The complainant lived in an area with water restrictions. She was issued with an infringement notice after watering her garden on a day when that was prohibited. A man with a video camera was present when the infringement notice was issued by an agent for the local council.

The cameraman was a contractor to a television news service, but the complainant was not told this or the purposes of filming. She assumed that the videotape was wanted for evidence in case there was to be a prosecution. A television news item was subsequently broadcast showing the incident and she complained to me.

However, I did not need to form an opinion because the complaint was settled by agreement.

The council explained that it had a bylaw restricting water use in the summer months and it wanted to encourage compliance by demonstrating that it had an active monitoring, detection, prevention and prosecution programme. The council used the media to assist with this and therefore arranged for the cameraman to record the issue of the notice to the complainant.

The council considered that, if the complainant had been alerted to the purpose of recording the issuing of an infringement notice, the news item would have seemed contrived, and the enforcement programme would have lost its credibility.

This complaint raised issues under information privacy principle 3, which requires agencies to take reasonable steps to draw certain matters, such as the purpose of collection, to a person's attention when information is being collected from them. There are exceptions to this requirement, but none of them seemed relevant in this case.

I did not need to form an opinion because the complaint was settled with a letter of apology to the complainant and an ex gratia payment to acknowledge the humiliation and embarrassment she had suffered.

NB: The Privacy Act does not apply to the news media in relation to their news activities, so the complainant could not complain to me about the cameraman. She could not make a complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority because the statutory deadline for complaint had expired.

August 1999