Williams Poto: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 31 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2764. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Thank you Mr Chairman.Hon Ruth Dyson: Good choice.POTO WILLIAMS: Yes I agree—it is a good choice. Thank you for the opportunity to take a short call. I hope I can make a valuable contribution in the Committee stage of this particular bill.As many of you know I am very concerned about ensuring that we do what we can as is our responsibility to ensure the protection of our children. I believe that this legislation makes a serious attempt to deal with the issue of objectionable material and publications.I do have a couple of opening comments I want to make particularly with regard to this legislation perhaps making the best of what it can. But in terms of good legislation and good laws to protect children we could possibly have taken a much broader approach and looked more fully at lots of different aspects around issues of child protection rather than making fixes to legislation as they come along.With specific reference to clause 4 in Part 1 with your indulgence I did look up some references to the term “objectionable”. I think that is obviously key to this piece of legislation. What is “objectionable”? I had a look at a previous Act the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993 and if you would just bear with me it says: “a publication is objectionable if it describes depicts expresses or otherwise deals with matters such as sex horror crime cruelty or violence in such a manner that the availability of the publication is likely to be injurious to the public good.”Included in that definition of course is the issue of violence. Many of you will know that you just have to switch on your televisions download a movie and actually just have a look through some Facebook feeds sometimes to realise that what may have been objectionable at the time we started defining that in terms of publications certainly is in a different space today. We are exposed to things that we would not want our children exposed to things that were not even thought of as being accessible in the days when we were defining “objectionable” particularly in that Act that I referred to from 1993. We were not even considering the availability of that material in everyday use on every device that we have in every situation of our lives.So just in terms of clause 4 the knowledge relating to objectionable material and the offence and in terms of the increase to the penalties the maximum term is moving to 14 years for the actual manufacture or the provision of that material. I know that this was brought up by other speakers in other submissions on the topic but it does seem that the actual manufacture of these publications the presentation of these publications is penalised at a term that is actually out of step with the penalty for the abuse that occurs in the manufacturing of these publications. I for one would like to encourage the Minister to perhaps make reference to that and perhaps answer why that is and whether there are going to be steps to actually align that more consistently.I also want to refer to an issue that was brought up in terms of what happens around the ability to rehabilitate people who have been charged with these offences and that the length of term potentially does not guarantee that they will actually be able to access the type of rehabilitation services that they need.