Goudie Sandra: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Goudie Sandra: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:647;Page:16125] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 I rise once again to support National’s decision to vote against this legislation. In speaking to the title we could call the bill a number of things but I would call it the “Death of our Democracy by a Thousand Cuts and This is Just Another Slice Bill”. It absolutely is so. Openness and transparency is a fundamental principle of democracy and that is being denied in this bill. 
I ask what is driving it. Earlier I mentioned Sir Geoffrey Palmer who expressed some serious concerns about this legislation. Just for the benefit of members on the other side of the Chamber I say that he had serious concerns about this legislation and I will tell members why. The reason was that the access provisions proposed in the bill will not only affect birth deaths and marriages registers but also may have other implications for wider registers. With regard to this we can probably bear in mind the driver for this measure which is partly the view of the Privacy Commissioner whose new concept of access to information is called privacy pollution. 
The other concern expressed by Sir Geoffrey Palmer was that there is no evidence of how much identity fraud in New Zealand is made by access to births deaths and marriages records. Indeed the information required for identity theft can be obtained from many other sources. He is absolutely right. I said previously that the KPMG report on identity fraud made no linkage between access to the births deaths and marriages information in the registers. Sir Geoffrey said also that no figures are available as to how many people if any have expressed concern about the current availability of information on the births deaths and marriages register. The officials had a great deal of difficulty dredging up the half a dozen that might have existed. We are one of the most open societies in the world and I think it is to our shame that we are starting to shut down on that openness. 
As I have said before there are two aspects of this legislation that in our view are absolutely unnecessary. All of the submitters who opposed this bill were absolutely right in that this bill is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. This is about essentially two things. The bill in its current form—the Minister is still putting through Supplementary Order Papers—is denying people that ready and free access to the information on the registers. They should have been able to have free access and they should still be able to have it. They should be able to get printouts or photocopies of information. 
The other problem we tried to bring to the Government’s attention was the fact that anyone can go to the registrar’s office and get an authorised document without providing any form of identification. For some reason the registrar’s office produces authorised documentation to people who go there just wanting a bit of information. How dumb is that? I cannot understand how those officials could make that connection between providing an authorised document without the person having any form of identification whatsoever. 
Identification is required for a driver’s licence for a gun licence and for a whole raft of other licences. If people want an authorised document they should be required to provide some form of identification. I am sure that that could have been done through any other process than legislation. As I have said before and as the Government seems to ignore completely one of the first principles of legislation is to identify the problem—define clearly what the problem is that we are trying to fix. 
Sir Geoffrey acknowledged that the linkage to identity fraud was essentially dropped and that the driver was this thing about privacy pollution coming out of the Privacy Commissioner. We should be very very clear in the first instance what the problem is and define it very very clearly. 
The second thing that the legislative guidelines ask is whether there is some other way that this could be addressed without having to introduce yet another piece of legislation. I feel that this could have been done by a simple requirement through regulations that some form of identification be required if someone wants an authorised document—not if someone wants any other information—and free and ready access to all of that information. But no this is the sledgehammer to crack a nut.