Bishop Chris; Tisch LindsayCHRIS BISHOP (National): This has been a good bill and I have got to say the process that we went through on the Justice and Electoral Committee on this bill was also a good process and Jacqui Dean the chair did a great job. It was a real pleasure actually to work with the Government members and also the Opposition members. Denis O'Rourke the speaker who has just resumed his seat has played a very constructive role in relation to this bill and also another knotty issue that we are working through on the committee at the moment as well. I think we have come to a good space on this bill. We have got into a good position and we have made some useful amendments which have come through the select committee process.I want to briefly talk about suicide reporting which is obviously covered by the bill and is a topic that I took a particular interest in. It was something I had been interested in before I came into Parliament. I think everyone has acknowledged that the current law under the current Coroners Act 2006 around what the media can and cannot report or say about suspected or actual suicides is deficient. You see that the law is widely flouted and actually just yesterday a news media organisation ran a story that was definitely a breach of the law because it described in the headline that a particular incident was a suspected suicide. Well that is a breach of the law. You are not allowed to do that. It will be legal once we have passed this bill and the legislation comes into force but it is not legal at the moment. That is just a small example of how the current law is ignored.It is a very vexed issue because the pure libertarian view is that everything should be able to be published. There are some people who make that argument—that you should be able to publish anything you like about suicide. There is another school of thought—and I have heard people express this view as well—which is that there should be absolutely no reporting on any type of suicide in New Zealand and that the risks are just so great from that reporting. It is a very very tricky issue and actually I think the Government did a good thing in 2013 by getting the Law Commission to do a first-principles review of this and actually go away and look at the evidence. The experts at the Law Commission did that and I think the recommendations that they came up with which have largely—and particularly in this instance wholly—been endorsed by the Government and made their way into this amendment bill are good ones.The conclusion that they reached after studying the international evidence from overseas is that some forms of reporting are strongly associated with the risk of further suicides. That is why after we have passed this bill into force you will not be able to publish the method of death or the place where that death took place if publishing the place would suggest the method of death—I am sure people can think about how that might come about. This is because the international evidence suggests that the publication of those details is very risky in potentially perpetuating further suicides—copycat suicides. The evidence tends to suggest that.In some ways the new law will be a liberalisation but it will also be a toughening-up. The penalties for breaches of the law have been raised but we are going to allow the media to report that something is a suspected suicide. If something is a suspected suicide that will be allowed to be published but it is only in the event that the coroner finds that something is a suicide after the investigation has happened that the media will be able to say that. I think that is appropriate. After a death happens if it is a suspected suicide the media can say that. This will avoid the media having to use the sorts of code words and euphemisms that they use at the moment which everyone in the know knows about and some people do not. We will end that farcical situation. But if you are in the media you will be able to call something a suicide only if the coroner says that and as I say you will not be able to publish the method of death or the place where publishing the place would suggest the method unless the coroner grants an exemption. I think this strikes the right balance. What we are trying to do is encourage responsible reporting. It is important to have a conversation about suicide I think in New Zealand. We want responsible reporting but we do not want irresponsible reporting and that is what the bill seeks to prevent. I thought long and hard about this issue on the committee and I did quite a lot of reading about it. I think we have struck the right balance and it is good that this bill is going to become law. I commend it to the House.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): The next call is a split call. Jan Logie—5 minutes.