Harawira Hone: Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill — Second Reading 
Harawira Hone: Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:636;Page:6863] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Kia ora Madam Assistant Speaker. Kia ora tatou te Whare. This stuff can get a bit too serious and a bit too detailed. When I first heard about spam my initial thought was of a Monty Python skit about canned meat. It was a skit set in a cafe and some members will remember it. A group of Vikings were wearing horned helmets and whenever somebody said “spam” they all stood up and started singing chanting dancing and carrying on. Eric Idle and Graham Chapman in drag playing his wife entered the cafe and asked what was on the menu. The waitress said there was egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; and spam sausage spam bacon spam tomato and spam. Members will get the idea. Sometimes when I check my email it is like Monty Python all over again—whether the issue is section 59 trans-Tasman therapeutic goods or the Auckland stadium it all seems to be spam: spam bacon spam tomato and spam. 
Although there is a sense of the sublime and the ridiculous in all of this it is also worth noting that spam comes in emails texts and instant messages from all over the place all over the world at a rate of 350 million a month. That is big-time nuisance stuff. Sure there are filters to counter spam but they often delete good messages. The fear is that amongst a whole bag of rotten apples there are often a couple of good ones but they get dumped along with the rubbish. I know this only too well because some of the excellent contributions the Maori Party has made in this House have been blocked by some email addresses because of the use of some language that could be termed to be rather passionate and colourful. 
Rodney Hide 
: Direct. 
HONE HARAWIRA 
: Direct! Of course spam artists just bypass the filters by changing the addresses. The thing is that spam is just plain hoha—crackers slackers Viagra vendors and hackers who attack websites and threaten computer security. It reduces productivity it creates stress it wastes networking computing resources and it often perpetrates financial schemes like those emails from somebody’s long-lost Uncle Albert in Nigeria who wants someone to take his millions before a brutal new regime takes over and who says that person can also have a couple of million dollars as long he or she enters his or her bank account details. 
Of course the whole issue of security and computer theft has served us spectacularly through the blaze of publicity surrounding Nicky Hager’s claims that his latest publication  
The Hollow Men 
 was based conclusively on material gained from emails obtained from Dr Don Brash’s address. Nicky Hager says that his use of the emails was justified because they show that National had been acting unethically and dishonestly and getting away with it. Dr Brash got an injunction to stop them from being published and in TV3’s application to have it thrown out Carol Hirschfeld said the emails were in the public interest and blocking them would be an unreasonable restriction on freedom of expression. Whether or not those emails are private spam or items of public interest I suspect that this is not the last we have heard of that scandal. 
We are pleased with the Commerce Committee’s suggestion that Internet service providers not have to deal with the complaints about spam because at 350 million messages a month they would be doing nothing else but answering their mail. I include here the Maori Internet Society Te WhanauIpurangi which promotes a strong Maori presence on the Internet and lobbies for Internet administrators to better accommodate Maori needs. I know that it certainly does not have time to deal with the thousands of complaints that it would receive about spam. 
I want to raise a couple of other matters about commercial and promotional spam pre-recorded voice-over phone calls and unsolicited messages that come in the form of junk mail. I turn to the comments of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment which are a bit “out there” that the Government’s failure to follow through on the New Zealand waste strategy “undermines the whole process of democratic engagement with government”. He went further to suggest: “This loss of confidence may raise questions about government’s commitment to the NZWS”. That raises the question of why the Government does not also take action to stop the phone and mailbox trash while it is dealing with the electronic trash. 
The drain that electronic spam places on personal and professional productivity will only increase as Internet traffic itself increases. Here in Aotearoa Internet access has increased in the last 6 years for Maori from 27 percent to 47 percent and for Pacific Islanders from 11 percent to 40 percent. Although the total for Polynesians is still dramatically lower than that for Europeans who are on 65 percent and that for Asians who are on 80 percent if the trend is anything to go by access to the information highway will only increase. The Maori Party will support the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill in order to ensure that our access to that information highway remains free and open. Kia ora koutou.