Chadwick Steve: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Chadwick Steve: Films Videos and Publications Classification  Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:623;Page:18707] 
STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) 
: 
 I am pleased to be given the opportunity to make a third reading speech. First I would like to thank the chair of the Government Administration Committee Dianne Yates who nurtured this bill through and also all the members on that committee. They took this legislation very very seriously. It was one of the nicest bills I have ever worked on—for something so contentious and difficult—in that we worked in consensus on it. I thank the National Opposition members who were on the committee Lindsay Tisch and Shane Ardern. They worked very well with the other committee members. 
Also we were well supported by staff from the Department of Internal Affairs. They took us to see their monitoring of Internet sites and I was incredibly impressed with the professionalism of the small unit that traces the trading and movement of Internet pornography globally and with how well it did it. New Zealanders can be very proud of that unit which is run by the Department of Internal Affairs. They can feel confident that the unit is taking a real world lead in participating in and contributing to the tracking of child pornography. That was very reassuring to the whole committee. We had first considered this bill after the Ministry of Justice review of offence and enforcement provisions but it was only after looking at some of the images when we visited the unit that we realised that perhaps the penalties regime proposed in the original bill was too light. 
Also it was really quite deeply disturbing to see after a briefing by the Chief Censor of Film and Literature the censorship challenges that members of the censor’s staff have with the classification of publications—whether those be moving images books or magazines. I personally found their work to be hugely challenging. I would be classified as being a liberal but there was a threshold at which I found some of the images to be absolutely abhorrent because they definitely depicted women children or men—who were not actively participating in the filming of those images at all—being grossly exploited. There was a margin where one thought: “This is OK—Whoops! This is the cut-off.” So after having been briefed so intensely by the chief censor and the classification office as well as by the Department of Internal Affairs we certainly took this bill incredibly seriously. 
The offence provisions and penalties in the bill are not light and that is exactly as we intended. We intended to put out the message that reflected both this Government’s and society’s abhorrence of the dealing in this material. As well people who distribute pornography do not do it lightly. It is not just a matter of those people flicking on a file; it is about their downloading material meticulously filing it into subfolders and then posting if off to people whom they know like the particular material in a folder. The demand for that is incredibly sophisticated. 
As a mother I feel regretful that I did not watch my children’s use of the Internet closely enough. I thought they were happily engaged. I really do urge all parents in New Zealand to monitor more what their children are quietly doing when they are on the family PC and make sure they are not happening upon quite innocently often some horrific Internet pornography sites that are very very easy to trip on to. I urge parents in New Zealand to take more of an active lead in that respect. 
This bill is a very good tidy-up of outdated legislation passed in 1993. Technology has moved on quite dramatically in the last 12 years—from what first were just publications really. Films that went through the censor are now also part of the fast-changing global Internet. I believe we have got the measures in this bill right and I would like to thank all those who contributed to it. The bill sadly is not supported by one Opposition party probably because its members were not party or privy to what we saw when on the select committee. I believe that if responsibly they had been party to that process they would never have held the rather peculiar views they subscribed to in their debate on the bill. I know that our community can feel that we have a pretty good grip on this now and that those who are dealing in this material—not innocently but deliberately—will meet a penalty that is commensurate with penalties in the UK and Canada and that will put us on an equitable footing with the rest of the world. I was proud to be part of this process.