Seymour David: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4670. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT):Mr Chairperson—Hon Ruth Dyson: This will be a relief after that.DAVID SEYMOUR: I did not expect to hear that. It has taken quite a long time but after almost two decades it is nice to see a thawing in my trial separation with my Labour Party ancestors. On this issue we find common cause because as I said earlier it is a case study in bad lawmaking. All of the elements are there: you have a high-profile case that leads to a reaction where any lawmaking appears to be a solution; you have a solution that will erode our liberties and yet not seriously mitigate the harm; and at the end of the day the politicians end up looking like they have done their job—they have done something—but the welfare of citizens has not been improved.As a little bit of insight into why this may be: I am a recovering electrical engineer and one of the things that our profession has done is produce Gordon Moore. Well we did produce Gordon Moore and he produced Moore’s law. Moore’s law will tell you that approximately every 2 years the total power available in terms of computer processing speed doubles and that has meant a couple of things. It has given us some of the impetus for this bill. It has meant that hate speech can spread farther and faster than at any previous time in history and that certainly scares people. But it also means that the remedies for hate speech and bullying are more sophisticated than they have ever been before and we see those remedies coming from those very hosts of online intercourse—the Facebooks the Ask.fms or whatever they may be—just as quickly as the problems emerge. So this is fundamentally a technological change but the technological change has provided not only the problem but also the remedy.It has also opened up a larger and larger gap between an exponentially faster internet with a larger and larger velocity of transaction and a Government apparatus that as Kris Faafoi pointed out leaves you with 4 days before there can be any response. We had a speaker earlier—in fact the first speaker in this Committee stage—who alluded obliquely to a political party that is not in this House but that has been involved in some scandal recently and it is interesting that she raised that question because first of all the individual involved is among the most litigious in New Zealand politics today. He is someone who would actually use and abuse this law—much as the Star Chamber was used and abused—to silence his opponents. But also that entire scandal if there is any mercy in the world will by tomorrow have been fit into a 96-hour period during which for the whole time the approved agency would not have been able to make a useful response. That is funnily enough the result of Moore’s law: there are physical underpinnings to these occurrences.I have gone on before about why criminalisation cannot be supported.Tracey Martin: It doesn’t apply. It doesn’t apply Mr Seymour.DAVID SEYMOUR: I have to say that I am listening to some interference from over there that reminds me of a blogpost that I saw recently on a popular blog asking the question: “Is Tracey Martin the full quid?”. That is the kind of posting that might well be silenced by this bill. But I return to the subject.I have put forward a Supplementary Order Paper on this bill that would make a very simple change that would deal with one of the most egregious and demonstrable offences which has been made possible by modern technology and that is a new offence that I think we could all live with because it will not spread beyond scope. It is easy to prove. It is easy to disprove. It is easy for the law to discover whether the offence has happened and is deserving of punishment. And that offence is simply when a person has made an intimate digital recording with or without the consent of the recordee and has then propagated it across the internet—propagated it rapidly as you would expect in an age of increasing computer power—that is an offence. I do not think there is anyone in this House who would disagree that that should be an offence. The Supplementary Order Paper that I have put forward asks that that be put in its proper place in the Crimes Act—not by creating new offences.That is why this legislation and the episode that led to it is a perfect example of bad lawmaking. You had a high-profile incident. The agencies that were supposed to deal with it were incompetent and did not deal with it. The laws that existed and that were supposed to be enforced were not enforced and today we find ourselves rather than addressing that problem creating a new agency to be approved and new laws in order for the same problem to be targeted. If you were a Martian who had recently landed on Earth—not thinking of anybody in particular—then of course one would think that that is completely nuts.So I appeal to the Committee its conscience and its sanity and to those who want our profession to be well respected to say that we should not—as Jacinda Ardern put quite eloquently I thought—try to pass a law and be seen to do something and then to wring our hands and wash them clean. Actually we should put the legislation and the public policy measures that are required in the place they really deserve to be. That place is the Crimes Act. That is creating a real crime responding to the real technological change that we face and responding to something that is egregious that is easy to demonstrate and that has been made possible by technological change. We should put that in the Crimes Act—that is to say that if you make an intimate digital recording of a person and propagate it across the internet or digitally without their consent you have committed a crime.If that Supplementary Order Paper were to be supported tonight that would be this House’s insurance against the possibility that this broader piece of bad lawmaking will not succeed. Sanity would prevail the integrity of the political profession would prevail and this House would vote down what will otherwise become—and I guarantee this—a textbook example of bad lawmaking with all the elements of bad lawmaking that we have become so used to seeing come out of this House. So I end my appeal. I think it has become clear to all those in this Committee capable of comprehending simple ideas that this Supplementary Order Paper is the right thing to do that it would improve the quality of lawmaking and that ultimately it would improve the welfare of all New Zealanders through better public policy. Thank you.