Logie Jan: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Logie Jan: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6536. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JAN LOGIE (Green) 
: 
 I would like to make just a very brief call on behalf of the Green Party to offer our support for this bill the Electronic Identity Verification Bill as well in the Committee stage and actually to raise our voice to share some of the concerns that have been raised by our Labour colleagues. Our reasons for supporting the bill are primarily about easing citizens’ engagement with the State through a variety of different agencies. We know there is a need to ease that engagement. All too often people are being required to bring information again and again and again and are being sent away from appointments which may have taken them some time to get because they do not have the required information. It is our deep hope that this bill will go some way to alleviating this problem. That is the reason for our support. 
We also though do have concerns around privacy issues—clearly. We have heard of a number of Government departments recently—ACC the Inland Revenue Department the Ministry of Justice the Ministry of Education with Novopay and Work and Income—that have all had very significant privacy breaches. We are interested and we expect to hear that possibly other departments have also had privacy breaches. We are seeing at the same time coming through this House a range of bills and amendments to other existing legislation that seek to change basic legislative arrangements for and protections of people’s privacy. It makes sense that we do that as technology develops but it is also incredibly important that we take the duty of care to ensure that it does not undermine people’s confidence and ability to place their trust in the State. We have no choice on many occasions but to engage with the State. It is essential that we can trust that our information is kept secure in that process. Sadly at the moment we cannot necessarily have that trust. That is a very worrying situation. 
We see that there are many reasons for these breaches of privacy that have happened. My colleagues have mentioned the culture within some of the Government departments that does not prioritise privacy. We hope this bill will actually help to put it high up the agenda as we hope the breaches will as well. Another reason that has been mentioned for some of the breaches of privacy is a lack of expertise in terms of information technology within the departments and the fact that a lot of the systems that have been set up in-house were set up in another time. We hope and trust that the Department of Internal Affairs and every other department that does engage in this process will ensure they have the appropriate information and communications technology expertise to ensure that privacy is protected in this process. 
The digital divide is another aspect that I would like to just mention. I hope this bill is also a stimulus for each department to consider how it can provide the same ease of access for people who do not have access to online technology: older people people on low incomes people who have English as another language—all of those groups. If we provide a service only online we will get a lower-quality service from our Government. I do not believe that is good enough and I think that this bill could be a spur to consider what assistance we could put in place to help those people get that information online so that they too can get the benefits of this bill. So I hope to see those policy initiatives come out of this bill. 
On that note again I will mention the Green Party’s support for this bill which is a bill of its time and we are pleased to support it in that context.