Coffey TamatiTAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): I rise in support of the Privacy Bill currently before the House and before I dig down into the intricacies of the actual bill I just want to share a story which highlights just how necessary a review of the Privacy Act actually is. It wasn't too long ago that I returned home after work one day and my sister was on her laptop and she was talking on the phone to somebody in a distant country. As I walked into the house and I saw this happening I said to her What's going on here?" She said somebody had contacted her and told her that she had something going on in her computer—it was infected—and that she had to enter her password in and a few login details and then go to a couple of specific sites which she was trying to do to try and obviously get her computer back on the straight and narrow.When I revealed to her that she could potentially have been scammed she then told the person on the end of the line "My brother says that you're trying to scam me." to which the person said "No I'm not trying to scam you—your brother is lying. Keep doing what I'm telling you." at which I then grabbed the phone and hung up for her and then looked at her computer screen only to find that there were screeds of files that were currently flashing up on the computer screen in front of her. I turned the computer off immediately and we had to have a little sit-down conversation about privacy and about how passwords shouldn't be given out especially to people over the phone that you don't really know.So as I look over this Privacy Bill that's before the House realising that it's been a long time since we first had this brought before the House—the Privacy Act 1993—I think it's about time for a refresh. I support the provisions of this bill and I support them on behalf of my family too.Let's talk through some of the key messages. First of all this here is to protect people and obviously their privacy online and that can't be minimised because with the amount of work that we do now online there is a lot of our private information currently out there and we are in a very different world to the world that we were in in 1993. Now banks are encouraging you to do all of your transactions online. Branches are closing down around the country in favour of online banking. We put all of our details in and it doesn't take much to ask for your name your address your phone number and your email. Generally any site that you go to and think "That's a cool site." you type in your information and that's your information's that's then being sometimes—as we've found out in the case of Facebook recently—shared all around the world with third parties that we don't really know too much about. So any moves by this Government to actually change things in a modern context the context that we're living in today is a very good thing.Again the key purpose of the reforms is to promote and protect people's privacy and give them confidence that all of their information online is going to be secure and adequately protected. The Privacy Act in its current form has been with us for nearly 25 years and as I've said before it is time for a bit of a change because of obviously social media e-commerce websites that we sign up to etc. etc.Let's talk about some of the provisions in the bill. First of all as the previous speaker who's now departed Mark Mitchell has identified there is the mandatory reporting of privacy breaches. So if an agency knowingly has a breach of privacy they then need to under the provisions of this new bill actually tell that there has been a privacy breach and that's a very new but a very informative change that will be going through. It's a great provision in there and there will be criminal offences if they don't tell. So it will be an offence to mislead an agency in a way that affects somebody else's information and to knowingly then destroy documents once you've been requested to provide that information. The penalty for that is $10000. So it's a hefty penalty but it's a necessary penalty as we move into the new age.There is also going to be a strengthening of cross-border data flows and the protections around that. That's incredibly important as the World Wide Web knows no bounds and when we enter information into a website here inevitably it can often be related to an overseas agency. So that begs the question: what is an agency? I'm glad that the bill has drilled down into exactly what that is because some people out there might not know. An agency is the name used for any entity that handles personal information. So an agency can be just one person or it can be persons in both the public and the private sector but it doesn't apply to people in their personal or domestic capacity and it also doesn't include the Sovereign the Governor-General Parliament courts and tribunals exercising judicial functions. So any agency that knowingly misleads the public about any kind of breach of privacy will be dealt to and dealt to very strongly.One of the other provisions in the bill is also to strengthen the Privacy Commissioner's information-gathering power. Now the commissioner's existing investigation power is strengthened by allowing him or her to shorten the time frame within which an agency must comply and increasing the penalty for non-compliance. I've already referred to that but in giving more strength to the Privacy Commissioner that gives more strength to New Zealanders so that we know that the right thing will be done if there are any of these breaches. The commissioner is able to make binding decisions and again this is a very commendable provision—binding decisions on access requests. That reform is going to enable the commissioner to make decisions on complaints relating to the access of information rather than the Human Rights Review Tribunal. The commissioner's decisions will be able to be appealed to the tribunal as well.All of these when you put them together are provisions that are going to make the information that New Zealanders store online a whole lot more sound so that we can sleep at night especially in light of what's gone and happened with some very famous privacy breaches around the world. It will enable us to sleep a lot easier knowing that our information isn't being sent out and divvied up to third-party agencies.The Privacy Commissioner John Edwards when this piece of legislation was put before the country was the first one to pipe up saying that he welcomed the introduction of the bill to maintain New Zealand's strong track record of protecting the privacy interests of individuals. It's nice to know that our Privacy Commissioner has that kind of strength of character to believe that here in New Zealand we've been doing a really good job so far and we need to continue to do that. He said that privacy law reform and this particular bill was overdue and had become an increasingly urgent issue since the Law Commission made the recommendation back in 2011.At this point I think it's only appropriate to acknowledge that the actual petition was put in place by the Opposition who were the Government at the time but they did kick off the work for the Law Commission to put in the review to make the recommendations. It's a bit of a pity that all these years later—that's seven years now—we've had to step in and actually finish this off but as we all know good things take time and this bill is currently before the House and it seems to have agreement on both sides of the House too.So I have only support for this bill and for the protections that have been put in the bill. I think that this is something that New Zealanders should also be jumping in and supporting especially as we move from the first reading stage through the select committee process. Obviously if anybody's got any problems with this or with any facets of this particular bill then they need to involve themselves in that select committee process. But as it stands I have absolute confidence that this is going to help New Zealanders to sleep at night knowing that their information that we know we're sharing online is going to be a whole lot more protected than possibly it has been in the past and that there are going to be severe penalties for agencies that intentionally break that law. This bill actually compels them to come forward compels them to notify the individuals concerned where there are breaches and also puts in place a very hefty penalty one of $10000. As I say it's been nearly 25 years since this Act has been revised and I commend this bill to House. Kia ora.Bill read a first time. Bill referred to the Justice Committee."