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The register-general of births, deaths and marriages says the move to a new civil registration system is a chance to improve the collection of iwi data.
Jeff Montgomery says the crown stopped recording iwi affiliation information in 1961.
Consequently, people have no easy mechanism to identify themselves as Māori to the government, nor to identify themselves as affiliated with an iwi or hapū group.
A group of iwi advisors and experts is considering the issue as part of the Department of Internal Affairs’ five-year Te Ara Manaaki programme to modernise and future-proof its core identity and life event technology systems and processes.
The work includes upgrading and replacing all life and identity – birth, death, and marriage – data registers and then moving them into a new Microsoft cloud data centre in Auckland.
Mr Montgomery says in the future people will be able to more easily see their information, share their data, see who’s accessed it and authorise others to access it.
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