Street Maryan: Privacy (Giving Privacy Commissioner Necessary Tools) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Privacy (Giving Privacy Commissioner Necessary Tools) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14669. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak to this Privacy (Giving Privacy Commissioner Necessary Tools) Amendment Bill which is a small bill but could be extremely effective. I want to commend my colleague Sue Moroney for having spotted the gap in the Privacy Commissioner’s ability to do things about complaints. When the Law Commission made a recommendation to the Government in its review of the Privacy Act 1993 which was published in 2011 it said: “At the moment enforcement of the Privacy Act is complaints-driven. People can complain to the Privacy Commissioner about breaches of their privacy rights under the Act. But the Commissioner has only limited powers to take action about breaches of the Act on her own initiative. Such a system is often not well suited to addressing underlying systemic problems.”The bill does two things. It inserts a new section and a new subsection into the Privacy Act. One simply alters the functions of the commissioner and it says that the commissioner will be able “to conduct audits of an agency’s practices and systems for handling personal information and the personal information maintained by that agency for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not the information is maintained according to the information privacy principles.” That gives the Privacy Commissioner an ability they do not have at the moment to audit an agency’s practices in respect of privacy principles. Secondly it gives the commissioner the right to “issue a notice to an agency that is found to be in breach of this Act requiring that agency to take action” to repair the breach and to get their practices in order.As usual these things do not come out of a vacuum. These things come out of the fact that we have seen a string of major privacy breaches by Government agencies over the last few months. If I could just list them for a moment—I have got only 5 minutes so I will be as quick as I can. There is the Earthquake Commission and ACC. Paula Bennett herself as a Minister saw fit to disclose private information regardingbeneficiaries with no regard to the fact that she had all of the power of the State behind her and they had very little behind them. The Ministry of Social Development Work and Income Novopay the Inland Revenue Department Immigration New Zealand the Department of Corrections the Ministry of Education Housing New Zealand the Ministry of Justice—in all of these pieces of the apparatus of the State we have seen privacy breaches. It is hardly surprising then that this has emerged as something on the radar for ordinary citizens. It is that concern that my colleague Sue Moroney is reflecting in this bill tonight.The bill does two things and that is all. It would be really good if Government members could see their way clear to supporting this simply by giving the Privacy Commissioner the power to conduct audits and then giving the Privacy Commissioner the ability to note breaches and to require remedial action where there have been breaches. This is not rocket science. This actually reflects something that many people consider to be really important. So many thousands of New Zealanders have had their privacy breached that the Government apparatus is becoming a laughing stock. This is a piece of legislation that could remedy that. The Government does not have to do much in order to remedy that and this is the way it could fix it. Thank you.