Dyson Ruth: Identity Information Confirmation Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dyson Ruth: Identity Information Confirmation Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6559. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to speak on Part 2 of the Identity Information Confirmation Bill. As you correctly pointed out it starts at clause 7 and goes through to clause 20. I just want to begin by expressing a little bit of disappointment in the response that the Minister in the chair the Minister of Immigration gave to my colleague Trevor Mallard when he described the significant amount of change that was necessary to make this bill suitable for bringing back to the House. I was going to take a call on Part 1 but we suddenly seemed to have been voting so I will just briefly refer to the fact that a critical part of Part 1 needed amendment and that was the definition of “agency”. A big part of this bill is about ensuring that agencies are able to confirm identity but the very definition of “agency” needed to be changed by the Government Administration Committee because the bill that the Minister introduced did not include “intermediary” and that was an obvious problem that the select committee alerted the officials to. The officials quite properly drew up very impressive revised definitions of both “agency” and then a new definition of “intermediary” which again is described in Part 1. So two critical parts of making this bill work right—the definition of “agency” you know a sort of 101 of how this bill is going to work—needed to be corrected before the bill could come back to the House. 
In Part 2 the part we are up to now of course we now have to look at the insertions consistently throughout of “intermediary” which was omitted in the Minister’s first attempt at the bill but then we have other quite substantial amendments as well throughout this part including the exceptions which are outlined on page 8. So again there were substantial deletions and rewriting by the committee. Then we get to clause 11 where the entire clause which is a page and a half long is deleted and replaced with appropriate wording that actually goes for—if I could just count—one two three nearly four full pages of revised text. We are talking about a bill that is only 18 pages long and goes to clause 20 and then on to the schedule. This is not a big bill yet five pages in this bill are total rewrites. That is over a quarter of the bill was rewritten. When my colleague Trevor Mallard referred to this pretty flawed not great attempt at a bill that the Minister in the chair the Hon Nathan Guy had introduced the Minister pooh-poohed it. He brushed him off. He dismissed his concerns basically calling himself a pretty good Minister and saying that he had done a jolly fine job. Well the evidence is before the Committee as we speak. I am very pleased that the Government Administration Committee and the officials did such a lot of work to make not a great bill but one where the intention was clearly supported by Labour into something that was fit to be returned to the House. 
Obviously clause 13 is another area that has had a complete rewrite. That is in relation to requirements of the Privacy Commissioner. If you are talking about people having confidence in a system where an agency is able to use that service to confirm identity information that has been provided to it then having a clear definition of “agency” is pretty fundamental. There cannot be anything more fundamental than that. Then if you are talking about relationships and responsibilities I would have thought—and I think that most members of the Committee would think—that the requirements of consultation with the Privacy Commissioner would be another fundamental. This is the second part of the bill that has had to be substantially rewritten. 
Why do we think these issues are important? Well I will tell the Committee why from my perspective we think they are important. It is because so many things have been going wrong with our departmental systems. 
Mr Chairman—I thought you were going to push the buzzer there and I was just anticipating. [ 
Bell rung 
] Mr Chairman. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch) 
: The Hon Ruth Dyson. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: That was a taunting little act Mr Chairman—done in the best humour I know and actually on the grounds of accuracy I am sure. 
Some are systems that are in-house like the shambles that we have seen at the kiosks at Work and Income where a regular punter went in did not hack into the system just used it as it was intended and the next minute was provided with copious amounts of information that nobody wanted him to have. Work and Income had been alerted to this security concern and for some reason did not seem to think that it was appropriate to tell its Minister the Minister for Social Development. Maybe its Minister would not have been interested in such a potential security breach but in my view that is the sort of activity that the Committee should be extremely concerned about not just because it was not hacking—it was just using the system as intended—but because it exposed some of the most vulnerable members of our community to potential abuse. 
There was a breach of their privacy. Fortunately the person who breached the security—quite legitimately as I understand it—did not use that information for any purpose that could have done any harm. Thank goodness for that. What if it had been someone who had malicious intent and knew how to operate the kiosk? The kiosk was set up so that Work and Income clients—people who are receiving a benefit or people who are going there for information and support—can look up things like information about jobs. It was never intended to pass over information about children in foster care their medication their personal addresses where they are living or other information that potentially is very damaging. 
We have also had some discussion about the total shambles that Hekia Parata has—in a pretty intelligent move actually—pushed on entirely to her Associate Minister of Education the Hon Craig Foss. I guess the temptation to pass on this sort of shambles to your associate is pretty strong especially when you are in such a lot of difficulty. In my home town of Christchurch the Minister came into town and said she was going to close and merge a lot of our schools and now people are wondering what on earth that is all about because there is no logic to it and there is no intention to have better educational outcomes. It is all a bit of a frustration and stress inducer actually. 
But what the Minister Hekia Parata has pushed on to her Associate Minister is responsibility for Novopay. First of all the problems with Novopay were pretty straightforward—immensely frustrating for teachers. Some of them just did not get paid. Then we found out that some of them had got paid even though they had left teaching some time ago. Well pleasant though it might be to get a big dollop of money in your bank account when you are not working for the person who has paid you that money you have also got to pay it back. You feel pretty uncomfortable that you have taken something that does not belong to you. It is an additional hassle and stress for people who frankly do not need it. 
But now we have found out that it is not just teachers not getting paid or people who are no longer teachers getting paid but that some schools are getting access to information—private details—about teachers who are not at their school. I noticed the Associate Minister’s comments about that. He said that every issue was being taken seriously. Well that is jolly fine but actually what we would like is the system fixed so that we do not have this ongoing problem for teachers who are now going through their exam period thinking about the Christmas break and not knowing at all what their financial situation is going to be because of this totally incompetent pay system. Having the Associate Minister say “Oh we’re taking all these issues seriously.” does not actually cut the mustard frankly. 
It is not good enough. It is like the quality of this bill when it was first introduced. The Marshall Laing Primary School associate principal said that it would have been easy under the current Novopay system to divert money from a teacher’s bank account through the breach in the system. How do teachers around the country feel about that? I do not think they would be very satisfied with it at all. This is just the latest in a series of very important and serious breaches where people’s individual privacy has been threatened and where people have been sent the wrong information by Government departments. I do not think frankly that the Government is getting on top of this at all.