Franks Stephen: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:623;Page:18653] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 In summarising through this debate on the title and the first clause of the bill it is appropriate given the claims the Minister has made for this bill to look at what the principal Act already has and at what changes this bill really makes. That Act provided already a very substantial focus on the interests of children and on the offences that can take place against children. The key advances of this bill are to belatedly expand the offences to ensure that what was previously only an offence for trading is also an offence for possession and to deal with the internationalisation of such material to ensure that Internet transmission is more easily followed as some of the Act’s provisions had been done in an age when import and export was a much more straightforward thing. 
But the Minister has not explained why Part 1 in the first few clauses so substantially expands the powers of the censor to restrict. It is perfectly possible—and ACT did not try to change and did not object—to expand the wording so that it expressly covered infliction of pain self-mutilation body modification or self-inflicted death. Although it appeared that the existing section defining pornography for those purposes probably covered it we could see that it did no harm if one accepts the scheme of the Act to make those matters express. Nor were we concerned about the provision that deals with looking at the likely outcomes to test what the nature of the material is and the wording of the new section 3B(4)(b) inserted by clause 4A which states: “increase significantly the risk of them killing or causing serious harm to themselves others or both;”. We could see that that was the sort of boundary one might choose. But Mr Goff made no attempt to argue why this should go further and allow the banning of material that encourages people to consider themselves demeaned. 
Obese people feel demeaned when obesity is pointed out. All kinds of people raised in strict or rigid religions—for example Muslims Hindus or Jehovah’s Witnesses—would feel demeaned by the kind of mockery of various forms of Christian belief that is routine in our media. That mockery is something that in a free society is important. It is laughing at tyrannies that has eventually started their collapse. But this bill allows the censor to decide—as this censor did 4 years ago—that a bunch of middle-aged talking heads who say that homosexuality is wrong and bad for young people can be banned so that those young people cannot get that message. 
The Minister has made no attempt whatsoever to explain why it is that he is now pushing through legislation with the help of United Future to enable the censor to go back and re-ban what the Court of Appeal said should not be banned because it would be a breach of free speech. The Minister has not tried to explain. He falsely implied that ACT had forgotten about a section in the legislation that says that someone cannot be convicted retrospectively. But he ignored the fact that our amendment was to try to prevent the censor from going back and retrospectively changing a decision that had already been made on a publication and in this case a decision where the censor was directed by the court to go and apply a different test. 
Why should anyone vote for a bill that is being pushed through with the Minister being completely unwilling to answer questions on the words and responding to critics only with a tirade of completely false accusations against those who ask for an explanation? He talked about this bill banning swearing or foul language. Nowhere does the bill refer to swearing or foul language. The words it uses are “highly offensive to the public in general”. Well for a very long time it was highly offensive 
to the public in general to question the existence of God and I cannot see anything in the bill as it stands that would prevent someone from using this legislation for similar purposes against some current fervent belief held by the majority of the population that happens not to be right. 
In this case it could well be as Mr Prebble pointed out that the highly offensive language provision is invoked by Muslims who simply do not like—[ 
Interruption 
]—or against Muslims. It could be for or against and in a free society it is wrong that a censor can get into determining on the basis of the offence caused instead of on the basis of applying article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which outlines the fundamental human right to free speech. [ 
Interruption 
] Exactly. Well in fact it is not fanciful. In Britain at the moment a bill is being debated that would enable the Government to ensure that Salman Rushdie’s book could not be published in Britain. Of course the Government finds it easier when it has a whole lot of fanatics to decide that the person causing the problem with the fanatics is the one who stands up to them. That is exactly what this Government is setting the censor up to do whether or not it wants to. When the power is there in the law fanatics of all persuasions will bring pressure for that power to be used so they do not have to meet offence with reasoned argument. 
Before parties vote for this bill they should ask the Minister to explain what he has not managed to explain in the three calls he has taken—in fact in the four calls when we consider the extended one he had first off—because this is a very serious issue. It is obvious that we all support increasing the effectiveness of provisions that deal with child pornographers and those who abuse children. But it should be of equal concern to every party when the Government brackets together something that pursues an entirely different objective. In this case we do know that the New Zealand censor wanted to ban a publication by fundamentalist Christians about their objections to homosexuality. I tell the Minister that that is a fact not some figment of our imagination. The censor did that and then dragged his feet despite the Court of Appeal saying that the section 3 gateway test was not satisfied. The publication did not involve exploitation torture or sexual degradation; it was a propaganda film that was a form of free speech. 
Now we have the Minister refusing to explain why a provision in this bill states that the censor in future can ignore the Court of Appeal judgment in that regard. In future the censor does not have to apply the gateway tests. The Minister has not explained and no one else has tried to explain why the members of the Government Administration Committee thought they were preserving the gateway test. I wonder whether they even knew what had been drafted for them. I do not think there is a lawyer on that committee and that is a shame because sometimes a slippery Government will slide things past a committee that has acted in perfectly good faith—a committee that has heard the concerns of very legitimate people and has tried to respond to public concerns. Here in this bill have been put some provisions that it appears the committee did not understand because the committee’s own report seems to be contrary to what the words of the bill provide.