Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) (remote): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak on this bill. There's a bit to unpack not just in the Governance and Administration Committee deliberations but in what the Minister has just told us so I'll attempt to do that in the time available.There's no doubt that the statistics legislation that we have does need updating. I'm not a fan of repealing and replacing just because it is of a certain age. But the case for making changes to our statistics legislation is pretty easy to make. If you look back to 1975 we had no internet no email and no cellphones. We were living a fairly homogenous existence in nuclear families and we probably didn't put any energy to the views of tangata whenua over the collection and storage of information. So we've come a long way since then and to some degree this bill is actually giving legislative effect to current practice.But as the Governance and Administration Committee found out as they were going through their deliberations on this bill it is a technical bill and we certainly relied very much on officials and submitters. I'm very grateful to them and I thank them for their thoughtful submissions. They came from former Statisticians from the Privacy Commissioner from civil libertarians and from iwi. So we had a very broad range of views within which to pore over those technical elements. I'm going to focus on two particular issues: one of privacy; and then as the Minister has touched on the potential for a delay in census 2023.So there's two matters in privacy that I just want to touch on. The first is clause 39 where there was an amendment to clause 39 to effectively give a legal ability for Statistics New Zealand to publish data in a form that may identify an organisation but there's little that we could do about that. The select committee spent quite a bit of time interrogating officials as to why this was necessary and what circumstances might exist for this to occur. As the select committee report points out they used the example of a community with perhaps for example one aged care facility where simply identifying data related to aged care would inevitably identify the organisation that was being talked about or being referred to. I think most committee members were in the end accepting of the need for this amendment albeit that members on both sides of the table expressed a hope that that was as far as it goes.I want to draw the House's attention back to the comments that the Minister has just made that the bill does not expand the power of the State to collate data and statistics. I hope he's right. There were submitters that didn't agree with that assessment of what the bill does and that the bill perhaps gives the State more power than it needs to collect data. I'm somewhere in the middle of that discussion but we need to keep a weather eye on whether or not this does go beyond the powers that are appropriate in the circumstances.The second element of the privacy issue that I want to raise is a very thoughtful submission from the Privacy Commissioner. Now I'm sure like all parliamentary colleagues I have a very high degree of trust and confidence in the Privacy Commissioner and when she provides advice we need to listen carefully. Albeit in supporting the bill she nevertheless came up with a number of recommendations for the bill to be improved. We didn't make many of them and so it was important to the committee that we were confident that the Privacy Commissioner was satisfied overall with the response to their submission. We were advised by officials that notwithstanding that only minor changes were made based on the recommendations of the commissioner's office they were broadly satisfied with where Statistics New Zealand officials have got to. I hope that's right. I think it's really important that we listen carefully to the privacy elements. We're in a very very unusual environment where people are fiercely protective of their privacy but paradoxically have no problem in open-source social media for example revealing quite a bit about their lives. But nevertheless they still have a right to privacy particularly when it comes to the State collection of information.Now I want to turn to the other matter that the Minister raised and that is of census 2023. He managed to gild the lily and have a slap at the previous Government all at once. Flexibility is only good Government practice if it's got the protections around it. Where he described quote rushing through retrospective changes to delay census in 2011" that is a rewrite of history of course because the Canterbury earthquakes occurred I think somewhere less than two weeks out from the census.Hon Dr David Clark: Guilty conscience. I didn't say that.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: It wasn't retrospective in any event; we passed legislation under urgency but it wasn't retrospective. I mean actually the Minister I think just said "I didn't say that." Well he needs to go back and read his own Hansard. So this started—well it started for us as a question to the Minister on 16 February when he appeared before the committee and I asked him "Would it be necessary to amend primary legislation if it was decided that a delay to census 2023 was necessary?" And his reply was almost theoretical. He said something like "I suspect we would. Yes that's my understanding." Well actually he understood a heck of a lot more than he was letting the committee know because documents now indicate that they had been working on an amendment to this bill for months initially as a Supplementary Order Paper and then some official probably had a eureka moment when they realised that because the bill was still before the committee a simple amendment to it to allow a delay was possible and that's what we have before us.Now the Minister has also admitted that a decision would be made in July. And my question to him which I will examine in the committee of the whole House is why July? And why if Statistics New Zealand are so well prepared would it be necessary to make the decision seven months or eight months out from the due date? Because we can't predict what will happen. At this stage it's eminently possible given the way COVID is tracking to be able to hold the census in March next year; if nothing changes why are we going to make a decision to delay the census for a whole year eight months out from it? Now the shape the bill is coming back to the House in has that very broad amendment. Now I'm not averse the National Party is not averse to an amendment to the bill to allow the delay. But I think the way clause 34 is currently rewritten is far too broad. There needs to be a reason for the delay. So I will be moving an amendment to the bill at the committee of the whole House to specify the conditions that will need to exist in order for a delay to occur. They will include things like a national state of emergency a major pandemic—such as we've got very recent experience in—and civil unrest and something else.The Minister should make that decision not the chief statistician and he should make it only after consultation with the public. One of the reasons that shouldn't be used but which currently could be is political expediency—the risk that the Government will oversee yet another debacle the like of which we saw in 2018 six months out from a general election that produces the sort of political embarrassment that this Cabinet will want to avoid which I believe is why they are going to make the decision in July or August rather than wait until much closer to the time. So I don't think that's good enough. I certainly think it's consistent with the track record. I think it's laughable for the Minister to describe their good governance practice given what they oversaw in 2018. So this amendment is not well written and we'll be seeking to amend it.We will continue to support this legislation but we believe much tighter constraints and parameters should be brought around the Minister's ability to delay next year's census. With that we'll continue to support the bill. Thank you Mr Speaker."