Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Oh thank you very much Madam Speaker. A very simple way to assess bills like this Films Videos and Publications Classification (Commercial Video on-Demand) Amendment Bill is simply to ask: what is the intention how effective will it be and what unexpected or unintended consequences might occur if Parliament was to pass a law such as this?The intention of it is set up pretty early. In the explanatory note it says The objective of this bill is to reduce the potential for harm to consumers from viewing inappropriate content." Well anyone vaguely familiar with the internet and the way that people access content and video content in the modern world knows that there is zero chance of this bill being remotely effective and the reasons for that should be intuitive. The most harmful content out there is content that will never be viewed or touched by any New Zealand Government regulator but is freely available to anybody who wishes to view it. There are literally millions of videos probably billions of videos now on YouTube. They are being uploaded at a rate faster than any New Zealand Government department could ever seek to classify them.And that's a benign site. That's without considering some of the websites I was going to mention and I looked over and I saw Dan Bidois the member for Northcote grinning as he anticipated me mentioning those sites. And there's Chris Penk the member for Helensville. He gave a smirk as well. And there we have Tim Macindoe from Hamilton East or West—who knows? He's also grinning the King's College old boy. He's grinning at the thought of those websites.There's a lot of websites out there that will never be anywhere near within the reach of the New Zealand Government. So we can say pretty early on that you've got an intention of stopping people viewing harmful websites and video content that may be streamed and having the harm reduced by being able to view a standardised classification system. That's the intention: reduce harm by giving standardised classifications to video content online. And we also know that it's going to be completely ineffective because the overwhelming majority of content and particularly the most harmful will never be classified by the New Zealand Government.Then we move to the unintended consequences which are legion. One of them is that an outfit such as Netflix might have a look at this legislation and say "Is it worth our while to comply with a New Zealand specific regime to enter that market?" I suspect Netflix will because they're a big outfit and they make a lot of money here in New Zealand. But one of the unintended consequences is that some outfits that currently stream to New Zealand will either stop servicing the New Zealand market or be blocked. So the potential is that there'll be some—not the really bad sites not the really good sites—in the middle that will actually abandon the New Zealand market as a result.Another is that domestic producers of content those that stream in New Zealand who pay their wages here who pay tax and who are domiciled here will have no choice whatsoever—there's a one minute bell Madam Speaker; oh I can keep going—about whether or not to comply with these regulations. So one of the unintended consequences is that New Zealand content providers who have to comply will be put at a disadvantage vis-à-vis foreign content providers that New Zealanders can view but who do not comply with these laws and those are the ones that the New Zealand Government will never manage to regulate.So in summary the ACT Party opposes this piece of legislation. It's another example of poorly conceived legislation that will not be effective in achieving its goal but will have negative consequences that will actually reduce the welfare of New Zealanders in total. Thank you Madam Speaker."