Pallett SarahSARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you so much Mr Speaker. I rise to speak towards the Harmful Digital Communications (Unauthorised Posting of Intimate Visual Recording) Amendment Bill.I am not a member of the Justice Committee but I am a huge fan of their work and I just want to commend the chair Ginny Andersen who spoke earlier and the whole of the committee for the incredible work that they do. It would be completely remiss of me not to add my congratulations and gratitude to Louisa Wall who is bringing this bill to the House. As my Green colleague Jan Logie has just said in detail and I wholeheartedly agree we are incredibly fortunate to have had such incredible legislation be brought to the House by Ms Wall and we are very grateful for it.Another group of people that I'd like to thank in addition obviously to all of the officials and clerks who have worked so hard would be the 74 submitters—22 of whom I believe spoke to the bill in person. I just want to say that speaking to a bill of this nature takes an enormous amount of courage and the issues and situations that they were describing were I understand extremely distressing. I know that it would have required a great act of courage for them to do so; so I thank them for doing so in order that we could create better legislation. Because that is really what we are trying to do here. The aim here is to prevent and mitigate the harm caused by image-based sexual abuse. It's an increasing problem for us here in Aotearoa New Zealand. According to NetSafe I believe that 5 percent of adults have either been threatened with and/or have had personal intimate sexual content shared without their consent. That's an extraordinary amount of people.What we're aware of with content once it enters the internet is that it is completely uncontrollable and spreads like wildfire. And this legislation actually has some points in place that will enable us to actually bring that under control a little bit more swiftly which I'll talk to a little bit later. We're really talking about the situation of revenge porn. Revenge porn can often have and often does have the name and contact details of the persons who have had their image used without their consent published. And you can imagine Mr Speaker that I'm not overstating it when I say that the effect of that is similar to sexual assault. Five percent of—sorry I beg your pardon 51 percent; I can't read my own notes 51 percent of those victims had contemplated suicide. The distress that it causes is extraordinary and the legislation that is currently in place is not providing those protections. When those contact details are published it enables the victims to be further stalked bullied and stigmatised.Under the current legislation section 22 there is a requirement as we've heard in detail for an intent to cause harm to be proven. That's an incredibly difficult thing to prove. And what you miss in those situations is capturing situations where the person sharing the image is potentially arguing that they're doing it for their own pleasure or just to show off or for a joke. As if this sort of thing was ever funny. This bill recognises that the non-consensual sharing of intimate images is intrinsically harmful. The harm is implicit. As soon as that upload button is pressed without the consent of the person whose image is being shared it is given that harm is caused and intended. So that really enables us to move forward with this piece of legislation.Who does it affect? Well it basically affects anybody—anybody—who has placed their trust in another person either to take an intimate image of them or who has shared an intimate image that they might have taken of themselves with them. And there's absolutely nothing wrong in doing that—absolutely nothing wrong at all. The offence is committed and the harm is done when the perpetrator takes that image takes the trust that's been placed in them by that sharing of that image or sharing of the video whatever it is—which is a precious trust I think—and violates that by sharing it without their consent.Now we've got a study that basically covers the United Kingdom with the UK Safer Internet Centre and an Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner as well as NetSafe New Zealand did a study in 2017. And what they found was that one in five young people has been asked to share nudes and 24 percent of those are women. It is unfortunately a form of gender-based violence because it does affect women at a much higher rate than men although I would absolutely accept that it does affect men too.If we look to the people and the effects that we're having a simple Google search—although I would be careful when you put your search terms in—does bring up the story of a Christchurch woman who spent thousands of dollars on a civil court action to get a sex tape removed after it was posted without her permission. She won the civil case. The man admitted publishing the footage; he did it on multiple porn websites. It was almost impossible for her to get those images removed. She had to contact every single website herself and go through their application process to have that content removed. It was live for a year and had about 35000 views. It caused her to be devastated" in her own words.So we were updated on that particular situation in July and the offender or the fellow who admitted doing this admitted uploading the footage without consent. But he can't be charged and that's the problem that we're trying to solve here. He can't be charged because the police don't believe that it can be proven that he intended to cause harm. So the victim is angry. And of course she's angry as well as devastated and upset but she's angry at the legislation that enabled this. She's angry at those of us in Parliament who have created the legislation that enabled this and quite frankly I don't really blame her. That's why we're here today: we're trying to actually make it right.Now Ginny Andersen spoke of how if this bill is passed it'll make life easier for the police too. I'm really glad about that because I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for the good people that I know that work in the police force in Christchurch. I'm aware of the detective inspector—I know him personally—who worked on this case and I can imagine it would have been profoundly distressing for him to have to not be able to bring charges. So I'm sure it will be a great relief to the police that they will be able to do that.To give you another example of the sort of thing that we're looking at a case reported in Stuff in 2019 and I'm going to read directly here from the article: " 'I'm going to make you famous' he said. 'Keep an eye out on the web.' " And that's exactly what he did. Do you know what he did? He took an intimate photo and published it with offensive sexual comments her son's business name her Facebook and Instagram accounts and even her physical address. She found out about this when she started receiving propositions from complete strangers on Facebook as a result of that man's actions. So this is a really important piece of legislation and it will help us to protect largely women but men and young people too—a large amount of them—from the harm that's caused.One of the things that's really important I noted as a recommendation by the committee was as we heard setting the age of consent at 16. So you can't ever ever be considered to have given consent to your images being shared if you are under 16. But I would also say that 16- and 17-year-olds might still find that the visual recording was considered objectionable under the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act. There are some other interim orders that enable it to be easier for the court to order to take down or disable material and order that the defendant cease or refrain from the conduct as well as not encouraging other persons to engage in other communications.This is a really important piece of legislation. We really need it. I congratulate Louisa Wall in bringing it to the House and I thoroughly commend it. Thank you."