Webb Duncan; Mallard TrevorDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Mr Speaker. Talofa lava. Can I say that it was a real pleasure to work on this bill including with Mr Finlayson in committee. One of the good things about this bill is that it takes what it must be said is an arcane area of the law. The law of contempt is one of those areas which has pretty much been left alone because it's part of the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court and we know that the High Court guards that very jealously. One of the difficulties with that though is that it's very difficult for an ordinary citizen to understand exactly where those rules lie and perhaps uniquely ordinary citizens are very much involved in the court process. So I think it's a very good step forward to essentially take the existing law of contempt and to codify it.There's not a huge amount of change of the law here although there will be some but the real mission was to take what is a complex and arcane area of the law and to put it in understandable language. So one of those areas which I think was very useful is disclosure of jury deliberations because in today's day and age of Instagram and Snapchat and what have you everyone seems to want to let everyone know what they've been doing that day. Jury deliberations don't fall into that class of thing. So I think it's very good to be able to set out in a very clear way including so that a judge can direct a jury. We know that a judge does direct a jury not to disclose deliberations not to go on the internet and see what the media is saying about the case as it progresses and so on but I think it's a lot better now that the court can refer to this bill soon to be an Act I sincerely hope and make it quite clear that there are significant penalties for that.I understand the Minister's spoken about a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP). One of the good things about the committee was that it was very much a cooperative committee and had some very very good submissions. We had a number of submissions which essentially talked about the interplay between freedom of speech and the ability to criticise the courts and the need to protect judges. Judges are in a difficult position it must be said because whilst in any free and democratic society their decisions should be subject to robust scrutiny if what has historically been called scandalous allegations are aimed at them they're not in a position to defend themselves in real terms.Whilst at least notionally they can avail themselves of the law of defamation in practical terms it's simply not good form. And I know of no case—although I'm not saying there are none—where a judge has chosen to take defamation proceedings for the kind of scurrilous criticism that has sometimes been aimed at judges for their conduct in court. Sometimes those allegations are so baseless so nasty and so pernicious that they really should be prohibited. And whilst this bill before us has takedown orders where the court can direct people to take down immediately—on a very low threshold an interim order can be granted requiring that those scandalous items be taken off the internet or any other publication—and penalties which will flow if those orders aren't followed the fact is that that is an after-the-event remedy and there certainly is room for consideration of having a clear rule that scandalising the court is inappropriate.Having said that the bar has to be very high. I must say I found it quite amusing when a number of academics came and said I write scathing academic articles criticising the judges. Are they going to be prohibited? This is an outrage. I could be fined or conceivably go to jail for saying that a judge's decision was wrong." Well quite clearly no matter how strong the terms of such criticism are if it's an honestly held academic belief it certainly won't fall foul of any scandalising the court provisions. I've seen some pretty fierce arguments between academics and judges they've criticised but there's never been any suggestion that it's a contempt to say that a judge's decision is muddle-headed wrong and poorly thought-out—Chris Penk: Are you quoting from Professor Webb?Dr DUNCAN WEBB: —and I might have been on the receiving end of some of that criticism. Ha ha! But having said that when those allegations those false utterly baseless allegations of corruption and the like are thrown about there's certainly room for a much closer examination of that. I look forward to seeing that being explored in this House at committee stage. But with that I commend this bill to the House.SPEAKER: I call the learned gentleman Chris Penk."