Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's probably my last opportunity to speak in this Parliament so I'd just like to wish everyone all the best—there's some event coming up apparently in a couple of months. I do actually mean that—I think everyone who's not a politician doesn't realise what we all go through in this period. So I just want everyone to enjoy the process and all the best. Hopefully we'll see most of you back.This bill the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill is certainly a solution looking for a problem. I really don't understand the need for it at all. We're in incredible times. I think if we look back at other major changes like going from horse and cart to the combustion engine while it happened rapidly it was nothing like the pace we're seeing in the change in the digital world particularly when it comes to the media and the way they interact with that. One of our major newspapers Stuff was sold for a dollar. In days gone by—it wouldn't be that many decades ago; maybe only a decade or two ago—those sorts of banners would have gone for billions or at least hundreds of millions. But now it's a dollar. That was a real opportunity to innovate and I don't think we've really seen that. People consumer their news in different ways but when you click on a link from social media and go through to that website the host news organisation's website you see digital advertising. In fact I advertise digitally through Stuff and the New Zealand Herald so that is how they're benefiting from it. So why would you want to pay to put our stories on your website on Facebook or whatever else it is? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me and I listened very carefully to the first three speeches and I didn't get an answer except from my colleague here which basically confirms my view that I'm very sceptical about the need for this bill.I know that this is a very difficult and uncertain time for journalists because of the fast pace of the change. But the reality is that people do not want to consume their news through a piece of hard paper. They're mostly going through the digital portal to read their news and that does impact on their advertising. But the classified advertising like the TradeMes of this world have eaten their lunch basically but it's much more user-friendly for the public. So why would we ever want to change that? We can't do that. We can't walk that back; the horse has bolted.The media now needs to find a way to actually adjust their business models to make it in a digital world. I think that they haven't done that successfully yet. I don't know if someone will find the magic way to do it but I think there's actually an opportunity in the digital world for a very small publisher to get a lot of coverage. A lot of people who are well read write opinion pieces and they get a lot of hits through social media and I think that's a real opportunity. People want that sort of that thing now. We're no longer the media of old and I think that with the Public Interest Journalism Fund and all the lockdowns and the misinformation that came from supposedly trusted sources people now don't trust. They simply don't trust because their trust was abused through the lockdowns and all the misinformation that came out.So now some people wrongly I think have gone down a rabbit hole as a result of that but the Government made that problem far worse with the Public Interest Journalism Fund and tying the values of those media organisations to the Government's values. I think that was a really sad day for New Zealand and this is part of the problem or the fallout from that that the Minister is trying to address with this bill. I think he's doing it with good intentions—I don't doubt that—but it's the wrong solution and we oppose it.I don't know how the media platforms actually benefit from this in the end because what we've seen in Canada is that it's actually had the reverse effect. Those platforms that were sharing the news are now not so they are getting less exposure not more. So what people will do is just go further to selected media organisations rather than getting a broader perspective on what is happening and that's a really sad thing. It's really sad if you're only going to read and consume your news in an echo chamber—that is really sad. But that's effectively what we got with the Public Interest Journalism Fund. We didn't have that broad sweep of views that inform the public and I think that was very sad. I was angry actually when that came out. I thought it was really a bad move. All of the things that we talked about at the time things that would happen as a result of that have happened. So we're still in the stages where those media outlets are trying to react and adapt to this new world that we live in. And it is kind of like the survival of the fittest so I can really understand why those media outlets and the people working in them would feel so uncertain at this time.But Governments picking winners as my colleague says is always a bad way to go. I don't really have any more to add but we do have major reservations about this. No doubt the Government's got the numbers to pass it. It may not even be picked up next time around. I don't think we would if we're fortunate on 14 October. So with that all the best.