Coates BarryBARRY COATES (Green): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. I rise to thank Chris Bishop for bringing this bill to the House. To us it is a relatively minor change but a welcome change to the current regulations. It also gives the chance for us as MPs to look into areas that we do not always look into.It has caused me to go back and look at censorship in New Zealand and abroad and discover some things like All Quiet on the Western Front being banned in the 1930s for its anti-war message. During the waterfront dispute in 1951 it was illegal to publish material that was supporting the strikers. The Wild One starring Marlon Brando was actually banned in 1953. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is a book that was banned in 1960. Mad Max surprisingly enough was banned in 1979. Then we fast-forward to Into the River by award-winning author Ted Dawe which prompted this member's bill and which was banned in 2015. It was banned for 6 weeks after three previous censorship decisions as we have heard had ruled that the book should just have restrictions.So in so far as this member's bill will help provide a temporary categorisation of restrictions rather than an outright ban we think it is a marginal improvement. But really this is kind of fiddling while Rome burns. We do need restrictions on materials that can potentially fall into the hands of children or vulnerable adults. If you look at the stuff around sexual violence torture and many other forms of content that we would regard as exploitative and objectionable they are out there and all over internet and online services and they are unregulated.We are talking here about a very very narrow slice of books and film which do not occupy much of the current attention span of young people today. Recently for example the two largest providers of on-demand entertainment Lightbox and Netflix have withdrawn from being covered by classification. Games are not covered; online games are not covered. Videos are not covered. Posts on Facebook—there is an enormous amount of stuff online that is not covered and much of it I think we would find thoroughly objectionable. Furthermore a lot of it is not able to be intercepted via the provision of any warnings or it is without options for parental control.So my question is: rather than fiddling around with this member's bill that addresses a very narrow and small issue why in fact has the Government not undertaken some much-needed work on updating these regulations in order to cover the far more dangerous and concerning aspects that are currently not regulated? I draw on the evidence provided by the chief censor to show that legislation on these issues is not by any means impossible or unfeasible but has not yet been actioned. So why has the Government not taken this action after 9 years of this Government? I am a little confused because what we have here I think is a danger to young people from materials that they should not be exposed to particularly those that are really most exploitative and objectionable.So while the Green Party supports this rather trivial member's bill we do not support the Government's inaction on a lack of censorship and guidance to parents and users of the vast majority of materials that are available to them online. With that I will end a short call. My thanks to the framers of this member's bill to Chris Bishop to the Justice and Electoral Committee—I was not part of that committee but I have read a fair bit of the evidence. We support this bill but certainly we would hope that a future Government would actually step up and deal with these far more pressing issues that are far more fundamental. With that I give our agreement to this bill. Thank you.