Mallard Trevor: Identity Information Confirmation Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mallard Trevor: Identity Information Confirmation Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 13 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6555. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I want to start off by thanking Ruth Dyson for the work that she did chairing the Government Administration Committee and by saying again that it was a committee that worked well as a group. Gareth Hughes made I think some significant contributions on the Identity Information Confirmation Bill and I look forward to his contribution in the Committee. Both Mr Auchinvole and Mr Bakshi were also I think part of a team that treated this on a pretty much non-partisan basis. But unlike the bill that we were discussing earlier in the day and without going back on to the bill the Minister who was in charge of this bill when it was introduced just did not do his work properly. 
Nathan Guy who was the Minister in charge of the bill gave us a bill where on every substantive clause from clause 5 through to clause 16 we had to amend the bill and in fact we had to add some extra clauses in in order to get it into the sort of shape that is acceptable. I know that the Minister is a relatively new Minister but to introduce legislation to the House that is so badly inept that the whole substance of it—every clause that had any substantive effect—had to be amended is in fact something that is of major concern. 
So you can start at clause 5 “Interpretation”—not that it is that substantive. To be fair clause 6 which is within this part and which states: “This Act binds the Crown.” managed to make it through unamended and I congratulate Nathan Guy on getting that particular clause right. It is just a pity that he did not work as hard on the following clauses to make sure that they were accurate. Maybe he was just putting a challenge there for the select committee. Maybe what the Minister was doing was playing some sort of game with Mr Bakshi and Mr Auchinvole to see whether they could find all the mistakes that he had made in the bill that was drafted and that he had introduced to the House. But I want to say to him that it is a bit of a waste of the time of the Parliament to introduce a bill that is so badly drafted and in such a bad form as he did. 
The purpose of the bill is to provide a consent-based service to allow both private and public sector agencies to check identity information. It extends the use of the data validation service to public and private sector agencies but it is very much on a need-to-know basis. There are also the intermediaries which we will get on to. I think they are just referred to in this part but in the next part the intermediaries are a much more important part of the bill—the major change in the bill is the intermediaries. They are in the interpretation clause and we had to put them in there but their substantive role is outlined much more later on in the bill. 
The bill allows checking whether the identity information provided by a customer is consistent with that held by the Department of Internal Affairs through the citizenship registers the passport database and the various registers of the Births Deaths and Marriages registry office. For the purpose of this bill there is a key official and that is the Registrar-General of Births Deaths and Marriages. That is a person on whom there is quite a lot of focus and I think is the person—yes we have identified that person in the definition of “Registrar-General” in clause 5 of the legislation. 
We are supporting the bill as is obvious because it does give Government agencies and the private sector an ability to use identity information in the fight against fraud. I think all of us know that there is a lot of identity fraud around. I do not think there would be a member of this House who is not invited 10 or 20 times a day—it might have something to do with the quality of the spam filters that we have got—to supply information that would be used for fraudulent purposes. 
The Privacy Commissioner was satisfied that the legal arrangements and controls in this bill are adequate but what we did do was a beefing-up of the responsibilities of the registrar-general and the intermediaries to work with the Privacy Commissioner on each of the contractual arrangements. We are concerned as with the previous legislation the Electronic Identity Verification Bill about the security of private information. Frankly I do trust the registrar-general and his team more than I do Novopay—or Paula Bennett for that matter—with private information but I think the lessons that we have had recently indicate that we should be eternally vigilant against people who break into systems and against people who have systems that leave doors open for people to go into. That is why it is important to have a good person in that position of registrar-general as part of the team and for the Privacy Commissioner whose role is indicated in clause 5 to be actively involved in the area. 
My colleague Kris Faafoi referred to the case of David Garrett. It was one that was an old case it was a suppressed case and he was someone who used the methodology that was outlined in  
The Day of the Jackal 
 as a method of developing an identity. What we are told is that that sort of approach was quite common in the older days before there was a quality of electronic records and the ability to go back and trace. And what— 
Louise Upston 
: Back in your days Trevor. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well back in my day although— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Better days. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I think Ruth Dyson might—no probably not all other members of the House will remember the case of Malcolm Douglas. Malcolm Douglas was a short-term MP in this House who was replaced in the Hunua electorate by— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: The Hon Winston Peters. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: —the Rt Hon Winston Peters who at the time was not even the Hon Winston Peters. But Mr Douglas was replaced when Winston Peters was first an MP. The electoral petition from the time was based on Mr Douglas voting gravestones. Effectively the register of voters in the Hunua electorate was boosted by a number of people who had died. Some of them were put on the roll and others had died and had never come off the roll but by miracles these people were voting. As a result of that Mr Douglas who shared the approach to life of that family was in the end no longer a member of Parliament. The point that I am making or trying to make is that I hope that over time we can work through these systems and make sure that as well as having a good identity arrangement for checking it is extended to the electoral roll and in fact to the quality of the information on the electoral roll—the fact that people go on to the roll and hopefully stay on the roll even if their addresses change. It could work there. 
These cases are modern as well. There is a case that I will not go into in any depth because it is one where the woman is still waiting for sentencing but she is a woman who has been found guilty of more than 20 charges relating to opening fake TradeMe accounts gathering people’s Inland Revenue Department information trying to access their bank accounts and using other people’s credit cards. This is the sort of thing where we hope this legislation will make a difference. It will mean that that sort of fraud is harder to do in this particular case. Of course the systems eventually work but the fact that she had more than 20 charges—and I understand that they were representative charges which means that there were quite a lot more—is an indication that our current systems are not working as well as they should. 
The last case that I want to mention of this sort is the case of Te Rito Henry Miki. He was a sex offender who was employed in multiple schools as a result of changing his identity changing his name—apparently legally by deed poll—but not having continuity of record which was very important in stopping this sort of offending. 
I think it is important that we focus on who uses this register. I for one hope that the Teachers Council is an organisation that uses it and properly establishes information that tracks individuals especially if they use changes in name in an attempt to avoid something that is bad in their past or in some cases to organise charges to be made in a different name from the one that they are normally known by. That I think is something that is quite dangerous and again I think this legislation could help. 
The other criticism that I make is that although this bill is going through unanimously now I think it is one that has taken some time. At the beginning of this legislation the urgency of it was impressed on us and that was quite some time ago. The select committee worked expeditiously on it—very thoroughly as we can see from the number of changes that had to be made to the legislation—but then it just hung around on the Order Paper for an extraordinarily long time for a bill that is getting unanimous support from the House. I want to say in conclusion that I hope with the other recent failures that had been identified in the management of the security of private information that if there needs to be a legislative response to them it does not take the Government nearly as long as it did in this particular case. Thank you.