KEY POINTS:
Faced with a walnut-sized problem arising from identity theft, the Government once again reaches for its sledgehammer. Under the guise of making it harder for conmen, criminals and foreign agents to assume your identity, the Government plans to restrict all people's access to the register of births, deaths and marriages other than for information on themselves. Predictably, the hand of the Privacy Commissioner is behind some of its thinking: shutting off public access to information is part of that role's raison d'etre. But it is no more compelling than, say, the ASH lobby group advocating the end of cigarettes.
Births, deaths and marriages are not private matters. Indeed, the law requires brides and grooms to hold their nuptials in a "public" area so that interested members of the public cannot be excluded. In all three cases, the facts are and have long been recorded on public registers.
Even in the twilight zone into which "privacy" is extending itself in other cases, it would be hard to argue that information that has always been open to the public ought suddenly to be hidden behind the wall of secrecy.
The Births, Deaths, Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Bill, which is before Parliament's government administration committee, seeks to make a change that is wrong, and make it for the wrong reasons.
The Herald and other news organisations are opposing the bill through the Media Freedom Committee of the Commonwealth Press Union because there is a direct threat to freedom of the press and public access to facts. The public registers are verifiable sources of facts in numerous stories and broadcasts in which personalities, both public and perhaps not so well known, are given scrupulous examination of their claims. Simply, the facts that the public so often demand more of from their media are in this instance under threat of permanent removal.
Take, for example, revelations in the past of bigamy, of welfare fraud through false declarations of age, of international conmen pulling off hoaxes on a normally sensible newspaper and even mis-statements of life history in the context of tributes to the dead. In these and many other instances the public record ensures that the news media can present the facts. Interestingly, these public registers helped expose conmen in one Herald inquiry - the people whom the Government and others claim to be targeting by keeping birth, deaths and marriages information secret.
And who is to say that the threat of identity theft is substantial enough to curtail a longstanding right? Or that even if it is, which is highly doubtful, that the public is ready to trade away that right rather than undertake alternative measures to deal with the skulduggery.
The Press Council, a body dominated by lay people with media representation and chaired by a former High Court judge, has also felt the need to speak out over the bill.
Its chairman, the Hon Barry Paterson, QC, gets right to the nub of the issue: "We just wonder [whether] this particular restriction might stop legitimate press investigation of matters which are of public interest."
Happily, some minor parties in Parliament have concerns of their own about the bill and have told the Labour-led Government that continued access to the registers will be necessary for their support for its other measures.
The Prime Minister is unfussed one way or the other, it seems. She ought, then, to ensure the sledgehammer is put back in the shed. No doubt some lobby group or advocate will dream up another use for it soon enough.
