Hudson Brett: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHudson Brett: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1758. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BRETT HUDSON (National): I think it is fair to say that we all enter this House to achieve very important things. Some of us may have entered here with views around economic development education health or other areas of social justice. What we have the opportunity to do here is to do some really important—very great in fact—work around helping to protect our children and helping to keep them safe. I think it is very much part of the idea of what brings us all together into this House.I would like to follow on from what my colleague has said with particular emphasis on making sure that our laws are keeping up with modern society and the tools that we are using today. Firstly this bill is about implementing an action plan to increase penalties for producing trading or possessing objectionable publications. New Zealanders deserve to feel safe in their homes and in their communities and this Government is definitely building a safer New Zealand. At the moment crime in New Zealand is at a 35-year low but that did not happen by accident and it will not continue by chance. It is only through vigilance and ensuring that our legislation is keeping up to date with modern methods and modes of communication in particular that we can ensure that.The part I wanted to really focus on was around the information age. The provisions in this bill make it clear that in the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act the possession of objectionable material includes intentionally viewing material over the internet—including viewing material without consciously downloading it or saving it. One of the great things of course about the internet is that it has given most of the population incredible access to information that some years ago certainly a decade or more ago was much harder to source. That gives people a lot more power in their day-to-day business when they trade or buy things whether they do so over the internet or in shops but what it also does is proliferate a lot of material that many people find quite objectionable and the areas of pornography and in particular child pornography are held to be very prevalent. So it is extremely good that what we are doing with this bill is ensuring that our law enforcement agencies and our judicial system can adjust and adapt to the fact that the way people are viewing this sort of material today is perhaps a great deal different from when this sort of legislation was first enacted and last amended.Just before I go on to some part of that it was not without some irony that I noted before with the Judicature Modernisation Bill that members had about half a tree sitting on their benches. It seemed a bit odd when we are talking about modernising something that we would be killing trees to be able to display it. I would have thought that tablets would be better and not tablets of stone either but tablets connected to the internet.So today as has been canvassed offenders can access objectionable material in any sort of form and at any speeds over the internet. In fact the problem here is that possessing that material actually creates a market for further production and proliferation. This House has heard in debates on other matters about peer-to-peer networking and file-sharing technologies and services. So once an individual has sourced this material from the internet possessing it actually makes it a lot easier to share it and spread it around which is of course something we do not want to be seeing.So it is very very good that we are making sure that we are capturing not only people who download material but also people who consciously view it but take some measures to ensure they do not save it on to their local machine—where of course it can be more readily detected. It is also very important that we are including tools such as social networking sites texting and other forms of technology that make it easier particularly for adults to communicate with children in order to exploit them. So I would just like to finish by saying this is a wonderful bill and I commend it to the House.Debate interrupted.