Street Maryan: Communications Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
Street Maryan: Communications Legislation Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:634;Page:5450] 
MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koutou te Whare. I rise to take a short call on the Communications Legislation Bill. 
As a member of the Commerce Committee the discussion took me into areas I had never been in before but there was one area that I did understand particularly and it was raised in the speech of the previous speaker Barbara Stewart. It was to do with band expanders. One thing I did understand was the nature of a band expander having once upon a time bought a second-hand Japanese car and discovered that I could not get National Radio on the radio. I then went to find out how I could remedy this problem because the car clearly had a capable radio in it but I did not know why I could not pick up some of my favourite stations. I could not hear Parliament for example. So I went to a place that installs car radios and the people said: “Madam you need a band expander.” I asked what that was and they said it was a device that increased the capacity of a radio to access different radio stations and receive a wider range of frequencies and therefore increased the coverage of one’s car radio. I said that was fine and to put in one of those. 
What happened thereafter I found really interesting. In the course of the discussion in the select committee it became clear there were some concerns about the wording of the legislation and whether the definition of “interference” was going to make life difficult for people with cars that had band expanders. I am not the only person in New Zealand who has ever bought a second-hand Japanese import. It became important to clarify as reported back by the Commerce Committee that interference did not include any effect on the reception of radio communications caused by the use of inappropriate receivers. In other words the key point was that band expanders tend to affect only the reception in one’s own car and not the reception in other cars. So it is not as if it creates a difficulty for anybody else in receiving a signal from a given frequency. 
So it was clear that the law needed to be clarified in the wake of a court case to ensure that the efficient allocation of frequencies was not prevented by the fact that a band expander can cause interference because generally the interference is very localised—to one’s own car. But the point that my colleague Barbara Stewart raised was that there was some anxiety about whether the existence of band expanders could interfere with the reception of particular kinds of transmissions; I think she mentioned emergency frequencies and things of that sort. 
That issue having been covered in some detail in the select committee it was clear that there was not a significant risk of this at all largely because people like myself with band expanders in a car would normally listen to stations with good reception in their area. If they do change stations they are more likely to change to the wider coverage of an AM service which is not affected by a band expander. So in the view of the committee the issue would not really arise in practice. In any event a band expander does not affect the reception of all FM stations available in an area. So it is unlikely that during an emergency or something of that kind like a civil emergency an individual would be unable to tune to a station with the required emergency information. 
Although the Radio Broadcasters Association suggested that band expanders should be done away with altogether it would seem to be a very draconian and very heavy-handed mechanism if we were to do that. In the end whether one has a radio with a band expander in one’s car is a consumer choice issue. That is something the Commerce Committee decided was best left at that point. 
We discussed further another point that my colleague the previous speaker raised. We discussed the extent of consultation with interested parties. Certainly we had some parties back more than once in order to ensure we had addressed their concerns and had allayed any fears about whether there was a danger of usurping property rights or anything of that kind caught up inadvertently in this bill. The bill was unanimously supported by the Commerce Committee because we felt that none of those concerns—which we did address with considerable vigour—really warranted the anxiety with which they had been portrayed. 
I commend this bill to the Committee stage.