Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. I rise with pleasure to speak to this first reading of the Privacy Bill. This Privacy Bill of course repeals and replaces a now outdated piece of legislation the Privacy Act 1993. It did form a very large piece of work which was undertaken by the former justice Minister Amy Adams. Privacy reform was something that she took very seriously and this is a very significant piece of work that has taken a long time to get to this place.That is why even by the Government's standards it is a little curious to hear their chorus of amazement that it's taken this long. Things take time as they're just starting to find out because of course they've done no work in nine years not thinking they'd ever be in Government. They haven't got very much—although of course there was that little four-line bill earlier that they churned out. But they're not capable of putting the level of work and intellectual rigour into a piece of legislation like this.So naturally National will be supporting the bill because we did all the work on it.Hon Tracey Martin: Has this person actually read it? Hon MAGGIE BARRY: There's that Chihuahua again. There might be a little bit of water in the pipes; shall we call in the maintenance people? There's an unfortunate yapping sound which we will just ignore—nothing very private about that member's mental health issues.So we support the Privacy Bill because this is a piece of legislation that after 25 years—and as other speakers have noted the technological advances have been extraordinary. We needed to get up to date with what was happening.I recall a piece of work I suppose it was: Hosking v Runting. That was where the tort of privacy was first developed in the way that we've come to understand it now. In those days in the 1990s breaches of privacy and issues around privacy were more to do with individuals because that was the nature of the way we used to operate as a country. These days of course with the huge technological advances which most of us enjoy and benefit from on a daily basis there is now a large amount of personal data that can be stored and transmitted digitally. We need look no further than today seeing Zuckerberg of Facebook come before committees and explain about Cambridge Analytica.Our New Zealand Privacy Commissioner John Edwards has already taken Facebook to task for breaching our Privacy Act and I'm really pleased to see enshrined in this legislation that the Privacy Commissioner will have more additional powers than they have currently. So binding decisions for example on access requests will be there. At the moment the process is clunky: the Privacy Commissioner has to refer complaints to the tribunal; it takes a long time. We need to be nimble; we need to move quickly. I mean if an agency refuses an individual's request to access their personal information then again the Privacy Commissioner will be able to direct the agency to make that information available.I think strengthening the Privacy Commissioner's information-gathering powers is extremely important and I think will serve democracy very well. So those additional powers are a very good thing. I think too that when we look at the range of activities that this particular piece of legislation which was widely consulted on—something like 80 submissions.Of course there are disappointments. It is disappointing and bewildering actually to see why the Government has removed some of the very good work that Amy Adams and the team put into it in the last Government around reforms to how the approved information sharing agreement operates. The agreement has needed modernising for some time. It ought to be in this bill because enforcement information—who owns it what informs it and how accessible it is are all issues that we need to grapple with. Perhaps this is part of their cunning ploy to get more legislation of a small and tailored nature to pad out their extremely thin legislative programme.This bill has a number of disappointments that are not included that have come out of the Privacy Commissioner's February last year report on the Privacy Act including increasing the fines to up to $1 million the issues around the data portability compliance monitoring and controls on the re-identification of data which is all part of I suppose trying to find out exactly where it goes because people are very clever indeed about hiding their traces. Adjustments to existing criminal offences—this also has been left out—and reforming the public register on privacy principles. So unfortunately this Government has not quite gone all the way. That's what they do I guess—we'll probably need to get used to that—but at least they've made some effort and that builds on the great work by Amy Adams in the last Government. It is with pleasure that I commend this bill to the House.