Tolley Anne: Privilege — Consideration of Report of Privileges Committee Social Media—Reporting on Parliamentary ProceedingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTolley Anne: Privilege — Consideration of Report of Privileges Committee Social Media—Reporting on Parliamentary Proceedings[Sitting date: 16 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6696. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister for Social Development): It is a pleasure to stand today and take a call on the report of the Privileges Committee on the question of privilege regarding the use of social media to report parliamentary proceedings. I want to start by referring to an article in the newspaper this morning about Shona Robb. She has worked here in Parliament for the Labour Party for 39 years. She is finally calling it quits and is retiring and we wish her all the best. She represents a large number of people who give enormous duty here. I was very interested in some of what she said in her farewell speech. She started work in the Opposition’s typing pool in September 1976. She said: “Faxes weren’t invented and MPs didn’t have computers.” She said: “Technology for a start has changed things hugely. [Then it was] typewriters and carbon paper. You ran round the building with a duplicate copy to give to MPs. Now it’s done by the press of a button.” She said: “The House runs exactly as it has always run. It’s how we do things that’s changed.” That resonated with me in relation to the discussion we are having today. It was part of the discussions that we had at the committee.The House does run as it has done. We do serious work here. We are elected here to represent New Zealanders. We are here to pass legislation. We are here to build a healthy safe and prosperous community for all those people whom we represent. We might disagree at times about how we do that but it is serious business that takes place in this House. But over the years the way that that is done has changed dramatically. I remember not too long ago a Young Nat talking to me about carbon paper. You know he said: “What is carbon paper? I’ve never seen carbon paper.”I think that where the committee got to was as the Attorney-General said that we are not Luddites. Technology is changing the way that we work and we should acknowledge that and accept that. We should have rules for the way that we comport ourselves that actually allows for that. But at the heart of it what we do in this House is serious business and therefore there have to be some rules that allow us to do that serious business.I remember making the point that this is a place of work. We work long hours. We work long into the night and there have been occasions when people have yawned. Some people have even fallen asleep in the House and it is not right then that there should be the ability to make political capital out of that. We are as Chris Hipkins has said human beings and we have the same frailties as people out in the communities. We might have slightly bigger egos than people out in the communities but we do have those same frailties.The other thing that we discussed that has come through in our recommendations is that actually we do need to maintain the public’s confidence in this place. Question time is robust and some of the general debates are robust. We do disagree with one another and sometimes we do say things to one another across the House that maybe we might regret later when we see it on the television. It is a House of robust debate and so it should be—if we all agreed there would be something dramatically wrong—but we do need to maintain the public’s confidence in the way that this House works. So it is a balance then between allowing the use of technology and bringing the public into the work that we do on a far greater scale than it was done in the days before television and when carbon paper was the norm. That is to be supported and that is to be welcomed. At the same time we need to maintain the gravitas of this place in order to keep that confidence of the public. That is a balance and I think that the report that we have presented produces that. It does well to maintain that balance.Then finally I would say that we do need to make sure that we protect one another. So there are warnings in here that you need to think very carefully about what is parliamentary business when you are using that modern technology that is instant. Once it is gone once you press that button it is actually out there and you cannot take it back. Members these days with a much more litigious public need to be aware that they could put themselves at serious risk of being sued for defamation and also could get themselves into serious trouble within this House for issues of contempt. It is a sensible report as the Attorney-General said. It is a short and concise report. It has been a very interesting process to work on it and I commend it to the House.