Tanczos Nandor: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Tanczos Nandor: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:647;Page:15909] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
 I am giving this speech on behalf of Keith Locke who is unable to participate in the debate this evening. The Greens will support the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill now that the Supplementary Order Paper has dramatically transformed it. We thank the Minister Rick Barker for recognising the role that the Greens and in particular Keith Locke have played in this transformation. Keith was of course added to the Government Administration Committee to represent the Green Party on this bill. 
As has been mentioned by previous speakers including Mr Connell just previously the original bill met with huge opposition—in fact from virtually every genealogist historian biographer and journalist in the country—and rightly so. The original bill largely eliminated the traditional free access to births deaths and marriages records or at least people would have to go through a hugely cumbersome time-consuming and costly process of trying to get immediate relatives to give them permission to look at records of relatives who had died less than 50 years ago were married less than 80 years ago or had been born less than 100 years ago. The Green Party responded to these concerns and said that we would not support the bill going any further. We linked up with United Future and in the best MMP tradition Peter Dunne and Mr Locke presented a joint submission to the Government Administration Committee which was considering the bill and Mr Dunne has referred to that. 
With several MMP parties plus National being against the bill the Government did not have the numbers to pass the bill in its original form. Rather than simply opposing the bill as the National Party had done the Greens tried to look for a way through and we think that it has been found. The key point is that we have pretty much kept open access to records. If people want it they can get it. However there is provision for people to close their records but the Greens successfully pushed for this to be on prescribed grounds and for a prescribed purpose. We were given confirmation in the House by the Minister that it will not be easy to meet these prescribed grounds. He said it must be on “substantive” grounds and the prescribed period cannot be too long either. We reiterate that position particularly for the reference of those making the regulations and for the Regulations Review Committee. 
The select committee looked at a real substantive ground that might occur infrequently. It looked at cases like a woman who had left a spouse and set up a new relationship and did not want her former partner to be able to track her down. The former partner may be able to track her new address by getting hold of a marriage or civil union certificate finding out the new partner’s name and then the address. So it has to be something serious to close a record. It cannot be done just on a whim and for a long period. The period would not need to be for years and years because there is the right of renewal with the registrar. 
After the big changes made to the original bill New Zealand remains like Britain and parts of the United States in that it is holding the line for open access to records. We do not need to exaggerate security concerns because Government officials could not identify many people who were stealing other people’s identities by using the births deaths and marriages records. In fact it is much harder to steal a person’s identity now due to computerisation and checks in the records of the Department of Internal Affairs. It is much much harder to steal the identity of a dead person— 
Sandra Goudie 
: There never was any correlation between access and fraud. 
NANDOR TANCZOS 
: All I can hear is yak-yak-yak. It is much harder to steal the identity of a dead person because a death is now registered in the computer records in the same file as the person’s birth marriage or civil union details. If someone goes to the Department of Internal Affairs for a passport plenty of questions can be asked of a fraudster to check them out. Some defenders of the bill in its original form said that might be true but what about the private firms banks and various agencies that might be deceived about someone’s identity if information on births deaths and marriages is too readily available? Well if they do not do the proper checking it is their lookout. We do not need to close off the records because of their incompetence. 
There are a couple of new checks and balances in the revised bill that are not too onerous and will give people some protection against fraud. First people accessing information have to provide some identification and their access to a particular subject’s files will be recorded on that subject’s access register. Secondly if people have some worries that a particular person might be trying to get at their details with ill intent they can check their access register regarding their own birth marriage or civil union details. The death details are outside this process for obvious reasons—it is a bit difficult for a deceased person to fill out the relevant forms. Thirdly the identification criteria for the person accessing records will presumably not be too onerous. The requirement is for any means of identification that are reasonably necessary. It will not be watertight identification but it will make it easier to track down harassers and fraudsters. 
Presumably it will not be necessary for bulk users like genealogists to go through a lot of hassles and repeatedly lodge ID. They might be identified by a particular email address for repeated searches. Cost and ease of access is rightly important for many genealogists. They are often retired people without much income who often have to go up many paths to track down forebears. The computerisation of records should make it easier for them to get printouts and hopefully will be cheaper for the recipient in that there is a much lower administrative burden on the Department of Internal Affairs with computerised records compared with paper records. What are known as historical records will be readily available—that is where the person was born 100 years ago and the like. 
There is a provision in the bill for the Department of Internal Affairs to provide information on whole categories of people in an easy form. This could be very important for some historical research. For example one researcher did a project on what types of people were most affected by the 1918 flu epidemic in New Zealand and where they lived. A comprehensive look at the death records during the several months of the flu epidemic was obviously required. The downside for researchers is that the Government will not now be providing sets of hundreds of people’s records or summaries often called indexes in the same way it did previously. People will not be allowed to put whole sets of records on the Internet. How this will work in practice is anyone’s guess because the long arm of the New Zealand law does not necessarily get to Internet jurisdictions on the other side of the world where foreign websites may host the mass genealogical records of New Zealanders which currently exist. This question of whether a mass of records or summaries of them should be available on the Internet and the practicalities of preventing it is one we will have to work through over the 5-year test period of the legislation. 
In finishing the Green Party thanks the dozens of submitters to the bill who were instrumental in paving the way for this bill to be changed to allow open access of records. Mr Locke says it was also nice to see the two Tims—the two previously faceless editors of the  
New Zealand Herald  
and the  
Dominion Post 
—Tim Murphy and Tim Pankhurst pop their heads above the parapet and jointly make the case to the select committee for freedom of information. The original bill was very unpopular. As the Green MPs talked about it around the community we discovered that almost every second person appears to be a genealogist which is great not only for family histories but also for the refining of our nation’s history. We praise these genealogists just as we praise the historians and biographers who will gain greatly from the changes in this bill. In the main genealogists historians and biographers work long hours month after month year after year generally unpaid—in fact spending money out of their own pockets quite often—just to bring some enlightenment to their families and their nation.