Hon RICK BARKER (Minister of Internal Affairs) : As we were discussing last time the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill was being debated, I was getting to the end of my presentation and it had the Opposition riveted. Those members were very interested in the section that I was talking about, which related to both parents being required to sign the birth certificate. This is currently not a requirement, and it was quite surprising to me as to why the department recommended this. It is because often there were genuine debates over the naming of the child. The parents would ostensibly agree on what the name was and one parent would register the name, then some time later he or she would find out that the details were different. For example, instead of it being Mary Jane it could be Jane Mary or some other name could have been slipped in. We will now require both parents to sign their signature.

There are cases where both parents are not able to sign the form, and I have outlined most of those. The last one I got to before the interruption of the debate was in the case of only one parent at law—for example, where the child had been conceived as a result of an assistive reproductive procedure and born to a mother who does not have a partner. Only the mother’s details would then be registered. It is worthwhile noting that under the registration regime in the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, which was passed by this House in 2004, children in those cases would be able to find out about their genetic heritage and other genetically related siblings who were born as a result of donations made by the same donor. That sorted that issue out.

The interesting thing about this bill is that is has generated quite an amount of debate. I think people have on occasion missed the purpose of the bill. For hundreds of years our records for births, deaths, and marriages have been paper-based; they have been in registries. When anybody wanted to know about that information he or she had to present themselves in person, and the registrar—often the court registrar—would know exactly who the individual was who fronted up and would know all the details about that person; there was knowledge of each other. We were an intimate society, but we have changed. Society has become less intimate. The information will be held in a digital form, and therefore people will be able to access these records from anywhere. For that purpose, it is more important to protect this information, because it is more liable to be used for bad purposes where people might want to steal an identity and do some other things with it.

The balance of this legislation is to protect the identity of the individuals whose information the State holds, whilst giving people open access to court records. The bill will enhance and modernise the functions of Birth, Deaths, and Marriages and it will ensure the registrar continues to be trusted with the stewardship of life events recorded in it. I commend the bill to the House.

SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) : I rise in opposition to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill, and I do so with a little bit more confidence than I did on the bill we previously debated. It is at times difficult in Opposition to find the socialist wrongdoing in every piece of legislation that comes before this House. In this particular case, thanks to the Minister, the Hon Rick Barker who just left the House, he has given us plenty of opportunity tonight—

Hon Trevor Mallard: I raise a point of order, Madam Assistant Speaker. This afternoon one of your colleagues in the Chair took some exception to some discussions around the fact that I had indicated that the Leader of the Opposition was present for question time. I am sorry but I do not have the particular Speaker’s ruling in front of me, but it is convention that one does not draw attention to people leaving the House. This afternoon I was not; I was saying he was present. In this particular case, that member has just drawn attention to the fact that a member has left the House. My view on this is that seeing as it is a convention, it is a matter of good behaviour and not a matter for the member to be drawn up over and he should be allowed to continue. In the interests of consistency, it would be right for him to withdraw and apologise for that comment.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Marian Hobbs): Yes, I would ask you to.

SHANE ARDERN: I withdraw and apologise. I am sure the Minister, Rick Barker, is listening to the proceedings in the House nearby tonight, and he has given us plenty of opportunity to debate this.

For a start, we have a Supplementary Order Paper that has been introduced in the late stages of this bill, which is almost as big as the bill itself. There are 20 pages in this Supplementary Order Paper. If that does not speak volumes about the convoluted process that the Government has gone through after having sent this bill to the select committee, then I do not know what does.

In regards to this legislation, we have to ask the question: what was the wrongdoing, the mischief that was trying to be fixed up? As we looked through the detail of it, we found that yes, on one side there was a feeble attempt—which I think may have been enhanced by the Supplementary Order Paper, when we get a chance to get a closer look at that—to modernise the way that we record our births, deaths, and marriages and bring into the equation some of the new family configurations that now exist and have legislative support for them, such as civil unions and the like. So I suspect that there may be some plus side to it there.

But when we look at the other side of the equation we see the fact that over the years people like genealogists and autobiographers have had an enormous interest in trawling through our Births, Deaths and Marriages register. The media also claimed that they needed access to it for accuracy in reporting. Then one has to ask what the wrong is that needs to be fixed. It is on that point that National could not agree with the process or proposal that is before us now. The select committee put a lot of time into this bill. A huge number of people were interested in it. There was multi-party participation in the debate in that select committee, and I thank the members of the select committee for giving their time and energy to this particular legislation.

The Births, Deaths and Marriages register is something that is important to people when they need it. I know that when I got married I had to sign the marriage certificate and it was registered. I know that if I go to the Births, Deaths and Marriages register it will have not only my own name and address, etc., but also my wife’s name, her maiden name, and her family name. To that end, it is something that has had a tradition that goes right back to the English beginnings of the Births, Deaths and Marriages register, which was recorded in those days by the churches. One can go back to England—certainly to Great Britain—and find a lot of the names that exist in this House. “Cosgrove” I am sure would be found, for example. One would have to go to Ireland for “Connell”, I imagine, but it would certainly be one of those names that one would find if one went and searched the old church registers and suchlike of the British Isles.

Registers have a long and proud history in that regard, but to come to Parliament with a proposal that actually restricts people’s access to them on a range of grounds where there is no evidence to prove that in fact any wrongdoing is taking place or any potential future wrongdoing may take place is just one step too far. On that note I say that the National Party cannot support this legislation.

DARIEN FENTON (Labour) : I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the second reading of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill. As the deputy chair of the Government Administration Committee I am pleased that Labour was able to reach a suitable accommodation with other parties during the select committee process, although I regret to say that does not include the members of the National Party.

This bill was a genuine effort by Labour to place appropriate limits on public access to the statutory registers maintained by the registrar-general, because those registers contain personal information about almost every New Zealand citizen and some of the information is particularly sensitive. The purpose of the bill was also to update and enhance the previous law by taking into account the changing nature of relationships in New Zealand today.

Interestingly, despite the outcry we saw in some quarters in New Zealand about the bill restricting completely open access to the registers held by the Government, many other countries, including all of the Australian states and territories, 10 of the 13 Canadian provinces and territories, and the great majority of the states of the USA, have imposed restrictions on access to their births, deaths, and marriages registers. It is not true to say that access is currently unlimited in New Zealand. Some of the information held by the registrar-general has always been inaccessible to the public, and some has been accessible only in limited ways. For example, there is no open access to the original birth certificates of adoptees and sexual reassignees, or to information linked to protected identities and illegitimacy notations on birth entries. During the first reading stage I talked about my own experience of that last example.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Marian Hobbs): I am sorry to interrupt the speaker, but the barrage of noise from the people who are not speaking is actually quite rude to the person who is speaking. Can they just desist from that.

DARIEN FENTON: Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. A large amount of personal information is also held outside the registers, particularly information contained in source documents, and those are not normally accessible to the public.

As the Minister has said, the births and deaths registers in New Zealand date back to 1848, and when they were created little thought was given to the privacy risks. But that is perhaps because the risks were low. One of the interesting things we learnt at the select committee is that when births were originally registered in churches in England, it was done around the collection of taxes. The issue was not so much about keeping a public record. As the Minister also said, the registers were usually in paper form, not easily available, and often held in one central location. Technological developments, of course, have altered that quite radically, and as the Privacy Commissioner said in her submission, which I listened to very carefully, personal information has become a valuable commodity to be bought, sold, combined, sorted, profiled, and mined, which means that the opportunities for the misuse of information held on public registers have multiplied.

Given the lack of scrutiny of what are essentially disclosures of personal information, and given the threat and reality of identity theft, the original bill was aimed at restricting the access of strangers to information about any person on the register that could then be used in a way that ultimately causes harm to that person. I believe that Parliament would be failing in its duty if it did not recognise the threat of identity fraud and neglected to recognise the potential for the widespread abuse of personal information. Overseas trends and, in some cases, trends in New Zealand have given sufficient cause for alarm for the Government to take action. It is true that personal information can be obtained from many sources for fraudulent use, but the intent of this bill was to make it more difficult for fraudsters to obtain information from the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and to use that information for illegal purposes.

The challenge was for this legislation to preserve the benefits of the public registers, including easy access for those who require it in the public interest, while minimising the risk to individuals. I believe that we have struck an appropriate balance with the amendments proposed by the Minister in his Supplementary Order Papers.

During the select committee process, genuine concerns emerged from submitters such as genealogists, historians, and journalists about the consequences of restricting access to registry information. We in Labour took those submissions seriously, and we worked with other parties, like the Greens, to find that important balance. I recall that during the first reading debate one of National’s objections to the bill, from those esteemed parliamentarians over there, was that the public would no longer have ready access to information on the Births, Deaths and Marriages register. I am here tonight to tell those members that I have very good news: the select committee process enabled genealogists, historians, and the media to put forward their views and be heard, along with other organisations that had concerns about further restricting access to those records. In true MMP style, and with the collaborative effort of parties other than National, we have dealt with the issue of access to information, which is in the Supplementary Order Paper, while at the same time ensuring that there is a degree of greater protection for people’s personal records.

But what did National do? The National members had the chance to be part of the process of finding a solution to the concerns they expressed in the first reading debate, but instead they chose to persist in their blind opposition to the bill, regardless of the changes proposed by the Minister and worked through by Labour, the Greens, United Future, and New Zealand First. That is their call, but no one should have any illusions about it. National’s opposition to this bill must be seen as pure political spite.

The process of working with other parties, particularly the Greens, was a very good experience for me of what is possible under MMP. I want to thank the member Keith Locke for his practical and collegial approach to finding solutions to what we all felt were genuine concerns. I also want to thank the Minister, Rick Barker, who was absolutely open and solutions-driven on the concerns we were presented with at the select committee. Unfortunately, because the committee could not reach agreement, the key changes to the bill will be presented by way of a Supplementary Order Paper, and we have already heard some whingeing about that from members on the other side of the House. However, the Supplementary Order Paper will address concerns raised in most public submissions that the proposed access provisions would unduly restrict the ability of genealogists, historians, and other researchers to access information about other people.

The Supplementary Order Paper retains the current ability of any member of the public to access any named person’s registered information, but applicants for certificates, printouts, copies of documents, and the inspection of records will be required to present reasonable identification. That adds a meaningful step and ensures that those who may seek to access registry information for fraudulent purposes will think twice before doing so. In addition, an access register will be created so that people can apply to find out who has accessed their records, if they so wish. This adds another layer of protection so that if a person is unfortunate enough to have his or her personal information acquired and then used fraudulently, that person can at least find out who accessed that information.

In some circumstances a person may request that his or her records not be disclosed to the public for a certain period of time. We had a lot of discussion in the select committee about examples of that. I am sure that we can all think of horrific situations where people may not want to have details made available to the public, and that proposition seemed to be fair enough. The grounds for non-disclosure directions will be prescribed by regulations, but a review of the operation of these new access provisions will take place 5 years after their commencement.

Those amendments are a very good balance between protecting personal information from those who wish to obtain and abuse that information, and maintaining freedom of information and the right of public access.

I am pleased to support this bill. I thank the members of the parties who are supporting the bill at the second reading. Again I thank them for their collaboration, and I look forward to the bill progressing to its next stage.

SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) : I am very proud to rise on behalf of National in opposition to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill, and for very good reason. Yet again members on the Government benches are misleading the New Zealand public about the reason for this bill, because the only reason they could give—and this was canvassed exhaustively with the officials—was the opportunity for fraud. No evidence was provided of where this was in actual fact happening, to any degree whatsoever. So the justification for this particular bill was spurious in the extreme. There was no correlation between fraud and access to information from the Births, Deaths and Marriages records.

I point out that the National Party tried to explain to the Government members what the real issue was. There is no problem with the information supplied to the public from the Births, Deaths and Marriages register. There is no problem with their having access to that information. The problem lies in the fact that any member of the public can go and get an authorised document. It is one of the few Government departments that provides an authorised document without any identification whatsoever, and the provisions in the Supplementary Order Papers that the Government will put through will not necessarily change that.

The Minister has said to me, in response to a parliamentary question about a fraud case, that there is nothing to stop any member of the public from getting a properly authorised document in relation to anybody else. That is absolutely wrong. All that needed to be changed is for people to be told that, sorry, they have to provide some form of identification in order to get an authorised document. I make it clear that it is a properly authorised document. Instead of just doing that, the Government is going to the extreme and saying that people cannot have information from the register, which is patently dumb. It is a situation of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut, and Government members still do not get it. This is the very reason why National continues to oppose this Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill.

At no point did the Minister give any relevant evidence in relation to fraud and access to information from the Births, Deaths and Marriages register. For all of those genealogists’ groups, lawyers, and banks, there is more justification for having access to that information than for not having it.

• Debate interrupted.