Little AndrewHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you Madam Chair Tolley. I think the good thing about the Electronic Interactions Reform Bill is that there really is something in this for everyone because Part 3 not only allows for serving notices and providing notices through email but actually continues to allow for the service of notices—for example to the Commerce Commission—by way of fax. You would have thought in this day and age that there were not many offices left that have a fax machine in them. The National Party almost certainly does because they simply have not moved on. They certainly have not moved on from 23 September. We know that that is causing them great anxiety as they have to very quickly equip themselves with knowledge of the Standing Orders as we've seen this afternoon. The requirement in clause 53 in Part 3 which allows for a notice to be faxed to a claimant but also to be emailed to a claimant allows extraordinary flexibility—Hon Simon Bridges: Why is the justice Minister not dealing with Pike River?Hon ANDREW LITTLE: —because when it comes to emailing and faxing notices of a legal nature—indeed of a litigious nature—actually the Minister of Justice is absolutely qualified to speak upon this. As somebody who has actually appeared before and given evidence to the Commerce Commission I know just how handy it is to be able to communicate with the Commerce Commission by way of both email and fax.What we see in clause 53 in Part 3 is this presumption that if a document or notice is sent by fax or by email it is deemed to have been served on the claimant or other person the day after—or in the case of an email the second working day after the date on which it was emailed. Of course that then puts an onus on the recipient to prove that they hadn't received it or that the email address was wrong. This is going to revolutionise the communication of notices and the service of notices in this particular context and so we do have to be alert to the risks that are associated with this. We all want to move into the 21st century and to modern telecommunications but we also have to understand that there are risks associated in doing so.It is interesting to see in clause 54—also in Part 3—a new subsection 2A saying that In the absence of proof to the contrary a notice that is emailed to a person" is treated as having been served on that person on the second working day "and in proving that the notice was emailed it is sufficient to prove that the notice was properly addressed" to the email address that was commonly known to the person upon whom it is being served.These are new devices and presumptions in law of this nature and so we do not take lightly—we do not take lightly—the role of this House and the committee of the whole House stage to provide appropriate scrutiny for these sorts of measures. The legal profession has been talking about modernising for a long time. Ever since the member for Tauranga stopped being a Crown prosecutor the rest of the legal profession decided it was time to modernise and left him in its wake. But actually providing for the emailing and faxing of notices to the Commerce Commission or to parties to action in the Commerce Commission is I think a novel step for the law and it is important that the rules around that and the presumptions associated with it as indeed Part 3 does are a vital development in this part of the law.The Electronic Interactions Reform Bill will herald the way to a new way of doing business in so many institutions not the least of which is the Commerce Commission. It is interesting to see also that not just notices on parties or the commission itself but the serving of summonses now can be done through electronic means. That does open up a whole new can of worms because there will be issues about whether Bill of Rights rights are properly observed and whether or not there is scope for challenges to that. But we cannot underestimate just how significant and how revolutionary the provisions in this particular bill are."