Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to join others in the introduction of this Privacy Bill. I think I'm actually the only member who was in the House at the time when the Privacy Act was passed in 1993 in a very different technological age but I would say with some pride from the National benches that the hard yards around improving New Zealand's law to protect Kiwis' privacy have been taken by our party. I particularly want to acknowledge the hard work that Amy Adams the former Minister of Justice put in over two years to the provisions that are in this bill. The most important issue that Parliament needs to address in this legislation is the huge revolution in technologies over the last 25 years that pose far greater challenges to the way in which we deal with people's personal information. But I also want to stress particularly in the context of the Green Party's contribution to this law that we equally need to be balanced and ensure that our privacy law is not turning into a bureaucratic nightmare for everyday New Zealanders out there that are doing good stuff in our community. I don't think there will be a constituency MP in this Parliament who's not dealt with some sort of crisis in the area of mental health where the Privacy Act has got in the way of common-sense sharing of information that will actually better protect New Zealanders from harm in areas as complex as mental health and crime. So the real challenge that we have to get right as a Parliament with this legislation is laws that properly protect the privacy of information that is sensitive but which do not go so far that they make the basic administration of core public services more difficult for New Zealanders to navigate their way through. I for instance believe that the sharing of information between Government agencies is critical to get right. There wouldn't be an MP in this Parliament who would not want to tear strips off those Government services that allowed a child molester and murderer like Phillip Smith to get on a plane and fly to Brazil because our information-sharing services did not allow corrections to be able to pass the information on to an agency like customs and our airport to ensure that he was blocked and not allowed out of our country. So I commend the work that Amy Adams has done in bringing this very complex bill to the House. It's absolutely crucial that our privacy laws do take into account the massive amounts of information that are available on information technology. But I'd also urge the select committee in putting this bill through the parliamentary system to give it a great deal of scrutiny to make sure it is practical and workable in the real world so that those people that work in those services whether they work in crime whether they work in health services or whether they work in our education services—to ensure that they do not drive a culture in the public sector of siloisation of public services that actually holds us back on key issues like helping children that are at risk and dealing with those sorts of social issues. It is a good bill—a bill that National will support but a bill in which we must be identified on the detail to get it right.