Sepuloni CarmelCARMEL SEPULONI (Labour—Kelston): It is highly offensive when a Minister stands up in the Chamber and tries to infer that she is the only one who cares about the well-being of children. I am of no doubt that the Minister does care but I am of no doubt that everyone in this Chamber cares about the well-being of children. We just have different ideas actually about how we are best going to respond to their needs.I want to touch on the Minister Anne Tolley's comments about children needing to be at the centre and about the well-being of children needing to be paramount. No one disagrees with that. I have a concern though and that concern is that the Minister thinks that that only pertains to this ministry. I am not even sure that she has got it completely right here in this legislation.But I want to give an example and that is that she is also in charge of the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). There are a set of principles that guide the Social Security Act. We put an amendment forward to say that we should amend those principles to include a principle that is about ensuring that every policy in the Social Security Act is about ensuring that the well-being of children is paramount. Did the Minister think that children should be at the centre of policy then? No she did not. She thinks that that pertains only to the Vulnerable Children Act and the Children Young Persons and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) Legislation Bill and nowhere else. When we are talking about the well-being of children we need to also put them at the centre of any housing policy. But does the Minister agree with that?Hon Members: No.CARMEL SEPULONI: So how can we possibly be looking after the best interests of children when we have such a narrow view of where their best interests lie? That is the first thing that I want to point out about the flaws in what Anne Tolley is talking about.She has talked about the fact that the legislation was not working. Well I sat through those submissions as did quite a number of people in the Committee today and a lot of the submitters actually pointed out that there were good things in the original legislation. The problem is that it was never operationalised properly for a number of reasons as has been pointed out in the Committee through interjection not by the Minister. The culture of the department has never been attended to or addressed. There have been issues with regard to resourcing and if it is underfunded how do you possibly realise all that was already in there? Because of the underfunding and the under-resourcing you have overstretched staff. You do not have professional development offered to staff who are in very important positions and need that professional development. So there are issues with the ministry which do not necessarily translate to the actual legislation that that Minister still has not responded to. Yet she thinks that by tinkering with the legislation all of those things are going to be fixed up. I do not have the confidence that that is going to be the case.I am like every other New Zealander in that recently we heard the story about Isaiah Neil the 8-month-old child who was left in the car while his parents and his grandmother were doing synthetic drugs. He ended up dying in that car. The really upsetting thing about that as if that is not upsetting enough is that the family had made eight to nine complaints to her ministry and nothing had been done. That child had been left in that dangerous situation and the Minister is trying to say that the formation of this new ministry and her tinkering around the edges is going to stop that from happening. Well we can guarantee unfortunately Minister—we do not want to have to say this to you but it is not going to stop it from happening at all. And that is upsetting to all of us in the Committee actually.I wanted to spend most of my first 10 minutes actually talking about an issue I have spent the best part of 6 months talking about—I have gone a little bit off track so I am going to have to take another call. But that issue is around data collection. I am really concerned that we are heading down the wrong track again and that the Minister who ignored the Privacy Commissioner's concerns on data collection through MSD with regard to the individual client-level data collection is again ignoring the Privacy Commissioner's advice with respect to this bill.We should be concerned. If we put it into context in terms of what happened the first time that Minister ignored that advice then we are all very aware because it was very public that what we ended up having was a system for data collection that had to be shut down and an overall Government agenda that had to be put on hold because actually the Minister ignored the advice of the Privacy Commissioner around the importance of making sure that that security portal for collecting holding and sharing information was safe. She went too fast and she ignored the advice.It was not just the Privacy Commissioner who had warned against it at that time; it was the social services the clients of the social services and Opposition political parties. Then of course there was the breach in January which the Minister was never informed about then there was the Privacy Commissioner's report and then there had to be another breach for the Minister to finally say: OK stop. Hold up. Maybe the Privacy Commissioner was right. We've moved too quickly. This isn't safe." Now here we are in the same situation again and the Minister is ignoring the advice.The Privacy Commissioner's submission on this particular bill was very clear in that he said: "the information sharing provisions contained in clause 38 have been developed without adequate consultation are complex and fragmented and will be harder to understand than the current legislative regime." His view on this is that "as currently drafted the information sharing provisions in the Bill will not deliver the intent of improving information sharing and may make things worse for some of the most vulnerable." Is that the track that we want to go down particularly given that the last report we got from the Privacy Commissioner to the Minister on data sharing was absolutely right? Yet here we are ignoring his opinion in this case.It was not just the Privacy Commissioner who raised concerns; it was also the Children's Commissioner who raised concerns about the data-sharing provisions in this bill. In fact the Children's Commissioner said that "there is a significant risk that families could withdraw from government services as a result of fears about their information being shared." That is the last thing we want to happen. We have already had a family who could make eight to nine complaints to Child Youth and Family about a vulnerable child who was potentially in danger and who eventually ended up dying and here we have the Children's Commissioner telling us that families might not even come forward to share their information because of the fact that this will put them off doing that. That is similar to the concern that the Privacy Commissioner had with regard to MSD's overall individual client-level data-sharing agenda in that he said and clients said and social services said that actually the risk is that people will be put off from accessing the support services that they need.That is why I have put up an amendment about this which tidies it up and basically gets rid of the fragmented complex and extended compulsory information-sharing that could potentially cause harm—as has already been said by the Privacy Commissioner—because we do not want to go down that track. I for one—particularly given the Privacy Commissioner's good track record on this—want to take on his advice here because it is too risky not to and there is too much at stake. I would like to hear from the Minister about why she thinks in this instance the second time this year it is worth ignoring the Privacy Commissioner's advice on something as important as this—children—and why she thinks that it is putting children at the centre to ignore this really valuable advice on data sharing."