Franks Stephen: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Franks Stephen: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:623;Page:18711] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party in the third reading and last debate on this amendment to our censorship legislation. I have very much appreciated the comments made by Mr Peter Brown of New Zealand First whom last night I noticed was following the debate. There were 15 calls including three from Lindsay Tisch and from other members who sat on the Government Administration Committee. Peter Brown followed the debate very closely because he was genuinely using it for a purpose for which it is not often used in this Chamber. He used the debate in the Committee stage to try to decide how to vote on a matter that is quite thorny. 
Censorship is a thorny issue. We can all feel horror at the perversions that are made to seem normal or attractive. We can all wish that pornographers were much more heavily sanctioned socially or that there was a way in which the community’s disgust could be converted into making life much harder for them. I remember years ago when my firm was working on the upgrading of the new trans-Pacific telephone cable. We had to go into the financing of that and do a whole lot of the background technical work. In the end we called the team of lawyers who worked on the funding of that billion-dollar project “team pornography” because we found that the traffic that was expected to pay for the cable was typical of the traffic on the Internet. The experts told us that at that stage about 60 percent of the data load would be porn which is very sad when we think of that flowering of human capacity and the enormous talent that is being crystallised on the Internet—and what it was being used for. 
I thought we would be approaching this bill as a no-brainer that in fact there would be a few ritual speeches and we would all vote for it because it was updating our censorship law to take account of the Internet and to increase penalties in areas where we have found we needed them—for example for people who may be liable for trading but not for possession but who nevertheless have enormous quantities of that sort of material. If the law is to be there it should be enforced. I thought we would get an explanation from the Government of just why it was passing new law yet again when it is not very good on enforcement. We have just had  
Time 
 magazine labelling us as a “pervert’s paradise”. The truth is that it does not matter how many words we put into the law or what we talk about in this Chamber if there is some kind of reluctance to enforce the law then it is idle to be increasing penalties. 
Mr Goff referred to the very good work being done by the Department of Internal Affairs in trying to track down child pornographers and people who harbour pornographic material and he referred to it with his throbbing intensity of distaste for them. However he did not explain why it was that when a list was supplied to the Australians by US customs from a very big sting in the US the Australians went out and arrested some 200 people but when the list showed that New Zealand participation had apparently been pro rata much the same nothing happened here. We understand that the police had actually assembled and planned to do a raid but still nothing happened. [ 
Interruption 
] 
So I was a bit stunned I say to Mr Brown to find that I was the victim of an attack from a Minister who would not explain what had happened in that respect or answer legitimate questions as to why Australia had discovered a whole lot of those people in its midst named from a list supplied by the US but we had apparently found none. And of course how will we find them now once they have been warned of the scale of this bust and they know where the list came from? 
To come back to the bill I was persuaded by Mr Goff’s explanation that my proposed amendment to the meaning of the word “objectionable” was unnecessary. I was also persuaded by Mr Goff’s hysterical reaction that what I had identified as “the risks” in the other part of the bill was eminently justified because he could have been just as reasonable and detailed in his explanation on that part as he was on the first amendment. Instead he did not even try to deal with it. 
My concern is that this bill is a Trojan Horse. The Government has bracketed and tied together some very sound ideas for improving enforcement capacity and penalties with a sneaky and very very slippery change to the censor’s powers to enable the censor to go back and take revenge for having been blocked in trying to block the Living Word videos. I read in the new sections 3A to 3D proposed to be inserted into the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act by clause 4A of the bill precisely the language that the censor tried to use against the Living Word videos. Mr Brown usefully summarised them as being about a pretty unpersuasive boring group of talking heads in suits saying why they thought homosexuality was bad for kids and bad for the country. The censor was stopped from banning those videos because the Court of Appeal correctly said that it would have been an intrusion on free speech. Whether or not we like it people have a right to say that they do not like lifestyles and to try to persuade others not to adopt them. That is how cultures evolve. If it is offensive to some people to have their lifestyle described as despicable degrading dehumanised or in all those other ways; that too is how societies evolve. The Catholic Church responded with rage to what it said was blasphemy when people first questioned some of its doctrines and now those things are mainstream. It could happen only with free speech that was offensive to the majority. 
What do I find in the new section 3A in clause 4A of the bill? I find a power to ban “highly offensive language”. Mr Goff said that it just means swearing and foul language. Well I ask why he did not use those words. Why does the bill not say that because it is defined in the new section 3A(3) as something that is “highly offensive to the public in general”. That is precisely why we have free speech. We must tolerate people who are offensive and we should define the term so that it does relate to swearing and foul language. The bill should clearly state that it does not relate to the content. People are not entitled to take offence purely at content. 
Section 3 of the current Act covers violence torture horror and exploitation of children—the things that this community has decided censorship ought to cover and that we recognised and would have supported. Instead we have this term “highly offensive language” which the censor can use to cover anything that he does not like. Worse still the censor will now be able to ban stuff in the hands of people of a specified age—but the bill does not say what the age is—if it describes depicts or expresses physical conduct of a “demeaning nature”. That is in the new section 3B. Demeaning? Well that would include laughing at fat people. Is that now able to be bannable? Section 3B(3)(b)(ii) goes on to include visual images of a person’s body “with any other contents of the publication” that is degrading or demeaning. Well that could be anything. Then section 3B(4) goes further and states that the censor can do that if the availability of the publication would cause people to be shocked or encourage them to regard themselves or others as demeaned. That is precisely what free speech is about. 
Then I find that section 3D—although the select committee reported to this House that it did not want to interfere with the Court of Appeal’s decision on a gateway; in other words the subject matter had to be about violence torture horror or exploitation of children before the censor could start inflicting his own philosophy—excludes and reverses the Court of Appeal’s decision. This section states very clearly that the censor can apply those new tests without regard to section 3. Then as Mr Brown pointed out we find out further on in clause 4B that it is retrospective. It is retrospective which is bad in principle. The select committee made no explanation as to why it should be able to go back and Mr Goff made no attempt to tell us why he was so adamant that this was not intended to allow reversal of the decision on the Living Word video or anything like it. 
I am extremely sorry that we cannot vote for this bill but we have to stand up for a principle. The Government deliberately brackets together a bill that has been toughened up with our support—a bill that we could have supported 80 or 90 percent of—tying it together with the agenda of that nasty little cabal that controls the Labour Party and wants to tell others how to live. This is a direct assault on freedom of speech. I was delighted that National New Zealand First the Greens and ACT stood for principle yesterday and voted for amendments to try to restrict this bill back to what it should be about which is child pornography bestiality and other disgusting material for censoring and I was astonished that United Future saved this little plot of the Government’s.