Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (Minister of Justice): I will take a brief call on the Enhancing Identity Verification and Border Processes Legislation Bill. Firstly can I begin by thanking the Law and Order Committee which did work very well and very constructively on what is an important part of our law enforcement framework. I think the circumstances that led to this piece of work and the inquiry around the escape of Phillip John Smith are well known. It is a matter that certainly sticks out in my mind. I had been the Minister of Justice for just a few weeks and was immediately presented with this situation. Of course your first instinct is to identify what has gone wrong in the system to allow it to happen and what needs to be put in place to stop it happening. What became clear very very quickly was that there are a number of both practice and legislative barriers that stopped agencies working in the way we might expect would be the case. When we found that in fact agencies like Corrections did not feel able to share information with border agencies around who should and who should not leave the country when we found there was legal uncertainty about the ability to leave the country and when we found that an offender—a manipulative offender—was able to manipulate our name register systems and our identity verification system to his own ends it very quickly became clear that we had to look at our frameworks in New Zealand to ensure it did not happen again. That is why of course there was an inquiry instituted to look into these issues.But I think it is worth making the point that this was not just an inquiry looking into a single escape and what needed to have happened to stop that particular set of circumstances. What that situation did was identify a need to look more broadly at how we thought about identity verification across our whole law enforcement and border systems and how information sharing needed to be set up to facilitate those systems working. That is what the inquiry was asked to look at and it recommended to this House that the systems needed a step change" to use its words. It was not a question of some small incremental tweaks; it was a recognition that our systems from the Department of Internal Affairs from Births Deaths and Marriages from the Police through the courts through Corrections right through to our border agencies needed to be comprehensively rethought and redesigned.It also reflected a very prescient observation which is that name records are not sufficient in the current environment to properly protect and understand who we are dealing with. I think it is the expectation of New Zealanders that the systems are able to know with a high degree of confidence who they are dealing with and that that is not able to be defeated by something as simple as a name change or by using different legal names to carry out that behaviour. It should not be sufficient to enable offenders to have several identities that they can operate at their will. And certainly it is not sufficient that we can have a breakdown between law enforcement processes and our border agencies. That is what this bill is designed to do.The inquiry came up with 39 substantive recommendations and the Government accepted all of them. Twenty-two of those related in the main to Corrections operational practice which have all been fully implemented and are now in place. But as I mentioned earlier a number of them talked to the step change required between the ways we access things like the births deaths and marriages record like the real-time ability for our law enforcement professionals to have access to identity verification like the ability to be able to verify an offender at one stage in their life and have a single source of truth about who they are as they flow through the system. This bill will give effect to that. It is an important part of our framework and I commend it to the House.The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 344 in the name of the Hon Amy Adams be agreed to.Amendments agreed to.Parts 1 and 2 schedules 1 to 3 and clauses 1 and 2 as amended agreed to.House resumed.Bill reported with amendment.Report adopted."