Dyson Ruth: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dyson Ruth: Electronic Identity Verification Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4962. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 Can I first of all thank the member who has just resumed his seat the Minister of Internal Affairs Chris Tremain in whose name the Electronic Identity Verification Bill is before the House and say that I appreciate the comments he made in relation to our select committee work. The Government Administration Committee worked pretty rigorously on what is quite a small bill but one that we thought was really important. 
But I am disappointed that he chose to politicise this bill given the fact that our select committee worked so hard together regardless of which of the three parties we represented on that bill. 
Hon Chris Tremain 
: I didn’t politicise it. I just said that it was one of the key priorities of the Government. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: Well the Minister just got up and read his speech. Perhaps he might have considered reading it prior to that because then I am sure that he would have detected how overly political he had made an issue that was not politicised at all throughout the select committee process. 
I want to also acknowledge the leadership of our entire select committee which broke new ground in the processing of this bill. We decided that we would not just put an ad in the major dailies calling for submissions; we would leap forward into the current century—well ahead of the rest of Parliament I have to say. Despite the best efforts of some of our advisers to the committee and even to the concern of the Clerk’s Office we decided we would advertise this bill electronically so that people could go on the internet and find out that we were calling for submissions. It was great to break new ground in that way. We did it within the existing budget and we thought that it was a good process for Parliament to go through. 
So it was with some excitement that I saw that InternetNZ was appearing before the select committee as one of the 12 submitters who put in a submission on this bill. I asked InternetNZ where it had heard about the calling for submissions on this bill and I expected it to say that it had read it through this groundbreaking measure we had made when calling for submissions. InternetNZ said that it had read it on the regular Clerk’s page of the Parliament website. So it was a great disappointment to me because— 
Chris Auchinvole 
: It’s a start. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: Well it was a great disappointment to me that despite this huge leap forward no submitters had responded to it in the way that we had hoped. InternetNZ gave us a very very helpful submission actually as did the Privacy Commissioner as the Minister mentioned in his speech. We got only 12 submissions but it is a fairly specific bill and it does achieve a lot. It allows people to verify their identity online and across different Government departments and agencies and clearly that is important. 
 The primary concern of course is that of identity theft. We do not want people to be able to use that access to represent themselves as another person but the reality is that that was possible prior to internet access being available. We have seen some pretty distressing cases of that in recent times where people have represented themselves as being somebody else. People are actually more anxious about an increased ability of identity fraud to occur under this system than they were under our traditional systems. The reality is that that is not the case but I think it was important that through this process we also tried to deal with that perception and made sure that the process of protecting the system was rigorous. 
The Minister went through the number of changes that we made. I am sorry that I had not been alerted in advance to the change that the Minister noted as a Supplementary Order Paper. I had not picked that up. I have been at a select committee this morning. I will have a look at that but I am sure that if it is exactly as he outlined it should not be a problem for us to support it. 
We also considered in our select committee the changes that are outlined in the bill. It caused me some reflection as to why in such a small bill that was quite straightforward and one that has quite a lot of overlap with the Identity Information Confirmation Bill which will be considered later in the day and which was looked at by the previous Government Administration Committee there were still so many areas that needed amendment. I would recommend to the Minister that he give further reflection to this. I do not think that for a small bill—one that does not have any political edge to it at all particularly—we should have had to make so many changes before we were confident that it met the standards that we considered appropriate as a select committee. I will just leave that with the Minister for further reflection because I do not think it actually should be the case. 
I look forward to the progress of this bill. It has been a pleasure for the select committee to work on and I want to acknowledge all the members of the select committee who put a lot of effort into it—nobody dozed off at any time at all during the select committee which was very fortunate because it did require some rigour—Mr Auchinvole who kept us all on our toes from the National Party side Gareth Hughes representing the Green Party and my colleague Trevor Mallard. The other thanks that I would like to give before I conclude are to the officials. We did have as I say a number of amendments that were made and they worked really hard and really diligently and they paid close attention to the points that the committee members made. We have reported the bill back and I think we are now happy to progress it in a much better state than it came to us in.