Dowie SarahSARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak in support of the Films Videos and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Order Classification) Amendment Bill in the name of Mr Chris Bishop. It must be Feel the Love Day" for Mr Bishop—it must be "Feel the Love Day"—because I too think that this is a really good member's bill that balances the public good with freedom of speech. I think it is well overdue and I commend Mr Bishop for spotting the anomaly seeing a problem and working towards providing solutions so that freedom of speech is upheld but also providing practical measures so as to better monitor publications when it comes to interim classification. So well done Mr Chris Bishop. Well done also on having the luck of the Irish to have a couple of members' bills pulled from the biscuit tin. Of course prior to this he had the live organ donors bill which was well received by many communities across New Zealand. Long may it continue that Mr Bishop keeps up with these great ideas presents them to the House and provides solutions to make things—Kris Faafoi: He's an ideas man.SARAH DOWIE: He is an ideas man Mr Faafoi. "Feel the Love Day" Mr Bishop—congratulations.Look the current regime has a very specific purpose that is grounded in common-sense logic. The bill gives the president of the Film and Literature Board of Review the High Court and the High Court judges more flexibility when making interim order restrictions. Of course this bill will seek to amend the parent Act which is the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993.I want to pick up on one of the points Ms Curran made with regard to censorship. Of course the Office of Film and Literature Classification is responsible for classifying publications and of course that ranges from books to videos to games to audio recordings. For this purpose the classification system is there to protect the public and inform them about the publications that they will use or see. I just want to basically praise the office. Last year I think it was or a couple of years ago we had the opportunity in the Government Administration Committee to review the functions of the office. Those censors do a fantastic job of classifying publications. We as part of that review had an opportunity to look at snippets of publications that these censors had to go in and watch and come up with a classification for. Quite frankly it can be quite distressing work. So they should be praised for what they do. It is in the public good for New Zealand and we need to make sure that again they are commended for that.But there is an issue as Mr Bishop raised when it comes to interim classification. This bill was brought about because of issues surrounding Ted Dawe's award-winning novel Into the River. Where that case went was that there was this book—and again I have to admit I have not read it—Fletcher Tabuteau: Oh! Have you read the extract?SARAH DOWIE: Well I mean this was not my member's bill but you know as the chairperson of the Justice and Electoral Committee I took the process very seriously and also listened to the submitters. Of course one of those was Family First and as Ms Curran said the Family First submitters used snippets of the book to highlight their points. I think where we need to go with that though is that when you are taking snippets of publications out of context you do not necessarily get the entire gist of a publication.However where this went was that Into the River was banned for 6 weeks in 2015 and this highlighted the problem with interim restriction orders. Basically interim restriction orders are straight censorship. There is no nuance around those interim restriction orders. So currently they function like censorship and they make it illegal to possess distribute import or display the actual publication. Obviously interim restriction orders can be imposed by the High Court—a High Court judge—or the president of the board of review if it is in the public interest to do so. This bill will make some changes to that. It will nuance the system for interim restriction and allow the interim restrictions to be nuanced so that a particular age or class of persons can for a particular purpose be banned. So we are going to allow those nuances. We are going to allow an ability for flexibility and a ban through an interim restriction order is just simply confusing and does not make any sense in today's society when it comes to material that we watch. The committee has worked extremely hard on this. There were only two submitters but we listened very carefully and we had a lot of debate on this bill.Chris Bishop: There were four.SARAH DOWIE: Sorry Mr Bishop. There were four—two on the torts bill. We are coming to that bill next. The committee worked hard to ensure that this bill effectively fulfilled its purpose so there are a number of recommendations. We made some structural changes to ensure the intended policy was properly reflected in the bill and that amendments would set out the four types of interim restriction orders more clearly in that nuanced state to bring that flexibility into the system and so that the orders were more clearly defined and more easy to understand.The other thing is an amendment to clause 1 to change the bill's name to better reflect what we are doing—Films Videos and Publications Classification (Interim Restriction Orders) Amendment bill. That makes it very clear as to what we are doing and how we are changing the parent Act and it more accurately reflects the content of the bill.We were also advised that the principal Act actually contained offence provisions that did not envisage the more flexible interim order regime as proposed in this bill. The existing penalty for breaching an interim restriction order applied to breaching any new types of orders hence we added clause 6 to insert new section 133A in the principal Act. That new section would introduce new offence provisions for interim restriction orders.So I think this is a well-rounded bill. I think as I said earlier that it looks to protect the right to free speech but also allow a more nuanced regime in the public good. I commend the work that the Office of Film and Literature Classification does. I commend the work done by Chris Bishop and of course the fantastic Justice and Electoral Committee which has a very high workload at the moment but managed to move through this bill very effectively and efficiently. We now enjoy its second reading which I support. Thank you."