Roche Denise: Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:9985. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): It is my great pleasure to rise to take a call for the Greens on this bill. First of all I would like to congratulate the member Paul Goldsmith on bringing this bill to the House. I imagine that when Mr Goldsmith was the chair of the community services committee on Auckland City Council and was working on the homelessness action plan this was one of those crucial issues that kept him awake at night the Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill. I imagine he was dreaming of this night and day and of his opportunity to bring this bill to the House.The purpose of this bill is all about postal acceptance and the postal acceptance rule. It has quite a lot of interesting aspects to it—well actually not really—but the bill makes clear that the archaic postal acceptance rule does not apply to electronic transactions meaning that an electronic contract is formed at the time that acceptance of the offer is communicated to the offerer the person who is offering the contract. The main effect of the old postal acceptance rule is that the risk of acceptance beingdelivered late or lost in the post is placed upon the person who is offering the contract and if the person who is offering the contract is reluctant to accept that risk then they can always get a receipt that they have posted it. But nowadays we have moved into modern times when people send things by electronic mechanisms i.e. the computer and so I guess this bill is a good thing in that it is trying to bring us up to date with what happens when we send contracts to one another.However the explanatory note of the bill says: “The issue of whether the postal acceptance rule can be extended to electronic communications has not yet been considered by the courts.” So although I commend Mr Goldsmith for thinking towards the future I do kind of worry that maybe there was no great hurry to have this bill introduced.As we know from New Zealand Post postal use is declining so it is timely I guess to bring this legislation to the House. However one does have to ask oneself why the bill is being brought in as a member’s bill that has gone through the ballot rather than as a Government bill which the Government could just push through. In fact it could probably go through as part of an omnibus bill because there is going to be very little dispute about it so long as we all get the right bill that we are talking about. I can only assume that the reason it was put into the ballot was to take up some space in what is basically a raffle—a raffle for members’ bills—so that it could get pulled out and somebody else’s bill did not get pulled out.It is members’ day tomorrow so some more bills may be pulled out of the hat which is really really exciting because there are some really good ones in there. There are ones like for example the one that I will be putting in the Charities (Charities as Advocates) Amendment Bill which looks at the long-overdue definition of what “charitable purpose” means. In the last ballot there were things like the Care of Children (Adoption and Surrogacy Law Reform) Amendment Bill. There was Catherine Delahunty’s Citizenship (Acknowledgement of Te Tiriti o Waitangi) Amendment Bill. Mojo Mathers had a good one the Consumers’ Rights to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill. In fact there was the Copyright (Parody and Satire) Amendment Bill. There is a raft of bills that take up a bit of space in the ballot which is actually a raffle. I know that I have some issues about gambling but this is one gamble I am willing to take because I want my bill to be drawn out. So it leaves me with a sense of dissatisfaction that the member has had his bill pulled out of the ballot when actually this could have been done more or less overnight.But I commend him. We will be supporting it. It is fairly inoffensive and it is nice to have Mr Goldsmith thinking of the future. Just for the record in caseHansard does not pick it up I have had a huge tone of irony in my voice during this speech. Nō reira tēnā koutou katoa.