This Supplementary Order Paper amends Supplementary Order Paper No 259 amending the End of Life Choice Bill by providing some guidance about the consultation required by the Registrar of the Privacy Commissioner.

The information held on the register will be crucially important to the lives—and deaths—of many New Zealanders and the privacy implications can hardly be understated.

Matters of policy and practice in relation to protecting privacy should be reviewed frequently. It is not enough to require simply that consultation take place at “regular intervals”, as regularity is not the same as frequency. For example, a consultation exercise once every 10 years is regular but it is not nearly frequent enough for the purposes of clause 21(3).