He taonga ō tātou raraunga.   

Kirikowhai Mikaere, Lead Technician for the Data ILG and Te Kāhui Raraunga, has urged the Health Select Committee to apply Māori data governance principles and practices to the Improving Arrangements for Surrogacy Bill.

The Bill intends to simplify surrogacy arrangements and to collect and store information that can help people born from surrogacy arrangements learn about their genetic and gestational origins, and their whakapapa.

Te Kāhui Raraunga supports this intention, however it is essential that Māori data (including whakapapa data) is subject to culturally grounded models of protection and care.

In our submission, we set out why Māori Data Governance is critical and make three key recommendations:

1. Settings - Māori data must be subject to Māori data governance across the lifecycle of the data collection and storage process – and especially once it is collected by the Registrar-General.

2. Infrastructure - Whakapapa information collected by the Registrar-General must be held by iwi or their chosen infomediary – not by the Crown.

3. Funding - Resource should be directed towards designing a data infrastructure system that enables iwi to have control over their own data.

   
   

Click here to read our full written submission.

Watch our oral submission:

Video source: Office of the Clerk/Parliamentary Service. Licensed by the Clerk of the House of Representatives and/or the Parliamentary Corporation on behalf of Parliamentary Service for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Full licence available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/