Simpson Scott: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSimpson Scott: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 14 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14750. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): It is always a pleasure to follow the reasonably unordinary reasonable Andrew Little and it will be good to have him back on the Justice and Electoral Committee to consider this very useful and good piece of legislation the Harmful Digital Communications Bill which has been introduced into the House.Hon Maryan Street: Why what’s wrong with me?SCOTT SIMPSON: I think the Hon Maryan Street needs to be there as well. But what I am suggesting to the member is that we are missing him from the committee. It is often appropriate I think usually that the justice spokesperson for a serious party should sit on the Justice and Electoral Committee. But however in this case usually we do not see too much of him but he will be welcomed back for this piece of legislation.Bullying sadly has been around since time immemorial really. The difficulty with bullying in the past has been how to track it down how to stop it and how to control it. But one of the challenges that those of us who were not born digital natives have is that we were raised through our adolescence and our teenage years in an environment where we were not subjected to harassment by digital technology.Simon O’Connor: Some of us are younger.SCOTT SIMPSON: Some of my colleagues are of course younger. But today we find that for most people under the age of about 30 I guess they are what we now know as digital natives. They have grown up in an environment where sadly it has been a lot easier to partake in bullying and abuse and far worse by the use of cyberspace Facebook the internet texts and all those modern communications. The purpose of this bill of course is to mitigate the harm caused to people by digital communications and to provide victims of that harm with a quick and efficient means of redress.The trick I guess for this piece of legislation is how do we manage that in an environment that is in many respects a little bit like the wild west of technology? It is a challenging conundrum for legislators I suspect all over the world. I am looking forward in the select committee to seeing what steps are being taken in other jurisdictions because I suspect this piece of legislation has the potential to be quite world leading. I suspect that there will be others who will be watching closely what we do.The Law Commission has found that there could be as many as one in 10 New Zealanders who has already experienced harmful communications on the internet and that for those aged between 19 and 29 the number could well be double that. There is obviously a serious issue here. The Law Commission was doing work already on harmful communications as part of its report on new media. The report was entitledThe News Media meets ‘New Media’: Rights Responsibilities and Regulation in the Digital Age. It was last year that the Minister of Justice Judith Collins asked the commission to actually speed up their work and to fast track the work. In August of last year she received the Law Commission’s recommendationsHarmful Digital Communications in the form of a briefing paper and it was in this April that she announced a suite of proposals to tackle cyber-bullying which will be implemented through this bill.The main provisions of the bill are to create a set of 10 communication principles to guide the approved agency that will be created under the bill and that I think will be something we will want to look at closely in the select committee. But the bill will create essentially a new civil enforcement regime that includes the setting up of this new agency as a first port of call for complaints. The agency will be able to investigate and resolve complaints directly and very quickly with the most serious complaints being referred to the District Court which can then issue what is known as a take-down order and of course they will also be able to put in place cease and desist notices. This legislation provides a mechanism for people to quickly and easily request the removal of harmful digital content from websites and blogs if necessary and it also creates this “safe harbour” provision.I am very much looking forward to the select committee process. I am pleased that the Labour Party is supporting this bill through to the select committee and I hope that other parties across the House will do likewise. I commend the bill to the House.