Hughes Gareth: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 07 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:147. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. It is a pleasure to rise to take a call on the Electronic Identity Verification Bill. I would also like to share the best wishes of this House so congratulations to you Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson; congratulations to Amy Adams the new Minister for Communications and Information Technology; and congratulations to all members in the House who were elected at the last Parliament. 
I also want to thank the officials. It has been surprising that Labour has not taken credit for this in the debate I have heard but it did do a lot of work in the years it was in Government in getting this process with igovt the process towards getting this legislation started. So I would like to acknowledge Labour members’ work and also the officials who have worked with them over a number of years for this bill.  
It is an important and emerging issue we are discussing in this Parliament in 2012. We are quite right: we are talking about our lives we are talking about our memory and we are talking about our data. One has only to look at Facebook to see that that company did not get rich just by selling ads or subscriptions; it got rich because it managed data. It managed to package compile and share data in such a way that it is one of the wealthiest companies in the world. I think its share offer will be immensely huge.  
The Greens share with the other parties their support for this legislation’s referral to the select committee. What I would like to talk about is the importance of it around easing the relationship with Government departments. I note in the regulatory impact statement there is a quote that there are over $300 million in tangible economic benefits to the nation. That is good. I would love to ask one of the officials what they estimate the time savings could be for people using this system around the country. I am prepared to wager any member in this Chamber that the time-savings from this bill for a minuscule sum of money will be much more considerable than the $19 billion the Government is currently borrowing to spend on motorways literally saving only minutes of Kiwis’ time across the country.  
So we see the potential. We see the benefits. That is why we are supporting the bill to the select committee. But like the other parties we do think there are valid concerns and we will be asking some questions at the select committee. So this bill effectively sets up an online passport. I think it makes sense. I think it is common sense. You have a mishmash of different log-in requirements for different Government departments. Like Darien Fenton I cannot remember half of my passwords. I have to keep getting them to email them to me because there are just so many when you are engaging with Government departments let alone all the other services that people use online for work or for pleasure. So we see the common sense.  
 I have been very interested to follow over the years the progress of igovt which is currently the contractual-only service preceding this legislation—the trial that is effectively making this legislation relevant and I would say desirable. But I would also note that there are only 400-odd people on igovt at the moment—the Minister might be able to correct me—and I would love to see more people using this service.  
I have also got some concerns because I have to write to the Minister of Internal Affairs just to go to the National Library. I asked him more than a year ago whether I could have a briefing from officials because I am interested in this and I would like to engage constructively but to no avail—Minister Guy would not let me have a briefing.  
So to look at the detail it is important that we as legislators get our heads around this issue. Technology is shaping lives in ways we cannot even imagine probably in the next 5 to 10 years and certainly longer. More and more of us are engaging with our Government online; more and more of us engage with the Government only online. As Chris Auchinvole said the Government is embracing technology. I think they have done some good things but I also think it is maybe a bit of an exaggeration to portray ourselves as world leaders in the technological field. We have got Skynet the copyright infringing and file-sharing law and we are engaging with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations recently signed in Tokyo and the punitive rules in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  
Look you know I do not think we are embracing technology as we could be. I do not think we are world leaders in this but this is one area where we certainly could be. Take the Inland Revenue Department—it was only last year that this Parliament passed a law the Education Act No. 4 that let student loan borrowers go online to check their balance. In 2011 this Parliament was not passing such legislation. Take the legislation just before this bill the Road User Charges Bill. At a time when we could be using digital electronic technology we are instead going down the absolute opposite path and getting average weight-based models of calculating road-user charges.  
The stuff we are talking about in this Parliament is topical. We have just seen in America and all around the world that literally 7000 websites I think it was—4.5 million people—signed Google’s petition in 1 day. We saw the two Houses the House of Representatives and the Senate in the US fully step backwards from the punitive copyright legislation there—the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. We have seen the Megaupload arrests where we have had 70 police officers flying in on helicopters to catch someone in relation to alleged copyright infringing. And to the right side of the ledger we are seeing the Government invest a considerable sum in ultra-fast broadband which the Green Party supports the intent of.  
I think what we have seen in terms of the Skynet legislation debates in New Zealand and the stop online piracy and protect IP debates in America is that it is no longer OK—as a popular blog post also points out—for us as legislators to not know any more. It is not a badge of honour to pretend we do not use computers and we do not know how to engage—it is not OK any more. We have to get on top of our game I think these are salutary lessons and I look forward to engaging with the other members the officials the submitters and the select committee.  
So we will be supporting this legislation to the select committee. We think it is common sense. We think there are some definite inefficiencies—we could be engaging with other departments—but also there are some tremendously exciting opportunities that flow out from this legislation. Take the last election: we saw the lowest-ever level of youth non-enrolment in our country’s history. I heard anecdotally of people around the country who would have enrolled and would have liked to vote but had to send in the blasted form via a fax machine from overseas. We heard of people who would have loved to do it online in between checking Facebook or Twitter and to enrol online. There is no framework or legislative allowance for that.  
I would like to see this law look at how we take this unique identifier to understand the potentialities not only for our economy and society but also for our democracy. So what we see with that change which I think would be desirable in our future is a challenging of the central tenet which we have talked about in the clause 4 debate in this Parliament which is that we should not worry about privacy concerns. Everything is taken care of in clause 4 “Principles”. At the moment the main protection is the fact that it is only opt-in for people to have their data saved but if we are going to unleash the powers of this legislation obviously we are going to have to look at a mandatory-type system in the future and what the privacy implications are there.  
So we see that people cannot opt out in every circumstance when it comes to this bill. People cannot opt out when it comes to statistical analysis. As Ruth Dyson aptly put it there is a digital divide. We still need to make sure people have options. We cannot replace every type of communication or validation with the Government. It has been good to see that the Privacy Commissioner has been involved in the drafting of this legislation. I think we might want to investigate in the select committee actually going slightly further than what this bill outlines which is that currently the Privacy Commissioner can go to the chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs and ask for a report. I wonder whether we should write into the legislation or through an Order in Council a regular reporting requirement given that this is the front line of both the privacy and the new technological developments in New Zealand.  
The regulatory impact statement talks of the risk of function creep which I think is a definite risk. When we look at the Privacy Commissioner’s website principle 12 of the privacy principles says categorically—and it is going to be interesting to ask her how she is going to deal with it—that the Government is not allowed to give people one personal number to use in all their dealings with Government agencies. There is a whole bunch of questions around privacy around the sharing of information between Government departments and around what I believe is a flagrant overuse of Orders in Council by this Government to pass regulations.  
These are all questions the Green Party looks forward to raising with officials and submitters and the other parties in the select committee process. We urge Kiwis to get out there make a submission and find out more about it. I think there is a whole host of subsidiary issues which I think would be valid to raise on the select committee. There are questions around the need for a time line for those Orders in Council to be broadened by the Government and there are some questions around what the scope of those fees is going to be for the full costing.  
I think we have got to ask the officials flat out whether they are confident we can avoid cyber-security or hacking threats given having one unique repository for information does make us vulnerable. We have seen Governments fall victim to that recently. As a historian in the interests of future archivists what are we going to leave as a legacy given that so many of us found out about our families around the world because those paper forms those parish books still exist and we can still access them? So I think there is a whole bunch of important questions. This is the front line of the privacy and the technological debate in this country and the Green Party looks forward to constructively engaging with all the parties in Parliament. Kia ora.