Shearer DavidDAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): The Labour Party will be supporting this bill to the Government Administration Committee. As the Minister of Internal Affairs Peter Dunne just laid out it obviously has some advantages in terms of moving many of our ministries into the digital age and allowing them to be able to communicate with New Zealanders much more easily. There is a cliché really that we are moving into a digital age and therefore the Government needs to be kept up to speed with that as much as anywhere else.The Minister went on to talk about some of those advantages including with regard to the marriage licences Act—being able to perform a lot of those activities online including signing your marriage licence as I understand it. For the Department of Conservation it includes hunting licences and game licences for example—being able to do that online and have that as part of an app or even allowing the election on the Fish and Game Council to be carried out online as well rather than having to do that in a paper form. I have to say that begs the question that if you can do it with the Fish and Game Council why can we not move more rapidly to bring out online voting for say local body elections. We have just seen how appalling the local body election turnout has been in New Zealand and a lot of that relates to I believe the fact that for many young people—and certainly I can speak for my own children who were voting in this local body election this time for the first time—this is the first time they have ever had to post a letter in their lives. They sit there on their tablets or their phones all the time; it is about time we got our electoral system into the digital age as well.There are other advantages as well that the Minister mentioned including the transfer of Government bills and of photos—for example for licences—with the agreement of the applicant etc. so that a digital photo can be used rather than a hard copy. All of that is I think uncontentious. It is useful. It is going to speed up the activities of government and the efficiencies of government and can be supported. But obviously there is another side to every initiative that is taken and I think it is worthy to mention three on this occasion.First of all there is a digital divide that is opening up in New Zealand and I think we need to address that. The digital divide is between those people who obviously are well and truly electronically connected and those who are not. In the second category I put those sorts of people like older people who perhaps have not had the advantages of going through a more computerised education system or computerised age and those who cannot afford to have a computer or connect to the internet in their homes—of which there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who are not connected in that way. It is worthwhile realising that we do have this divide and it is up to Government as well not only to put in these new-fangled and welcome efficiencies but to ensure that they are universal and right across the board and not just for some and not others.Secondly there is the risk of—as we have seen constantly and consistently particularly in the last few months—the penetration into our digital systems into our databases etc. by outside influences. We only have to look across to the United States where recently all of the Government records—all of its Government records—were entered into and stolen. There is Yahoo! where some of its digital information was passed across to Government agencies and this morning in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee we were listening to a number of submitters giving evidence on the intelligence and security changes that we are trying to make. Once again we have an agency the GCSB that is currently assessing the penetration by outside influences into our Government departments and key companies in New Zealand which are being constantly bombarded by both other nations and crime syndicates to try to penetrate and get information from the Government. I am not convinced that we will ever be able to protect those resources completely but we have to understand that there are going to be inherent risks when we consolidate and we put that sort of information together into databases and make it available in the way that the Minister laid out.Lastly thirdly I want to mention this as well: this Government has not done very well when it comes to protecting our information. We have had leaks in health ACC social welfare IRD—pretty much every single department in the Government has had various leaks in which people's personal and private information has made it into the public arena. We have to do a lot more—I say we but the Government in particular—to ensure that that information is protected. When it comes to those databases the Government has not done particularly well in terms of setting up databases that are robust and actually work. The obvious example is Novopay which despite the fact that it has got out of the news is still rumbling on through schools and still creating problems 6 years after it fell apart in glorious fashion.The other thing that is happening right at the moment is in customs. Customs embarked on a new customs information-gathering system that was supposed to replace the old system called CusMod with a new system called the Joint Border Management System (JBMS) which IBM was putting in place. The JBMS has not delivered anything like what was expected of it and my understanding is that IBM has just been sacked by the Government and told: There's the door go through it because we don't want to have anything more to do with you." having delivered over budget 3 years behind what it said it was going to be and not being able to deliver the most fundamental part of what it said it was going to do which was to be able to establish the risk and intelligence functions of goods and people coming into New Zealand.It is terrific to laud the progress of the changes that the Minister was talking about and on the face of it they are pretty simple they are pretty straightforward. But behind that there are problems: first of making sure that that connectivity is universal across New Zealand; second of making sure that the databases that we have in New Zealand as we have seen so often over the past few years are protected and that private information does not make it into the public arena; and third the woeful—the woeful—handling of major information projects that this Government has taken on and I mentioned Novopay but more recently perhaps in the last couple of weeks the exit of IBM from re-establishing and reformatting the entire customs system of border management. That has gone by the wayside as well and IBM has been as I said given the sack having delivered well over budget—about $30 million or $40 million over budget—3 years late and not having done what it said it was going to do. It has been woeful it has been a waste of taxpayers' money and it is one of those things that we have to keep a very close eye on. Thank you."