Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill to the House.

💬 SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

That’s a very long title, Mr Speaker, of this bill, and I hope that you forgive me for just reading this first part of my speech so I don’t get that title wrong. This bill amends the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993, also known as the Classifications Act. I think that title I like better, being able to say it. It does make really important changes that come as a direct response from the atrocities of the March 15 Christchurch mosque attack, where it became really clear that our legislation needed quick improvements to protect New Zealanders from objectionable material, such as the terrorist attack being livestreamed online. Prior to this time, the actual act of livestreaming wasn’t illegal.

The bill updates the Act to take urgent steps to prevent and mitigate harms being caused by objectionable publications. The objectives are to ensure that the Government and internet service providers and online content hosts can swiftly and consistently take action against objectionable material. Now, I need to be clear that when I say “objectionable”, this is already referring to a legally defined category of content, which is already defined in our primary legislation. This is the worst type of material that is already illegal in New Zealand. It includes child exploitation material and violent extremist and terrorist content. Now, the bar for determining objectionable material is already extremely high, and it is the job of the Chief Censor to apply the legal test. In that legal test, the Chief Censor already takes freedom of expression considerations into account. Once a publication is deemed objectionable, it is illegal to possess the content or distribute it; that already exists in law today. I say that because people have got that confused, that this bill was about redefining that definition that exists in current law; it doesn’t. We’re talking about something that already exists in law.

Since the bill has been at select committee, we have made some significant improvements. Firstly, I said in my first reading speech that I had reservations about the way that the filtering provisions in the bill had been drafted, but I wanted them to go through to select committee to see what submitters were presenting at select committee and to see if improvements were being made. It became clear to me, from the select committee submissions, that there was a high level of concern around the filtering provisions and how they would work. So both the select committee and Cabinet agreed to my recommendations to remove new sections 119L to 119O and all references to the electronic filter, including the regulations in the bill. Given the purpose of this bill was to enable the swift response if another attack or another incident, such as livestreaming of a terror attack, were to occur, I think that what the select committee has sent back for this second reading now creates a really good place that we have landed, and that means that we will be able to act effectively and efficiently without the use of an electronic filter system.

I’d like to take a moment to thank the Governance and Administration Committee for their work and their careful consideration of this particular bill and the valuable improvements that they have made and recommended for it. I’d also like to thank the 163 submitters who gave careful consideration to this bill, but particularly those who made oral submissions on it. Overall, I feel that the work that was done in the select committee by the members, but also those submitters, has added to the bill and made it very much stronger. They’ve made some sound recommendations to improve the bill, inserting clause 5C to add a new section 14A to the principal Act. This amendment would provide a process for online content hosts to submit online publications for classifications. It would provide more clarity to the process for online content hosts, as currently they are not specified in the Act.

The majority of the remaining recommendations that the committee suggested clarified existing provisions, increased transparency, or were technical in nature. But there are a couple that I’d just like to highlight here today. The first one is around the “safe harbour” provisions. When the bill was first introduced, it included a provision intended to ensure that online content hosts were held liable under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classifications Act 1993 where they had knowledge that objectionable content was being hosted on their platforms and refused to take this down. In order to achieve this, the bill recommended removing those “safe harbour” provisions that were under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 for online content hosts. Those provisions do provide protection to online content hosts from liability when illegal content is posted on their platform without their knowledge, providing they take certain steps set out in the Act.

Following the submissions on this clause, it was acknowledged that a blanket removal of the “safe harbour” provisions would lead to unintended consequences, and that it’s not appropriate for platforms to be held responsible for content that is uploaded or shared on their platform that they have no knowledge of. So the select committee and the officials agreed that the removal of the “safe harbour” provisions should only apply in instances where it is subject to a take-down notice and where knowledge of the element is met. So a take-down notice would specify the material that is objectionable and require it to be removed. So then they would have knowledge of that at that point. It is appropriate and consistent with existing offences in the Act that an online content host becomes liable once they have that knowledge that they are hosting objectionable content and refuse to take it down. It gets a little bit confusing, but it’s about the fact that they then know and have that knowledge, and if they refuse to then take it down after having the knowledge, then they become liable.

The bill provides safety for New Zealanders and certainty for content providers with the new ability of the Chief Censor to make interim classification assessments in urgent situations for content that is likely to be objectionable. This means that the public will know as soon as content is found to have the potential to cause significant harm. It also means we will be able to move faster on content, as enforcement agencies and online content hosts will have the legal certainty they need to remove objectionable content. So, unlike other jurisdictions, we’ve had to rely on voluntary requests to remove illegal online material. This bill now will use authorised inspectors, who will be able to then issue take-down notices. So we’ll be moving from a voluntary regime to now having inspectors, who will be able to issue those take-down notices for online content hosts to remove objectionable material on their sites.

I’d also just like to signal, before I conclude my speech, that I am giving notice of my intention to table a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) at the committee of the whole House stage. All this SOP will do is amend the commencement date of the bill, which has since passed.

So, finally, I would just like to say that this bill is about fundamentally protecting New Zealanders from harm that we know viewing objectionable content online can cause, and I commend this bill to the House.

💬 SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It was a pleasure to be the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee as we worked through the submission part of this bill. I’ve now handed over the chair of that committee to the very able Mr Ian McKelvie, who I’m sure will do a great job on the rest of the work that needs to be done on this bill. But I really did very much enjoy working on this bill because it started, as Minister Tinetti just said, with a very abhorrent event that happened in New Zealand, which we all said would change who we were in New Zealand and change things forever. We’ve had a number of things that have actually changed people’s lives, but none of them were as deliberate and as abhorrent as that one. So this bill is catching up with the technology.

So, as the Minister said, the objectionable—and that was one of the first things that we worried about: what is objectionable? Because there are people that are offended by things that other people might not be offended by. So we had all those questions that we asked, but “objectionable” is defined in the law, and it is an extremely high bar. Nobody would say that what happened on March the 15th 2019 wasn’t objectionable. So the Minister laid out very well what the bill was intended to do and some of the changes we made. I just want to, at this point, acknowledge Minister Tinetti, because I always admire a Minister that sees a problem in a bill and makes some changes to do something about it. As the Minister said, the filter was causing a huge problem. We were concerned about it. We can now support this bill. We couldn’t support this bill in the first reading because people were really concerned about the filter and that actually came through in the select committee process from the majority of the submitters that were concerned about it.

The other person I’d like to mention tonight is Melissa Lee. Melissa Lee is our spokesperson for all things digital. Melissa, we haven’t seen in person for two months; we’ve only seen her in digital forums, in little boxes on computer screens. But Melissa was the person who questioned a lot of the detail of technology in this bill, and her knowledge around things digital far exceeds mine.

The other change that’s happened with that select committee is that the member Tangi Utikere was the deputy chair. The Minister mentioned that this bill had a very long name, and I can remember the day that the clerks came to my office with Tangi Utikere and we had to make a video launching the submissions on this bill. They actually ended up holding up a piece of paper with the name of the bill as we sat there and tried to get it out on a video, tried to be natural, talking about the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill, second reading. So, well done, Tangi. I think we did a good job of that video considering the material that we had to work with.

There’s another group that I would like to mention and that is the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and the advisers. They were so thorough in the work that they did. We actually went across to DIA, we had some visits, and we were able to sit around a table and talk about some of the things they do over there and how they protect people from online harms. So it really was a great, thorough investigation. It was very much, I think, a joint committee effort, and while we had a very serious subject to deal with, we really enjoyed what we did.

So, as I said before, we had significant concerns about this bill. The removal of the filter has been a massive step for National in being able to support this, because it was the key. Is the bill perfect? Melissa tells me, “No, it could be improved, but it’s way better than what it was.” If Melissa was here, she’d probably be able to explain very clearly in some of the clauses why she feels that way. I’m sure her view is correct because you can always improve legislation post the point that you’ve done it. But will it protect New Zealanders from seeing horrific videos? Yes, it should, and it may. I think the point that we discussed the most was that we may not be able to hide that forever, but it should stop our children and grandchildren from going on Facebook and accidentally picking up their phone and seeing something that they really, really shouldn’t see as those things happen. So, yeah, of course, anyone can find anything if they go looking for it, but it is actually a protection.

So Melissa’s line, I guess, that I’ll put across tonight is while she sees a number of technical inadequacies that may still be in the bill, the view is that the bill will no longer do more harm than good after the removal of the filter. So we really do thank you for that, Minister.

So what it does is it grants the Chief Censor the power to make swift, time limited, interim classification assessments that can have legal effect for up to 20 working days. So that was also a concern of submitters, that once the censor had made the classification, it needed to be time bound because while it’s pretty clear under the law what “objectionable” is, people just needed the guarantee that this was a limited time frame, just in case the censor had done something that wasn’t considered by everybody to be the right thing to do. I don’t think anybody would have disagreed that it would have been, had it been available in March 2019.

So there were 163 written submissions, dozens of oral submissions, and there was a wide group of New Zealanders that participated in this. One of the main reasons that people were concerned about the filter was that they were really concerned that anything that we did in this bill around the filter would have had an effect on their ability to have freedom of speech. And, I guess, that was probably the biggest thing that concerned National at the time as well, because we don’t want people not to feel free to say what they want to say. Of course, that doesn’t need to be hateful and, certainly, we’re really pleased now that we have the ability to stop this.

So, even as we were going through the provisions of the bill, the Chief Censor, David Shanks, had said to us at the time that there was too little detail around how internet filters would be used and too few safeguards around their use. So we even had it from the person who was going to do the job. So, well done, Minister, we respect you for making that choice to change something that you felt wasn’t perfect.

And with that, it may take me the rest of my speech tonight, but I’m going to say that the National Party caucus supports the second reading of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. May we never have anything again in New Zealand. Hopefully we make this bill and, hopefully, the Chief Censor doesn’t have too much work to do, because it’s an awful thought that we would be using this bill a lot, but it’s great to be able to capture what happens in this bill should we have another awful event, and we all really hope that doesn’t happen. It’s my pleasure to support this bill on behalf of the National caucus. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Thank you to the previous member, my colleague Barbara Kuriger for your support and for the National Party’s support. When I came into this House a year ago—today, actually, was my first day here—it was very much around “How do I be constructive? How do we work together for the betterment of New Zealand?” Hearing those conversations that we’ve just had, hearing Melissa Lee’s critique and work, and hearing the hard work of the select committee very much shows me how we can work together and make our nation a better place.

I want to say a thankyou to our Minister of Internal Affairs, the Hon Jan Tinetti, for bringing this piece of legislation forward, and as someone who’s worked for many years with young people, it’s really important to me and for me to ensure that we protect our rangatahi, and, knowing the content that is out there—not even objectionable, but just stuff that’s unhealthy and not good for young minds—I’m glad that we can come to a place where we can ensure that it is an offence to make, possess, supply, or distribute objectionable publications such as this.

For me, I’ve been paying attention over the last few weeks to what’s been going on in America, around Facebook and Frances Haugen, and the fact that they talked about—it really pricked my ears up when they mentioned, “It’s easier to inspire people to anger than to any other emotion.”, and creating anger, creating division is something that social media is an expert at, and we want to stop that. So I’m glad that we’ve made it through to this reading, we’ve had the select committee, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, I find myself in somewhat uncharted territory again, as the member Barbara Kuriger pointed out, not only uncharted territory but, of course, when I was young, if we wanted to see anything objectionable we had to go to the movie theatre—ha, ha! There was no other way of seeing it because we didn’t even have a TV, and that just shows how the world’s—

💬 SPEAKER: A blue-movie theatre!

Ha, ha! Oh, I never saw one of those. That just shows, though, how the world’s changed.

And, I guess, the other thing that I’ve observed about how the world’s changed is that when this bill went to the Governance and Administration Committee, I don’t think anyone but the governing party supported it. It’s come out of select committee, certainly, with us able to support it, and I think that’s a tribute to the select committee process, and it’s one you don’t often find happens in this House. I don’t really recall a bill that wasn’t supported at first reading coming back to the House and being supported by an Opposition party in the second reading. So that’s certainly a tribute to the select committee.

As the former chair, Barbara Kuriger, said, Melissa Lee contributed a lot to that. Unfortunately, because of the environment we live in, the three Government members on that committee are locked down in other places than Wellington, and that’s just how it is. So you get to have a whole lot of people speaking on this bill who weren’t necessarily part of the deliberation and all of the hard work that went into getting it to this point. Of course, the only part I played in this bill was actually to be there for the very last part of it. I had no part in anything other than the final deliberation. But we were pleased to be able to support the bill, because, I think, whilst it creates a lot of doubt, and I’ll get into that in a minute, it also does make an effort to deal with what, I think, is one of the most challenging things we’ve got going on today.

I just want to give a bit of an example of that, because we’ve had one or two relatively contentious bills through the select committee in recent times in this House, and it really intrigues me what technology, the internet, and Facebook’s actually done to the way people submit on bills in this House. I think we’re going to have to be very careful in the future how we manage that process, and this bill touches on exactly that point, because the publicity and the public exposure you get through instant streaming of select committee processes, of submissions, and submissions that are made in good faith, often, and the negative comment and the comment that comes almost instantly as a result of those submissions, right in front of our faces and in front of the submitters’ faces, actually, I think, is intimidating people in a manner that I think is completely unacceptable.

I think, if we don’t manage that process—and it’s very relevant to this bill—in the future, we’re going to have people who refuse to submit to this House simply because they don’t like the unfortunate attack, I guess, that takes place—they see it as an attack—on them. And we’ve got to remember that people who submit to this House are not—we put ourselves out there and expect to get a degree of criticism. I don’t think people who come here to submit on things—they come here to submit here in good faith—necessarily expect to get criticised. So I think that’s going to be a great challenge for us in the future, or for this House in the future, as technology makes things that used to take a long while to assimilate through and to get through to a point—it’s instant now, and so people are instantly getting criticised or getting attacked for things they believe in, rightly or wrongly. I think it’s, at times, toxic and highly unpleasant. So I think that we’re going to have to manage that process, as well, as we go through this bill.

So this bill—of course, one of the things that intrigued me was the Chief Censor, who I briefly referred to earlier, because the censor has been around as long as I have. I remember, in the early days of my life, the contentious issue of what the censor cut out of those movies you were talking about, Mr Speaker, before we got to see them. But now, of course, the Chief Censor’s job’s much more complicated, and this bill, again, includes him. But I was really intrigued by the fact that he argued that—and I’ll quote him—“We need to embed in such a potentially powerful tool, fundamental protections around human rights and freedom of expression”. I think that’s the great challenge of this bill.

One of the sections that I think is going to raise some doubt in the future is—if you look at section 119C in new Part 7A, inserted by clause 9, this reinforces my point, because it will be very interesting to see how that is implemented in the future. I think we need to monitor those kinds of things, because the worry that the National Party initially had about this bill was the impediment it could have or imposition it could put on freedom of speech and expression. And I think that those particular clauses in this bill, or sections in this bill, are the critical ones that we’ll need to watch closely what happens, as it’s implemented. I think this topic is a very big topic and needs a lot of discussion going forward. So this bill will be a bit of a test for it in some ways.

I think it’s been said already that the bill is not necessarily perfect. It’s very hard to make it perfect. But I do think it’s one of the real challenges that this Parliament will face in the next few years: how we manage this massive rush and the huge advancement in technology, almost on a daily basis, that enables things that we never would have dreamt of happening a year or two ago suddenly to happen. And so that’s one of the things I think is going to be really challenging for the bill.

The other thing that I think is challenging in the implementation of this bill will be how you judge what’s right and wrong—and I know the Minister said that there was some pretty clear definition around some of that, but there’s always going to be grey areas around what the bill intends to be right and wrong and what actually is judged to be right and wrong, and there’s going to be some personalities come into that as well. So that’s a challenge for the bill as it goes forward, as well.

I think that the select committee has done a pretty good job of this bill given, as I said, that not everyone in the House agreed with it when it started. So I’m pretty confident that going forward it will turn out to be OK. I didn’t have the benefit of sitting on the select committee until, as I said, its deliberation and as it’s reported back. It sort of becomes very clear when you read the bill what a minefield it potentially is. So I think the committee has done a really good job of it. I think we’ll wait and see what the outcome long term of that is, but, none the less, I think it’s a pretty good effort, and I’ve got no problem in commending it to the House, and I look forward to the discussion in the committee stage of the bill.

It’s interesting that the Minister responsible for this bill is responsible for another bill that’s before the same select committee at the moment. I notice a fair few of the select committee got changed before the next bill got to us, but it’s equally as contentious as this one could have been, I’ve got to say. That’s the one I was really referring to earlier when I talked about the divisive nature of some of the comments that are made as a result of what comes into these bills. So I commend the bill to the House.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill, and I do recall, actually, sitting in Barbara Kuriger’s office, and I think we actually did it in two or three takes—getting the name of the bill out—which I thought was OK, but, clearly, this has got to be one of the longest titles of a bill in history.

But I do want to acknowledge the members of that particular committee. I’m no longer a member of it, but I know my colleague the member for Nelson, Rachel Boyack, has taken on the mantle as deputy and will do a fine job there. The bill itself, we did hear from 22 submitters orally and the majority of those concerns were around the filter provision, and so I do want to acknowledge the Minister, the Hon Jan Tinetti, for working closely with the select committee. I found it to be a very collegial opportunity for members of the select committee, alongside the responsible Minister, and what we have in front of us is a testament to that. So thank you to the Minister for her efforts in that space.

I also want to acknowledge the hard-working officials. This is—as I think the speaker who spoke before me referred to it—a potential minefield in terms of a digital environment where many things can mean many things to different people, and so time after time, officials were tasked with providing responses to some tricky questions. So I do want to acknowledge the work that they have done. But I also want to acknowledge the hard work of the Department of Internal Affairs, but also the New Zealand Classification Office because, as Barbara Kuriger has already mentioned, the select committee did go on somewhat of a couple of site visits and were able to see behind the scenes the hard work in trying circumstances, in terms of content, that those officers and officials have to deal with. So I’m delighted that the select committee process has actually delivered to this House a bill that is workable, a bill that responds to the concerns that were raised by the Minister initially and through the public opportunities as well, and I’m delighted to be able to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m going to give it a go, the longest bill name: the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. The Greens will be supporting this bill. Like many of the submitters, and a number of the parties in the House as well, we had a number of significant reservations around the internet filter, so it’s good to hear that the Minister of Internal Affairs worked with the Governance and Administration Committee to make a bill that is workable, and I do want to acknowledge the select committee for that. I didn’t have the pleasure of sitting in on the select committee process as well. The report was very thorough, and I really appreciate being able to look back on what the different submitters said in terms of all of the issues presented.

This bill addresses the specific legislative and regulatory gaps in our current online content regulation. These were highlighted in the tragic events of the Christchurch mosque attacks on the 15th of March 2019, and I think it’s really important for us all around the House to continue to hold on to that in terms of how we respond to what happened in Christchurch in all the bits of legislation that come to this House. The terrorist of the Christchurch attacks sought to exploit online platforms to promote his acts of hate-based violence. Following the original livestream broadcast, footage of the attacks spread across the internet through social media, and in the days that followed we saw thousands of links appear across our social media platforms.

When I was reading up about this bill as well it kind of made me reflect on the 1990s, and the 1980s maybe, because when this bill originally came out, it was for, you know, things that came out in the films or came out on DVD or came out on cassette tapes or VHS tapes as well. I think all of us in the House probably remember those times, and so having that legislation updated to respond to social media and the power of social media is really, really important. The bill proposed to address this through a number of the following changes: creating a new offence of livestreaming objectionable content; allowing the Chief Censor to make interim classification decisions lasting for a maximum of 20 days—and it was interesting and good to know that, actually, the select committee and the Minister have sat down with the Chief Censor to really take a look at this legislation to get something that will be workable for him and his staff—allowing take-down notices to be issued to require the removal of objectionable online content, and then, of course, the “safe harbour” provisions that the Minister talked about earlier as well.

You know, censorship is a really difficult issue, and so I will say thank you again to the Minister for qualifying what that was and what that meant in that context as well. I think people around New Zealand will now know that that is actually codified in another piece of legislation, and what this is about is trying to make that all, kind of, usable for the Chief Censor and other officials. It is a difficult issue, and the Greens have expressed the complexity of the problem in the past. It really needs to be consistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act framework, protecting freedom of expression is a primary consideration and recognising the very real need to affect and address significant harms and create transparent and reviewable frameworks for any restriction.

Clearly, the internet filter that was proposed—to me, it was an inadequate tool trying to deal with a very, very horrendous problem, and I also note what the Chief Censor said as well. But I have a quote here from one of the submitters, Thomas Beagle of the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties, who said, “We can’t meaningfully stop … motivated users from accessing materials. There’s just too many channels and too many mechanisms, including encrypted chat rooms, peer-to-peer file transfers, websites … overseas and of course Virtual Private Networks … to ensure that no one in New Zealand can even [access what they’re getting at]”.

But as I was going through some of the other submitters, I was reading the Inclusive Aotearoa submission by Anjum Rahman, and she focused on, in one of the pieces of her submission, algorithms. In that, she said, “Further, algorithms have caused documented harm in moving individuals to more extreme and radicalised positions. Algorithms, AI and machine learning systems should be subject to independent audit, to ensure that outcomes of such systems are not causing harm. Such an audit must be a requirement for any electronic system envisaged in legislation.” If you don’t know what an algorithm is, it’s when you’ve got your phone and you only see about 100 pieces of content but, actually, because it’s Facebook and all that, there’s, like, thousands and millions of pieces of content. So the algorithm prioritises actually what’s in there.

We often get caught up talking about the right to freedom of speech, but maybe we need to start talking about the freedom of reach: the ability for objectionable content, wherever it might be, or particular opinions, to actually be disseminated far and wide across social media networks. The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you engaged with most of all in the past.

I was watching the news—not on Facebook or not on Twitter; actually, on the TV for a change—and there was an article by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who was a product manager on the civic integrity team at Facebook. She was talking about—she was a whistleblower, and, you know, Facebook is a trillion-dollar company. I can’t even imagine a trillion dollars, let alone a billion dollars. One of the things she said is that one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking up that content today is it is optimising for content that gets engagement or reaction, but its own research has shown that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarising is easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions. And, yes, Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, and they’ll make less money. She revealed that they, kind of, turn these settings off and on. When they saw that a particular president was getting incredibly problematic, they turned on a whole lot of settings; he disappeared. They turned them off again, and next thing you know, the events at the Capitol house happened as well.

So we need to get that balance right for freedom of speech, but let’s start thinking about freedom of reach, because possibly this is where the issue is. Through the pandemic, you know, I’ve talked to anti-vaxxers that have gone down the rabbit hole. We know that the proliferation—for vulnerable young men in particular, they can disappear down these rabbit holes, and next thing you know it radicalises them in very, very dangerous, dangerous, dangerous ways.

So my reading of this bill is it does improve things. It will make things better for us. But what it has also done for me is actually open up a whole lot of other questions, because, at the end of the day, what we want to do, I think, right around the House, is to make sure that we reduce harm, that we mitigate harm, and that we promote a peaceful Aotearoa. So we know the algorithm’s really good at making Facebook money and stuff like that—good at making the social media giants money—but what about an algorithm for conflict resolution? What about an algorithm for, I don’t know, climate justice, an algorithm for world peace, and an algorithm which actually helps to deal with the problems that we have around the world? So we will be supporting this bill, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Well, I have to have a go at saying the name of this bill because everybody else has. I stand to speak on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill.

💬 Hon Member: Well done.

Thank you.

At the first reading we had wondered what would this confusingly titled bill actually do. Will it improve online safety? Will it improve the harm? Will it improve the access? And we questioned, do we actually need this bill? Don’t we already have adequate censorship laws in place? During the first speech, ACT’s leader, David Seymour, retold the story of where he was on the 15th of March 2019, at the university down in Christchurch, with 500 students locked in a hall with the Speaker of this House, watching online what was unfolding and wondering whether it was going to come to them in the university hall. I, myself, recall actually driving down the road with my daughter and I received a text, an urgent message that had a link on it telling me to look at it urgently. Because I was driving, I actually gave the phone to my daughter and asked her to click on it and to have a look, tell me what was going on. She told me to pull over, and when I pulled over and watched some of the mayhem that was unfolding we quickly turned it off. I will never do that again, where I ask one of my children to have a look at a link because I had no idea what was going on nor did I suspect it was going to be as horrific as what we actually watched.

What I did do, though, is when I got home, at that time I was with the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners, and I tried to get that link and link it to an email to ask them if this is true. Is this going on? Is this actually happening? But the link that I attached to the link actually didn’t work. It had already been taken down from that platform. I was confused as to whether or not this was actually happening. Was it a scam? Was it in New Zealand? What was actually going on at that time? I wonder whether there’s anything that we could have done, in retrospect, on that day in an official capacity. Could we have stopped it any sooner than what had already been done?

Well, the Government thought we could do more, and they came up with what ACT initially thought was a communist bill. We had grave concerns about the filter. The filter would have allowed the Government to censor what you watch. So we’re very grateful to the 163 submitters who expressed their concerns in the select committee, Governance and Administration Committee, that stated that most submitters were against the filter. It seemed to me that the reason why was because the Government was unable to actually tell them what the filter was going to look like, how it was going to work, and what it was going to restrict. With that lack of detail, we are, of course, going to get a large number of submitters wanting to know more precisely what they would be restricted in watching. The main proposal, of course, included a filter for objectionable online content. Again, without the detail on what this filter would look like and how it would work, it left submitters and the Opposition concerned as to how far this filter could eventually be used. So I’m really glad that the select committee listened to their submitters.

Maybe all select committees should be led by Opposition members, Ms Barbara Kuriger. We tend to work well when we have Opposition-led select committee chairs. So I’d like to commend that select committee for most of the improvements that they’ve made, and I’d like to acknowledge the Minister as well for listening to the voices of the people and making those changes, especially in regard to the filter, and the fact that you deleted every reference to filters. Part 7A actually now only refers to the take-down orders. But again we’ve got to ask: why is this needed? Our legislation cannot be flexed internationally. Wasn’t the Christchurch Call meant to fix this? So has that failed?

The submitters raised concerns. They raised concerns about freedom of expression being impacted. They wanted to make their own minds up on what it is that they will access. They don’t want to be dictated to by the State as to what they can watch and what they can’t, what they can share, and if they’ll get prosecuted for sharing posts. I note recently that a friend of mine shot a good-sized stag and he placed an image of it on “Stalk book”. It was covered because it could cause offence. But this is the way of life for many people, and for many people when they look at what looks gruesome to them they have concerns that, actually, this is just the way that they live. So while it’s gruesome for others, it’s a way of life for many. We wonder whether that could become objectionable in the future.

In a democratic society, we should be able to express our views with freedom. We should be able to share content and have it taken down later if it’s deemed objectionable. I mean, Facebook do it all the time. What ACT does have concerns about is a new offence in section 132C(1), which is sharing objectionable livestreamed material when it’s not necessarily been made objectionable yet. We see this as just going after innocent people. It was actually noted by the select committee that the intent can be difficult to determine, and it gave examples of where it would be OK to share certain types of objectionable material. It was warning people that a judgment needs to be made on background factors. Well, it seems a bit to me like, “You know it when you see it.” It’s not needed. It will potentially capture youth and the unsuspecting internet users. I am witnessing a few laws which are going through, where the police or our judiciary are the ones that are being left to interpret what we mean, because our laws are becoming so unclear, probably because they’re unnecessary.

ACT understands the inherent need to keep our society safe, and we also feel that this is important. What we don’t support is unnecessary laws that will potentially criminalise everyday people going about their everyday activities, posting unsuspecting objectionable material, and being prosecuted for it before it’s been made objectionable, just because they shared it. ACT cannot support this bill while it seeks to criminalise potentially innocent people, restricting our ability to decide for ourselves what we should not be watching, and the laws that we already have that make that determination. So, in that respect, ACT cannot support this bill in the second reading.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m grateful to rise and take a call on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill.

I’d just like to, first of all, thank the Minister and the Governance and Administration Committee and acknowledge that they remained focused on the original intent that was expressed by the previous Minister, Tracey Martin, that this bill is about protecting New Zealanders from harmful content they can be exposed to on their everyday social media feeds. The innocence of our young people as they’re scrolling through their virtual lives and coming across such horrific images is something that is a really, really valid pursuit. So I thank them for staying focused on the prize, and acknowledge the changes that they made to ensure that this goal is met.

They have enabled, with the changes with this bill, to allow those involved to be more effective in playing their part; both the Chief Censor’s abilities to respond more nimbly and the obligations for those who host content to ensure, swiftly and effectively, to minimise the impact—the negative impact—of such content.

In my previous life as an educator, and as a mother, I am very, very aware of the profound scale and pace of reach—something that’s already been referred to in the House this evening—of social media, and it changes every day. Many of us have acknowledged, tonight, that it’s really hard to keep up with the technology. So I’m really pleased that this is able to help us to better respond, and it’s an ongoing piece of work about making content a safer place to be in the future, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As has been canvassed by many speakers tonight, this is a bill with a very complicated name, but I think it’s also important to note it’s very complicated by nature. By that I mean, as many other speakers have referred to as well, the speed and nature of change occurring in the digital environment, the complexity of the multinational digital environment that most of us operate in these days, is very, very hard to police. But this bill is viewed as a necessity born out of that horrific terrorist attack on the 15th of March 2019, and I think it is important that we as members of this House do always bear that in mind: that is the reason why we are here.

We must also remember the families of those impacted, a number of which have actually moved into my electorate as a result, wanting to get out of Christchurch City. So I do see the ongoing harm that this event has occurred on a very regular basis. The harm that the bill seeks to address is urgent, and the intentions of this bill are laudable. National did oppose it at its first reading because we felt that the internet filter was too much of an overreach and it didn’t achieve the bill’s objectives. The submission that stood out to me the most was from InternetNZ, which colourfully described the filter as “a blunt tool which is a mile wide and an inch deep.” and was “purely symbolic … which anyone can get around”. I sat in on the select committee, and we took the view that society needed to be protected from seeing the kinds of content that the bill was seeking to block, but we also had to balance that with those critical rights and freedoms.

Some of the comments made a little earlier in the House I’m not sure are entirely correct. This bill has been very, very carefully drafted and redrafted so that it will not criminalise everyday users simply for sharing something. It’s really important to note that it targets livestreaming of objectionable material. I think, going back through the submissions that we as a select committee both read and heard, it was telling and worth acknowledging that many of the providers—that’s the ISPs and the platforms—were really quick to respond, actually a lot faster than the bureaucracy of Government. Facebook, for example, almost immediately halted the autoplay functionality that it has, and there were other multinationals, like Microsoft, that, in responding to the inquiry, pointed to work that they’ve already completed outside of legislation to develop technology that detects and removes known images of child exploitation and abuse.

So given we as a party saw it as an overreach, the removal of that filter was a really important step for us to be able to support this bill. It is really important, I think, in an environment like this that we do listen to the users, the experts, the user groups, the stakeholders, and they were unanimous in their opposition. The filter itself also was a key concern for many of the objectors to the bill.

I think my colleague Ian McKelvie mentioned the Chief Censor, David Shanks. It was quite significant for us to hear from him that the proposal initially offered too little detail and that there were too few safeguards around the usage, a And so we’re very grateful for the opportunity to go to the Department of Internal Affairs and spend some time with them and the officials to observe for ourselves the great lengths that they were prepared to go to satisfy the concerns of the committee, and also for us to be able to see that very trying work that a lot of people in those positions, in those roles, are asked to do. We as a society I think, should be very grateful for them for that work. They’re, effectively, protecting all of us—I think, sometimes at their own expense.

So I just have to wrap up quickly. Obviously, we as a party very much do support this bill, but we also just would like to caution future Governments, and the challenge for future Parliaments, to ensure that legislations and regulations like this are written and enabled to keep up with that pace of change, and we do commend this bill to the House.

Dr Duncan Webb—five minutes.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai Whakawā. I rise to speak on this bill, and I must say that was an excellent speech by the member for Selwyn touching on the main points. I do want to, essentially, just emphasise that it’s an excellent thing that we agree that there should be reasonable limits on freedom of speech and, unlike the member for the ACT Party who would apparently have people able to share pretty much any information without any constraints, most of us in the House—the vast majority—agree that reasonable, proper constraints which are correctly tailored are absolutely appropriate constraints on freedom of speech in a free and democratic society. That’s what this bill achieves, it’s what the select committee has refined, and that’s always been the intention of the Minister. For that reason, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you to the member for Christchurch Central. He’s so wise—very wise—and the people of Christchurch Central are well served by that member right there.

Can I say, having not sat on this committee, that this is one of the first times that I’ve seen this bill, but I must say that I’ve been convinced by the various arguments around the House tonight—especially from our main parties—on the justification for it. If I was on the Governance and Administration Committee, I probably would have argued to rename it. But, actually, this name made it through—let’s have a go—the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. After all of that select committee process, that’s where they’ve landed—good on you.

The law often chases advances in technology. In the short time that I’ve been a member of Parliament, what I’ve noticed is that, often, we’ve stood in this House and we’ve talked about how technology is running away and, actually, we as lawmakers need to try and catch up with that, and that’s exactly what this bill has gone and done.

The World Wide Web has very few controls. It’s up to each country to decide how they implement those controls, and having gone through a select committee process, having had this brought to the House by the Hon Jan Tinetti, who is also a brilliant member of Parliament and a Minister, our Minister of Internal Affairs—she has brought this forward because she believed it was something that needed to be talked about. It’s been through a select committee process. We do have the numbers around the House to be able to support it. So, for that reason, I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I didn’t sit on the Governance and Administration Committee, and I’m not going to attempt to say the title of this bill, as everybody else has done. But what it does remind me of a little bit, particularly listening to my friend Ian McKelvie, is it takes me back to the days of the movies, and that was referenced. In the days we’d go to the old picture theatres—that was the days after they were silent movies. But the title of this bill reminds me a little bit of the song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, which was the very well-renowned song sung by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, the paragons of virtue. There’s been an element of levity in the House this evening, just with the pronouncement of this bill to the House this evening.

But moving to the seriousness of what this represents and depicts, and it is about ensuring that the protections are there for our vulnerable, who are our children, but are people who are prone to things that weren’t intended really for them to see. This has been prompted very much by—it’s etched in our memories and in our history—the events of the Christchurch massacre on the 15th of March 2019, and the livestreamed video that people unintentionally tuned to, not realising what it was until they did. So it is appropriate that this legislation, the National Party now supports.

There were initial reservations about the overreach that came with this. That’s been remedied through the submissions having been heard, the members on the select committee appropriately responding to that, taking heed of the Chief Censor, David Shanks, and also other specialist leading international digital technology giants, who gave the expertise of their experience and their advice that’s been taken into account by the select committee, and commend them for doing so.

It’s also interesting, because these bills coming before the House cause us to reflect on our life experience, and we draw and share that from different generations—don’t we, Ian? For those of us who have been around for a little while now—and I conferred with my colleague, because I reflect back to the days of the 1960s and the 1970s, a very renowned woman. She became renowned as being the paragon of virtue—in fact, the person who deemed that she was the censor of social morality in New Zealand; her name was Miss Patricia Bartlett. I remember her for the fact that she drew very much on her experience and deemed that New Zealand was going down a pathway which required recalibration of the social fibre and moralities of our society. So, for those of us who are a little bit more seasoned and experienced in life, Patricia Bartlett was one of the first who is imprinted in our memory for censoring the appropriateness of what should be viewed—in those days in the picture theatre on the big screen, but also through what we had access to as children in our literature and in our reading.

So this films, videos, publications, classifications—in short—amendment bill is doing that. It’s recalibrating and ensuring that there are those censors that are in place with the technology that we have today that is very rapidly evolving, and that with that rapid evolvement, it means that there is more accessibility to that.

So the National Party originally did not support this bill for some of the reasons that have been shared in the House by my colleague Nicole McKee. However, we’ve recalibrated and take the view that we support this bill before the House and that it’s not perfect, but it’s a very good start to ensure that there are those safeties and precautions in place. Accordingly, the National Party commends this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a real pleasure to stand and take a call on this very long-named bill, which I will not repeat because I want to say a couple more things first, before we carry on.

First of all, to my colleague the Hon Jan Tinetti, this has been a difficult piece of legislation to think through, and I really want to commend my Minister for the work that she has progressed and her determination to fix something that needed to be fixed. I really appreciate that she has done that. I’d also like to acknowledge the 163 submitters—22 of whom gave oral evidence—and the Governance and Administration Committee and the officials, etc., etc.

Now, I was not a member like many of tonight’s speakers on this bill. However, I had a really good read of the legislation and this is my understanding: objectionable publications have a very high bar and definition. So this bill has brought to balance, I believe, the freedom of expression and speech versus the harm that objectionable material may give, and I think that that is very important. Of course, we all, each and every one of us, recall the events of March 15th 2019. We also recall the harm that occurred when people saw and watched live and then had it relayed time and time again around the country. It was horrific.

I do want to acknowledge, however, that prior to that event, there was all sorts of harmful digital exposures occurring. My own daughter was at school some 12 years ago and had the experience of someone showing her someone being murdered on social media. They thought it was very funny. It was incredibly harmful for my daughter; I had to go and pick her up and take her home from school at the time. So this is a matter that has needed to be looked at for quite some time, and I’m really pleased and grateful that we have actually got to the point where most in this House have supported this bill at second reading. I commend the bill to this House.