Sio Hon Aupito WilliamAUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): Thank you for the opportunity to speak Mr Chairperson. I joined the Law and Order Committee in the latter part of it when this bill was coming to the latter part of the select committee's consideration. Generally speaking I thought that in the main the key parts of the bill are common-sense changes that allow the Government departments to better share information in order to avoid a similar case to the one mentioned by the previous speaker Maureen Pugh with regard to Phillip John Smith. The only point that we raised then and will continue to raise is that it is a shame it took something like the Phillip John Smith case to highlight the gaps.There is another point that I want to make to this Committee which was raised by many of the submitters. It has to do with the information sharing between agencies. There were many submitters who submitted that in terms of Part 10A in new schedule 4A information sharing was unnecessary as there were already approved information-sharing agreements between agencies and that was already available. Therefore those submitters felt that by legislating for this it actually gave much broader powers and broader potential I suspect for corrupt practices to occur if we did not have sufficient controls around the way that that information was shared.I point that out because from time to time I get complaints mainly from the Muslim community who travel overseas in particular when somebody in the family has died. You see at our borders we sort of collect that information and when we see that somebody has paid for an airfare the day before and with cash that person becomes sort of suspicious in terms of raising the antennae of border control when in reality the reason why that would occur is in accordance with the Muslim faith that once somebody dies they have got to bury that person immediately within a certain time frame and therefore there is no planning for those travels. It must be immediate and often it requires most families instead of using a credit card to use cash in order to be at the airport quickly fly to the family and bury their dead before the time frame runs out for that to happen. When they return they are then picked up at the border and our border controls feel somewhat suspicious about the way that their travel was planned or the lack of planning thereof.I raise that as one of the issues where when we give powers to Government agencies particularly for collecting biometric information and for the controlling of travels for those who are on parole often our systems seem to pick up people unnecessarily simply because of a lack of information or the information that has to do with their travel plans raises red flags at our borders.But none the less there was general support I would say by the committee. I think many in the committee felt that the Act provided an existing legislative framework for those approved information-sharing agreements and they believed that the matters listed in new schedule 4A could be achieved by having six approved information-sharing agreements covering the information exchanges between the accessing agency and the holder agency.But notwithstanding that I think as we move forward and as we tend to give more powers to our Government agencies we do need to ensure that we have oversight of that. We have got to protect our reputation and so far we have an international reputation that is well formulated and one that establishes us as being very credible establishes us as a country with high integrity and so forth. I would hate for any Government whether past or present to move into an area where we simply give massive huge powers to Government agencies to do this kind of work without any oversight particularly when it comes to the sharing of information where we value our information—[Bell rung] thank you Mr Chair; I do not have very long to go—where we value our own personal information and it can get caught up in the whole scheme of things. It is not necessarily those people whom we are wanting to capture.In the report Requirement to import and identify what information-sharing is occurring"—I think that that is important that we agree that "a requirement to report on the operation of Schedule 4A would provide further accountability." However the Law and Order Committee did "not propose prescribing how reporting should take place; this would ensure that agencies have sufficient flexibility to incorporate this process into their existing annual reports." None the less the majority of the committee felt that agencies should have flexibility in reporting back. It is still important I think that we have that oversight and that this House in particular needs to keep track of those particular reports on how that information is shared and which agencies are sharing any feedback from the general public about how they are treated. That is all I wanted to share with the Committee at this point in time."