Bishop Chris: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBishop Chris: Harmful Digital Communications Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 30 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4859. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS BISHOP (National): I just want to acknowledge the member who spoke just before Tracey Martin. I think it is pretty clear from listening to her speech that she played a constructive role in the gestation of this bill but also in the improvements that have been made to this bill through the select committee process and also through the Committee of the whole House stage. I think it is also clear from listening to her speech—and I know the honourable member serves on a board of trustees in Auckland in Rodney—that she has some experience in the school system so has some not unique but certainly useful experiences to bring to bear on this issue which primarily of course affects the young. Although not completely: but primarily it affects the young. So I think some of the examples that we have just had mentioned by Ms Martin have been a useful contribution to the debate. It is not often that Tracey and I agree so put that down for the record.This bill was introduced in November 2013. Unfortunately I did not have the privilege of being in Parliament then or indeed of serving on the Justice and Electoral Committee which considered the bill. But I have interrogated the bill and its principles pretty thoroughly over the last few weeks and I am very glad to stand here supporting it. The driver of this bill is really technological change. It is one of the paradoxes really of modern society that privacy to individuals is becoming more important whilst at the same time individuals feel free to place more of their lives online than ever before. They feel free to share photos. They feel free to put up photos of their cats even likening them to politicians. They feel free to share their poetry online. They take Instagram shots of their food and place them online. They place their holiday snaps online. Previously you had to go around to somebody’s house in the evening to watch a boring slide show of their holiday snaps whereas nowadays if you are really keen on seeing somebody in Angkor Wat or in Burma or anywhere you can just log on to Facebook and see them straight away.Technology really is changing everything. The world’s biggest transport company Uber owns no cars. The world’s biggest accommodation provider which is Airbnb does not have any hotel rooms and does not own any buildings. So really the internet is changing everything. But with that comes new threats. If you read the regulatory impact statement on this bill it rightly makes the point that there are new threats for harassment for abuse for threatening behaviour for the publication of invasive photos and for invasions of privacy that come with this new technology. If you read the regulatory impact statement it makes the point that TradeMe has 2.8 million users. It is actually quite astonishing. That is about 75 percent of the New Zealand population assuming that each user is an individual person. There are 2.8 million individual users with 25000 posts per day—and I think the regulatory impact statement was written about 18 months ago so I suspect that figure is actually far higher now. If you look at Twitter there are one billion tweets sent per week. Again I suspect that figure is actually far higher now.With these new technologies come new threats. In some ways the traditional school playground has moved online. Growing up I remember—you know we did not have cellphones when I was growing up or certainly they were a very nascent technology and they were too expensive. They were outside the realms of a chap like me. But I remember going home and logging on to MSN Messenger. That was the playground for abuse in my day the famous MSN Messenger technology—now sadly retired. Microsoft has got rid of MSN Messenger but that used to be the thing—David Seymour: No!CHRIS BISHOP: It has. It has gone. It is gone Mr Seymour it is gone. Mr Seymour is of a similar age to me so he no doubt remembers as well going home from Auckland Grammar School—finishing rugby practice and all of the extracurricular pursuits he no doubt pursued at Auckland Grammar—and logging on to MSN Messenger to catch up with the very same people he had been talking to at school that day but also people from other schools in his community. It is gone now but MSN Messenger was certainly a hive of interesting and challenging behaviour.Nowadays of course very many students at school have cellphones and they have 4G or 3G access to the internet. They even have Wi-Fi at schools. The potential for students to bully harass and make life a misery for other students in the school has certainly been heightened. If you read the background work on this bill something like one in 10 New Zealanders say that they have experienced harmful communications on the internet. That comes from the Law Commission. That figure rises to one in five for adolescents. The Minister in her third reading speech outlined some very sad cases which I will not repeat of harmful bullying and abusive behaviour that took place over the internet in New Zealand society. The question that confronts Parliament then is what is the appropriate legal response from the legislature to something that—I think there is unanimity on this in the House—is poor behaviour? What should be the legal response?Well the Law Commission did a review and it concluded that basically the existing remedies that we have in our law like defamation harassment and vilification do not effectively address the potential for harm from these new technologies. So we have a lacuna in the law. There is an argument I think—and it has been advanced by the some people—that we should just rely on defamation law and that we should just rely on the existing civil or tortious remedies in our law. I think with respect—and I think Tracey Martin pointed this out and others have as well—that it is a little far-fetched to expect that we could rely on a 13-year-old or even a 16-year-old to rely on defamation law to enforce their rights against those who seek to violate them. So I think that is a little bit far-fetched and I think the Law Commission went through that and came to that conclusion as well.So we have this bill put forward by the Government. So what does it do? It creates a new civil enforcement regime to quickly and effectively deal with harmful digital communications. That is its first major objective. Secondly it creates new criminal provisions that deal with the most serious conduct. There was some debate I think about whether or not there should be a criminal offence included in the bill but as the Minister has made clear I think it is correct to say that we do need that backstop provision for the most egregious vile and reprehensible conduct and I think it is clear that that is required. Certainly the United Kingdom has moved towards this; it has criminalised revenge porn for example. Australia I understand has had a law similar to this for a decade and there have not appeared to be many problems with that.So how will this law work in practice? I regard it as a cascading series of options—well not options but a cascading series of things that the law does. Firstly the law sets up this approved agency. It is very correct to say that the major priorities for this new approved agency are that it must have an educative focus it must be well resourced and it must be seen as a credible authority in this area. The Minister has given that assurance that that will be the case and I for one will be inside the Government caucus making sure that that is true. So it sets up this new agency and then what we have are mediated outcomes. The Minister has said that the vast bulk of the activity of the new agency and the vast bulk of complaints that take place under this new Act will be dealt with through these mediated outcomes and I think that is appropriate. Then of course we have the ability to apply to the court for civil orders for take-down notices to remove material and then of course the criminal sanctions that I have talked about.Just in closing I want to briefly talk about freedom of speech because section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act protects that and it is very important. I was concerned that this bill would potentially impinge unnecessarily unfairly and unjustifiably on section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act so I went and looked up the section 7 report—because of course the Attorney-General is required to report to the House if a bill is unjustifiably inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The legal advice is published so I went and looked up the legal advice from the Crown Law. The legal advice from the Crown Law is that this does not breach section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or to the extent that it does it is a justified limit because it finds that “expressions can be limited to the extent necessary to avoid or redress serious emotional harm or other harm or the incitement of harm:”. That is according to the Crown Law Office a justified limit on section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and that is in essence what this bill is trying to do. So I was comfortable to conclude that this bill is acceptable and a justified limit on section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. Because of that I commend this bill to the House.