Statutes Amendment Bill

Members, we come now to Part 4. This is the debate on clauses 16 to 18, “Amendments to Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021”. The question is that Part 4 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just have two quick connected questions for the Associate Minister of Justice, just noting that the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021 doesn’t actually have a definition as far as I can see in the primary legislation for historical information. Can I just check with the Minister to what extent is any information considered historical? The reason I ask that is under clause 17 in Part 3, a person does not need to confirm their identity to request access to historical information, but if that historical information is still referring to another person who is alive, I wanted to check how that’s going to work. Does that mean that anyone can actually then request that kind of information? That’s all.

I hope this answers the member’s question. Please let me know if it doesn’t sufficiently, and I’ll get further advice from officials.

My understanding is that us inserting “for non-historic information” after “in respect of a request” is to clarify the policy intent. It’s only to obtain evidence of identity when accessing non-historical and historic register images.

Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan: Oh, OK.

Hon NICOLE McKEE: Yes. You can’t sort of put a time frame on what is historic; it’s the capturing of the information that’s there.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for the Minister’s comments. I just acknowledge that, yes, my understanding is a lot of this work was done under a previous Government and has come through, and I appreciate that it won’t be the Minister herself who’s been drafting this, but I appreciate her being able to access the advice through officials and just to clarify some of those instances. But, yeah, I do appreciate that this is a piece of work that has gone on through at least two different Governments now and that it’s a regular way of updating the law. I appreciate the purpose of that, and please don’t think these are directed at her as an individual—but I very much appreciate her candid responses to our questions.

In Part 4, I just had a couple of questions. When I looked at this section, I think it may have related to some of the comments the Minister made earlier in relation to getting rid of barriers in place for people who are wanting to access information—and so this may be another area that she may have been thinking of, as well. This particular section, when I looked at clause 17(1), “Section 88 amended (Person must confirm identity to access information under this subpart)”, the part that was being deleted—and that’s always of interest, of course, because usually with the minor and consequential amendments the reason that you would delete something is that either it’s no longer relevant or it’s duplicated, or something like that. But when I did look into this, this particular section, I think, refers to a lot of the historical information that is actually held online that people may be able to access, and so I just kind of wondered why that would be a deletion entirely—but hopefully the Minister can elucidate on that. I understand that that intention was easier access to information, so hopefully that’s consistent with that goal, even though it is deleting that.

Then the second question I had on this part is really in clause 18. This is replacing a particular clause, and it’s really saying that the identity may be confirmed “(if required)”, in brackets. There’s slightly unusual drafting there, and I just wondered why the advice was that this be put in the bill, because, as I understand it, the intention was to require fewer checks in relation to identification to allow that information to go ahead. I appreciate it’s a tiny part of a much bigger bill, but if the Minister did have any information that she could share with the committee around how those jigsaw pieces work to achieve that aim, I’d be grateful.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think this answer might also help with the Green member’s earlier question as well. The drafting of sections 88 and 91 of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act 2021 has introduced an unintentional shift in policy where evidence of identity requirements are being applied to all records, regardless of their historical or non-historical classification. The amendment clarifies the original policy intent and makes it clear that an evidence of identity check should only be required when accessing non-historical records and historical register images available online.

For the next clause, clause 18, it’s the same reasoning, which is that the drafting of those sections 88 and 91 in the 2021 Act has introduced an unintentional shift in policy direction.

Part 4 agreed to.

Part 5 Amendments to Building Act 2004