Tēnā koutou Office of the Privacy Commissioner,

This is a request under the Official Information Act.

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties is seeking information to help us understand issues relating to the Data and Statistics Bill. To help with this we request the following information from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner:

1. all analysis the Office performed on the Bill and any unpublished drafts of the Bill;

2. correspondence (whether by email or other means) with Statistics New Zealand, and any other agency, on the Bill;

3. The minutes, and any handwritten notes produced by the Commissioner or any of their officials, of any meetings with Statistics New Zealand concerning either the Data and Statistics Bill, and the policy development work that led to the Bill;

4. analysis of whether Statistics New Zealand should have produced a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on the Data and Statistics Bill or the policy proposals;

5. correspondence (whether by email or other means) with Statistics New Zealand about their decision not to produce a PIA of the Bill; 

6. all analysis and/or consideration of whether the Office would make a written submission to the Select Committee on the bill; 

7. any drafts of a Select Committee submission which may have been started; and

8. minutes, or any handwritten notes of the meeting at which decided not to submit on the Bill. If the decision was taken by an individual rather than at a meeting, then that person’s record of the decision.

Under section 16 of the OIA, our preferred means of receiving the information is as an attachment to your response to this request. Under section 16 we would also prefer to receive the information in its original file format (presumably Microsoft Word), or a PDF of any emails. If only a PDF of the information has been retained, our second preference would be to receive it as a text-searchable PDF. We also prefer to receive information without it being watermarked with ‘released under the OIA’ (or similar) over the text. The OIA does not require departments to place such markings over information they disclose. The OIA only provides limited reasons for these preferences not to be complied with.

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

Ngā mihi,

Steven Ensslen

Secretary

New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties

Tēnā koutou Office of the Privacy Commissioner,

Thank you for your email of 6 April 2022 letting the Council know that the Commissioner has now made a submission to the Governance and Administration Select Committee on the Data and Statistics Bill.

In answer to your question about whether we still wish to proceed with our OIA request to the Commissioner, the answer is ‘yes’. The submission is not the information sought in our request, and we expect to receive a full response to our request as soon as reasonably practicable and by 20 April 2022 at the latest.

Ngā mihi,

Steven Ensslen
Secretary
NZ Council for Civil Liberties