Curran Clare: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1755. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I would also like to add my acknowledgment of the work done by my Labour colleagues the Hon Maryan Street and Raymond Huo on this bill as the representatives for the Labour Party during the select committee discussion on this bill. I spoke on this bill briefly in the first reading and I have been back and had a bit of a read about what I said and why I said it. I would like to confine my remarks on the Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill to the issues that concerned me back in the first reading and that still concern me following the return of this bill to the House. There is no doubt—and we will put it on the record that Labour is supporting this bill—that the behaviours that it is seeking to address or to provide penalties for are absolutely critical. The abuse of children—and not just the abuse of children but the actions of child pornographers and people who use and disseminate and produce objectionable publications and distribute them—should be condemned. There is no doubt about that. Nobody is going to deny that.My particular issue with this piece of legislation and another one that I am going to mention shortly is the absolutely important nature for this Parliament in 2015 to be thinking very seriously about how the legislation that impacts on the physical environment meshes with legislation that we bring before the House that impacts on the online environment. The internet is not a sentient being despite the point I think the previous speaker Jacqui Dean was making. It is a means of transmission. It is a means of connecting and communicating. It is not a thing in itself. There have to be people creating the actions and doing the communications. The behaviours in the physical world and the behaviours in the online world and the penalties and laws that we put around them have to have some consistency. It is my real concern that what is starting to emerge is a discrepancy between those things. I know we are going to see further debate and angst around the implications of that. So I am putting on the record that I remain concerned about this legislation and whether all of those issues have been thought through.One of the reasons that I make that comment is that when looking at the list of submitterson this legislation—of which there are eight I think and all extremely worthy submitters there is no doubt about that—it did not include the organisations and the people who are doing a lot of thinking and mulling over these implications. This raises a further point and that is how we as a Parliament and in particular the Government which is putting the laws on the Table for debate are actually communicating with the wider public around legislation that is being put before the House. I think we have to ask ourselves whether our process of communicating and inviting submissions ensuring that there is good consultation and engagement before we pass these laws is sufficient. Personally I do not think it is and I think that we are not doing enough work to get the draft legislation out there to the community to have those discussions. We expect everyone to come to us and we expect everyone to just know that these laws are out there. In legislation such as this I think there could have been perhaps a more extensive engagement process.There is another piece of legislation coming back to Parliament no doubt soon called the Harmful Digital Communications Bill which also attempts to create a new set of penalties that impact on the electronic digital environment which is different and separate to the physical environment. I think that this raises some significant issues for us as to whether we are getting it right. I think it is less controversial with this bill before the House at the moment; much more controversial with the Harmful Digital Communications Bill. I would like to signal that there is going to be—and there does need to be—a wider discussion in the community around that particular bill which introduces a new civil enforcement regime and a new criminal penalty that applies only in the online environment. Nothing like this has been done anywhere in the world—creating a new penalty which could mean prison that applies only in the online environment. So that is significant and it is very important that we are not having piecemeal discussions about these things.The point that my colleague Jacinda Ardern made at the beginning is about the importance of having a coherent strategy around a justice strategy and not coming up with pieces of legislation in a knee-jerk reaction. I am not meaning that in an extremely pejorative way but I am saying that any legislation such as this should fit within a wider strategy and we should be very careful not only to mesh it with other pieces of legislation but also especially if it is talking about the online electronic environment to make sure that there has been a lot of careful thinking about that. I just do not think it has happened. I do not think that that thinking is going on. I think we have got this “We have a problem therefore we must do something about it and here’s the thing to do something about it.” response and I am concerned that the unintended consequences of some of our approaches to this will have impacts down the track.One remedy is to ensure that we have done the right consultation with the right groups and with the right people who are doing the good thinking around this. That has not happened as far as I am concerned in this piece of legislation. One of the issues that has been raised—and I think it was raised in a regulatory impact statement—was around the difficulty in predicting the effect an increase in maximum penalty will have on reducing the offence. I think there has been a little bit of discussion about that already. One of the submitters on this legislation was the Dunedin Community Law Centre. I must say that the Dunedin Community Law Centre is a pretty awesome organisation. It submits on almost every piece of legislation—can I say—and I am pretty proud of it just giving it a bit of a shout out here tonight.Grant Robertson: Started by David Parker.CLARE CURRAN: Oh it was started by David Parker—our own David Parker—but the centre is a very assiduous organisation which really gets out there and puts the work in to submitting. Another submitter was the Salvation Army which pointed out that increasing the penalties for objectionable publications offences could distort relativity with other offences by treating some physical offending as being less serious than the depiction of that same offending. The Salvation Army submitted that this created an anomaly as physical crimes should be punished more severely than objectionable publications offences and the Dunedin Community Law Centre suggested that this may send the wrong message to those physically abusing children. Well I rest my case. This is the physical environment versus the online environment. Are we doing enough thinking about the impact of the new laws that we are bringing into this environment and what are the implications for that? I do not have all the answers to that but I just do not think we are really thinking it through.