Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): It's a pleasure to rise in support of this bill. In an age of mass data collection; in an age of Facebook leaks that affect the outcomes of elections Facebook leaks that affect thousands of New Zealanders right here and mass spying by our own Government agencies under the previous Government as we've found out; in an age where even anonymous data can be re-identified because there is just so much of our information—Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. That's a completely unacceptable statement for anyone to have made in this House and I think it should be withdrawn and apologised for. The previous Government was not mass spying on New Zealanders. That is not something that's been found out because it never existed. It never happened. It's a fiction put about by the Green Party.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Thank you for your intervention. It is a debating point and I will allow the member to continue with her contribution.Hon Gerry Brownlee: With all due respect it cannot be a debating point when someone says something that is so outrageously offensive and dishonest as that.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): You are now calling the member's veracity into question. I had ruled that it was a debating point and I had called the member to continue with her contribution. Now Mr Brownlee if you have an issue with that you can take it up in another way but the member will continue. Thank you.GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN: Thank you. So in an age where there's so much of our data out there on the internet that it's impossible to even keep it anonymous in an age where our phones contain some of our most intimate data—in this digital age privacy may be one of our most precious rights. It affects in fact our ability to realise most of our other rights which is why I think most New Zealanders would be shocked to find that New Zealand doesn't in fact enshrine the right to privacy in law. Neither our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or our Human Rights Act contain the right to privacy. So I think most of us in light of that would also be shocked to find that the Privacy Act in the ad hoc but so far only way we have to protect our privacy rights hasn't been updated since 1993—before the internet existed at least in the way that we now know it to exist and before Chlöe Swarbrick here was even born as she's pointed out.This makes safeguarding our privacy rights all the more important and the outdated nature of this privacy framework all the more dangerous. We are vulnerable to corporate breaches and to governmental breaches whether deliberate or accidental. Updating this law has been so overdue and I'm so pleased that this Government has put it on the agenda so urgently. Even in the last two weeks since this bill was introduced privacy breaches have overtaken news. There's been 63000 New Zealanders affected by the Facebook breach—a breach that that corporation believes falls outside our Privacy Act. We've had a Government agency—in this case Immigration New Zealand—using a risk assessment tool that may have been discriminatory and may have been misusing data.Privacy rights are a passion of mine. I came into this House as a human rights lawyer with this on my agenda so I was pleased that I was able to raise this issue with the Minister of Justice the Hon Andrew Little who has now brought this bill and I am confident that this bill goes some way to fill the existing holes in our law when it comes to protecting our privacy. It empowers the Privacy Commissioner to actually deal with privacy complaints—something that the Human Rights Review Tribunal was so overburdened with that it now faces two-year delays in dealing with any human rights complaints. I've spoken to the commission; they're delighted that the watchdog mandate of the Privacy Commissioner is extended in this way and privacy complaints can now be much more urgently dealt with and expediently settled.The bill introduces additional ways to enforce information privacy principles—for example the Privacy Commissioner will now be able to make binding decisions on complaints about access to information where that's needed. It can require agencies that hold our private information to actually issue notices letting the Office of the Privacy Commissioner know when a breach has occurred before harm ensues. Up until now people affected would have to wait until there was harm before they even found out that there had been a privacy breach. The bill requires this kind of notice putting an onus on agencies holding our private information—essentially emphasising the right to privacy in a binding way. It also finally strengthens cross-border data flow protection. It clarifies the application of our law when New Zealand agencies use offshore services to hold our data. It's astounding to me that that wasn't something that was clear in our law until now.These are all great first steps. I'll be working hard to introduce further steps. One of those will be protection against discrimination in risk assessment algorithms. This is something that most Western nations actually have; it's not radical at all. The EU protects against the use of discriminatory identifiers like race age gender disability and sexual orientation in algorithms that assess risk—in algorithms that are then used to decide who gets resourced who gets opportunities in law. This is something that we do need to work on and I do hope that either the select committee process or another piece of legislative work that we can initiate in this Government will actually address that.In the human rights sector we've known for quite some time that algorithms are in use by Government agencies in New Zealand that determine whether someone—often a child—is at risk of underachieving in a certain area and so doesn't deserve resource. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in our last reporting cycle actually asked that New Zealand introduce legislation to protect against this. It found that it was a breach of our children's rights. It is a breach of our children's rights if we're going to misuse their data to determine that they're more likely to drop out of school and to double down on whatever discrimination might have led that demographic to underachieve in school or if we determine that they're more likely to be at risk of abuse or neglect and they should be removed based on these discriminatory identifiers. So doubling down on discrimination is one of the ways that our data is being used or misused and I want all data to be finally secured against that.Mass data collection now does determine what information we can see on our Facebook feeds on the internet whenever we're online. Who might be a criminal or a terrorist—it determines who might get health insurance and who might get a job. These questions used to be answered by human beings and now they're being answered increasingly by automated decision-making systems. We need protections against our data to acknowledge this. The Green Party would like to see safeguards in place that will protect our human rights and our human dignity in the face of this kind of misuse. The right to free elections workers' rights and the rights to healthcare freedom of expression privacy and even the rule of law itself are at stake and that isn't a radical ask because internationally these rights are protected including the legal prohibition against discriminatory algorithms. So I'm concerned that we do this work and that we do it soon—that we do it before the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement kicks in where we did give away our ability to regulate any future unknown technologies. I'll be working closely with the Minister of Justice and our own Green Party Minister of Statistics to bring New Zealand's privacy laws into the 21st century and to futureproof them. But for now the protections contained in this bill are necessary they are urgent and I'm pleased to commend this bill to the House.