Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Chair. Like my colleague who is just taking her seat Jacqui Dean I'd also like to reflect on a couple of elements of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) before moving on. In my first contribution I talked exclusively about the Department of Internal Affairs and I finished up by talking a little bit too about RealMe.One of the challenges we've seen in this area consistently over the years is uptake in the verified RealMe accounts which lags significantly behind projections and I'll move on to that. Before moving on to that challenge I'd just like to reiterate for members of the Committee and the public that as we move more and more into looking to do transactions with Government via the internet to make it easier for citizens to gain access to Government services from the convenience of how they live work and play then not only how we deliver the services up to those citizens but how we enable them to access through the security models and log-ins into Government is critically important. It was also seen with some importance at the end of the last Parliament as we passed the Electronic Interactions Reform Bill. Actually I think we might have done the third reading at the beginning of this term. That was actually about taking steps too—about presenting more of those services electronically.In order to access them one has to be able to prove to the service provider—in this case the Government—that the person trying to access is indeed who they say they are. RealMe is a system that Government has been using for some years now to do that. It comes in a couple of forms. In its most vanilla form for information-only general sort of access it gets a huge amount of use. Around 77 million log-ins have been recorded over the years for those more informational purposes. That's because it is a less onerous way to register. You simply put in your details online and you can access information.But when it comes to accessing more private information and services a verified log-in is required and that does require some actions on behalf of the citizen to validate who they say they are. It started off with having to go to a New Zealand Post outlet having your photo taken and getting validated through their system. Pleasingly it has moved ahead a little over the years since. But still I think it is an area which DIA would be well advised to spend a lot of effort in looking to streamline further because there are only 400000 validated RealMe accounts today and the projections say there should be about 1.4 million of them. So we're well behind.Now Government being Government one way it has to encourage the uptake of that sort of an account is to mandate it. Government has the power of compulsion and the Government could simply restrict access to these services unless users got an account of that nature and thereby force them into doing so. Well I'd counsel the Government and the Department of Internal Affairs not to go down that track. As soon as you have what amounts to a monopoly provider suddenly using powers of compulsion to force people to do things their way they lose they break the relationship between supplier and customer. They lose the sense of what it is to provide their service to the person that consumes it. Call them a citizen call them a constituent or call them a customer it is important that Government not just DIA always recognises that the services we are providing electronically or otherwise are for the consumption of a citizen a constituent a customer. We don't want to operate in a way like a monopoly where we break the relationship between gearing our services to their needs and not just forcing them to operate in our model.Now fortunately there were some questions to DIA around the time of the annual review as well as the conversation obviously in select committee. I'm pleased to be able to report to the House that the Government Chief Digital Officer was quite clear that seeking to mandate compulsory use of services is not their aim but it is something which we as a Parliament and certainly we as a select committee should remain vigilant about. That is a road to poorer service poorer connection to our constituents and poorer outcomes. If we simply use the power of compulsion through law—that obviously Parliament has the power to do—we will actually deliver worse outcomes for our citizens.The Department of Internal Affairs as I noted do a phenomenal job given the constraints of the budgets they have. One of the things the committee did was take a tour of He Tohu and see our founding documents on display. It is a remarkably Kiwi thing that we store them inside the front door of our building. Thank you Madam Chair.