Seymour DavidHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I think the Minister might need to go and have a chat to his ministerial advisers because it seems as though they've given him his second reading speech to deliver again exactly 10 minutes long and traversing just about every part of the bill. I'm not going to do the same. I'm going to focus—and I think it's necessary to some degree perhaps not to that degree that the Minister does traverse a wider range in his opening remarks and he certainly did that. I will leave him with some homework in respect of Part 1 but I want to touch on a couple of things that he did say. One is: the fact that we're here is because the Act is old. As a Minister who was born two years before the Act was born I'm sure he'll agree—and one who I think if memory serves is probably only a few months away from a certain milestone birthday—that something approaching 50 years old isn't necessarily out of date. His children might disagree but I'll go into bat for him on that point.The Statistics Act though is different. And as we have talked about both in committee and previous readings the environment for collection of data that existed in 1975 is light years away from where we are now. And I think it's that very modern very ubiquitous internet-based speed of data environment that has led to a lot of the concerns that the Minister and I as spokesperson and a number of other colleagues have received from the likes of the Council for Civil Liberties—legitimate concerns they are although I think they've gone over their skis a bit on a couple of the issues. But it's certainly necessary to update this legislation more so than any other 47-year-old Act. But I do want to just challenge one thing that the Minister said in his opening remarks. They relate to Part 3 but I think it's important to signal to him that we need to have the discussion about the role of research in this. Because I think he tried to reassure the committee in his opening remarks that research was not a primary purpose and that the collection of data is only for the publishing of statistics. But that's at odds with the words used in clause 22(c) which I'll come to and we will have a more reasoned debate about it in Part 3. Part 1 though lays out the purpose of the Act and as he mentioned several times the high-quality impartial and objective official statistics production is the goal. We have received a number of submissions to say that the purpose is much broader than it should be including from a previous Chief Statistician and the Council for Civil Liberties. So I wonder if the Minister in Part 1 could provide something of a commentary and potentially a reassurance that the protections that are set out in clause 3 of Part 1 are robust enough to give those who are concerned about that sufficient comfort so that people can volunteer data that's often very very personal and be reassured that it will be protected both from disclosure to the wrong agents—that it will be kept private confidential—and free from scrutiny from those who are not frankly in their view desirable to access.We've got some great words in clause 3 but it's actually clearly not sufficient to satisfy a number of the people who submitted to the select committee and who have corresponded with us since the second reading. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd just like to ask the Minister a question about clause 3(b)(i) which says that the purpose of this Act is to: enable the trusted collection and use of data for the production of official statistics and for research;". I wondered if the Minister could succinctly explain what the differences are between collecting and using data for the production of official statistics versus research. In other words how are official statistics different from research as a purpose of collecting data?"