O'Rourke Denis: Privacy (Giving Privacy Commissioner Necessary Tools) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is subject to correctionO'Rourke Denis: Privacy (Giving Privacy Commissioner Necessary Tools) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 23 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:14260. Text is subject to correction.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First supports the Privacy (Giving Privacy Commissioner Necessary Tools) Amendment Bill to the appropriate select committee the Justice and Electoral Committee. It has a very long name but it is an appropriate name because it describes serious issues with our Privacy Commissioner. One of those issues is about resources another issue is about status with regard to an initiating power for investigations and a third issue is about enforcement. Those are very important issues that certainly do need to be considered so New Zealand First welcomes the bill for that reason.The bill amends the Privacy Act 1993 in two ways as recommended by the Law Commission in 2011. It is amazing of course that the Government has not acted on this itself and I hear that it has probably just forgotten to do so because there is apparently no other good reason given for that. In any event the first thing the bill does is empower the commissioner to carry out an investigation or an audit into any Government agency’s privacy practices. It says: “for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not the information is maintained according to the information privacy principles.” There are 12 such principles set out in detail in section 6 of the principal Act the Privacy Act. Under this proposed amendment the commissioner would be able to investigate without first receiving a complaint. We in New Zealand First believe that is in fact what is now needed.It is a natural evolution for New Zealand’s privacy laws and it is needed because State agencies have demonstrated that it is needed by their repeated failures—in some cases—to ensure even basic compliance with the privacy principles set out in section 6. Indeed in the last 2 years we have seen some very gross breaches of personal privacy—in fact far too many of them. This is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg. Most people will never know about the breaches that agencies successfully cover up. They do not have the expertise or resources to know and they do not have the ability in many cases to do anything about it even if they did know. Many people are also unwilling to make a formal complaint and have to face up to the procedures required to do that.So for those reasons it is now clear to us that the commissioner must in the future be empowered to initiate their own inquiries. This will change the Office of the Privacy Commissioner into an investigations entity not just one with reactive powers following a complaint. So it is a fundamental change and it is one that should come. New Zealand First supports it. It is clearly time for this change. It will get a very large degree of public support. The Government should in fact embrace it and adopt this bill as a Government bill forthwith—otherwise why has it done nothing?The other thing that the bill does is to empower the commissioner to issue a notice requiring compliance with the Act. That is what is needed following an investigation. It would add a discretionary enforcement power to the current power to simply make recommendations. There is significant public dissatisfaction with the toothless Privacy Commissioner and agencies too often do not take full notice of recommendations.There is another issue also not dealt with by this bill and that is the issue of resources. The Privacy Commissioner is getting more and more work mostly generated by the public through complaints but some generated by recent Government legislation such as the recent Government Communications Security Bureau Act amendments. If this bill is passed there will be significantly more work if the Privacy Commissioner begins to initiate their own investigations. So I call on the Government to avoid its usual penny-pinching as far as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is concerned and toimprove the resources of the office to enable it to cope with the current increase in complaints and also the additional work that the bill is bound to generate.Finally the bill is one that as I have said I would have expected the Government to have brought forward. It has not done so. It should now support the bill. New Zealand First will do so. We want to see it go to the select committee with a view to it proceeding to a successful final reading.