Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to the third reading of the Data and Statistics Bill and it's been quite a journey that this bill's had. Initially ACT has looked at it and saw it on the surface as being something that would seek to modernise something in the form of the 1975 Act that probably needed to be modernised given the enormous changes in data-handling technology that have occurred over the past 47 years. But as we looked deeper into the bill we heard serious concerns raised by people who have enormous expertise. One of them was a former chief statistician Len Cook. Another was Sir Geoffrey Palmer one of the foremost architects of New Zealand's current constitutional framework. Another was the Council of Civil Liberties. Another was the council of librarians—although I'm going to get the exact title wrong on that. We looked at what these people were saying and we realised that this bill had serious problems. We hoped that the Government would respect the parliamentary process and when serious problems were raised with the bill—problems that brought into question whether the sanctity of data and statistics collected by Government and the security of those data and that statistics—we thought that maybe the Government would listen to these people with considerable expertise and make suitable changes to the legislation. There was even an alternative put up. Helpfully the Australian Parliament in recent time has passed a piece of legislation aimed at solving many of the same problems our Government wanted to solve but has done it without the pitfalls identified by those experts.What were those problems? Well as a bit of background the position of the chief statistician and in particular the status of official statistics have been carefully constitutionally protected for very good reason for a very long time. When a survey is done it has the potential to damage the Government of the day's interests. It may turn up results about employment or the price of things that might favour one side or the other of politics. It might gather data or information that would be key to some people's privacy. There are many reasons why you would want a person who had the power to not just collect but actually demand that statistics be provided. It's compulsory to fill out a lot of surveys done by Statistics New Zealand. It's critical that that person with that sort of power has their power tightly circumscribed and held accountable and that the official statistics that they collect are subject to a high standard of privacy and cannot be misused and the person collecting them cannot be interfered with politically if the results of their statistics might turn out to be politically charged. Those are things that at least the previous Statistics Act preserved.So people who are listening at home might think How on earth could you have a political debate about the collection of statistics?" Some people might think that it was a particularly uninspiring area of policy. Well actually it's critical and let me just give you one example. I saw recently a wonderful movie the movie Whina a biography of the life of Dame Whina Cooper. One fascinating scene that was described—and it was a real part of her life—was when she became the president of the Maori Women's Welfare League in Auckland and in order to find out about the true state of the welfare of Māori women in that city they actually went out as the league and did their own census. They collected data that the statistics department wasn't collecting and they forced the debate. Up until that time a lot of the statistics that New Zealand had collected had been administrative data and the problem with administrative data—that is data of people that have already engaged with a Government department—is that the people who most need to have a light shone on them by official statistics aren't included. A classic example of this was when the Government recently decided to use the health service user population for the population to vaccinate during COVID-19. They accidentally missed only about a percent but it was about 50000 people because they hadn't been to their doctor recently—exactly the people that needed to be included weren't. What they should have done is use the census and use the official data that the Government had that included everybody rather than just those who were already engaged with the healthcare system.So back in the 1950s and as recently as 2021 we see how important it is that we have official statistics that can be collected and that people will share their data with without fear or favour. That is a backstop to relying on administrative data that people can know will not be misused and their privacy will not be violated—all really important stuff.So what were the objections to this bill? Well really two things: first of all this bill muddies the water between the collection of official statistics and research. In other words assembling official statistics according to all the safeguards that are required to make sure that the data is given safely and not misused and that it's collected without fear or favour—that has been blurred into research which could be done by just about anybody. So the powers that the Statistician has to collect data are not necessarily just used for the collation of official statistics. In fact early in the bill I think it's Subpart 3 said "official statistics or research" and when I asked the Minister of Statistics what was the difference between the two he gave a perfunctory answer only to come back at 9 o'clock the next morning and say "Oh I was stumped by the simplicity and profundity of your question." Well I've always thought myself to be a simple and profound questioner but to have a Minister accept that he didn't understand two of the most critical terms in the legislation he'd been shepherding through Parliament for the last year is absolutely unacceptable.The next problem: having blurred the lines between official statistics and research and removed the protections of official statistic rules for the data that's collected by the chief statistician then it said "Well actually the chief statistician can defer or delegate those powers they have to anyone else in the entire public sector."—theoretically about 47000 people. I've been in correspondence with Len Cook who said to me—and I'm sure he won't mind me repeating—that if he'd been told in his time that his powers that he held to be important and a sacred duty had been delegated to someone else well what would he have done? He said he would have resigned. But now we have this enormous and sacred power of the chief statistician that is blurred into collecting official statistics and research that anybody can have. Anyone can have it delegated to them by the Minister and what we do is we destroy that line between official statistics and research that Whina Cooper had to contend with almost 70 years ago.Now we have a situation where the Government can demand your data the Government can use the powers to demand data delegated to any other department and that data can be used either for the purpose of official statistics or research. It undermines the whole integrity of New Zealand's statistics-gathering operation at a Government level. That is completely wrong.I'd also add that this legislation has peppered throughout it requirements that Māori be consulted early and meaningfully and I think that's a wonderful thing. The only problem is I think we should be consulting all New Zealanders early and meaningfully in a modern multi-ethnic liberal democracy. You know the statistics department itself categorises New Zealanders as not only Māori and European but also Asian New Zealanders also MELAA or Middle East Latin American and African New Zealanders—for people who might be interested—and also Pacific New Zealanders. Having just been to Samoa I have always regarded it as a very important part of New Zealand. Unfortunately the racial preference that has been needlessly peppered through a bill on statistics is another example of this Government's divisiveness. It has to stop. We need to unite behind good ideas and stop trying to make discrimination great again by finding superficial differences in each other instead of our common humanity. That is just one extra reason why the ACT Party cannot support this bill. But the real problem with it is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the Minister himself what this bill actually does to the integrity of statistics gathering in New Zealand. Thank you Madam Speaker."