Adams AmyHon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn): Thank you Madam Chair and I appreciate your forbearance. I have to tell you that the effort of leaping up and down as my colleagues all fought for the call was getting somewhat distressing to me so I thank you for your guidance and your forbearance.I want to come back to the issue I raised earlier around information gathering and respond to the Minister's response. He has dismissed the amendment that I've put on the Table on the basis that he says that it's important the Overseas Investment Office has the ability to ensure compliance of overseas investors with the terms of their consent. And I've got no problem with that; I agree with the Minister. Of course it's important that an overseas investor where conditions have been imposed—New Zealand should have a way of checking that those conditions are complied with and enforcing them if they aren't. That is not the point that I was raising and that is not the point that the Privacy Commissioner was raising.The point that I've raised in my earlier call and that my amendment addresses and that the Privacy Commissioner raised—which with respect Mr Parker has not been fully addressed by the Finance and Expenditure Committee—is that the bill doesn't limit itself to checking compliance with conditions by overseas investors. What it does is enable information gathering that effectively can extend across any property transaction in New Zealand. And that is why I have suggested as the Privacy Commissioner did that section 41 in clause 24 of the bill reverts to its original drafting and that's what my amendment does.So simply saying Well we need it so that overseas investors can be held to account." is frankly an absurd response in that that is not the issue. That is already possible under certainly the opinion of the Privacy Commissioner and certainly it would be extremely surprising if that weren't the case in the core Act. The issue is why the information-gathering powers now extend to non-overseas investors to transactions that don't include an overseas investor. And if the Minister is indicating a willingness to revise section 41 to make it clear that those powers only apply to an overseas investor and in respect of a transaction that the Overseas Investment Office has approved or in some way dealt with then I would welcome that amendment but right now that is not the crafting and the framing of those clauses that I've referred to.In a similar vein if you look at the very last clause of Part 3 before we get into the schedules clause 35—and this is a related point but I accept that I'm outside the scope of my amendment at least for now—that one deals with amendments to the Fisheries Act. Now it's a consequential amendment but it's interesting because the one change it makes is to replace the term—and again relating to information gathering—"monitoring" with "information-gathering". That's the very point I'm making that the information-gathering powers have now gone beyond monitoring compliance and detecting offences to information gathering over the whole sector.So Mr Parker I'm sorry. Your response that this is necessary for enforcement and compliance simply doesn't stack up in light of the wording of your own bill which I have certainly read and hope you have and it certainly doesn't stack up with the advice to the committee from the Privacy Commissioner. Now his advice to the committee was very clearly that section 41 should revert to the original drafting in the primary legislation. It does not do that. The bill we're debating right now adds in a newly expanded section 41 and my amendment puts to the House that that is not warranted it has not been justified and it is not sufficiently constrained.Now Mr Parker taking to your feet and simply saying "Well we need it for compliance." when that is the whole point—that it goes beyond that—is not a response. Now I would ask the Minister in the chair to either tell us why the power now entitles information gathering across all property transactions or agree to constrain it to circumstances that the Minister himself described which are circumstances involving ensuring compliance of an overseas investor with their conditions because this side of the Chamber would have no difficulty with that. But if this debate is going to be meaningful and if the Minister is to have any respect at all in terms of his bona fides in this debate he will address it on its merits and not refer to some fatuous response that doesn't deal with the point being made and with the criticisms of the Privacy Commissioner.I would like to think that he would have read the Privacy Commissioner's concerns given his somewhat unfair attack on me earlier in his response and if he has he will know that that's exactly what the Privacy Commissioner said: don't make section 41 wider limit it to what's currently in the Act. What's already in the Act is very broad and enables detection. I can see from the words that that's not what's there."