Hon DARREN HUGHES (Minister of Statistics)
: I speak in support of the second reading of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill. I know the Hon Tariana Turia will be taking a call on this bill as well.
The Government Administration Committee spent a long time on this bill trying to come to grips with the issues that confronted it, particularly the level of submissions received from people who are very interested in access to this important information. It is a constant struggle to strike a balance on access to this data. If the information is the records of the births, deaths, marriages, and relationships registrations of people who are part of someone’s family or ancestry, then those are the sorts of statistics that that person will be very keen to know about. But at the same time, in a modern world where technology makes access to these records so much easier, we want to protect them to make sure that these records are not being used inappropriately. That is a genuine balance.
Sandra Goudie: The Government stuffed it up!
Hon DARREN HUGHES: I hear the Opposition spokesperson—I am not sure what Mrs Goudie is a spokesperson on—saying that this was some sort of stuff-up. I do not regard a select committee process that results in people’s genuine views coming forward and a bill being altered as a result of what the public have to say as being anything wrong. I think it is one of the great functions of our particular New Zealand Aotearoa parliamentary democracy that the Government of the day introduces a bill to Parliament and any member of the public or interest group can come along and not only make a submission on it, but also sit right in front of our lawmakers and put their point, make their case, and explain how this legislation is going to impact them.
As a side issue, I say that one of the things we find most humbling when foreign visitors come to visit our Parliament is that they all want to know about our select committee process, because it is the way that the ordinary person can make a change to legislation.
I think this bill is a classic example of where the Government Administration Committee has proposed key changes that take into account what a lot of the genealogy groups said. In all of our communities—I think of my own constituency of Otaki and the towns dotted throughout that electorate—there are people who take a real interest in the history of their family. There are people who like to trace things right back—hundreds of years in many cases—and the World Wide Web makes that even more of an option for people.
As I said, the select committee had to struggle with the dangers that that presents if somebody, through identity theft or identity fraud, is able to use somebody’s details in order to try to make a statement of claim of who they are to access some entitlements that they might not be able to, such as passports, social security entitlements, and all manner of things where people are required to present birth certificates. Simply enrolling in tertiary courses is another example of where birth certificates are required. As for death certificates, there is not a huge point in imitating those for any purpose, but they do show the circumstances of people’s deaths, which is very useful for people when they are charting the history of their family. If people visit an old cemetery somewhere, it is quite interesting to look around and read about people who have died a
long time ago, the kinds of conditions they lived in, and the ages they died at, compared with what modern science is able to do for us now.
The bill amends the existing Act. It changes its name to recognise that other forms of relationships now have legal recognition; that comes into the title of the bill. The other aspect of the bill that is very important—and we make the point in Parliament tonight—is that the changes to the bill mean that any member of the public can still access that registry information.
