Dunne Peter: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Dunne Peter: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:647;Page:15907] 
Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future) 
: 
 The previous speaker Brian Connell referred to those who made submissions on the bill to the Government Administration Committee. I was one of those who did so in concert with my good friend Mr Keith Locke. I think it is fair to say that we made a submission on the bill as it was introduced and on some serious shortcomings we saw in the bill but we now see that the amendment the Minister is proposing—the Supplementary Order Paper that will be moved at the Committee stage—substantially addresses our concerns. 
The view we took was that this bill would impede those who were seeking family histories that the limitations it contained originally were excessive and we doubted its impact on resolving the issue of identity fraud. The Minister and the select committee have listened and the amendments they propose will address those issues. To some extent though the whole issue is somewhat of a fiction. In the last couple of months I have taken the time to catalogue my own family’s history back through all of my own grandparents great-grandparents great-great and great-great-great-grandparents for the previous five generations. I have all of their data but none of that has been obtained by accessing official records in this country. I have gone to cemetery records I have used overseas records newspaper accounts and some of the National Library’s provisions and I have built up a pretty complete picture of my own origins. I am quite satisfied with having achieved that as a spare-time hobby. But it does raise the issue again that we were concerned about at the time we made the submission on this original bill. 
The amendments being proposed remove some of the immediate problems we foresaw about access beyond certain periods. But I think it remains a fiction to suggest that even with this amended bill which we will be supporting the fundamental issue that was put up as the reason for it in the first place is valid. As I recall telling the select committee and as my experience in recent months has confirmed it is pretty easy when one sets out to trace information about families and about people if one has a few basic tools. 
I will give members a “for instance”. The member who preceded me is from the Christchurch area. The Christchurch City Council has available on the Internet all of the cemetery burial records for Christchurch cemeteries. So if people know the name of an ancestor or a family member they simply type it into the search page and it will give them all of the details date of death description of where the person is buried occupation age and last-known address. It has nothing to do with registers of births deaths and marriages; this is information that is held by other sources. If people are then interested enough they can go to the National Library’s Papers Past website which has a record of previous New Zealand newspapers up until around the first years of the 20th century. One can search death accounts obituaries and other pieces of information there. 
Genealogists and amateur historians will know this well but the point I am making is that even with this bill even in its most Draconian original form and certainly with the amendments now being moved to it it will not have any impact on people’s ability to access that degree of information. So a number of the concerns that were being raised are readily able to be addressed. 
That then leaves the question of identity fraud and whether one wants to put restrictions on the period through which one can have access to records to prevent the exploitation of fraud for those purposes. It reminds me of a story attributed to the late President Johnson who in earlier days in Texan politics was part of a group of people who used to visit gravesites at night to find the names of the dead whom they could then enrol to cast votes for them in current elections. A story was told about one evening when a group of people were going through a particular cemetery. The trick was to go back several generations so that there was no prospect of the person they were having vote ever having anyone who would turn up and say “Hang on that’s my uncle who died a few years ago.” They were going through the cemetery and Lyndon was particularly punctilious in going to the oldest graves he could find to get the names. His contemporaries were saying to him: “Come on Lyndon we haven’t got time for this. Just grab these names and go.” He turned to them and said: “He’s got as much right to vote as anyone in this cemetery.” 
The point I am making in relation to identity fraud is that although the bill puts some restrictions in place if people are determined enough they can find their way around it. That may be an extreme example for a nefarious purpose but to go back to my example of cemetery records one can find people there. One can find out that they did not have any descendants so one would be quite safe in assuming their identity. As members will be aware we have had many cases of people adopting multiple aliases for fraudulent purposes. It is a comparatively easy thing to do and the restrictions in the bill will not prevent that from happening. 
So why support the bill? I think we need to make an effort to offer some level of protection. I think that the amendments the bill contains—and certainly the Supplementary Order Paper that the Minister has indicated he will move subsequently—are an improvement on the original. I think that is indicative of the fact that the select committee did listen to the submissions made to it. I have talked to a number of those who made submissions at the time who feel somewhat more comfortable about the bill in its likely amended form than they did in its original form. Most people acknowledge that some protections need to be put in place to prevent the rampant misuse of information that is held about people but clearly at the same time they also acknowledge the old proverb that where there is a will there is a way. 
We should not think that by passing this bill we will absolve ourselves of the difficulty of identity fraud. We should not think that we will prevent people from getting legitimate access to information because they will and they will obtain it from all variety of sources but we are in a position to offer some modest protection against the misuse of the official information that is currently held by the Registrar-General of Births Deaths and Marriages and civil unions are probably now added in there as well. For those purposes we think that the bill is a reasonable step forward and we will support it given the fact that it is a vast improvement on what was originally introduced.