Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill

I move, That the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill be now read a first time. At an appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be considered by the Government Administration Committee and that the committee report finally to the House on or before 22 August 2008.

The Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill will establish a scheme that makes payments to New Zealand authors in recognition of their books being available for use in New Zealand libraries. As Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, it is my pleasure to introduce this bill, which gives legal recognition and support to New Zealand authors. As Minister responsible for the National Library of New Zealand, I applaud the acknowledgment the bill makes of the public benefit of having New Zealand authors’ books widely available to New Zealanders through libraries.

The bill will establish a new scheme to replace the New Zealand Authors’ Fund, currently administered by Creative New Zealand under section 31 of the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Act. The bill repeals section 31 of that Act. The Authors’ Fund was established by a Cabinet minute on 2 July 1973. It approved “the establishment of a scheme for making payments to authors for the library use of their work”. This scheme had been foreshadowed in the Labour Party manifesto in 1969 and 1972, and was originally, I understand, the idea of Professor Keith Sinclair, who was a Labour Party candidate in 1969. In 1972 the then Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, said: “one of the purposes of the public lending right is to make it possible for authors’ earnings to be increased to a point where they could provide authors with time to put into writing.”

New Zealand was the first English-speaking country to introduce such a scheme. The fund was administered by the Department of Internal Affairs until it was transferred in 1991 to the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, now, of course, Creative New Zealand. The Hon Doug Graham, in creating the organisation that became Creative New Zealand, had proposed that the Authors’ Fund would be taken up or, indeed, lapse—as he said to me it would—under that organisation. So basically he had proposed that it would die.

In 2000 it was then put into the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Act through the work of Richard Northey, the Hon Christine Fletcher, and me, and I am very proud of the fact that the Authors’ Fund exists today because those members of Parliament decided to take that action. So we received the Authors’ Fund in the form it is, and in 2002 the Government topped up the fund by half a million dollars with the assistance of the Green Party. I acknowledge the work that Sue Bradford did in enabling that extra funding to come into the Authors’ Fund. There was also, of course, other money allocated, which was used to promote books and New Zealand writing in other ways.

Under the Authors’ Fund, authors have the expectation of payment rather than explicit entitlement to payment based on the library holdings of their work. The available fund is divided amongst eligible authors and is on the basis of the number of books held in libraries, and as the number of authors and the number of books have increased the book rate has gone down. This situation, and the lack of clarity around the entitlement or expectation, has developed, and the Government’s specific purpose in funding this scheme to provide for these payments needs to be clarified. Section 31 of Creative New Zealand’s legislation follows the 1973 Cabinet minute and states that the purpose of the scheme is to provide compensation for loss of royalties as a result of books being available in New Zealand libraries. However, such loss is very difficult to quantify. Payments under the scheme represent compensation in only the broadest sense. In reality, payments have come to be seen by authors as a justified income stream and a form of recompense to which they are entitled as fair payment for allowing their works, which often have taken years of research, writing, illustrating, and developing, to be available for wide public use in libraries without every individual having to buy a copy.

Mandating the current scheme within Creative New Zealand’s legislation and requiring that agency to fund and administer it has proved an uneasy fit on occasions. The New Zealand Authors’ Fund provides payments from a set fund to authors who are registered for the scheme, based on eligibility criteria. Creative New Zealand’s core business, on the other hand, is to disperse its funding through application-driven processes, contestable funding decisions based on merit, and its own strategic priorities for the development and expression of the arts across New Zealand at arms length from the Government. Creative New Zealand supports the transfer of the Authors’ Fund from its responsibility.

In line with comparable schemes overseas, such as those in the UK and Australia, the bill establishes a public lending right scheme that recognises there is a public benefit for the use of books in public libraries, for which authors deserve, and should be entitled to, payment. Internationally there are 28 such schemes. In line with international practice the bill does not include in the scheme non-book material held in libraries, such as CD-Roms, audio tapes, music scores, on-line services, videos, or CDs. We are willing to consider this issue further, and will, if convinced, include such material in future policy.

There has been an ongoing call for stand-alone legislation to give clear direction on the scope, eligibility criteria, and administration of the public lending right scheme to replace the current legislative arrangement for the New Zealand Authors’ Fund. Providing for the scheme within stand-alone legislation will give the public lending right statutory protection and reduce the risk of it being abolished. Stand-alone legislation would also bring New Zealand in line with comparable arrangements in Australia and the United Kingdom.

The provisions of the bill reflect calls from authors and take account of a major review of the Authors’ Fund that was completed in the year 2000. This followed the Labour Party’s 1999 manifesto commitment to “develop a satisfactory statutory basis for administration of the Authors’ Fund in consultation with authors and Creative New Zealand;”, and to “work towards a book rate that properly compensates authors for loss of royalties”. I recognise that this process has taken rather longer than I had thought when I put those words into the Labour Party manifesto in 1999, but I would also argue that this Government has done a great deal for authors and literature across New Zealand of which I am very proud. This bill has been developed with input from representatives of the New Zealand Society of Authors and many others.

The details of where the newly established public lending right scheme will be administered are a matter for debate, and I would expect submissions to discuss this. Both the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and the National Library have been suggested. Both have advantages but may have conflicts. My preference is not to establish a stand-alone organisation, as this will always be a comparatively small fund and we want as much of the money as possible to go to authors.

Until now the New Zealand Authors’ Fund guidelines were issued from time to time with no required consultation with authors or with the Minister. The bill requires regulations to determine the criteria on which authors, books, and libraries are to be included in the scheme, and changes to legislation will be subject to both consultation with an advisory group established for the scheme and recommendation from the responsible Minister to the Governor-General.

The bill requires the chief executive of the administering department to appoint an advisory group in consultation with the responsible Minister, and the advisory group will consist of representatives of authors and librarians, employees of relevant Government departments, and others who have appropriate experience, knowledge, and skills. The establishment of such a group is something that authors have strongly advocated. The responsible department will make annual payments under the scheme in accordance with the regulations, and each registered author will receive an annual payment based on a book rate that represents an amount payable per copy of eligible titles held in New Zealand libraries.

The amount of funding available to the scheme will be subject to the usual Budget cycle processes. In May 2008 the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, who is also, of course, the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, announced that an additional $2 million will be added to the Authors’ Fund over the next 4 years, raising its current annual funding to $2 million. The Authors’ Fund will continue to operate as currently administered by Creative New Zealand until the date the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Act comes into force.

The bill gives recognition to the vital contribution that New Zealand authors make to the Government’s cultural provision. As a comparatively small market of 4.2 million people, New Zealand will not be able to support all writers to write full-time without significant exporting of New Zealand literature, in spite of the very high rate at which we buy and read books, especially New Zealand books. By establishing a public lending right, there is a clear recognition of the entitlement to, rather than the expectation of, payment to authors for the books they write that are read across New Zealand. I also note that we are about to see the only district in New Zealand without a public library, the Chatham Islands, get one, which will mean that every New Zealander will have a library.

I am grateful to all of the parties that have given their support to this bill, and I urge them to support the first reading and the bill’s referral to the Government Administration Committee for the calling and hearing of submissions and further consideration. I commend this bill to the House.

National will support the first reading of the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill and its referral to the Government Administration Committee. The bill does, however, require a great deal of work, and I will touch on that in the course of my speech. We have heard from the Associate Minister this afternoon the official history of the Authors’ Fund since, say, 1973, but I want to give members the real history—the real oil.

National recognises the huge contribution of authors to New Zealand’s culture. Indeed, it is fair to say that in the last 20 or 30 years there has been a real explosion in all types of writing, and this bill represents one way in which that magnificent contribution can be recognised. It is fair, as we finally get to talk about the public lending right in this House, that I recognise some great writers and some great New Zealand authors, like Dame Fiona Kidman, who is a wonderful New Zealand writer, and Owen Marshall, who is our greatest short story writer. I mention those writers because they both served on the Arts Board of Creative New Zealand with me and made a huge contribution in their 3-year terms. Karl Stead is another one who has made a great contribution to New Zealand literature. He too served for a very brief time on the Arts Council, but he resigned in disgust after one meeting because of the state of the Authors’ Fund. I will also mention good old Tony Simpson, who works for the Minister of Agriculture, and Philip Temple, who worked long and hard to see the establishment of the public lending right in New Zealand.

I also recognise some great historians. I particularly want to mention Dr Barry Gustafson, who was once a member of the Labour Party, but saw the light. He stood for us in Birkenhead in 1987 and is the author of a wonderful book on New Zealand’s great former Prime Minister Sir Keith Holyoake. It would be inappropriate to go through some of the great writers without mentioning New Zealand’s pre-eminent historian Dr Michael Bassett, who has just published an outstanding book on the Lange years. As Mr Groser and I were sitting and contemplating this issue before I was called to speak, I was wondering who this Government’s Michael Bassett will be. Who will tell the real story of the Clark Government?

💬 Hone Harawira: Shane Jones.

I initially thought that it would be Mr Maharey, but then I do not think he would be an appropriate choice because he specialises in polysyllabic sociological claptrap, and anything he would write would be unreadable. I agree with Mr Harawira. Mr Groser and I reached the conclusion that it would have to be Shane “I am surprised I am not the leader yet” Jones, because we think that Mr Jones will tell the story.

The starting point for a discussion about the public lending right is former Prime Minister Norman Kirk, who introduced the Authors’ Fund by Cabinet minute in 1973. Norm was an odd mixture. Apparently when he was Prime Minister he used to shoot at pigeons from his third-floor office. But that marks a great contrast with New Zealand’s very own Senator Joe McCarthy—the current Prime Minister. Norm shot at pigeons, but, as we know from yesterday’s question time, the Prime Minister prefers to shoot herself in the foot.

Initially, the Authors’ Fund was administered by the Department of Internal Affairs, then it was transferred to the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, and then over to Creative New Zealand when that body was formed in 1994. The Authors’ Fund should never have been administered by Creative New Zealand, because it is anomalous for a grants funding agency to administer that kind of fund. Moreover, it is fair to say that the Society of Authors used to get very annoyed with Creative New Zealand because the administration of the fund was messed up more often than not.

The next stage in the narrative is to talk about a person of whom everyone in this House is, or should be, fond: me. I was chair of the Arts Board in 1998, and I used to dread my meetings with the Society of Authors, because all its members would ever do was to complain about the Authors’ Fund and that Creative New Zealand had never administered it properly.

💬 Hon Shane Jones: You gave them great cause to complain.

So I commissioned a report, I say to Mr Jones, into whether New Zealand needed to have special legislation—whether we needed to have a public lending right Act. That report was completed towards the end of the 1990s by Geoff McLay, who is now an associate professor of law at Victoria University. Geoff McLay is a very fine copyright lawyer; he is probably New Zealand’s leading intellectual property academic. Indeed, he is the co-author of the leading text on the subject. Mr McLay reported to Creative New Zealand and recommended, among other things, that New Zealand follow both the United Kingdom and Australia in recognising the public lending right in a separate statute. That comprehensive report made a number of detailed recommendations on a variety of subjects related to public lending rights.

Labour has been lobbied hard by authors, because its 1999 manifesto promised there would be an overhaul of the Authors’ Fund. But nothing happened. Like many of Labour’s promises to the arts community, it was all show and no substance. The Prime Minister has always used the arts to promote herself. She is renowned for turning up at functions, giving a quick speech, and then leaving. One of her more notorious recent performances was at the music awards. But she has been hopeless when it comes to the policy detail, and that is why so many areas of the arts require comprehensive reform. They have been neglected for far too long.

Nothing happened regarding the Authors’ Fund for years. Then, after I came into Parliament in 2005, I thought it would be a good idea to have a regular round-table meeting with representatives of the New Zealand Society of Authors. That turned into an excellent opportunity for an inter-party dialogue with authors on issues of interest. I note Ms Kedgley is in the House, and she is a member who has appeared at meetings. Tony Simpson, representing the Progressive party, has appeared, as has the Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Judith Tizard, and indeed Mr Hide, the ACT member, turned up last year, as well. I always recall the first time the Associate Minister turned up at one of those meetings. She was very dismissive about public lending right legislation and when someone asked her a question about the statutory recognition of the Authors’ Fund, she snapped at that person that there was no point because it was all covered by section 31 of the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Act. But if she had bothered to read the McLay report on the adequacy of section 31, she would have learnt that we had slipped behind the United Kingdom and Australia—the countries to which New Zealand can be most compared.

So why is there legislation at this time? The answer is that when nothing has been done for 8 years, after promises to do something were made in 1999, and when one knows that authors are particularly annoyed and that the Opposition spokesperson on the arts has a particular interest in the subject, something needs to be done very quickly. So all of a sudden we found that the Labour Government had rediscovered the public lending right and had become interested in this issue.

This bill is the fruit of all its hard work. We have only to look at clause 10 to see that the work is inadequate and probably breaches the Legislation Advisory Committee guidelines on primary and delegated legislation. Indeed, clause 10 is one of the laziest clauses I have ever seen in any legislation.

💬 Dail Jones: Appalling!

I hope that Mr Dail Jones will be making a contribution, because he will agree with me that to leave all the key questions to be answered by clause 10 is simply unbelievable. Those matters should not be dealt with by regulation. Labour cannot even define an author or a book. What a lazy piece of work this bill is! It is an insult to our talented and hard-working literary community. After 8 years authors deserved something better than this bill. The resale royalties legislation is misconceived, but at least there is some detail in it. This bill is a disgrace in terms of lawmaking and, as I said, I think the literary community deserves a much better piece of work than this.

I am pleased that finally we have had the bare bones of public lending right legislation introduced into this House. I very much hope that I will be able to play some part on the Government Administration Committee in considering the bill, because the subject has been of personal interest to me for many years. But there is a lot of work to be done if we are to knock this legislation into shape for the literary community.

New Zealand First will be supporting the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill. Obviously it is very long overdue. As the New Zealand First spokesperson on the arts, I read a book or two now and then, and I am only too pleased to support a greater remuneration for the authors of New Zealand.

I recall the background of the Authors’ Fund. Members may know that I opposed Dr Michael Bassett and won the seat of Waitemata in 1975. I had many discussions with Dr Michael Bassett in subsequent years when he came back to Parliament. One of his little asides always was that he established the Authors’ Fund. Maybe Dr Bassett was the one who told Norman Kirk that something needed to be done, and the minute was passed. I am sure he will give submissions to the select committee, and no doubt this piece of history will come forward and become substantiated as the real thing, as the years go by. I give credit to Dr Michael Bassett for always mentioning this, for some reason or other, when we were having discussions. I am very pleased to see it being brought up to date.

Of course, there is one question that does cross my mind. I suppose there is no possibility of deceased authors being recognised in any way in New Zealand. This bill seems to apply only to living authors. Often we give credit to deceased authors, so that was just a thought that went through my mind. Maybe we have never done it in the past, and maybe we will never do it in the future, but perhaps some sort of recognition might be given to their estates.

We have done very well in recent years internationally—Lloyd Jones, who is no relation, with his Book of Fame, and of course his most recent book Mister Pip. He is Bob Jones’ brother. Of course, we should now say that Bob Jones is the brother of Lloyd Jones, because Lloyd Jones surely is much more famous, although having said that, I am sure Bob Jones might write a book on it to dispute the fact. I say good luck to both of them for being authors in New Zealand, and both of them being entitled to receive a dollar or two, although I am sure Sir Bob Jones would donate it to an appropriate charity, being the nice kind of bloke that he is.

Other authors are Margaret Mahy and her works The Lion in the Meadow, The Boy With Two Shadows, and The Man Whose Mother Was A Pirate. These books are very well read amongst a certain sector of the population—very young people. She has done extremely well in New Zealand, and I think she is even published overseas. As the previous speaker, Chris Finlayson, was saying, and as the Minister was saying, I believe, we need to export some of our work, and full credit to her. Keri Hulme has been mentioned, as has Joy Cowley, who wrote The Silent One, and the poet Witi Ihimaera, whom my son studied at school, and, of course, Bill Manhire, who wrote Dawn/Water. Let us not forget Maurice Gee, the author of In My Father’s Den. I think that has been made into a film as well. That sort of credit and encouragement needs to be given to New Zealand authors, and the Authors’ Fund will clearly be one way of doing it.

I had the misfortune, perhaps, of suggesting to an English literature teacher that there is one author who does not get enough credit in New Zealand, and that is Barry Crump, who has long since passed away. I did suggest, while Barry was still alive, to a literature teacher at a school that students should study him. She was complaining about boys not studying literature and not reading. So I said: “Why not give them Barry Crump?”, but for some reason she was absolutely horrified. I feel that there is a snobbery around sometimes, and that books that boys will read are sometimes not made available in schools because they are not highbrow enough. But I read A Good Keen Man and one or two others, and they flowed well. I can almost see people turning up their noses already at my view of literature when I suggest Barry Crump, but books are there to be read, and if people are not reading them, then maybe that is a criticism of the book itself.

I take the point raised by the previous speaker as far as the regulation provisions of this bill are concerned. I said that provision was unbelievable, and I am pleased the member took up that issue. I have never seen a regulations clause in a bill as small as this. There are only 17 struggling clauses in the bill, and the regulations clause, clause 10, has 10 subclauses all of its own. I wonder whether any work was actually given to the preparation of this bill. The things that are set out in clause 10, “Matters that may be dealt with in regulations”, should really have been taken into account. However, let us give credit, as the saying goes. The Minister has taken the trouble to prepare the bill. It is on its way. The problem with this institution is that if something never reaches Parliament, it never will. If we can get something into Parliament, we have something that Parliament and one of the various select committees can work on and improve. I take Sue Kedgley’s view that now that we have a bill we can, of course, criticise this regulations clause, but we can work on it and the select committee can work on it. We can ensure we know who an author is and define what a book is, and perhaps extend the matter to CDs and such like, as the Minister has said.

Some praise was given to academic historians and their contributions to writing. I find that the most boring histories ever written are those written by academic historians.

💬 Hon Judith Tizard: Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand was a wonderful book.

Keith Sinclair’s work on Walter Nash really put me off Keith Sinclair totally. Keith Sinclair was my favourite lecturer at Auckland University. He had a marvellous command of the English language. If people read his autobiography, Halfway Round the Harbour, which I have read and which I have in my library at home, they would believe it was Keith Sinclair talking to them. But reading his history of Walter Nash was utterly dreary and boring, and if it was not for the fact that he found some Security Intelligence Service papers in his garage, no one would ever have known that Keith Sinclair had written a book on Walter Nash. Maybe that is some of the hype that goes around as publicity. Historians should almost give up writing history books. Some of the other people who have written books on New Zealand—and there are plenty of them—make it so much more enjoyable compared with the likes of, with due respect, even Michael Bassett and my favourite lecturer ever, Keith Sinclair.

New Zealand First supports this bill. We look forward to a considerable amount of work being done on it at the select committee, because a considerable amount of work is required. But I congratulate the Minister on bringing the bill to the House and giving us something to work on. New Zealand First will be doing all it can to ensure that the authors of New Zealand receive at least the amount of recognition they deserve, if not even more.

I am delighted to follow my most excellent colleague Christopher Finlayson. I so admire his breadth of intellect and his incredible understanding of the arts, and the work he does so diligently as National’s spokesperson on the arts.

National welcomes the Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill, even though the Minister put forward this legislation 8 years after a review was conducted in 2000. Is it not incredible that last year she was on a panel for the Society of Authors, and said that section 61—which is only about five lines long—was absolutely adequate. She has changed her mind. It is a case of “Oh my goodness, it’s election year. We had better hurry up and do something. Perhaps we should hurry up and make some sort of placatory gesture to the authors of New Zealand, and to the Society of Authors, and promote this bill to the House.” [Interruption] Of course National will support the bill.

National members think it is eminently suitable to support the authors of New Zealand, not least because we want these books in our libraries and we want the public to be able to access them. But the moment I looked at this legislation and saw those regulations—all 10 of them—I thought that if Ian Wishart wanted to put a book into the library—maybe called Absolute Power—he would have to go through all these regulations. And what is that book about? It is about the current Prime Minister. If he wanted to know what the regulations said, he would find out that books had to meet certain guidelines in terms of how they support the current Government—or not, as the case may be. Members should look at Absolute Power and the detail that it gives—

💬 Tim Groser: What about Nicky Hager?

Well, would members accept his book? How, under the regulations in clause 10, will people define which books will be accepted and which will not? Who will be in charge of that? Actually, it will be the Prime Minister. Funny that, is it not? Would we then learn about “paintergate”, the motorcade incident and what really happened, and why there was such a delay between the time of the police being notified that there was a civil case and the pictures being burnt? All sorts of really relevant facts are out there, available to the public, and, hopefully, available in our libraries.

The regulations, which are outlined in clause 10, are just amazing. I reiterate the concerns already expressed by my most excellent colleague Christopher Finlayson. The bill has a regulation for just about everything. Clause 10(8) states: “Regulations may specify who may enter his or her name in the register,”. Oh, my gosh! They have another register, for goodness’ sake! An author who has spent a lot of his or her time and effort writing a book will probably have to fill out a book’s worth of regulations just to get that book into the public library, and even to access the money that will be provided through the Authors’ Fund. I am so glad that National has a sensible member like Christopher Finlayson as our spokesperson on the arts here in New Zealand. He will contribute so much.

One of the hallmarks of this current Government is that it introduces absolutely abysmal legislation into the House. The Government does not do enough homework. It does not identify the problems, and it cannot sort out solutions. One has only to look at the regulations in this bill to understand that. This is appalling, but, quite frankly, I do not think we have learnt to expect very much else from either the Government or the current Government spokesperson on the arts. One has only to look at the regulations to see that. The bill is short, but it could have been shorter. If Government members had done their homework, we might have been able to expedite this bill. But I can see it taking quite some time to work through each of the nine or 10 regulations that will be formulated, and the sorts of hoops that the Government will make authors jump through just to be approved for this funding. That is an indictment.

This bill will reinforce the concerns that my most excellent colleague Christopher Finlayson expressed earlier about the fact that authors will go along to Society of Authors meetings and resign in disgust. They will not waste their time jumping through hoops and going through what this Government expects them to go through. Let us face it: this Government has done nothing but grow bureaucracy in its nearly 9 years in power. We have gone from having 26,000 to 36,000 bureaucrats, and what have they achieved? The Minister cannot even do the basic homework necessary for a piece of legislation, despite all the people she has in her ministry—and other ministries, to boot—and that fact is coming through loud and clear. What a hopeless Minister she is, in terms of presenting something to the House that is robust enough even to go through the process.

I will make a few other comments, as well. This legislation is quite unlike the hopeless artists’ royalties scheme that, again, was introduced by this Government recently. It was absolutely hopeless. Again, not enough homework was done. This Government does not do the job properly, so all we end up with is lots and lots of problems. As has been said already, this legislation really is an attempt to curry favour with the Society of Authors and with authors throughout New Zealand—and we have fantastic authors.

In my electorate of Coromandel we have a plethora of wonderfully creative people. We have had Michael King, and the author of Jane and the Dragon. If I had known that I would be speaking on this legislation today, I would have put together a list, and we would have been here a lot longer than the time allotted. I also take the opportunity to mention Out in the Cold, by David Grant, which is an excellent book. He has put out a rather interesting anecdotal history about horse racing in New Zealand, as well—another very good author in New Zealand. I also recognise the poets in New Zealand and the works they produce that we are lucky enough to have access to in our libraries.

I am a huge fan of libraries. I think they are incredibly important, particularly so for a rural area. It is a wonderful opportunity for parents to take their children along once a week as a form of entertainment, and to go to the local library and just spend some time among real books. It gets children away from computers, PlayStations, and things like that. We cannot understate the importance of books in our children’s lives, and one of the delights I had in my early years was being able to go to the library every Friday night with my parents, my brothers, and my sister. We spent a lot of time in the library. It was a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. We would take home about six books at a time; we really enjoyed those books. They were very important in our formative years, and I am sure they will continue to be important in the formative years of many, many children to come.

Perhaps Government members could take a leaf of what everybody has said about the importance of books, do a little bit of reading themselves, and maybe come up with something a little better than nine pieces of regulation as part of the proposal for this bill. How is the public lending right for New Zealand authors in any way streamlined and supportive of authors if they have to jump through hoops to get access to that fund? We will look with interest to see how hard the current Government continues to make it for people just to access simple funding arrangements, and we will look forward to being able to contemplate that and bring some sense to the legislation at the select committee.

I will start my contribution by saying that the Green Party is absolutely delighted to be supporting this Public Lending Right for New Zealand Authors Bill. We had almost got to wondering whether this day and this legislation would ever arrive. It has arrived late in the year, at something of the eleventh hour. Nevertheless, it has arrived, and we are hopeful that with the goodwill and support of this Parliament it will be passed through in this Parliament as swiftly as possible.

We are aware that librarians and writers put together an excellent proposal for reform way back in November 2000. The Government has finally acted on that proposal, and we have here a bill that will entrench the Authors’ Fund scheme in its own stand-alone legislation, which authors have been calling for for decades and which the Green Party wholeheartedly supports.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.