Clendon David: Privacy (Information Sharing) Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Privacy (Information Sharing) Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 12 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7771. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 It has been interesting listening to this debate on the Privacy (Information Sharing) Bill tonight. How often the word “balance” has popped up. The Minister of Justice in her opening remarks referred to the balance she believes has been achieved in this bill and that has been reiterated by a number of other speakers from the Government side. It is interesting to note that the word “balance” actually pops up quite routinely in this Government’s rhetoric. It insists for example on talking about balancing the environment and the economy which generally means a little more environmental degradation for a little bit of an influx a short-term cash-flow hit which really is not a balance at all. 
We talk a lot about balancing the needs and the requirements and the legitimate claims of the State against the rights of the individual. It is interesting that by observation we can see that this Government actually does not value very highly the right of the individual to their privacy. The evidence of this is in the Government’s response to what has been referred to inelegantly but accurately as cock-ups over recent times: ACC the Inland Revenue Department and the various failures to protect information that people and organisations in good faith have submitted to some public agency. 
There has been a distinct failure. Accidents can happen. Things can go wrong but we judge the Government by its response. Almost uniformly its response has been defensive to suggest that the Government the State has some overwhelming right compared with that of the private citizen. And that is quite peculiar really coming from a Government that professes to favour small rather than large government and that has been heard to utter the words “nanny State” about former Governments in this country and not in a good way. We saw it with the search and surveillance legislation where yes there was some value in changing the law then in order to acknowledge new technologies and new challenges but overwhelmingly it took away the rights of individuals to privacy. And this bill unfortunately swings far too far on that pendulum once again. 
The point has been made that the Labour Party is supporting this bill but marginally. It was a line call for them clearly. The Labour Party has some serious concerns about it. The policy intent of this bill is not bad. It is one we could have supported and would have liked to support. We do see that initiatives like Whanau Ora and the logic of it—a provision of social services through multiple agencies to ensure the well-being of whanau and of communities—make perfect sense that Government agencies could reasonably want to exchange information. 
But this bill fails to put in place the necessary protections. It does not sufficiently protect the rights of the individual or the reasonable expectations of individuals and indeed organisations that information submitted to Government agencies will be secure will be safe and will be protected. Even the Government’s presentation the purpose of this bill the rather amorphous reference to Better Public Services and to facilitating public service is not a really compelling statement or a compelling argument. It does not really engage or give us any real confidence that this is what it wants to do. The point has been made. We had a very robust report from the Law Commission which looked at a whole range of issues and led us to think that there might be an attempt made to get a comprehensive statement a set of privacy legislation and regulations fit for use in the 21st century. This bill rather unfortunately simply meddles around the margin. It fiddles with one or two points. 
A couple of very easy improvements to this bill could have been to give the Privacy Commissioner some teeth. There is a requirement for consultation with the commissioner but no obligation to do anything more than have regard to it. There is an opportunity—and it is a good thing—for the recommendations to be tabled in the House but it is very easy to imagine the Government of the day doing something unpopular doing something that degraded the right of the individual to their privacy and taking the political hit in the short term in order to impose its will on the community and on the individual. There could have been some quite robust protections even in this rather short bill. The Greens unfortunately cannot support it and will not. Kia ora.