Dyson Ruth: Identity Information Confirmation Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dyson Ruth: Identity Information Confirmation Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6549. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 It would have given me great pleasure to say that the Identity Information Confirmation Bill like the previous bill that we have been discussing has been through the Government Administration Committee recently and that I was pleased to support its progress back through the Committee but actually that is not the case. The Identity Information Confirmation Bill was actually referred to the select committee on 19 October 2010—2010. That was over 2 years ago. The closing date for submissions was 1 December 2010. The committee received and considered 13 submissions and heard three. It received I am sure extremely competent advice from the Department of Internal Affairs. Now 2 years and 1 month later we get this bill back. What has the Minister of Internal Affairs been doing in that time I wonder? 
There does not appear to be much wrong with the bill. There do not appear to be any further changes from the select committee. The select committee made some very good changes actually—entire sections were rewritten. I have to say that the commentary on the bill is very clear as well. But to be frank there is not much to it Minister and I am not quite sure why it has taken the Government such a long time to get it to this final stage. Perhaps it does not consider identity information confirmation important but I do. 
We did have some departure from our total agreement with this bill but not to the point where we decided to vote against any particular provision. I just want to draw the Committee’s attention to the fact that during the debate at the select committee the Labour members would have preferred to delete clause 18 from the bill. Again this is quite similar to the comments that we have just been making about the previous legislation in regard to the protection from liability of various individuals. In this case Subpart 4 of the Identity Information Confirmation Bill says “There is no cause of action against the Crown or a Minister of the Crown or the responsible officials or a delegate of the responsible officials or an employee or a contractor of the department to recover damages for any loss or damage that is due directly or indirectly to the use of the confirmation service for an identity information check.” We were a little concerned that this was really absolving the Crown the Ministers and any departmental officials who were involved from any responsibility and that is not always a good thing. Sometimes it is important to say that it is better for an event to be owned up to to be claimed and then to move on from that. But in this case it is just absolving them of all liability. 
So Labour members expressed their concern about that at the time but we had advice through a formal submission from the Legislation Advisory Committee. That committee persuaded us actually that this was a good provision to have in and that our objections were outweighed by the arguments that it put to the select committee. That was our only major concern in relation to this legislation in terms of the specifics of it. 
It is again a pretty straightforward bill. It is quite similar in title but not in content to the bill that we have previously progressed. We have just progressed the Electronic Identity Verification Bill. This is the Identity Information Confirmation Bill. But what this bill does is ensure that there is a service that allows agencies to confirm an identity that has been provided to them by an individual. So if somebody says that this is my identity then there is a service that allows for confirmation of that identity. 
 I had not really reflected on how many alterations a person might go through during their life in terms of what is on their birth certificate and what their common name in use might be but that is not therefore in the documentation that they might otherwise be able to provide to prove that person’s identity. So if you are born with the name of Kris Faafoi—seeing as everyone is dropping that name tonight—but you decide that you might prefer to be called Freddy Faafoi for some reason then your birth certificate still says Kris but all your rates demands your power bills your phone bills whatever are all in the name that you use most Freddy. So quite common situations can actually cause quite a lot of difficulty. 
I think that the officials from my reading of the deliberations not only went to the most common areas where this could be problematic but they also looked at the areas that might be more unusual and ensured that this is a robust piece of legislation that will provide access to that service of verification for people regardless—