Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Internal Affairs: I move, That the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

The bill amends the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993, also known as the Classification Act. This Act establishes New Zealand’s classification framework, which has an objective of protecting New Zealanders from harm. Part of this includes setting requirements to make sure that DVDs and films shown at cinemas show suitable ratings and warnings. This, in turn, enables people to make informed choices about what they want to watch. If you wanted to buy a newly released DVD or a family classic to watch with the kids over the weekend, you can make that informed choice. You pick up the DVD. On the front is a label that reads “G”; you know, then, that it’s safe and that it’s fine for the whole family to watch. Likewise, if you see a label that reads “R16” or “R18”, with warnings for violence, sex scenes, or offensive language, you know that it wouldn’t be a good idea to watch that movie with your nine-year-old. That all makes sense, but our rating and labelling regime is out of date. It is pre-internet. These days, it’s not so much about buying DVDs, because streaming services provide a lot of content that we watch.

I know that the Minister of Internal Affairs has received a lot of letters and emails from members of the public who have concerns about their children watching content and movies that are not suitable for their age, causing them psychological harm and influencing their perceptions of reality and the real world. The worst example that we’ve had of that is the show 13 Reasons Why. I’m not sure who’s watched it, in the House. That did harm to young people here and overseas, in part because it originally had no rating and young people did not know what they were getting into and what they were about to watch.

That is what this bill is designed to address. It’s about reducing harm. It’s about bringing our law into the 21st century and having consistency across our ratings and descriptions, no matter how shows are viewed. This bill does not aim to prevent people from seeing or viewing movies they are free to watch, but, just like at the movies, and DVDs as well, it will require streaming services to consistently and clearly display appropriate age ratings and warnings. I say “consistently” because at the moment a movie can have a completely different rating and warning depending on which service you are viewing it on. For example, the film Suicide Squad has an official classification of R13, with warnings for violence, horror, and cruelty. It is rated as 16-plus on Netflix, with no warnings; 16V on Lightbox—the “V” stands for violence—and M on Google Play, with no warnings.

In addition to these inconsistencies, the ratings and warnings on these video on-demand services can be nondescript, hard to find, and hard to read. This shouldn’t be the case. This information is important. So the technical details like the form and look of these labels, which will be prescribed in regulations, will be developed with providers and regulators. They’ve got to be workable and effective and work across the different platforms that people use—smart TVs, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. The bill will make it so that the shows and movies you see on Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, and other listed providers display consistent labels in a consistent manner.

It will do so by requiring commercial video on-demand providers that are listed in the schedule to comply with the new labelling requirements set out in new Part A of the bill. The labels will have a rating that recommends a suitable audience for the show, and a warning for any mature themes like violence, sex, and suicide. Providers listed in new Schedule 4 can comply by following the current process for films in cinemas or on DVD. Alternatively, the bill enables listed providers to rate and label their own content by using a self-rating system approved by the chief censor. It is important to note that the new labelling requirements only apply to providers listed in the schedule to the Act. This reflects that these services are accessed by a number of New Zealand consumers and are household names. The schedule can be updated when necessary via Order in Council, in consideration of specific criteria.

I want to emphasise to the House that the chief censor will still be able to use call-in powers under the Classification Act. So if there are concerns around content provided by a service that is not listed in the schedule, then the chief censor can call it in for classification.

This bill will extend and modify legislation that was designed in the pre-internet era. I understand this is challenging, and I would like to thank the Governance and Administration Committee for its consideration of the bill. I’d also like to thank the 19 submitters on the bill, particularly those who made time to make oral submissions to the committee. It’s so important. The committee has recommended amendments to the bill in response to some of the issues raised in submissions and to improve the workability of the bill, and I thank them for that.

Of important note is a recommendation for the addition of a purpose statement in Part 3 of the new labelling requirements. The new statement emphasises the purpose for this bill, which is to reduce the risk of harm to children and vulnerable consumers from viewing inappropriate content. This, in line with the objectives of the Classification Act, is important. It also delivers on the Government’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, specifically the obligation to develop guidelines to protect children from information and material that can be injurious to their wellbeing.

The majority of recommendations made by the committee provide clarity on how the self-rating process will work in practise and adapt relevant sections of the Classification Act to accommodate the new labelling requirements. The Government supports these recommendations.

I give notice of an intention to table a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) at the committee of the whole House stage. The SOP will amend the commencement provisions in the bill to delay the implementation date for the new labelling requirements. This should give listed providers enough time to update systems, make arrangements, and discuss terms and conditions with a classification office. It will also allow time for technical regulations for the new labelling regime to be developed carefully, with detailed consultation with providers that will be regulated.

The Government is working with industry to develop a framework for how the costs of the new regime and role of the Classification Office will be met. Options under consideration include a levy which is not currently authorised by the regulation-making powers in the Classification Act. Therefore, the SOP will amend the bill to include the creation of a levy-setting power to charge commercial video on-demand providers, amongst the purposes for which the regulations can be made.

The Government envisages that the legislation be enacted before the House rises in August. This will allow the regime to be implemented as early as possible once the important work of ironing out the technical details is completed. It will help New Zealanders make informed viewing decisions when they are choosing what to watch on these services. It also provides for an efficient compliance regime, so there should be no delays in the availability of content.

Thank you again to the Governance and Administration Committee and to the officials for their efforts on the bill. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the National Party and indicate, as we have indicated through the select committee process, that at this stage, we are cautiously supporting this bill at second reading. I’m a little surprised to hear that the Minister is indicating a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in delaying the implementation date. That was going to be one of my SOPs, because I believe—considering the fact that there is wider media review and some issues that may actually occur, I was going to recommend during the committee of the whole House to delay the implementation of this bill. On that note, I would welcome any conversation that the Minister may extend to me in regards to the dates and the fees that were actually indicated by Minister Nanaia Mahuta.

I’d like to begin with a congratulations to Tracey Martin. I have to say that the Minister has actually been quite open to having a conversation. Unfortunately, we never quite got together to have a discussion, but I’d like to think that we’d like to blame COVID for that, perhaps. But I welcome a conversation in the next stage re. the delaying of the implementation, because there are some issues that I’d like to discuss with the Minister as well.

Minister Mahuta actually laid out the bill quite fulsomely, and I think I’d like to perhaps start off with the genesis of the bill, where the previous Minister of communications under the National Government, the Hon Amy Adams, was concerned about the convergence issue in the media sector—that people were not only watching content on linear television but people were consuming them through commercial video on-demand (CVoD), on the internet, through their laptops and phones, and the way that people were getting that content was varied. She felt that they needed a legislative change to make sure that we were protecting New Zealanders.

When the Labour Government came in, one of the things that the Hon Clare Curran did was to delay that, and since then, Minister Faafoi is actually overseeing the wider media sector review. There is also a review that was happening under the Māori media sector review. The internal affairs Minister, the Hon Tracey Martin, carved this particular area out so she could bring it to the House so we could actually pass this legislation.

Although I agree that this is something that we needed to do in terms of consolidating and making sure that the classification is ordered and people are not being confused as to when they are watching content online or on their linear television or on CVoD or whatever; that there is consistent classification; that people are not confused by whatever is actually on the sticker or on the labels—I agree that we need to have consistency. However, there were some concerns when this bill actually came to the Governance and Administration Committee at its first reading, and through the select committee process, I think we have ironed out some of those concerns.

One of them, to give an example to the members in the House, was that when a multi-platform broadcaster like Sky, who also stream online, who actually have broadcasting standard labelling for their programming on Sky—they have the same labelling or classification on their streaming service. But this bill would have, ultimately, meant that they had to have different classification, potentially, because they were being classified by two different regulators. So the one that is for broadcasting is actually quite different, and the other one that is overseen by the Office of Film and Literature Classification could be different. Potentially, Sky could have ended up with two different classifications for the same content that was going out on two different platforms—but it’s the same content. So that was one of the concerns during the select committee process. People have actually mentioned that there needed to be consistency, and it may end up, you know, with different classifications.

That was a major concern, and also the regulatory burden on these companies, because they already pay huge amounts of money to make sure that they stay within the legal frameworks, and they actually want to be responsible broadcasters. One of the comments that was actually made by a submitter was the fact that this, potentially, was an inappropriately applied band-aid for the system.

Some of the other comments that I’d like to bring to the House is the fact that this bill cannot fix the internet harm issue. I know that the Minister is concerned about reducing the harm, and I think all of us want to do that, but this bill does not actually reduce the harm of people who seek to find content that is inappropriate or harmful. Minister Nanaia Mahuta mentioned a particular programme—I don’t want to repeat the name of it because I don’t want to promote it, because it is actually content and subject matter that I don’t think children should really be exposed to. But they do. When something, as you know, hits the internet, whether it’s actually Twitter or any other social media, young people find the content without having to be on a platform like, let’s say, Netflix or Neon or Lightbox. They find it. They go looking for it. There are video on-demand providers who are not in the Schedule that we have listed in this bill, who provide content that is actually harmful.

So I am concerned that we are not dealing with the real harm, but for the purposes of making sure that we streamline content classification labelling, I commend the work of the select committee, as well as all of the officials who have actually participated, particularly the Office of Film and Literature Classification.

One of the things that I actually want to bring up—I purposely decided to request the office to provide me with the classification tool. There is a self-classification tool that the commercial video on-demand providers can sign up to so they can actually do it themselves. For organisations such as Lightbox or Neon or Netflix, they would not have people sitting there ticking boxes going “This is how many violent incidents or sex content or kissing” or whatever—you know, the ticking that they have to do to actually get to a classification. In my office, we decided to test the tool out. We decided to pick a cartoon that was G-rated. When we did the exercise, it didn’t come to G, and we have actually raised that issue. So there will be some tweaking around the tool that has to be done.

But one of the things that I’m really happy about is the fact that broadcasters who also stream are not subjected to the regulatory burden. The fact that content providers, commercial video on-demand providers, are actually willing to do this—there was a lot of concern that they may be geo-blocking. There was recently an article saying that we have the worst possible Netflix content in New Zealand compared to the rest of the world, because—you know, the number of the population size, I guess, is one reason. But if we have regulatory burden, commercial video on-demand providers may not provide the variety of programmes that we could be exposed to and actually enjoy, and geo-blocking is one of the ones. So if other countries can see it, New Zealand may be blocked because they’ve decided that it’s too difficult.

One thing that I’m quite happy about is the user-generated content that’s not going to be part of this, because I don’t think the platform should be responsible for, you know, the Hon Tracey Martin putting a family video, let’s say, online on YouTube. They should not be responsible unless it breaches the rules, and we already have regulation and legislation to make sure that harm is prevented and people are actually prosecuted accordingly.

In this particular instance, I commend the bill to the House and actually signal that I have an SOP that I will bring to the House during the committee of the whole House stage.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Firstly, can I just acknowledge the Hon Nanaia Mahuta and thank her very much. The public may not know, but the lifts in Parliament work really, really slowly. There’s only two going at the moment in the core of the Beehive. And even though I came down—I left my office at call number 10. The calls have been short and the lifts have been long. So I apologise and I thank the Hon Nanaia Mahuta for standing and taking the first call.

Can I acknowledge the member Melissa Lee, who has just resumed her seat. This is an area of extreme interest to her. She has raised, and did raise at the Governance and Administration Committee, with the Department of Internal Affairs, areas that she had specific interest in that she was worried may have needed to be on the Schedule. But then, after going through it, I understand at this stage she is comfortable that they are not on the Schedule. That may be the Supplementary Order Paper she’s talking about.

Can I acknowledge the conversation and the comments that are made in the House and will be made in the House. The member who resumed her seat is quite right. The media content regulatory system, the whole of it, needs to be reviewed; it’s pre-internet. My reality, when I sat in this seat, was that I had major research from the chief censor, among young people themselves that said, “We are being harmed and we think adults should be doing something about it”, and 83 percent of the New Zealand public said they wanted to see a single classification system applied across all platforms.

One of the reasons why a single classification system is so important is the parental blocker that you can put on your devices at home are set to New Zealand classifications. So if, for example, you have gone as a responsible parent and put in “I don’t want my child to see anything that is over a rating of R16.”, if we don’t have alignment of the classifications, that won’t work. That’s exactly what happened with a programme that I’m not going to mention by name. And there’s a programme on right now that required a complaint to be made because it had an R16 rating. At the moment, because this law is not there, the chief censor had to get a complaint first, which means harm has already been done. He had to go and view that programme and then he lifted the rating to 18+. Again, I’m not going to mention it because I’m not going to give them the media coverage, but this is important. So I carved it out because the piece of work, as the member Melissa Lee actually clearly identified—she’s absolutely right—is a much bigger piece of work.

The Hon Amy Adams did start that piece of work. I felt, as the Minister of Internal Affairs, and strangely enough, as the Minister for Children, that I couldn’t wait, or we couldn’t wait, and continue to allow young people and children to be harmed while we waited for that bigger piece of work to be done. I also felt, and I have had representation from the industry saying, that if it’s overly burdensome maybe people would geo-block programmes in New Zealand.

It is my view, and it is the view of this Government, that, actually, the wellbeing of our children is more important than sometimes I might not be able to watch a programme that somewhere else in the world they can watch. I know it’s a delicate thing when we start to ask the internet to take more responsibility or work with us and legislate levels of responsibility on them. I know it’s a delicate space, and I know that there are members in civil society who say it should be free and a Government should not touch it, but it is doing harm. The chief censor has, quite clearly, done an enormous amount of research with thousands of young people in New Zealand, and they are asking us to do something to make sure that they can be safe.

Yes, young people will seek out a programme if they’ve heard about it. But the reality is that more young people will now be informed that if you watch this programme, you will see these things inside of it. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It provides them with a choice. That’s what this bill is about: choice. Kia ora. Thank you very much, Madam Speaker.

National will support the bill to progress to a fuller discussion in the committee stage. I would like to thank our colleague Melissa Lee for her work and her understanding in contributing to the improvement of this bill. Now, no one would disagree that we should reduce the potential for harm to consumers from viewing inappropriate content. Research indicates that there are, indeed, harms that have occurred due to insufficient classification regimes online. So while people have become more aware of the potential for harm online, or commercial video on demand, the Government has its responsibility to somehow help the consumers by providing more protection. And this bill is an effort.

So this bill will require that the commercial video on-demand content that is made available in New Zealand display appropriate and consistent labelling—I would like to emphasise appropriate and consistent. At this stage, the providers of the commercial video on-demand content do not have a consistent regime to follow. Basically, it is very hard for consumers to get enough information or consistent information to make an informed decision, because there is a gap in our legislation at this stage. The gap is that on-demand online content in New Zealand is not subject to the mandatory labelling requirements that films for cinemas or DVD release are. So that is, the commercial video on-demand is not within this particular regime. That is why we need to somehow make this amendment, have this bill.

Under this bill, the labelling will provide information about the content rating and a description so that consumers are able to make informed decisions. This is the core of this particular bill, the purpose of the bill. To help achieve this, the bill will, basically, update the function of the Classification Office to empower the office to somehow make it more workable for the office to do their operational work.

Also, the bill will replace the definition of “film” in the Act because, at this stage, the definition of “film” in the Act does not include commercial video on-demand, and, therefore, this bill will make sure that the Act itself will cover this area. Also, this bill has an amendable schedule which will have a list of the providers of these commercial video on-demand, and the list itself can be amended as it sees fit. So these are the main provisions or main purposes of this particular bill.

Now, we support the bill, as I said, we would like this bill to progress to committee stage so we have a better discussion. But as the previous speakers have mentioned, we believe this bill itself is narrowly scoped. We have a much broader issue here. That is the content regulation. The content regulation is a much broader issue, we need to have more discussion about this. So this bill itself, because it’s narrowly scoped, could conflict with a broader regime and therefore may become outdated before too long. We believe we should have a wide-ranging, open-scoped review of New Zealand’s media sector, and this is the best approach to tackling the hard questions affecting broadcasters, producers, and content creators.

At a more technical issue, we need to have the right sort of classification framework and also content regulation that inform and educate consumers instead of frustrating them. So we made a number of recommendations or amendments at this committee stage, and we are going to go through all these recommendations at a later stage. But, overall, we believe that this bill itself is a good bill. We’d like to support it to the committee stage so that we have a better discussion.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. A very important piece of legislation, this, the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill. It is an amendment to the 1993 bill which lines up standards of regulation that we have and have gotten used to on our daily screens—the way that we currently consume our broadcast material these days—but actually makes it applicable for online services such as on-demand services as well. It’s a good bill, it gets support from us, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to stand in support of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill on its second reading.

I would like to acknowledge our lead person on this bill, Melissa Lee, and the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee, Dr Jian Yang, for their contribution, and the contribution of the Opposition members on the select committee to improve this bill.

We have seen transition in our lifespan, starting from the radio, to black and white TV, to colour television, VHS, then things kept on adding, and now the latest version is commercial radio on-demand. The law was a long time overdue to be updated so that the latest formats can be caught under it, and this bill does that.

There are some concerns, which have been raised by my colleagues on this side, particularly Melissa Lee. As she mentioned, the biggest concern was the implementation of this bill. As the Minister said in her speech, there will be a Supplementary Order Paper during the committee stage to extend the bill for its implementation. I think that’s a very good idea, and that shows that the feedback is reaching the Minister, and the Minister is listening to it.

So these are some of the points which have been already discussed by the previous speakers. I don’t want to repeat, but particularly the concern is that the same content has to be classified by different agencies, that was raised by some of the submitters, and the committee paid attention to that, and that has been resolved at the select committee stage.

So I hope that during the committee of the whole House some more improvements will be made to this bill so that it is up to date and will last for a long time. With these words, I commend this bill at this stage. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Green Party supports the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill. As others have said, there is a well-understood R-rating system which exists for classifying films and videos and what this bill does is making it mandatory to have this same classification applied to video content that people see through Netflix, through Neon, and through Lightbox—those internet streaming services—to ensure that we do enable viewers to understand what they’re going to see before they actually see it. We’ve got a voluntary regime at the moment. That’s not working; it’s inconsistent. So this bill will standardise that through requiring those providers that are listed in the Schedule at the back to apply a wider rating system.

And just to respond to the comments from the Opposition about why this isn’t part of bigger reform, I think the Minister made it very clear in her speech that this is part of wider reform, but it is more important to get this classification on the streaming services put in place to protect particularly children, and that’s why this is being advanced. We support the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Excellent to be talking on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill. I think most people have traversed the subject—of course, we are going to support this bill, and we’re a little bit disappointed, of course, that the Government’s taken so long to actually try and address it. Obviously, the Minister is trying to get this bill through. It’s pretty narrowly focused. It is at least something to get started in this area. We are keen that there are some provisions put in place, and it’s going to be an interesting process as this bill winds its way through the House. But we do believe that there needs to be an overall framework, a better framework, that encompasses the media sector in general, and I think this bill, whilst it has significant deficiencies, is a way of at least starting that process of reforming and improving the situation at the moment. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. In the absence of other people taking to their feet, I thought I would comment on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill—what a mouthful that is.

I want to just commend Tracey Martin for bringing this bill to the House. It’s not without its complexity and it’s not without, I guess, commentary from both sides of the discussion on this. But I do think that having a systemised and consistent classification process is in the best interests of New Zealand. And look, I do note that there are content providers who are saying if it’s going to be unique to New Zealand, that’s going to be an issue, and it may be that New Zealand gets geo-blocked from content being provided. Apple TV have said that. Microsoft have said that. Actually, all the big Silicon Valley players have said that.

I guess what we are saying is that, look, these are reasonable requests. They should be requests that jurisdictions around the world, in terms of protecting or stopping harm, particularly to young people—it’s something that every jurisdiction should have a consideration for. There may be an opportunity for a broader, more systemised approach right across jurisdictions, because these content providers are saying, you know, with 5 million people, the cost of doing that, it actually might be cheaper for us not even to provide content. Look, I do think that that’s a pretty blunt response to a situation that I think, particularly in the United States of America, with what’s been happening there, people would have significant concern over.

So there are all sorts of issues, particularly parents knowing what their young kids are viewing with on-demand video. There are concerns around that. Not every parent can be there in every room watching everything that takes place. We do need to have mechanisms that work. We do need to have some sort of filtering process or classification process, and increasingly this is coming through in the technologies that we are employing and having in our homes.

So, in my remarks, I’d probably like to just read out a quote from our chief censor, David Shanks, which he posted on 23 December 2019 regarding this. He said, “As a parent with children”—I think parents right around the country can identify with this—“spanning the ages of six, 12, and 15. I am keenly aware of the challenges facing parents and caregivers in today’s broad-ranging digital environment. Online game platforms, streaming services like Lightbox, massive content hubs like YouTube, and apps like TikTok provide huge opportunities for entertainment and engagement. But I worry that my kids find these things a little too entertaining, and I’m sure every parent knows what I’m talking about, being a parent myself, and I struggle to stay on top of what they are playing and watching. Lots of parents tell me they feel the same.”

He goes on to say, “This amendment certainly isn’t going to fix everything in the area of media regulation and nor was it intended to. It is a meaningful step in the right direction.”, which is why we as a party are supporting this to the committee stage. It gives us time to look at ensuring that as we head in the right direction, the mechanisms that are put in place will be effective, will be taking into consideration the nuances that have been presented to the committee from both sides of the discussion. He goes on to say, “We welcome the changes and know they’ll be of benefit to both industry and consumers.”

Look, I think those were very good comments. That’s why I wanted to read them out. I think they are good and they’re balanced and I think they resonate with Kiwis all over the place. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Jonathan Young. I’m sorry I was a bit confused at the beginning about your timing, and I didn’t actually call your name, so I do apologise for that.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be able to speak on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill. To be on the committee—it was great to hear submissions, and it’s really good to see that measures are being taken to standardise how not just anybody but our young people also get their video content, and for parents to know in advance what children might be being exposed to on some of these new online streaming services. This is an important move, it’s good to see that the Government is taking action in an area where it’s needed, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, and it’s a privilege to stand and speak on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill in this second reading. I too want to congratulate Minister Tracey Martin for bringing this bill to the House. I also want to acknowledge Melissa Lee and Jian Yang, who have worked very hard with the Governance and Administration Committee in getting this bill into the House and moving it through into this second reading.

Essentially, everything that everyone has said about the bill, about reducing harm to our children being a priority for this bill—I think it’s great that the Classification Office is being empowered. I think it’s a great start for the classification of commercial videos on-demand. It’s really well-timed to start a lot of—as Melissa Lee, my colleague, said, some of the content that’s in some of those videos were pre-internet times, and so we need to make sure that we keep our young people safe from harm from those videos.

Our side has declared a bit of caution in supporting this bill, but I’m sure, as Dr Jian Yang has said, that will be sorted out with the committee of the whole House period. So I support the bill. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This piece of legislation is a perfect example that when technology changes and delivery methods change, then so must our legislation to keep our young people safe. It’s all been said before, so I have no hesitation in commending this bill to the House.

Bill read a second time.