Curran Clare: Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCurran Clare: Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:9988. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): As you have heard tonight Labour is opposing this Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill and if it does get to the Commerce Committee then I am sure we are going to have an interesting time discussing the various legal cases for and against this particular issue. This bill actually amends legislation that Labour pioneered in 2002 which removed impediments to e-commerce and brought New Zealand into line with many other developed countries in the world. At that time it was part of Labour’s Digital Strategy—remember it was 10 years ago. It was 10 years ago when there was a lot of work being done by the previous Labour Government to introduce a Digital Strategy. This work amends that. What we say tonight is that this should be a Government bill. It should not be a member’s bill; it should be a Government bill.There is an inherent contradiction in it which is why we are opposing it tonight. At the heart of it is the issue that there is a fundamental difference between snail mail and email and no doubt if the bill does pass tonight then that will be teased out. As we have said we are describing this bill as spam. That is not meant to be a slur on the member Paul Goldsmith who has done the work on this bill but it is a criticism of the fact that there are many other important issues that could be being debated in this House. If there needs to be a law change in this area then the Government should have brought this bill to the House. The Minister for Communications and InformationTechnology should have actually done the work and provided the advice that would have brought this law change to the House.What I would like to say about this bill is that there has been discussion over the years about whether the postal acceptance rule should be extended to online scenarios but the prevailing view is that it should not. The issue was briefly considered in a 2009 Australian Federal Court case in which the judge concluded to the effect that the postal acceptance rule could not—should not—apply to acceptance by email. We have discussed this issue around what happens when an email arrives in your in-box—if the members on the opposite side of the House remember—in other bills at the select committee if they were paying attention. Is the person whose in-box it is liable for the contents of that email if they do not know it is there if they have not looked at it if they have not opened it? That is the question because there is a great big difference between when you send a letter to somebody by snail mail and it arrives in a physical letter box than when you send an electronic email to somebody and it goes within seconds. There are some considerable issues there to be determined.Case law based on theBrinkibon case which was a leading decision of the House of Lords on the formation of a contract using telecommunication and together with section 11 of the electronic transactions case law suggests that the bill means that the contract is formed when an email arrives rather than when it is read. But this is not clear in the bill itself. So perhaps if Mr Goldsmith would like to clarify to the House what he actually intends the bill to do then we would be able to make a more informed decision about this bill.Labour is pushing ahead with a comprehensive digital strategy in our development of policy which involves looking at the whole of the digital environment. A bill such as this as I said should have come before this House as a Government bill if the law needed to be changed and that should have been on the advice of officials. There could be many other issues of great moment in the digital environment that we could have been discussing in this House tonight. Certainly we do give congratulations to National for moving beyond quills and typewriters and acknowledging the existence of the digital age but there certainly are other major issues that could have been discussed tonight.