Lee MelissaMELISSA LEE (National): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the National Party and indicate as we have indicated through the select committee process that at this stage we are cautiously supporting this bill at second reading. I'm a little surprised to hear that the Minister is indicating a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) in delaying the implementation date. That was going to be one of my SOPs because I believe—considering the fact that there is wider media review and some issues that may actually occur I was going to recommend during the committee of the whole House to delay the implementation of this bill. On that note I would welcome any conversation that the Minister may extend to me in regards to the dates and the fees that were actually indicated by Minister Nanaia Mahuta. I'd like to begin with a congratulations to Tracey Martin. I have to say that the Minister has actually been quite open to having a conversation. Unfortunately we never quite got together to have a discussion but I'd like to think that we'd like to blame COVID for that perhaps. But I welcome a conversation in the next stage re. the delaying of the implementation because there are some issues that I'd like to discuss with the Minister as well. Minister Mahuta actually laid out the bill quite fulsomely and I think I'd like to perhaps start off with the genesis of the bill where the previous Minister of communications under the National Government the Hon Amy Adams was concerned about the convergence issue in the media sector—that people were not only watching content on linear television but people were consuming them through commercial video on-demand (CVoD) on the internet through their laptops and phones and the way that people were getting that content was varied. She felt that they needed a legislative change to make sure that we were protecting New Zealanders.When the Labour Government came in one of the things that the Hon Clare Curran did was to delay that and since then Minister Faafoi is actually overseeing the wider media sector review. There is also a review that was happening under the Māori media sector review. The internal affairs Minister the Hon Tracey Martin carved this particular area out so she could bring it to the House so we could actually pass this legislation.Although I agree that this is something that we needed to do in terms of consolidating and making sure that the classification is ordered and people are not being confused as to when they are watching content online or on their linear television or on CVoD or whatever; that there is consistent classification; that people are not confused by whatever is actually on the sticker or on the labels—I agree that we need to have consistency. However there were some concerns when this bill actually came to the Governance and Administration Committee at its first reading and through the select committee process I think we have ironed out some of those concerns.One of them to give an example to the members in the House was that when a multi-platform broadcaster like Sky who also stream online who actually have broadcasting standard labelling for their programming on Sky—they have the same labelling or classification on their streaming service. But this bill would have ultimately meant that they had to have different classification potentially because they were being classified by two different regulators. So the one that is for broadcasting is actually quite different and the other one that is overseen by the Office of Film and Literature Classification could be different. Potentially Sky could have ended up with two different classifications for the same content that was going out on two different platforms—but it's the same content. So that was one of the concerns during the select committee process. People have actually mentioned that there needed to be consistency and it may end up you know with different classifications. That was a major concern and also the regulatory burden on these companies because they already pay huge amounts of money to make sure that they stay within the legal frameworks and they actually want to be responsible broadcasters. One of the comments that was actually made by a submitter was the fact that this potentially was an inappropriately applied band-aid for the system. Some of the other comments that I'd like to bring to the House is the fact that this bill cannot fix the internet harm issue. I know that the Minister is concerned about reducing the harm and I think all of us want to do that but this bill does not actually reduce the harm of people who seek to find content that is inappropriate or harmful. Minister Nanaia Mahuta mentioned a particular programme—I don't want to repeat the name of it because I don't want to promote it because it is actually content and subject matter that I don't think children should really be exposed to. But they do. When something as you know hits the internet whether it's actually Twitter or any other social media young people find the content without having to be on a platform like let's say Netflix or Neon or Lightbox. They find it. They go looking for it. There are video on-demand providers who are not in the Schedule that we have listed in this bill who provide content that is actually harmful. So I am concerned that we are not dealing with the real harm but for the purposes of making sure that we streamline content classification labelling I commend the work of the select committee as well as all of the officials who have actually participated particularly the Office of Film and Literature Classification.One of the things that I actually want to bring up—I purposely decided to request the office to provide me with the classification tool. There is a self-classification tool that the commercial video on-demand providers can sign up to so they can actually do it themselves. For organisations such as Lightbox or Neon or Netflix they would not have people sitting there ticking boxes going This is how many violent incidents or sex content or kissing" or whatever—you know the ticking that they have to do to actually get to a classification. In my office we decided to test the tool out. We decided to pick a cartoon that was G-rated. When we did the exercise it didn't come to G and we have actually raised that issue. So there will be some tweaking around the tool that has to be done.But one of the things that I'm really happy about is the fact that broadcasters who also stream are not subjected to the regulatory burden. The fact that content providers commercial video on-demand providers are actually willing to do this—there was a lot of concern that they may be geo-blocking. There was recently an article saying that we have the worst possible Netflix content in New Zealand compared to the rest of the world because—you know the number of the population size I guess is one reason. But if we have regulatory burden commercial video on-demand providers may not provide the variety of programmes that we could be exposed to and actually enjoy and geo-blocking is one of the ones. So if other countries can see it New Zealand may be blocked because they've decided that it's too difficult. One thing that I'm quite happy about is the user-generated content that's not going to be part of this because I don't think the platform should be responsible for you know the Hon Tracey Martin putting a family video let's say online on YouTube. They should not be responsible unless it breaches the rules and we already have regulation and legislation to make sure that harm is prevented and people are actually prosecuted accordingly. In this particular instance I commend the bill to the House and actually signal that I have an SOP that I will bring to the House during the committee of the whole House stage."