Mooney JosephJOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): Thank you very much Mr Chair. Minister I want to just dig in a little bit more to clause 17 and just ask the Minister to comment on some of the concerns raised by a number of commentators including the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties. So clause 17 in the bill enables the Government Statistician to delegate any of the Statistician's functions or powers under this Act with the exception of needing approval from either the Minister or the Public Service Commissioner. Those powers or functions may be sub-delegated to any public servant including contractors with prior written approval of the Government Statistician. Now a former Government Statistician—Len Cook—pointed out that such a wide-ranging power of delegation is enormously risky and unheard of elsewhere and the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties has included his concerns at length and I'll just invite the Minister to respond to those.So: The Minister of Statistics David Clark has managed to avoid the public scrutiny" he says "of the constitutional implications of the Data and Statistics Bill despite transparency being a proper expectation [of] such change by citizens in a democratic society. The bill presented to Parliament by the minister waters down the role of the government statistician through the simple means of enabling the role to be delegated to unspecified persons or organisations without any further legislative oversight or qualification. Nowhere else in the world have changes of this sort been made. … Regardless of the political predisposition of ministers of the day we need trustworthy official statistics to have confidence in how we measure progress or lack of on economic environmental and social concerns. It is the independence of the government statistician in the use of the confidential information provided to government only for statistical use that underpins trust in official statistics. No policy service or compliance organisation that I am aware of has maintained without question a consistent reputation for being as responsible scientific and transparent for as long as the government statistician [of New Zealand] has. [This] bill makes the government statistician a close partner of the policy enforcement surveillance and operational agencies of government through overseeing data sharing on an unspecified scale. It reverses the long-standing constitutional checks that distance the government statistician from policy advocacy or justifying the operational delivery of policies. In providing such agencies with the powers of the government statistician as statistical clones concerns of the public legitimacy of statistical functions critical to trust in government may lead to a loss of the trust we need to have in [this] role."So I would invite the Minister to respond to those concerns.Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Statistics): Thank you Mr Chair. I think—and this is an important debate to have; I'll put that in front of my comments—that some of those claims from the Council for Civil Liberties are a bit of an overreach; to say there's been no public scrutiny of this. I have a great deal of faith in the members of the select committee that considered this and the—David Seymour: Too much!Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: I think I hear members opposite arguing there's been too much consideration or publicity. But you know the chair of this committee wearing another hat and the member the Hon Michael Woodhouse I'm aware and other members of this House on this side were part of a committee that fairly thoroughly considered this received submissions from the likes of the folks the member's referencing and reported this bill back with various amendments and protections to ensure that we can have confidence in the way any powers are exercised—or they allowed it to go through in the form that it was if they were confident.Now here we've got a whole set of expectations around any delegation. As I've said in some ways it's a mirroring of the Public Service Act and in fact it explicitly labels that here in clause 17 but it's also clear—and we've gone over the accountabilities thing a few times and I'm happy to go over that again—and I think members have probably heard clearly the message that the Government Statistician is accountable for every decision that's made so there's a clear sheet back to the Government Statistician and that will mean that the Government Statistician will think very clearly and carefully I would have thought before delegating any powers. But then: "the delegation of functions or powers delegated to the Statistician by a Minister requires the prior written approval of that Minister". So there's a check there. And clause 17(1)(b) states "the delegation of functions or powers delegated to the Statistician by the Public Service Commissioner requires the prior written approval of the Public Service Commissioner."So we've got those. We've also got the expectation canvassed previously where powers and functions are delegated that that is transparently communicated and recorded and that is part of the request and the expectation of the Privacy Commissioner. We have amended the bill to take account of that requirement to make sure that we are providing transparency around these matters and I think all of this is entirely appropriate. And it is the right debate to be having: have we got the balance right here? I think you know the official statistics that are produced are incredibly valuable for decision making and incredibly valuable for holding decision makers to account and we need to have a robust ethical framework that surrounds it."