Young JonathanJONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): May I just express our congratulations to the new Minister of Broadcasting Communications and Digital Media who managed to do 10 minutes on this speech in such a new portfolio—well 8½ minutes. I just want to acknowledge the communications Ministers we've had in this Parliament starting with Steven Joyce who really kicked off the whole ultra-fast broadband (UFB) rollout in New Zealand followed by Amy Adams Simon Bridges Clare Curran and now Kris Faafoi. It's incredibly complex and anything to do with regulation that has monopoly powers is something that needs a lot of thought. Can I also say thank you very much to the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee for the very intensive work that you have done and for how we worked together to try and bring together a passage of legislation that is going to work for our future. It's very important that we in these particular areas try the very best to find the right position for New Zealand to operate in.At the end of the previous Government just before we went into the election this bill came into the House. It went into abeyance because of the election and it was taken up by the new Government and brought forward. At that point in time almost 1.2 million New Zealand households and businesses had access to ultra-fast broadband and we were fast approaching our 1.5 million households and businesses able to connect. Currently that figure is 1.4 million. So we're well on the way and I think as the Minister made a comment this is incredibly important for New Zealand's economy for our education and of course for entertainment. I have discovered—maybe my facts and figures are a little bit old—that New Zealand is doing quite well in terms of international rankings. If people out there were going to download a 7.5 gigabyte movie it would take just over an hour. It is a bit quicker in Singapore but if you lived in Yemen that same movie would take two days to download. So New Zealand is doing well. In terms of worldwide rankings compiled by broadband comparison service cable.co.uk they put Britain one place below us. The United States is 21st; so they are nine places in front of us. Australia was 25 places behind us in terms of world rankings in speed of broadband. And South Africa as we know is just 2 points in front of us. Nobody got that one!Hon Members: Ha ha!JONATHAN YOUNG: A few! So this National-led Government allocated approximately in the previous Government $2 billion to deliver better connectivity. In the Telecommunications Act 2001 it required a review of the telecommunications regulatory framework to be undertaken to be commenced by 30 September 2016 and to be completed no later than 31 March 2019. So we are right in the middle of that time frame.This bill came to the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee in November 2017. We had 257 submissions. There was quite a bit of interest in the country and we had 31 submitters who came to the committee in Wellington to express their concerns their thoughts and their ideas on how to improve it. In fact there was one group of people—let me just mention them briefly—who were very concerned about electromagnetic radiation and we do hear this issue now and again from time to time regarding people's concerns about microwaves. As a committee we wanted to take every concern at face value and take these matters seriously; so we asked the Ministry of Health to come in and to brief us. They summarised their views to us orally and then we asked them to put it into writing and that report is available on the website. They said this bill has no impact on exposure to wireless radiation. They said there are international standards that set limits for maximum exposure levels to radio waves including the wireless radiation emitted through cellphone and wireless transmissions. These New Zealand exposure limits are consistent with the guidelines published by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection and New Zealand complies with these standards.They went on to say that mobile network operators also commission independent monitoring of exposure levels and the Ministry of Health has advised that 5G networks will be subject to the same limits that New Zealand has currently and they also advise that no cell site has failed independent monitoring tests. So I thought that would be interesting for listeners to hear tonight as we look at this bill because that is a subject that of course gets a little bit of airtime particularly on social media.Coming to the bill the bill will establish a new approach to telecommunications regulations and that is so important because we are in this zone where we have a whole new network that has been laid out rolled out in play and it's getting very significant uptake. At the moment 1.4 million households or end users are able to connect. And we are seeing the number of people who are actually doing the connections increasing exponentially.And so we fully expect that over the next number of years people will migrate from their copper lines to ultra-fast or to fibre lines. With the fibre lines come so many more opportunities in which we can use technology so there needs to be some understanding around that some regulation around that. Some who have had what are probably best to be described as monopoly powers have wanted to enlarge their ability to build and to extend technology through the network that's been established. You can understand that because this network offers a platform for exciting innovation that is going to be very very important—it already is but it's incredibly important for our next steps as an economy. It's important to work our way through that. One of the areas if I can just touch on another couple of areas before my time finishes and I think the Minister did touch on this was the line of business restrictions. There have been in the past some restrictions constrained upon monopoly groups of people and that is right throughout our economy in different areas. The Commerce Commission of course is the regulatory authority that looks at this. There was this line of business restrictions that I think became probably the most debated issue that came before the committee. It was very very strongly felt on both sides. There were companies who saw the opportunities of how they could develop new innovative ideas who had the capacity who had the size who wanted to step up into that space and Chorus was one of those who wanted to do that. Then there were retailers who felt that they had the nimbleness to be able to innovate and felt that the market powers exercised by very strong companies would quench that innovation. And so it became quite a difficult situation. So we decided—just in my last 30 seconds—as a committee that we would retain that line of business restrictions but after the first regulated period we would enable the Commerce Commission to do a case-by-case exception when there is application and when we have bedded this down and seen how it works to open up the possibilities that exist for New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House.