Tisch Lindsay: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Tisch Lindsay: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:623;Page:18444] 
LINDSAY TISCH (National—Piako) 
: 
 First I want to echo the views of both my colleagues Judith Collins and Shane Ardern and to acknowledge the work of the Department of Internal Affairs. As indicated by Shane Ardern Steve Chadwick and other speakers we have seen the work the department is doing in monitoring and tracking. It is using its facilities to enforce the law and provide information for other jurisdictions around the world. I think that that is a significant advance especially in the area of child pornography which has become a major issue for not only New Zealand but other countries. So I firstly acknowledge the work of the Department of Internal Affairs which has a member in the Chamber tonight and of its officials. 
I also acknowledge the Customs Service which is doing extremely good work at the coalface at the borders in being able to pick up this sort of material. I acknowledge the police who are involved and also the work of the Chief Censor of Film and Literature. I have been to the censor’s office. The Government Administration Committee chairperson Dianne Yates led the committee to look at the Department of Internal Affairs and the censor’s office. I would not like to be working in that environment. The explicit sex scenes we saw are simply not for the faint-hearted; to my mind they were quite disgusting and degrading. I certainly admire and acknowledge the work of those people who are keeping New Zealand safe and protecting New Zealanders young people in particular. I acknowledge their contribution. 
 We have had an interesting insight into this bill over a number of months and prior to that we had the inquiry. The amendments that we are making to the 1993 legislation are significant because they do make changes and certainly clarify the position on a number of issues that have been vague and that the censor has had difficulty with. It has been mentioned that the 1993 Act took account of the situation at the time and of the material available then which was mainly hard-copy publications. We have certainly moved on in that respect and now we have the Internet and what it can provide in terms of child pornography. That has become the No. 1 issue not only here but also internationally. 
We do acknowledge the right to freedom of speech and that is one of the reasons why the hate-speech provision is not in this bill. It was not an easy decision to make but that issue needs to be separate. We want to ensure that the right to freedom of speech is maintained but on the other hand we also believe it is necessary to accept appropriate boundaries in the context of criminal law and public policy. 
Pornography has grown substantially over the years and it is an area that is of major concern for us. It is a social issue for New Zealanders. It is interesting that if we look at what is happening in the United States we see it has put the pornography issue into the too-hard basket. Over the years the United States has acknowledged that it would be difficult to police legislation and difficult to come up with laws that actually reflected what society was looking for. We see that difficulty in the changes in what is now available on free-to-air TV programmes. The content and language are examples of the difficulty in reaching a consensus on what is acceptable and what is objectionable. What may be objectionable to me in my watching of television programmes or videos or in my reading of something may be acceptable to my neighbour. So there is conflict about what is acceptable in one sense and what is objectionable in another. 
But there is no doubt that society is very concerned about what people are seeing. At the end of the day addressing that is really going to be up to the values that parents instil in their children and their ability to instil in children the values that they believe are important. It does not matter what laws we make because there will always be those who will manage to get around them especially with the technology now available. Shane Ardern mentioned the messages using cellphones and there are chat rooms and Internet messaging services. That is what society faces today and that is the challenge that the police raised in their submission to the select committee. They said that pornography was a major concern and that it would be difficult to remedy that. 
However in saying that this bill takes some major steps. I want to highlight them because they are major steps forward in the fight against pornography in particular. The bill extends the scope of “trading or commercial” offences in the Act to include non-commercial distribution. It further extends the “trading or commercial” offences in the Act to include importing and exporting objectionable material for the purposes of supply or distribution and aligns that with relevant provisions of the Customs and Excise Act of 1996. It increases the maximum penalties for making trading and distributing objectionable material which includes child pornography to 10 years’ imprisonment. It creates a new offence punishable by 2 years’ imprisonment. The Minister intends to bring in a Supplementary Order Paper that will change that to 5 years in order to bring the period into line with that in other jurisdictions and we will be supporting that amendment. But the bill does create a new offence for a person to possess an objectionable publication knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that it is objectionable. 
 The legislation will require the courts when sentencing someone for an offence involving an objectionable publication to take into account as an aggravating factor the extent to which the publication is objectionable because it contains child pornography. It gives District Court judges the power to issue search warrants in connection with the suspected commission of a new “possession with knowledge” offence. It removes any doubt that nude or partially nude images of children that can reasonably be considered to be sexual in nature are publications that deal with “matters such as sex” and it specifies that a publication that would otherwise be classified as unrestricted may be given an age restriction if the publication contains offensive language exposure to which would be harmful to persons under that age. 
We believe that the bill is a move in the right direction. The current Act has been in force since 1993 and is now out of date. We also acknowledge our commitment and obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. When we move on to the Committee stage of this bill whenever that may be there are specific areas of concern that I will be wanting to highlight. They relate particularly to the Court of Appeal decision in the case of  
Living Word Distributors Limited 
 v  
Human Rights Action Group 
 because the word “objectionable” and the term “matters such as” which are found in section 3(1) of the Act are as we will see later on really of concern to the censor. The censor in producing the publication I have in my hand and taking into account the Court of Appeal decision would actually have to reassess a number of the publications and criteria that were accepted in the course of that Court of Appeal decision regarding the term “matters such as”. That phrase is wide and there needs to be a much narrower context when dealing with sex horror crime cruelty and violence that are actually included in a publication or video. Of course in the case I have outlined the Court of Appeal deemed it not to be action and that is why an issue now arises that the censor has to deal with. So there is much to debate during the Committee stage of this bill. 
National supports the bill as we have done right through its earlier stages. Some will say that the bill does not go far enough and it is acknowledged that some people will want a much tougher stand than this bill provides for but in our view it is a step in the right direction. It sends a very clear message that child pornography and objectionable material is not to be tolerated in society today. National will be supporting this bill. 
Bill read a second time.