Williamson Maurice: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Electoral Finance Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:644;Page:13468] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I say from the outset that I really want to concentrate on only one very specific clause in Part 1 and that is clause 5(2)(g). I say that because I want to alert members of this Committee to what technology will do in this area. I see that this bill is concerned with something that is “commonly known as a blog” and that it tries to include that in the area of “Meaning of election advertisement”. 
I want to say to this Committee tonight very clearly that I have worked in Eastern Europe. I worked with LOT airlines in Poland and I worked with Aeroflot in Moscow in the early 1980s and I found that the most frightening thing about those societies was that their citizens could get no information about the outside world other than what their Governments would let them have. That statement has nothing to do with National Labour or anything else. Let me tell members that in the Eastern European regimes of the early 1980s we had Ceausescu running Romania and Egon Krenz running the Eastern Germany operation and when I was in Moscow in 1981 Brezhnev was running the place. Those citizens could not get advice from anywhere else in the world. 
A decade later something happened that took my breath away: the Berlin Wall came crashing down. I got in touch with some of my colleagues and friends from Aeroflot and from other airlines and asked: “How did that happen? That came out of left field. I cannot believe it happened.” Members should listen to what they said; I thought it was amazing. I was told that the thing that brought down the Berlin Wall more than anything else was the fax machine. I said: “You’ve got to be dreaming! What are you talking about?”. They said that up until about 1986 the fax machine was illegal in Eastern Europe. Do members hear that clearly? The fax machine was illegal. If one was caught with a fax machine in one of those Eastern European bloc countries one could be jailed but companies and businesses in order to try to be internationally competitive had to communicate with the outside world. 
Members should listen to this because I thought this was a cracker. In 1987—the year that John Carter and I got elected to this place—the Soviet Government licensed the fax machine. People were allowed to have a fax machine but they had to report to the Government each year on what they had done with it. They had to show a copy of every incoming and every outgoing fax. What happened in Eastern Europe was that within the next 3 years the Government lost total and absolute control because the people just rode roughshod over such rules. Finally faxes between people and the  
New York Times 
 or the  
Washington Post 
 were flying in and out of Eastern Europe. By 1990 down came the Berlin Wall and with it the entire oppression of a nation and regimes that had stopped their citizens from hearing the facts. 
I will repeat to members again: the fax machine brought down the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Berlin Wall is probably the greatest change that has occurred in the history of this planet. If members think that the fax machine was stunning I tell them that I simply do not even use one any more. The Internet has about 10000 times the power of the fax machine. The Internet will democratise information. One will not be able to stop people from having their say. One will not be able to stop groups from saying what they believe. The “Nazi Party of New Zealand” even if it has the most disgraceful and outrageous beliefs may be able to have its own website.