Curran Clare: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4672. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South):I cannot believe that I am standing here tonight saying that I have actually agreed with two speeches by the ACT member David Seymour but I have so—[Interruption] Ha ha! Here we go—strange times! Nevertheless although there is agreement on broad principles around what is good law and what is not good law on the balance of things we are supporting this bill at the Committee stage. But we are as you have heard tonight very concerned about certain things.I am going to just briefly touch on what I described earlier as the missing voices in the debate around this legislation and they are the voices of young people and the people who advocate for young people. The message that is starting to build and come from them is that cyber-bullying will not be beaten by punishment alone. I want to refer to a group called Sticks’n’Stones which is a student-led digital citizenship project that is based in Central Otago which is probably quite chilly at the moment I would imagine. It was minus 4 degrees at Dunedin Airport this morning just for everyone’s information and I imagine it is much chillier there. These people are quite heated around this issue and quite exercised around it because they are teenagers and they are teenagers who have firsthand experience that words can hurt and be hard to escape. They have a message and that message is that penalties like fines or even jail seem more like a scare tactic than a solution and although they might stop people from cyber-bullying out of fear in the short term they are highly unlikely to change the mindset of bullies.I think that this really just reinforces what my colleague Jacinda Ardern said before. It is in the peer group that the work needs to be done. It is not just the peer groups of teenagers—although that is pretty important because teenagers go on to become adults with learnt behaviour—but the peer groups where people are active in online communities. My colleague David Parker earlier in this debate referred to the forums on TradeMe which is one of the areas where there is a lot of cyber-abuse. I know that TradeMe is very concerned and keen to have the safe harbour provisions in this legislation implemented so it feels it is protected from defamation cases and from liability. In respect of the peer-group behaviour and the role of the internet service provider the fact is that everyone along the line has to take some responsibility and legislation alone—particularly bad law and there are parts of the law that we do consider to be bad and badly written—is not actually going to address the problem.We have touched on the criminal provisions on a number of occasions tonight. We have touched on the safe harbour provisions and the fact that the perhaps unintended consequence of this legislation is actually that it will legally prolong the issues of cyber-offensive and bullying tactics intimate photos abuse etc. as these will be able to be legally kept online for longer periods of time before they can actually be addressed—48 hours plus 48 hours is a long time for information to go viral and to have huge ongoing effects on victims and yet that is what this law does. Those things are again things that are going to bring this legislation back to the House.The other matter that has not been mentioned tonight is the lack of a defence of public interest and the impact that this law may have on our media. This is actually a critical issue and one that again is going to have ongoing ramifications. Despite the work of the Law Commission that was done and despite the fact that there were a lot of submissions to the select committee on this matter the Minister of Justice refused to include an exemption for media in this piece of legislation which means that therefore there is no specific public interest defence that can be used in a mediation or a District Court process which is what the Law Commission recommended.I think that again one of the other glaring omissions in this law is what the impact is going to be on free speech. I think that the ACT member over there would no doubt again agree with the position being taken tonight that in the haste to try to put in place measures—which I know were described somewhere else in the Committee tonight as potentially knee-jerk—to try to deal with this issue there could be consequences for one of our core parts of democracy which is free speech and for media satire irony and cartoons. How long is it going to be before we have a media organisation ending up in the District Court defending its right to publish a religious cartoon that has offended a group of people? This is New Zealand and this is 2015 but if this is the direction we are going in then it feels like we are going backwards in terms of our democracy and our free speech.That is not meant to be the intention of this piece of legislation according to the Minister. She said very publicly in an interview on The Nation at the weekend that it would not be the outcome but she could not point to where in the legislation there is a defence because there is no defence. There is no public interest defence. There is no ability to defend on the basis of free speech.I want to just reference an example that was provided by Tech Liberty NZ which was one of the submitters on the bill. It posits the example of a photographer who captures a politician taking a bribe and posts the photo on the internet. By exposing the corruption he knows he will cause the politician serious distress. It may not necessarily even be a politician; it could be a businessman or it could be whoever but that person will no doubt suffer distress by having that photo published. In such circumstances the law regards the photographer as intending that outcome. Surely his is an act we ought to encourage not punish yet under this bill it would be a crime to which the law affords no defence. That is deeply troubling and should not be the impact of this legislation but unfortunately we are going to see more cases like it we believe and issues coming forward that will seriously test whether this legislation works or not.We know that cyber-bullying is an important issue. I think that everybody in this Committee knows the impact of it particularly on young people and of the publication of intimate material and deeply damaging material. We need to have measures to deal with it. Having an approved agency in place is a very important part of those measures but there are so many glaring gaps in this piece of legislation that we know that it is going to have to come back to this House to be fixed.