Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Deputy Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I rise to support the bill. I would like to congratulate the member Chris Bishop on having another bill pulled from the ballot. Look we will be supporting it. It is a minor bill. It is dealing with an issue a problem that has happened all of one time in history! It is quite phenomenal when you think that there are 70000 young New Zealanders out of work and out of training 40000 people sleeping in cars and garages unswimmable rivers pollution going through the roof and systemic economic problems that the issue to deal with is an issue that has happened once.Look it is a real issue. It is a minor issue. We will be supporting it because it is a real issue but let us focus on the real important issues to New Zealand.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Let us focus on this bill.GARETH HUGHES: On this bill which you have got to say is better than an airport luggage bill—this bill deals with this minor quirk that happened. I was one of many New Zealanders who were outraged at the decision that resulted in Ted Dawe's book the award-winning Into the River seeing a temporary ban. I remember standing outside Unity Books in Wellington with a whole bunch of noted authors and publishers. We all had books covered in brown paper bags to symbolise how ridiculous it was in 2015 to see a book literally taken out of public circulation. Kids and libraries could not access it. The amazing foot-in-mouth Barbra Streisand - effect result of all this negative publicity is more people bought the book. More people read the book. I think it is great to see that freedom of expression—to see that Kiwis wanted to get some of the forbidden fruit that the office had decided they could not access through their libraries etc. So look it was a real issue a minor issue and we support the intent of the member to address it.It does though raise some bigger issues. This gives the office a greater sense of flexibility which the Green Party supports wholeheartedly. It will be interesting to hear the arguments and the experts in the select committee. But I have noted quite particularly in the last couple of years that we are seeing a much more proactive and publicity-seeking chief censor in New Zealand. This is someone whom traditionally you do not hear a great deal of but we have seen a lot of the chief censor over the last couple of years.One of the issues the chief censor has really picked up on which is not contained in this bill is how we treat books literature and games. One thing the chief censor wants to do to New Zealand is require all the video games—and look we consume $162 million worth of computer games in New Zealand according to the last data in 2013. The chief censor wants to apply a classification regime across those thousands of video games that are consumed in New Zealand. The irony of course is that because of the creaking old-fashioned approach we have this would be an incredibly expensive proposition—in the order of $1400 to $2000 a game. At a time when we have got hundreds of Kiwis coming up with great ideas and selling them on platforms like Steam or the iTunes App Store often this would mean the difference between that game being available in New Zealand or not if the chief censor got his way.When I was recently in Australia at the largest Southern Hemisphere video game exhibition supporting about 10 New Zealand companies that are exporting into the Australian and the global market doing great work as part of the $92 million in exports our video game and interactive media industry earns New Zealand each year what they told me is that in Australia they have got a system called the International Age Rating Coalition. This is a voluntary body where game developers can submit their game to a voluntary self-classification body. It uses the power of the cloud and participants to give it a rating. The costs are almost minuscule. What they have seen in Australia is hundreds of thousands of games now getting a classification instead of the 200 or 300 a year that previously got a classification. I have got a message to the member. If he wants to focus on some of the bigger issues facing the sector and the chief censor maybe this is an area where New Zealand should be looking as well.I want to touch on the sentiment of Clare Curran. What we have seen from the broadcasting and communications Minister is this process the broadcasting convergence review. Years and years have gone into it screeds and screeds and papers and papers have gone into it. What did we get out of it? A potential release of the advertising ban on Sundays. That is the result. We are seeing giant media corporations merging in New Zealand and real threats to net neutrality if the Sky-Vodafone merger goes ahead in my opinion. There are ginormous issues coming from new technology but if the Government wants to focus on these minor technical issues so be it. We are going to focus on the big issues facing New Zealand.