Pallett Sarah; Dean JacquiSARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. It's my great privilege to rise this evening to speak in favour of the Protection of Journalists' Sources Bill. I'd also like to begin by thanking and acknowledging my colleague and friend Louisa Wall who is unable to be here to speak to her bill tonight and also to acknowledge the Hon Clare Curran who began this important piece of work. It is an important piece of work because the protection of sources and the support of our journalists is a key principle in securing freedom for the press and why is it important? A lack of clarity at the moment in the law is enabling and facilitating incidents such as we saw with what we know now to be the unlawful search of investigative journalist Nicky Hager's home. This particular bill will seek to address that by explicitly including investigative journalists in the definition of journalist" which has not been included so far in any legislation and I'm just going to read from the bill. So we have here that the definition of "journalist" is "a person who in the normal course of that person's work may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium; and"—and this is the key point for investigative journalists although I'm stepping away from the definition here—"includes an investigative journalist who publishes work including books of in-depth inquiry and original research into matters of public interest that may not otherwise be disclosed." At this point I just want to stand in my strong support of investigative journalism. Rather than dismissing it somewhat offhandedly as we heard a little earlier as just writing a book—and here I'm not referring to my colleague across the way Nicola Grigg but to a previous speaker so that I'm not misunderstood—investigative journalism is extraordinarily important and I would like to reflect to the work done by local colleagues such as Alison Mau with the #MeTooNZ work that she's done that's brought such important issues to the forefront of our minds. But if I cross what we used to call the Ditch when I lived in the UK looking at the work of our Pulitzer Prize winners we've seen them changing a Senate race by revealing a candidate's sexual harassment of teenage girls. We've seen them revealing mass bribery. We've seen them reveal rogue police narcotic squads reveal congressional corruption and neglect in protected care. So the work that they do is extraordinarily important and it's extremely critical that we make sure that that's protected. How are we going to do it? Well in this bill we're going to be requiring that the police have to identify if a person is a journalist or if the information that they're seeking is related to a journalist. They also have to include an explanation of the rights of journalistic privilege and give the journalist reasonable time to respond to a—I've got "to a production order" and I was about to say "protection order" but it's to a "production order"—production order before seeking a search warrant. I was kind of interested because I'm not a lawyer and I unfortunately won't be on the select committee but I wasn't sure what a production order was so I looked it up. It basically was made under section 74 of the Search and Surveillance Act 2012 which requires a person or organisation such as a business to produce documents to enforcement agencies as evidential material of a specified offence. Why is it so important that we protect these sources and that we enable journalists to do so? Well I think there's one pretty critical reason and that's that if you don't do it—and it is the responsibility of the journalist—you're very unlikely to gain the trust of anyone ever again. Nobody is going to talk to you any more. But more seriously those sources may have really serious cause to fear reprisals either physical economic or professional. So in closing I'd just like to highlight again the importance of protecting and supporting our journalists and including investigative journalists and making sure that we continue to support the important work that sits around our freedom of the press. I commend this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Ginny Andersen in reply."