Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. It was a pleasure to be the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee as we worked through the submission part of this bill. I've now handed over the chair of that committee to the very able Mr Ian McKelvie who I'm sure will do a great job on the rest of the work that needs to be done on this bill. But I really did very much enjoy working on this bill because it started as Minister Tinetti just said with a very abhorrent event that happened in New Zealand which we all said would change who we were in New Zealand and change things forever. We've had a number of things that have actually changed people's lives but none of them were as deliberate and as abhorrent as that one. So this bill is catching up with the technology.So as the Minister said the objectionable—and that was one of the first things that we worried about: what is objectionable? Because there are people that are offended by things that other people might not be offended by. So we had all those questions that we asked but objectionable" is defined in the law and it is an extremely high bar. Nobody would say that what happened on March the 15th 2019 wasn't objectionable. So the Minister laid out very well what the bill was intended to do and some of the changes we made. I just want to at this point acknowledge Minister Tinetti because I always admire a Minister that sees a problem in a bill and makes some changes to do something about it. As the Minister said the filter was causing a huge problem. We were concerned about it. We can now support this bill. We couldn't support this bill in the first reading because people were really concerned about the filter and that actually came through in the select committee process from the majority of the submitters that were concerned about it.The other person I'd like to mention tonight is Melissa Lee. Melissa Lee is our spokesperson for all things digital. Melissa we haven't seen in person for two months; we've only seen her in digital forums in little boxes on computer screens. But Melissa was the person who questioned a lot of the detail of technology in this bill and her knowledge around things digital far exceeds mine.The other change that's happened with that select committee is that the member Tangi Utikere was the deputy chair. The Minister mentioned that this bill had a very long name and I can remember the day that the clerks came to my office with Tangi Utikere and we had to make a video launching the submissions on this bill. They actually ended up holding up a piece of paper with the name of the bill as we sat there and tried to get it out on a video tried to be natural talking about the Films Videos and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill second reading. So well done Tangi. I think we did a good job of that video considering the material that we had to work with.There's another group that I would like to mention and that is the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and the advisers. They were so thorough in the work that they did. We actually went across to DIA we had some visits and we were able to sit around a table and talk about some of the things they do over there and how they protect people from online harms. So it really was a great thorough investigation. It was very much I think a joint committee effort and while we had a very serious subject to deal with we really enjoyed what we did.So as I said before we had significant concerns about this bill. The removal of the filter has been a massive step for National in being able to support this because it was the key. Is the bill perfect? Melissa tells me "No it could be improved but it's way better than what it was." If Melissa was here she'd probably be able to explain very clearly in some of the clauses why she feels that way. I'm sure her view is correct because you can always improve legislation post the point that you've done it. But will it protect New Zealanders from seeing horrific videos? Yes it should and it may. I think the point that we discussed the most was that we may not be able to hide that forever but it should stop our children and grandchildren from going on Facebook and accidentally picking up their phone and seeing something that they really really shouldn't see as those things happen. So yeah of course anyone can find anything if they go looking for it but it is actually a protection.So Melissa's line I guess that I'll put across tonight is while she sees a number of technical inadequacies that may still be in the bill the view is that the bill will no longer do more harm than good after the removal of the filter. So we really do thank you for that Minister.So what it does is it grants the Chief Censor the power to make swift time limited interim classification assessments that can have legal effect for up to 20 working days. So that was also a concern of submitters that once the censor had made the classification it needed to be time bound because while it's pretty clear under the law what "objectionable" is people just needed the guarantee that this was a limited time frame just in case the censor had done something that wasn't considered by everybody to be the right thing to do. I don't think anybody would have disagreed that it would have been had it been available in March 2019.So there were 163 written submissions dozens of oral submissions and there was a wide group of New Zealanders that participated in this. One of the main reasons that people were concerned about the filter was that they were really concerned that anything that we did in this bill around the filter would have had an effect on their ability to have freedom of speech. And I guess that was probably the biggest thing that concerned National at the time as well because we don't want people not to feel free to say what they want to say. Of course that doesn't need to be hateful and certainly we're really pleased now that we have the ability to stop this.So even as we were going through the provisions of the bill the Chief Censor David Shanks had said to us at the time that there was too little detail around how internet filters would be used and too few safeguards around their use. So we even had it from the person who was going to do the job. So well done Minister we respect you for making that choice to change something that you felt wasn't perfect.And with that it may take me the rest of my speech tonight but I'm going to say that the National Party caucus supports the second reading of the Films Videos and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. May we never have anything again in New Zealand. Hopefully we make this bill and hopefully the Chief Censor doesn't have too much work to do because it's an awful thought that we would be using this bill a lot but it's great to be able to capture what happens in this bill should we have another awful event and we all really hope that doesn't happen. It's my pleasure to support this bill on behalf of the National caucus. Thank you."