Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. The National caucus on this side actually understand the intent of why the Minister has put this bill forward. It's just the parts and the make-up of the way it's done that leaves us in a place where we're opposing the bill. No one would disagree with the first part of the previous speaker Ginny Andersen's speech where she talked about March 15. There's no doubt that this bill is a direct response to the events of March 15 the terror attack in Christchurch. And according to the Minister's statement here virtual witnesses were traumatised by the content. Now no one—no one—deserves to see content like that. The events were abhorrent and everything that went with it with the filming of it and everything else actually made the whole process even worse and even more abhorrent than what it already was.But the problem that we have with this bill and the problem that I have with this bill is the word objectionable". March 15 was absolutely abhorrent and no one should get to see that. But the problem that we have with "objectionable" is when you open up the word objectionable we could have a wide range of opinions here tonight sitting in the House of things that some people consider objectionable and some people don't. So what is tending to happen with some of these bills—and I really appreciate for this one that it's actually going to run a normal parliamentary process so that's one thing that we should be thanking the Government for that they are intending to go out and give the public the opportunity to have their say because we haven't been seeing that too much in the last couple of days since Parliament's come back together.So as the chair of the Governance and Administration Committee we need to give this a very full hearing and we need to make sure that we go through every clause in this piece of legislation listen to the feedback to ensure that this is not an overreach because one of the things that this Government tends to do is it has a good intention of solving an issue but it overreaches and the unintended consequences that this Government puts in place often are not what was intended in the first place.Melissa Lee has made a statement in the House tonight that live streaming does fall within the scope of the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993. So we'll look very closely at that. You know it says in here in the statement that the Government cannot require the removal of objectionable content from online platforms. Well maybe that was the view of the people who put this together but we need to investigate and see whether it's already possible to do that.So in looking through what's going on it's an overly invasive regime that encroaches on the rights of individuals. And it puts New Zealanders in potentially incriminating situations without their knowledge or consent and that would be a terrible place for us to go as a country. So a live stream showing something that does not fall under this definition of something objectionable could rather quickly switch to objectionable content without the knowledge of the individual that was sharing it. So it's not as if somebody's intended to set out to do something but something all of a sudden appears something happens and all of a sudden this person becomes criminal because they've accidentally captured something that they didn't intend to capture in the first place. So we've got to be very careful where we're going here.It places an extraordinary amount of power as it's currently written and discretion into the hands of the classification office. We significantly risk the goodwill of the global telecommunications firms as well as local digital stakeholders by imposing what could be crippling civil penalties for something that's outside their control. These businesses are already attempting to stamp out material that is considered abhorrent. Yes abhorrent—not objectionable but abhorrent. And we on the National Party side of the House—we don't want to see abhorrent material either but we're just really concerned about the reach.So some of the concerns that have been brought about in discussion around these bills talk about how over a dozen agencies could end up queuing demanding that it will be expanded so they also get the power to block websites. Crown Law may want to block overseas newspapers that break New Zealand suppression laws. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment will want to block any sites Hollywood studios complain about. The police will want to block websites. The Ministry of Health will want to block websites. Once you have a compulsory Government filter it only gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So we've got to be careful that we constrain this bill to what it is that the Government is trying to achieve.So again we talked about the bystanders who may actually get caught up unintended. If I compare this piece of legislation—at least as I said before it's got a full consultation process but there was another piece of law that was led after the March 15 event. It was one that our party supported and it was the gun legislation during the first tranche of the laws. But in the second part of that we fought really hard to change some things because the unintended consequences of that one was it captured competition shooters and it captured people who were just out trying to do pest control and conservation. There were a range of people that were captured in there who were all disadvantaged by the fact that one person had done something extremely abhorrent. And I don't want to see us as a society go there again—actually punishing the masses because of the actions of one person or a group of people.So let's just try and keep it to abhorrent rather than objectionable. We'll have a look at it we'll listen to what the submitters have got to say and see if we can make some changes to this on the way through and then we might reconsider where we're going. But at this point in time the National Party oppose this piece of legislation and we won't be voting for it tonight. Thank you."