Clendon David: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2761. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): It is good to see this bill back before the House. The Justice and Electoral Committee from my recall was hearing submissions on this bill about a year ago. There was a sense of urgency about it because it was seen that there was a gap in the legislation and that we needed to remedy that. So as I say it is good to have the bill back in the House.It is interesting that in the last few weeks I believe—possibly more than a few weeks—there has been a programme on Prime Television looking at the history of censorship in New Zealand. I think it is called The Naughty Bits. I have caught only a little bit of a few episodes but it has been a really good reminder that when we are dealing with words like “objectionable” and “indecent” and “indecency” in this instance we have to tread very carefully. These are incredibly subjective terms. One of the parts of the programme I did see that gave me some amusement was from back in the early 1970s when the film Ulysses came to New Zealand. It was deemed to be of such an extraordinary nature that you could not possibly have men and women sitting together in an audience. So it was allowed for public showing to people over the age of 18 but men and women had to be segregated which is extraordinary. I suspect that today it could go on air with perhaps a PG rating or some such. The point is that our perceptions our understandings our social mores in terms of what constitutes objectionable or indecent change dramatically over time. We have seen remarkable shifts even in the last 30 or so years in New Zealand.Having said all that I will say that the Greens are supporting this bill primarily because—and this has been touched on already—it is seen that the legislation essentially has not caught up or kept up with available technologies. With the internet and the availability of pornography particularly of child pornography part of the problem is that it is now possible to observe such things which inevitably involve abuse and harm to children without actually committing the offence of possession. Obviously to look at something online is not to possess it and this bill overcomes that gap in the legislation. I guess that at some point we have all fallen into the trap where you click on something that appears innocuous and suddenly you are looking at something you would rather not particularly if you are using a parliamentary computer—so one quickly moves away from that site. Clearly it is not the intention to catch people out but where people are using that sort of material it needs to be controlled and it needs to be managed. They need to be taken to task.The part of this bill that caused us difficulty and continues to is the increase in the penalties. The evidence I would argue is overwhelming that increased penalties on their own are not actually an effective deterrent. We had not a lot of submissions actually on this bill—fewer than a dozen I think—and only a handful of people submitted orally but they tended to be well-informed submissions and that came through in a number of them. They said that simply increasing the penalty for a particular offence can in no way give us any expectation of reducing offending rates. Where the investment needs to go is into treating people particularly people who use child pornography. There is something wrong with those folk. They need attending to and we need to understand what the motives are for that behaviour. Those are the issues we need to address. I have argued before that we need specialist courts in the same way that we have the drug and alcohol courts to deal with these cases. We need to endeavour to actually heal them to remove the temptation or in some cases the need these people seem to have to utilise this form of very objectionable and damaging material. So the Greens continue to have serious concerns about the additional penalties.I guess we are still able to support the bill with the expectation that the judiciary will apply judgment and common sense. They understand the social context. They understand the limited value of simply putting somebody in jail for longer periods of time. So it is to be hoped that we will get some positive outcomes around that and that the penalties will actually involve treatment and dealing with the cause of the offending as well as the offending itself.I have touched already on the issue of the definition of “possession”. In the select committee’s report back to the House the point is made in respect of the whole notion of sexual grooming offences that in many instances it is much easier to commit those sorts of offences to present to a naive young person as a peer as somebody you are not in order to affect their behaviours and ultimately to even bring them into a position where abuse can occur. So we think it is a very positive step that there is recognition of just plugging the possibility or minimising the possibility or the opportunity for that sort of offending to occur online in particular.Part of the report does engage with these notions of indecency particularly. The point is made that there is actually not a definition of “indecent” in the Crimes Act and in other parts of the law where we deal with issues around what is objectionable what is indecent and what is outside of what is acceptable to the so-called responsible normal person. Where we have some comfort is that there is quite a well-established set of case law and I think that that is the place to leave it—with the courts. The courts should make those determinations because I fear that if we endeavour to make a hard and fast definition in this place of what constitutes “indecent” it is almost certain to fail and probably fail in a relatively short period of time. Certainly within 5 or 10 years we will be back here trying to unpick it. Although it might initially look attractive to provide clear definitions—and often good law does that so there are fewer grey areas if you like and there is less room for subjectivity in terms of interpretation—I think that these sorts of moral judgments which these matters essentially are are best left to the judiciary where the intention of Parliament is made very clear.We want and need to protect people young people in particular in this instance. We want to remove the offences around child pornography and the like and we want to deal with people who feel the need to indulge in that sort of behaviour and deal with them humanely but forcefully at the same time. So I do think we had better not endeavour to lock definitions into legislation in these instances. We will have a bit more to say later but for the moment I just reiterate our support for this bill. Thank you.