Stewart Barbara: Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill — First Reading 
Stewart Barbara: Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:628;Page:1047] 
BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) 
: 
 On behalf of New Zealand First I rise to support the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill going to the select committee. The bill is long overdue. We need to see some action on spam as it is definitely a problem. We hope that the select committee and the submitters take the widest possible view as to how to stop those communications. 
Rodney Hide 
: Winston Peters lost Tauranga twice. Apologise! 
BARBARA STEWART 
: I thank Mr Hide; we do appreciate his apology. 
Even here in Parliament spam is a real problem and I would have thought that if those messages could be stopped then the parliamentary information technology team would have definitely stopped them. I note that the bill takes an opt-in approach which I hope Internet service providers can use when they take action in response to customer complaints. Here in Parliament we seem to be regular recipients of spam particularly for certain medicinal products that we would never buy over the Internet—although I note that the previous speaker said that those products would be useful for 1 percent of people. What do we receive? We receive spam for products like Viagra and other related products human growth hormones Russian caviar enhancement patches computer software investment alerts the best imitation Rolex watches and travel deals—just to mention a few. And they keep coming in every day. They are articles and products that very few people I would imagine would want to buy over the Internet. 
We receive spam letters from people who claim that we have been left or even that we have won $1 million—as long as we are willing to invest some money ourselves in order to collect it. The same messages seem to come from many different people. They are unsolicited totally unwanted and they must block up the parliamentary server. Those messages appear to be totally impossible to block from our own PCs. If they were I am sure that someone in the information technology department would have already done that for us. I know that I have looked carefully at Microsoft Outlook to try to find out how to do it. Those messages really are a pain and spam is a very big problem. Some process does need to be put in place to manage all those unwanted and unnecessary emails. 
It is very surprising that here in Parliament an environment that is very security-conscious we find that spam cannot be managed in any way. We can receive hundreds of emails—up to 200 over a weekend according to one of my colleagues who has counted them—and I can assure senders that those emails are a real pain when people use remote access on their cellphones. Basically here in Parliament we are drowning in spam and there is never ever an unsubscribe option. I was very pleased to see in clause 12 that every commercial electronic message and promotional electronic message that is sent and that has a New Zealand link needs to have an unsubscribe facility. It is interesting too to see in clause 13 that the onus of proving a defence lies with the person who is actually relying upon that defence. 
 This is an important issue and one that New Zealand First would like to see resolved. We have no doubt that the select committee will look further into the issue of spam and how to monitor it. We do not know whether the spam messages that we all receive so regularly originate here in New Zealand or elsewhere—over in Germany according to one of my colleagues. That will prove a real challenge for Internet service providers to monitor. It is an unfortunate fact that this legislation can apply only to messages generated within New Zealand and we hope that it can apply to all emails sent to an email address here in New Zealand. Otherwise it will be very easy for the smart operators to arrange for messages to be sent from an overseas Internet service provider and be above the law. 
So we are looking forward to this bill going to the select committee where the committee can scrutinise it very carefully—and I am sure that Mr Henare will be among those members looking at it carefully—and we look forward to the bill returning to the House.