Hipkins Chris: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 07 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:154. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I intend to take only a fairly brief call on the— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Thanks mate. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: —Electronic Identity Verification Bill. Not that brief Mr Henare not that brief. That sort of woke him up I guess. 
Kris Faafoi 
: You just made it longer. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Yes and the more he interjects the longer it gets. He never learns—never learns—from history.  
The Labour Party will certainly be supporting this bill to select committee because we think there are some very worthwhile elements in it. Increasingly citizens of this country interact with Government departments online. It is inevitable that that trend is going to continue and get larger and we want to make that as easy as possible for people. It is a fairly constant gripe from people that Government departments often require the reproduction of huge volumes of information—in many cases simply from other Government departments—and this potentially I think starts us down a track that says that the Government itself needs to think a little bit more carefully about how it shares information between agencies so that people do not have to constantly go to one agency to get some information held by one agency in order to give it to another Government agency which is one of the constant bugbears of constituents who come into any constituency member’s office.  
Now we need to be very careful in the way we do that. This is a very I think conservative first step which is simply around the verification of identity. But if it works if it is proven to be successful and if sufficient safeguards are in place there is actually potential for this to expand further. Now I know that there will be a certain number of George Orwellian figures out there who will be very concerned that this is the Government coming to take over their lives and that we are going to be storing all this huge array of information on every individual citizen. The Government holds a whole lot of that information anyway; it is just that the Government is not very efficient at communicating with itself about what information it actually holds.  
But to return to my original point safeguards are going to be really important in how we use this information and how we deal with it. The Public Service I think needs to be moving to a much more citizen-focused seamless approach to service delivery. I think it really frustrates individual citizens when in dealing with different Government agencies they are constantly being given the run-around and they are constantly having to reproduce the same information over and over again. It very much creates the impression that within Government agencies the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing and that is something that any modernised and more efficient Public Service is going to have to deal with.  
It certainly makes sense to introduce this legislation so that we do not have a whole lot of different Government agencies going out and establishing their own identity verification services because that would obviously be very costly. I was particularly interested though to look at when this bill is going to be coming into force because I know that the Minister in charge of this bill Amy Adams was a very diligent member of the Regulations Review Committee in the last Parliament. As part of the responsibilities of the Regulations Review Committee one of the things they look at is when a bill is going to come into force. One of the things the Regulations Review Committee frowns upon quite seriously is bills where the commencement date for them is unclear or where it is subject to ministerial prerogative—where Ministers can simply decide when a law comes into effect. So it is kind of ironic that having been such an ardent supporter of the Regulations Review Committee’s work in this area the very first bill that Amy Adams brings to this House in her new ministerial role contains exactly such a clause which allows this new law to come into effect at such time as an Order in Council is made rather than at a specified date. So basically it removes the power to determine when a law comes into effect from the Parliament and gives it to the executive to a Minister. That is something that the Regulations Review Committee frowns upon quite seriously— 
Charles Chauvel 
: Very seriously. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: —very seriously. The chair of the Regulations Review Committee I can tell is very concerned about it. I am sure that is something that the select committee will need to examine in great detail when it goes to the select committee. I am sure that the Regulations Review Committee as it always does will have a view on that particular matter. 
Charles Chauvel 
: And we’ll express it. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: And it will be expressed I am sure. So overall I think the bill is a fairly welcome step. We need to proceed with some caution. I am sure the select committee will be very diligent in going through the bill considering the privacy implications of the bill and ensuring that in fact this bill does not take us down the wrong track. I think overall on that basis the Labour Party certainly is happy to support the first reading and referral to a select committee. 
Bill read a first time.  
Bill referred to the Government Administration Committee.