Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. Can I thank the Minister for his contribution in leading off the second reading of this very important bill. I hesitate to say that we enjoyed ourselves on the Justice Committee invigilating this bill but we certainly worked very hard. It is an area of law that is of vital importance and it is an area of law that has been badly in need of an update as the Minister has made clear. This bill started life back in 2011 back in the 50th Parliament and it's taken until—what are we?—midway through 2019 and it looks like the bill will pass before the end of the year. It started life with a Law Commission report. I think there was an exposure draft as a response to that and then I think the last Government the last National Government actually introduced the bill—I think I'm right in saying that—and the bill was sent to our committee for consideration. As the Minister's rightly noted it is a total rewrite of the law. Actually various things had been kind of shoehorned on to the legislation over the last 25 years or so and I think it is appropriate that we do have a total rewrite in light of the advances in digital technology. That's the first point I want to make—that I think that the process has been a long one but it's going to lead to a good outcome. We did work really hard on the Justice Committee on the bill. It's a highly technical area of law as I'm about to canvass and I do just want to at this point acknowledge the hard work of the Justice officials who guided some people; some familiar with technology and privacy principles and some—it would be fair to say on the committee without disparaging my colleagues from both sides—not quite so familiar but they led us through in a very good way and were very practically minded and did a really good job. There are a couple of things I want to highlight in relation to the substance of the bill. The first is around the mandatory reporting of privacy breaches which is clause 117 of Part 6 of the bill. We spent quite a long time on this in the committee trying to find the right balance between making Parliament's expectation clear that agencies would take privacy seriously and that when there were privacy breaches that occurred they would be notified but also finding the balance between that and making sure that there weren't so many notifications that it trivialised the value of privacy and that actually with so many notifications to people and to the Privacy Commissioner people would stop taking things seriously. I think we've about got the balance right. A notifiable privacy breach is one that is reasonable to believe has caused serious harm to an affected individual or individuals or is likely to do so" and in clause 117(a) there's a series of factors that agencies have to take into consideration. I've got residual concerns that we haven't quite got the balance right and maybe that's something we can talk about in the committee of the whole stage but we worked pretty hard as a committee to get that balance right. The Minister's made reference to the other area I wanted to mention which is the quite serious attempt we have made to bring agencies based outside New Zealand into the law. We've recommended an amendment to insert new clause 3A to make it clear that it will apply to agencies outside New Zealand. It will apply to the actions by a New Zealand agency "whether inside or outside New Zealand" and apply to "all personal information collected or held by [a New Zealand agency] … regardless of where the information is collected" and as well as that all agencies outside. We want to make that very clear in the bill. The other thing I want to make clear is around the news media. Again we had quite a long debate as a committee about what exactly the role of the news media is in relation to privacy. What's clear in the bill is that clause 6 exempts news media and it's very important that they are able to play that role in a free and democratic society. We have actually widened the definition of what "news media" involves in the bill. So we have widened I suppose the scope of the exemption from privacy but at the same time we have made it clear that the only exempt media entities will be ones that are subject to independent standards of conduct which include privacy standards and a complaints procedure. So the examples of things we're talking about would be the Broadcasting Standards Authority and the New Zealand Media Council and we've given a residual power in the bill for the Minister in conjunction with the Privacy Commissioner to recognise another regime if something comes about in the future.Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 10 p.m."