Turei Metiria: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Turei Metiria: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:648;Page:17298] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I am presenting the Green Party position supporting this bill on the basis of points that have been provided by my colleague Keith Locke who sat on the Government Administration Committee which considered this legislation but who is unable to be here tonight to deliver our position himself. 
First of all this bill was a victory—in our view—for the MMP system. When this bill had its first reading most parties in the House including the Greens were not aware that it so fundamentally undermined the free access that we have had to births deaths and marriages records access we have had since 1848. The country’s genealogists historians biographers and journalists soon put us straight and their complaints dominated the select committee hearings. Two of the smaller MMP parties the Greens and United Future then got together to restore open access and Peter Dunne and my colleague Keith Locke made a joint submission to the select committee; the fact that Labour no longer had the majority for the original bill meant that it had to be dramatically transformed possibly more than any other bill in recent times. 
Open access is largely preserved in this reformed bill. There will be some access restricted by regulation which is why it is important to put clearly on record in this third reading—to guide future regulation makers—what MPs intended when voting for this bill. It is not intended that anyone can simply exercise a choice to close off records or to close them off for any period that one may like and it is not intended that there be more than a few cases of this happening in any one year. Those wishing to close off their own birth marriage or civil union records have to have a substantive reason as laid down in regulation which means something like being chased by a former partner who may want to find out one’s new location details from those marriage or civil union records. This is an issue of safety. Also the closure must be for a defined period which does not mean many years other than in exceptional circumstances and renewals should not be easy to get. 
This retention of openness is particularly important for us as a young nation. Many New Zealanders are desperate to trace their family roots and for Maori being denied access to records that could prove one’s whakapapa would be very hurtful. My colleague thinks it is also a sentiment among select committee members to keep down the costs of access. As far as Government costs go they should be cheaper than in the past because of the increasingly computerised databases. We would expect people in the future to be able to access details by computer with the right identification provided and their access actions will be added to the new access register under this bill. 
The whole question of the effect of the computer and Internet age on how this legislation works is still a bit uncertain. The idea expressed in this bill is that the Government helps access through the computerisation of records keyword checking and the like and we sincerely hope that this happens. When we review the legislation under the review clause in the legislation we can deal with those matters further. It is best that the Government matches up to the task of providing easy access because the reality is that we live in an age when everything is being digitalised and there is no way of stopping people accessing birth death and marriage records in newspaper files or in other ways using keyword searches or the classic techniques. Genealogical databases are being stored on overseas sites beyond the reach of our law. 
We agree that the Government was right to be worried about identity fraud but there was not that much evidence that the Births Deaths and Marriages database was much of a source of false identities. The main problem with identity fraud is that many private agencies in New Zealand are slack when checking identities and the law cannot substitute for those agencies getting their act together and providing a quality service. Actually there is a huge amount of information about us on various databases and any agency can ask any applicant for a credit card or for whatever plenty of tricky questions so that he or she would have to be the genuine person to be able to answer them properly. 
In effect the Greens are pleased with the outcome of this bill. We are very pleased to have worked with the other MMP parties to make the changes that were made. We are pleased that the MMP parties were able to exercise the influence that MMP was designed to provide to those parties. It is a victory for openness for the community and for MMP itself. Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker.