Chauvel Charles: Juries (Jury Service and Protection of Particulars of Jury List Information) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Juries (Jury Service and Protection of Particulars of Jury List Information) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 31 July 2012. Volume:682;Page:4122. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 The commentary from the Law and Order Committee contains a helpful explanation of the rationale for Part 2 of the Juries (Jury Service and Protection of Particulars of Jury List Information) Amendment Bill. I would like to quote directly from the penultimate paragraph of the commentary because it is probably the best way to give members who are not familiar with the legislation and those listening at home an idea of what Part 2 is designed to do: “Concern was raised in 2010 when a self-represented defendant corresponded with people whose names and addresses were on the jury panel for his trial. The bill is intended to address this problem by amending the Juries Act 1981 to allow some information to be excluded from the jury panel. It would be called protected information and access to it would be restricted.” The committee goes on to note one recommended amendment in respect of police employees which probably is not material for the purposes of the discussion. 
The scheme that the amendment bill would put in place is to classify jury panel information as protected particulars and it would go on to restrict the classes of people who could get access to that information—for example a barrister or a solicitor acting for a party to the proceedings the Crown or other prosecutor in criminal proceedings that are due to be heard during the week of the trial and so on. Then there are restrictions placed throughout the rest of the legislation on how those people who can get access to this protected information are at liberty to use it. 
The reason that members on this side of the House have decided to support the bill is that we think that it represents a generally helpful way to strengthen some of the protections that are contained in the legislation. We are however concerned that there is not total protection provided for. I would be most obliged if the Minister in the chair the Minister of Justice would take a call. She may want to get some advice from the officials. There are clearly categories of information that remain outside the protection—[ 
Interruption 
] Well National members by their interruptions are merely conceding the fact that this is not legislation that they regard as a priority. They have let it languish on the Order Paper since May last year. It has not been progressed with any expedition. If they are actually serious about improving the jury system they might want to consider what this legislation fails do to. Here is what it fails to do: a person who is determined to stalk a juror can go along to a jury trial and they can sit in the well of the court because we hold these proceedings in public for good reason. And there are all sorts of ways that the particulars of a juror can be obtained. These days they can be googled or they can be looked up in the phone book electronically or otherwise. There are all sorts of ways that a person who is absolutely bent on making mischief in respect of a particular juror could find things like their home address or their particulars for correspondence and then communicate with them outside the jury system. That is the very evil that this part of the bill is designed to prevent. 
It seems that nobody has really given a lot of thought to the way things work in the age of Google. We might for example have considered in this legislation extending the protections provided for jury particulars by making it an offence to conduct your own research about a juror for purposes not connected with a particular trial—at least about that person’s home address or particulars—if we really were concerned in the House here and if the Government was really concerned about protecting jurors in a meaningful way. But nothing like that has been done. There is only limited protection on a paper-based old-fashioned basis for that information. When members are considering this legislation they are going to have to consider the rather slapdash way it has been advanced and the fact that it really does advance only a partial protection along the lines I have described rather than the fuller protections that one would expect in the information age. 
I think it is relevant in this regard to reflect on the fact that the Minister in her capacity as Minister of Justice has before her a report from the Law Commission concerning privacy and information management in New Zealand. These are exactly the sorts of issues that the Law Commission and the Privacy Commissioner pointed out to the Minister. The Minister has accepted some of those recommendations but by no means all of them. This is probably a very very good example of the sort of situation where given that we are in the age of Google we need to think a lot more laterally about the sorts of protections that we can put in place around people who are performing a public duty like jury service where they are effectively putting themselves in a situation where they can be at risk as the evil that this bill is designed to address demonstrates. But it is no good simply providing partial protection just as in the privacy area it is no good for the Minister to say: “I’m going to pick and choose out of the Law Commission’s recommendations. I quite like that one but I’m not going to do what it recommended here.” 
The report is a holistic approach to information management and privacy in the age of Google. It recommends giving the Privacy Commissioner powers to order compliance and powers to audit where there is a suspicion that unsatisfactory practices are occurring with information management. Yet we still do not have a commitment from the Government on those issues because I do not think the Minister or her advisers fully understand the ramifications of that report just as here we have an incomplete protection for jurors who do a fine job and who do deserve much fuller protections—indeed the fullest protections that we can give them—as we respond to technological challenges. 
We will be supporting this part because there is no doubt that the protections it provides will be greater than they are now. They respond in part to the case back in 2010 that is referred to in the commentary. But they by no means provide protection for jurors as full as we might be providing them and I fear we will be back here doing this job again in a couple of years because for whatever reason there was not enough thought given to the sorts of protections that we ought to provide jurors for doing the fine work that they do.