The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is an independent Crown entity established by the Privacy Act. The Privacy Commissioner's principal powers and functions include promoting the objects of the Privacy Act 1993, monitoring proposed legislation and government policies, dealing with complaints at first instance, approving and issuing codes of practice and authorizing special exemptions from the information privacy principles, as well as reviewing public sector information matching programmes. In May 2004, the government has issued a discussion paper to outlaw unwanted spam and in February 2005 the Minister for Information Technology unveiled the shape of forthcoming legislation to combat spam.