration Committee’s deliberations.
Finally, I might observe on the Electoral Finance Act that it was passed in such a partisan manner that the Government threw out the convention of bipartisan support for electoral reform, so I note with irony that the Green Party has finally woken up and realised what a mess it was involved in with the passing of that bill. Indeed, their co-leader recently said that all the confusion could have been avoided if the regulated period had started on 1 April, not 1 January, which is exactly what I attempted to achieve by way of a Supplementary Order Paper, but it was voted down by, among other people, the Greens. Then today we had the most recent assault on our constitution. The Labour Government is intending to appoint another committee of review.
The exact scope of the legislation we will be looking at in the select committee is unclear. Clearly, it will address the issues I mentioned in the first part of my speech about the protection of both movable and immovable property in a time of armed conflict. But it is beyond argument that our constitutional cultural property has also been severely damaged by the Huns and Visigoths on the other side of the House. We have a Government that is disdainful of the constitution and its importance. It has contempt for the rule of law. It has politicised the Public Service. It has breached fundamental human rights, like the right to free speech. Destruction of cultural heritage is a terrible thing indeed. Just as terrible, if not more so, is a decayed Government that passes repressive laws and does not practise what it preaches. Notwithstanding that, we support the first reading of this legislation, and look forward to careful consideration of it at the Government Administration Committee.
Darien Fenton: Oh!
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I know that Darien Fenton, who is an assiduous member of that committee, cannot wait for the bill to get there.
