Dear Statistics New Zealand,

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties has been invited to make an oral submission on the Data and Statistics Bill to a Parliamentary select committee on 16 February 2022.

In this OIA response (https://fyi.org.nz/request/17682-advice-...) from the NZ Security Intelligence Service, the agency released a record of its meeting with officials from Statistics New Zealand held on 15 May 2020 (this document: https://fyi.org.nz/request/17682/respons...).

In the note on item 2, ‘Data Ethics Principles’, on page 2 of the document, the following statement appears:

“Stats NZ had done some work with Customs New Zealand and written a discussion paper regarding the dimensions of security vs. transparency.”

The Council is requesting a copy of the ‘discussion paper regarding the dimensions of security vs. transparency’ referred to in that note of the meeting.

Under section 12(3) of the OIA, we are requesting that Statistics NZ responds to this request urgently. Our reasons for seeking urgency are our need to read the document prior to our oral submission to Parliament on 16 February 2022. Besides the general public interest in transparency and openness, the Council further notes the strong public interest in disclosure of this document, in order to fulfil the section 4 purpose of the OIA, namely to enable people to participate in the making and administration of laws and policies.

Under section 16 of the OIA, our preferred means of receiving the discussion paper is an attachment to your response to this request. Under section 16 we would also prefer to receive the document in its original file format (presumably Microsoft Word). If only a PDF of the document has been retained, our second preference would be to receive it as a text-searchable PDF that has not been watermarked with ‘released under the OIA’ (or similar) obscuring the text. The OIA does not require departments to place such markings over information they disclose.

If you need to clarify anything about this request, please reply to the email address from which you received this request.

Ngā mihi,

Andrew Ecclestone
Deputy Chair
New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties