Goudie Sandra: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Goudie Sandra: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:647;Page:16116] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 I have to say we did hold the Minister to task and asked what the premise was for this bill. Time and time again he said it was to prevent identity theft. That was an absolute nonsense and he well knows it. We asked the officials time and time again what the problem was that they were trying to fix and constantly they said it was to prevent identity theft. We have to look at the KPMG report because that says that in no way does identity theft have any relationship to access to information from the births deaths and marriages register. The premise for the bill was just not there. 
I ask members to read the reports in the press. Here is one from the  
New Zealand Herald  
that states: “Faced with a walnut-sized problem arising from identity theft the Government once again reaches for its sledgehammer.” That is exactly what it has done with this legislation. 
There were some fantastic submissions—and I am referring to Part 1 of the bill which we are required to do—and one of those submissions goes to the heart the nub of what we are supposed to have in terms of information. It states: “The free flow of information and ideas is the lifeblood of a participatory democracy.” and that submitter is absolutely right. This is a Government that has forgotten all about one of those fundamental basic principles of democracy. It is for this reason that freedom of speech is protected by section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to ensure that everybody has the right to freedom of expression including the freedom to seek receive and impart information and opinions of any kind and in any form. 
The submission goes on to refer to our right to free speech being under threat and says that the warning was sounded more than 70 years ago when Justice Louis Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court said: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard … when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. … The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well-meaning but without understanding.” I say that this bill completely undermines our freedom and our democracy. It is death by a thousand cuts and this bill is just one example of it. It is what submitters said right across the board and in spite of some of the changes that people tried to negotiate that death by a thousand cuts has not changed. 
I note that Darien Fenton talked about the Privacy Commissioner. Well what did she say about privacy? She actually described access to information as privacy pollution! That is just so bad. What sort of premise is that? What does that say about transparency and openness and the freedoms of democracy? That is what we get from the current Privacy Commissioner. Her idea of access to information is to call it privacy pollution. That is why we now have this current Government in the back rooms looking at how we have access to registers—and there are dozens of them—right across Parliament and at how it can shut down our access to those registers. It is very like the sort of thing a Mugabe regime would indulge in. 
It was interesting to see who many of the submitters were who made submissions on this bill. The members of the Trade Union History Project opposed the bill. Sir Geoffrey Palmer expressed grave concerns about the bill as well. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Who’s that? 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: Sir Geoffrey Palmer—goodness me who was he? He is actually the president of the Law Commission. He had scathing criticism of Labour’s ill-thought-out amendments to the Births Deaths and Marriages Registration Act and that is there in the documentation if the public want to take the time to read it. This current Government cannot deny that those criticisms were made by Sir Geoffrey Palmer. 
It comes back to this whole stretch about the reason—the premise—for this bill in the first instance. One of the hallmarks of this Government is its inability to do good problem-definition so we constantly have legislation coming out of this Government with poor problem-definition. We have all of these consequent problems as a result including the regulatory problems that go with them. That whole compliance area has been a major issue. 
What did the Trade Union History Project members say? Actually they did not want to appear before the Government Administration Committee; they just opposed the legislation outright.