Sharples Pita: Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sharples Pita: Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 27 February 2007. Volume:637;Page:7719. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Maori Party) 
: 
 Last Thursday the House witnessed a most unprecedented event. Two bills were each rushed through a stage in unseemly haste with absolutely no debate whatsoever on their contents. The first was the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill; the other was the second reading on the Disabled Persons Employment Promotion (Repeal and Related Matters) Bill. Neither of those bills is what one would call straightforward yet the speed at which the business of the House was conducted saw the House rising at 5.02 p.m. 
In reviewing the  
Hansard  
we see that apart from the Minister of Customs speaking to her bill and a mere four sentences from the Minister for Courts about the Judicial Retirement Age Bill the Government was curiously silent about the matters of State before the House. One has to wonder what the state of affairs is if in only the second week of business for this parliamentary sitting programme the Government is unable to speak to the policy programme it is promoting. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: The member needs to address the bill. 
Dr PITA SHARPLES 
: When we look at the  
Hansard 
 record of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill we see that the Committee-stage proceedings record only that Parts 1 2 3 and 4 were agreed to the schedule was agreed to clauses 1 and 2 were agreed to and the bill was reported without amendment. 
I am not someone who knows a lot about distribution lists or a great deal about the workings of Internet service providers. In that light and with the recommendations from the Commerce Committee I am relieved to support measures to do away with the dual regime distinguishing between promotional and commercial messages and to instead refer to electronic messages per se. Anything that can reduce confusion and avoid uncertainty has to be good. 
But even a novice like me in the use of information and communications technology cannot help but notice the unwanted invasion of junk mail offering stock-price tips cheap loans healthcare miracle diets hair restorers etc. According to a BBC report spam now accounts for almost 70 percent of emails worldwide. That figure is expected to reach 80 percent by the middle of the year. 
The Maori Party is therefore happy to support a bill that takes as its primary purpose the intention to protect New Zealanders who are accessing the Internet from any untrustworthy and unsolicited messages. We support the intention of the bill to require all commercial and promotional spam to include accurate identification and contact details of the sender; to include a functional unsubscribe facility; and to ensure that the prior consent and proof of identification are taken into account in preventing vexatious messages being sent and clogging up the system. 
However although there is no doubt we urgently need anti-spam legislation the downside for smaller businesses may be uncertainty and higher marketing costs. In thinking about this issue we inevitably think about the 8397 people of Maori descent who described themselves in the 2001 census as “employers” and the 15975 people of Maori descent who are “self-employed with or without employees”. We think also about the employment-related compliance costs the Occupational Safety and Health Service paperwork and the inordinate amount of administration that business is already taxed with. We wonder what sort of impact the recommendations of the Commerce Committee will have in the context of compliance-cost priorities particularly for small business activity. 
The latest annual survey of business compliance costs conducted in 2006 by Business New Zealand—KPMG surveyed some 1400 businesses and concluded that compliance problems and costs were still disproportionately high. The survey confirmed the trend of the last three surveys—that compliance costs fall more heavily on small businesses than on large businesses. It was reported that small businesses with fewer than 10 employees face compliance costs averaging around $3000 per employee whereas larger companies with over 50 employees have compliance costs of less than $1000 per employee. 
The Government has acknowledged that businesses most likely to be caught by this legislation before the House today are small and medium enterprises. Larger businesses tend to follow e-marketing best practice and as such it is likely they will suffer little impact to their regulatory routine. But for small businesses—which after all constitute the vast majority of New Zealand businesses—the regulatory impact will be far more severe. The Government estimates the cost of compliance for small and medium enterprises could constitute at least an extra $1000 to $2000 including changing address lists to develop an opt-in system ensuring all marketing and promotional messages contain correct sender information and how to unsubscribe setting up systems to update electronic addresses held for marketing purposes and separating commercial and promotional materials. 
The Maori Party recognises the enormous impact that such changes can have on business productivity and acknowledges also that many businesses may not have sufficient lead time to comply. We also acknowledge that the bill will place unfair costs on Internet service providers because even though they usually cannot do anything specific about spam they will still have to pay for the complaints process. 
I have some knowledge of the commitment and effort put forward by the Maori Internet Society Te Whanau Ipurangi which promotes a strong Maori presence on the Internet and registers domain names such as “maori.nz”. I acknowledge for the record the initiative of Ross Himona and Kamera Raharaha who have led the way in establishing an authentic Maori presence on the Internet since 1997. 
But in a frantic cyber-world the hassle involved in constructing a process to deal with complaints about spam is simply not feasible. As a result the recommendation from the Commerce Committee that further work be undertaken by the industry to combat spam as part of a multi-pronged approach is to be endorsed. Based on current estimates if users are being confronted by some 350 million messages per month then solutions must be considered on many different levels. The report of the committee referred to the current work being undertaken on developing an anti-spam code of practice for email services. The Maori Party supports such an approach as well as the associated procedures for dealing with complaints and constructing appropriate software programmes and technical remedies to filter spam. 
Finally I refer to the advice of the Ngati Porou and Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki writer Sally Pewhairangi in her work  
Internet Safety and Maori 
 in which she said: “The internet has a lot to offer Maori but there are concerns of intellectual and cultural property rights control language accuracy and authority and access.” We must now add to that list the need to abide by compliance requirements to prevent the use of unsolicited electronic messages. 
The Maori Party supports the moves to create a safe and secure information highway within Aotearoa and we will vote accordingly. But we simply remind the House again that yet another compliance cost is being placed on New Zealanders that an administrative burden is being sanctioned by this legislation and as such we have a concern that the financial burden in our view will fall heavily on those least able to afford it—the little people the small-business enterprises.