Lees-Galloway IainIAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): It is a great pleasure to speak on the Electronic Interactions Reform Bill—it is the little surprises that make the day that little bit more interesting. So this is a good piece of legislation. It is designed—at least its intention is—to make interacting with Government more simple more aligned with the way people interact with each other these days through electronic means and hopefully a little bit cheaper for people to interact with Government as well.I do note that it is an omnibus bill; it amends a large number of pieces of legislation. I was reading through it to see exactly what it does do and I note that it amends a number of pieces of legislation to allow communication by email rather than by what we call snail mail these days. And I thought: There is another piece of legislation that is before the House at the moment that does something similar." Then I recalled the Companies (Annual Report Notice Requirements) Amendment Bill in the name of Matt Doocey which is a member's bill drawn from the members' ballot that allows companies to communicate with their shareholders by email rather than by snail mail. At the time we said: "Well that would fit nicely in the Statutes Amendment Bill." It would actually fit very very nicely—perfectly in fact—in the Electronic Interactions Reform Bill which I think just proves the point of what a complete waste of time Matt Doocey's bill was; that amendment to the Companies Act could easily have been included in this piece of legislation and in fact maybe that would be a good amendment to make at the Committee of the whole House.Maybe a member—maybe even Matt Doocey himself—would like to propose a Supplementary Order Paper to this piece of legislation or even the select committee could. This is going before the Government Administration Committee. It could propose an amendment to this piece of legislation—and then we could not waste the time of the House dealing with Mr Doocey's bill; we could do it under this piece of legislation. The change would be made. It is a noble change but it does not require the time of the House of a whole member's bill and we could free up a space amongst the members' orders of the day to deal with something a bit more substantive. So that is my recommendation to the select committee that is considering this piece of legislation.A number of members have raised two areas of interest and concern. One is around security. Are our Government agencies up to keeping people's data and information secure? I would relate that back to the decision made by Government earlier this year not to hold the trial for online voting for local government elections. They said that there were issues with security. I have heard the arguments. In fact there were some very convincing arguments about the issues of security with voting but I have to ask this: if we can bank online—if we can trust the interwebs to deal with our money—then why can we not trust them to deal with our votes? Why have we not cracked the security issue with our votes? In fact we have already got RealMe—and if that is secure enough to keep our data and our private information secure then why not our votes as well?The other issue—and I think this is the far more pertinent and interesting issue that this Parliament does need to consider—is that question of the digital divide. I know for us we are all in the privileged position where yes everything is online—everything—and we seem to be in constant demand because of people's ability to access us through all manner of online means. But the truth is there are people who have difficulty accessing the internet both by virtue of geography and also through the sheer fact of poverty or not having sufficient income to have the tools or the connection necessary to be able to connect to the internet so as to be able to make use of the changes that this piece of legislation proposes. So I think we need to be mindful of that. That is not a reason to stop proceeding with this legislation. It does not preclude people from being able to interact with Government through the old means but it is something that we need to be aware of. We cannot fall into the trap of assuming that because digital technology is ubiquitous for us it is for every member of the New Zealand public. But this is a good bill an interesting bill and I commend it to the House."