Little Andrew: Urgent Debates — Accident Compensation Corporation—Release of Personal Information 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Little Andrew: Urgent Debates — Accident Compensation Corporation—Release of Personal Information 
[Sitting date: 20 March 2012. Volume:678;Page:1084. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ANDREW LITTLE (Labour) 
: 
 The last two speakers from the Government side have tried to minimise this issue. This is not a small issue. And it is not about a mistake by one manager inside ACC mistakenly sending information to another person. 
Let us start at the beginning. This is about ACC one of the most important institutions in New Zealand revered around the world because of what it does. It is absolutely essential to the health of our community so that when people do have accidents and get injured they can have a quick recovery without having to worry and stress about it. But absolutely crucial to the good functioning of ACC and its relationship with the community and this country is the very high trust that is placed in it by people when they make claims. We all do it whether it is for a sprained thumb or whether it is for something more serious. We have to provide information to ACC through our medical advisers—through our doctors. Trusting ACC is absolutely essential and that is what is at stake here. 
Information on 6752 claimants was wrongly and mistakenly sent to a person who simply should not have had it. The Minister for ACC is right and I support her stance when she says that that person has acted wrongly—she has. Let us put that aside for now. But let us also understand this: I—like no doubt many MPs—have been getting information from people who have had their phone call or got their letter and they are being told different information from what appears in the report that went to the Minister last Friday. They say that it was not just their names it was not just their numbers it was not just the status of their reviews; other information has been disclosed as well. We need to have that clarified. That is not a matter for the Privacy Commissioner; that is a matter for a proper independent inquiry into what has gone wrong. 
The other issue—and the very serious issue that lies at the heart of this and the privacy issues—is what has happened to those 131 people who have made sensitive claims. They make those claims because they are victims of sexual abuse. They make those claims because they suffer mental injury as a result. That is how serious those claims are. When I talk about the trust that people must place in ACC there could not be people who need to place more trust—whom we rely on to place the utmost trust—in ACC than those who make sensitive claims to the sensitive claims unit. The ACC website says to those who make sensitive claims that their information will be seen by only the small number of people who work in the sensitive claims unit and perhaps an independent assessor. But what we have seen in this case is that somebody outside the sensitive claims unit has access to that information. In fact the report to the Minister on Friday said it was a spreadsheet that was circulated to all ACC managers. How many is that? How many hundreds of people are getting access to information that ACC says to those making sensitive claims that only a small number of people will see? That is a crucial issue. The Privacy Commissioner might deal with that but he or she will not deal with the myriad of other issues that arise in this particular case. 
What has happened? I accept what today’s Minister for ACC has said. We know that with the management of data today there is so much of it and it is easy to make a mistake. We know that. We understand that. But it is what happened here in this particular case that matters. There are real questions that need to be answered. Looking at the disclosure in the first place why was a person—a manager in the recovered persons unit or whatever that one is called—handling this spreadsheet and all of this information in the first place? Why did they have it? We know that that was disclosed in August 2011. Why was the sensitive claims information included in that spreadsheet? What is the assurance that has been given to those people now to give them some comfort and security? 
The next piece of information we know is that there was a meeting in December that involved two senior managers from ACC who say that they did not know there had been a privacy breach up until that time; there was Bronwyn Pullar the person who had received the information and had a long-time grievance against ACC; and there was the former National Party president Michelle Boag who is not well known in ACC circles as far as I am concerned. I have done a bit of ACC advocacy work. I have not seen Michelle Boag’s name on the list of advocates and others who have represented people in ACC. How is it that in an ACC system where many people struggle to get a meeting with their case manager Bronwyn Pullar can get a meeting with two senior managers from ACC? That gap has not been filled. That question is not answered in the report that went to the Minister on Friday. We just do not know but I smell a rat and it is a big one and it is a stinky one. 
We need to know what it is that prompted ACC to send two senior managers to meet with Bronwyn Pullar an aggrieved claimant and a former National Party president Michelle Boag. There is more to this than meets the eye and we need to know what it is. The Privacy Commissioner will not answer that question but we need to know what was really going on. What was discussed at that meeting? We are now getting conflicting information. The report to the Minister says one thing Bronwyn Pullar says another and we have the letter from Michelle Boag who remembers some things but not others. What happened at that meeting? That is not a matter for the Privacy Commissioner but it would be a matter for a proper independent inquiry which should take place and which the Minister has in her power to set up and get under way. 
We then see that nothing happened for 3 months. A letter was written—that is right. A manager who was at the December meeting sent a letter and nothing else happened for more than 3 months. This is the institution that we must trust so much that every New Zealander—not just the 1.7 million claimants each year but every New Zealander—must trust. Here was a manager of ACC who knew that there had been a breach of privacy—they say they did not know the extent of it but they knew there had been a breach of privacy—and very little was done. That is not good enough and we need to know why it was not. 
Was it the presence of Michelle Boag that made them afraid to take further action? Was it the fact that they now would have known that this woman Bronwyn Pullar was a National Party activist? Was it because they then saw that there was a letter from then Minister for ACC Nick Smith and they were too afraid to act—frozen in the headlights? That is what happens. When Ministers write letters on their letterhead using their ministerial titles on behalf of individuals going into the bureaucracy of which they are part they know the effect that that is meant to have. It is meant to have a chilling effect. It is meant to make senior officials freeze in the headlights and I suspect that that is what happened in this case. We need to know the answers because we are not getting them. We did not get them in the ministerial report on Friday we did not get them in the answers to Parliament today and we are entitled to have them for the confidence of all New Zealand in this most important of institutions. 
We then go to the role of the former Minister for ACC. This current Minister for ACC is clearly responsible and I accept that she was not to blame but the former Minister is not just responsible but he is to blame as well. What on earth was that Minister doing using the full power of his office and his title to advocate for a single person within the department for which he was responsible? That is unheard of. That is unheard of. Not even Bob Semple went that far and that was a long time ago. Nick Smith wrote a letter and said in it that he was not trying to influence ACC but then he put the argument that was all about influencing the ACC decision. That is how disingenuous this Minister was. It is such a flagrant breach—such a flagrant breach—of the Minister’s duties and responsibilities and of the standards of conduct we are entitled to expect of a Minister that that Minister must go. He must go from this Cabinet. 
If John Key is serious and if he as a Prime Minister expects the nation to take him and what he says about the conduct and the standard of conduct of Ministers seriously then he must see to it that Nick Smith is sent out of Cabinet because we cannot trust him any more. We cannot trust him not to abuse his position. We cannot trust him not to use his office to curry favour with whatever National Party activist asks for it next. What other favours has he given Bronwyn Pullar? Who knows? That is not a matter for the Privacy Commissioner but that is a matter for a proper inquiry that is about giving integrity back to this Cabinet to this administration and to this Prime Minister. You do not start a letter off “To whom it may concern” and claim it was addressed to the medical adviser. That was a letter intended to carry weight intended to carry influence and intended to change the ACC decision that had been made. It was improper process and improper procedure. 
The Privacy Commissioner’s inquiry is not enough. It is a good start for the privacy issues concerned but it is about how this happened. What was the environment that was happening here? What was the National Party involvement here? A lot of National Party personalities seem to have been tied up in it. We need to know. We need to know about the conduct of Nick Smith. We need to know about the conduct of Michelle Boag. We need to know about the conduct of the director of ACC who so far remains nameless and about what he knew and why he did not disclose that to the chief executive— 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Order! The member’s time has expired.