SpeechHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. Before I talk about clause 39(2)(ba) I want to just touch back on a point that the Minister made around the independence of the chief statistician. I'm going to contrast that in the context of the potential for a delay to the census with two other clauses in this bill. One is on the delegation of powers. So the chief statistician can only delegate powers with the approval of the Minister. In joint collections the chief statistician can only enter into an agreement with a public sector agency for the joint collection of data with the approval of the Minister. And so we've got this weird situation where the chief statistician is not so independent that he can't without the Minister's approval go into a joint collection agreement or a delegation of powers agreement but he's so independent that he can delay the census next year for up to 20 months at a cost of between $80 and $100 million to the Crown without the Minister's role. So if anything the Minister's comments about the independence—if he adopts the same approach on independence as he did with clause 17 and clause 24 he should support my Supplementary Order Paper 156. Now I want to go to Subpart 5 Statistical confidentiality" not so much to ask—and I'll be relatively brief because I don't have a question for the Minister but I think it's really important to put on the record for this committee what the Governance and Administration Committee was concerned about and what we reached in the context of clause 39(2)(ba) which is data that may identify an organisation when they don't want to be identified. That exercised the committee quite considerably because at all times we agreed with the paramount importance of data confidentiality but actually individual and organisational confidentiality as well. So we had this clause which basically said the Statistician will take all reasonable steps to ensure that information isn't published in a form that could reasonably be expected to identify an individual or organisation unless they agree to it which is fine. But then this sort of late addition came in that says "data in a form that may identify an organisation (but could not reasonably be expected to identify any individual)" can be published. So it's data that can identify an organisation and we were pretty worried about that. That's kind of the antithesis of what we're trying to do here. But I want to reassure the committee of the whole that the select committee scrutinised this at length and put the officials' feet to the flames. They responded well I think as well as they could in terms of providing scenarios where this would be necessary. The one example that I remember is of analysis on residential care aged residential care in a particular mesh block or town where it would be pretty obvious who was being referred to even if the organisation wasn't named because there's only one of them. So what do we do about that if the rest home in Cromwell or Arrowtown or something like that was the only show in town and publishing data on the needs of aged care in that region might identify an organisation? I think we got there. But I just want to reassure this committee that the select committee paid very close attention to this and ended up satisfied that this was the right thing to do."