Jones Shane: Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Jones Shane: Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:646;Page:15424] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 Kia ora no tatou. I sat on the Commerce Committee along with a host of our other colleagues from both sides of the House and—as I recall it Mr Copeland—and waded through a host of very technical submissions dealing with the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill. 
I follow Dr Sharples and share in a moment of mirth that he provided me with a story from the time when I went to St Stephen’s School about a—I think it was a 78—record that had been made collecting the ancient songs of the Ngati Porou tribe. If I am not mistaken it was a Mrs Dewes the daughter of the Rev. Pineamine Tamahori who had been recorded singing ancient oriori and waiata from Cape Runaway through to Gisborne. Listening to it was hardly the most interesting thing that we wanted to do. But I am reminded that this bill shows how far we have moved on from there because when we made a 78 record go faster than it should with a 78-year-old woman singing ancient laments from Hikurangi mountain it sounded like something quite out of this world. That did not please the Maori language teacher who—unfortunately for my backside because caning was still around—decided that I should suffer some punishment. 
It is unfortunate that I heard Dr Sharples announce that the Maori Party will not be supporting this bill. It caused me to recollect that great story about a scratched record. We are hearing from members of that party far too often that they will not support innovation and modernisation. They are condemned to their view of both our people and the place of Maori people in New Zealand society as being frozen in time like some static image incapable of moving forward in any dynamic current. However that is another matter and we will deal with that in November. 
When I was on the select committee there was a great deal of angst about whether section 88 of the parent legislation should go or should remain. We took some spirited submissions from people representing the Television New Zealand board I presume people representing Sky and people representing TelstraClear which may not actually exist much longer and could be consumed by Vodafone. In the end it seems that a compromise has been struck. There was a sense of sunk investment and that people’s existing ability to access some transmissions via the TelstraClear platform etc. in terms of the people who had already subscribed would disappear. But I have no doubt that a future Government will return to address that issue. 
Although this bill talks about somewhat arcane things there is a key public policy issue at stake here and it is one that I questioned the submitters about very intensely. It is whether copyright infringement should apply to civic institutions such as public libraries school libraries and tertiary libraries. I was clearly of the view as an individual parliamentarian who was sitting on that committee that although the providers of that information should be concerned that undue profit might be made at their expense access to knowledge is a great contributor to building civic virtue amongst not only our educated class but civil society in general. I was very very keen to see that prop be upheld so that our institutions can access information and make information available to our students in the most efficient way possible without the students or their long-suffering parents having to pay a penalty or the teachers or lecturers being pinged for unwittingly breaking the law to do with copyright. 
Although libraries are required to keep written requests and maintain a database the fact of the matter is that provided the material is not being used for pecuniary gain there is scope so that when material is copied digitally it remains the lifeblood of the young people. I remember that when I was studying law and economics we suffered pages and pages of cyclostyled or xeroxed—whatever the term was in those days—material. The fact that it can now be accessed over the computer does reflect the fact that although the information still has a critical role in evolving the sense of obligation duty and right that we look to university graduates to uphold in society their entitlement is finely balanced with that of the people who put the books together and who suffer the deprivations of having to give up rugby drinking beer and being with the family to write scholarly texts that unfortunately may be read only by students as studious as Shane Jones was for that brief point in his life—something that Mr Tremain and others should no doubt look at in an admiring sense— 
Chris Tremain 
: Take a leaf out of that book yes? 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: Yes. I think it is best to describe that—[ 
Interruption 
] The Kiwi Tavern unfortunately no longer exists. It was an institution of great repute amongst the Maori boys and girls who went to Auckland University. It is actually a marae now I understand I say to Dr Coleman. 
Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: I thought it was a car-park. 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: Is it a car-park? I can say that if it is a marae then it was already graced with great oratory before the university complex that now occupies that space turned it into a marae. Of course the Kiwi Tavern was known as the brother hotel to the Globe Tavern the “big eye”. Those matters have long since passed me by; we are on to far more important matters as parliamentarians. 
However the key point remains that the key public policy issue in this bill seeks to draw the right kind of balance. In relation to format shifting Dr Sharples talked about the need for us to use modern technology to capture the remnants of not only our Maori history but the history of pioneer New Zealand the history of families and the histories of communities. One thing that we should dwell on when we are talking about such dry and prolix topics as technology is that unless this technology is used by our young people so they become more familiar with and express a greater degree of owning their own history then our own sense of where we have come from as a country is in my view distorted. 
A lot of people ask why we Maori are so hard out on giving our genealogy and so insistent on reciting the names of our awas our wakas our maungas etc. I think that is an unfair challenge to us because that opportunity lies with every New Zealand family. All families should teach their children that their family came on the  
Ladybird 
 or whatever boat they came on. They should teach their children to be knowledgable about their history and to value their history and not wait until an earlier generation has all but died off then suddenly suffer an attack of anxiety and try to put the history together. Fortunately we are still a young country and many families are in a position to do that. 
But I will say that modern technology has helped a lot of our Maori families who have gone back and are now able to copy from master databases material such as the great speeches of the 1930s and 1940s that were collected by either Sir Apirana Ngata and his ilk or by Sir Apirana Ngata’s son a great ethnologist. Those speeches lie in a memory bank somewhere in the State broadcasting system but from time to time they are copied. They are copied in such a way that we can be driving down an electorate road a pathway—of course some like my friends from the Maori Party will not be on roads; they will be up the creek—and we can put on an iPod and listen to material that was recorded 40 50 or 60 years ago. That makes it accessible to a generation who in my view spend too much time on the iPod anyhow and need to spend more time kanohi ki te kanohi talking speaking and debating. 
The material covered in this bill allows for format shifting downloading etc. It does not all have to be Snoop Dogg and the wretched type of music that unfortunately blights too many of the rooms of my house. More for me are the Doobie Brothers Stevie Wonder Joe Cocker and so on. However that list unfortunately is used as an example of why my kids will not travel with me in the car. But they are able to help matua Shane Jones to download material and put it on to a system that then plugs into a radio. I can then drive knowing not only that I am generating great taxpayer value in the electorate of Northland but that I am also rehearsing my childhood memories and singing etc. which will come in handy one day in the unlikely event that the rugby team enjoys a surge this year. But we will hear more about those matters from those on the other side of the House. 
I commend this bill. Although the topic is somewhat dry its application is exciting. I am disappointed that my whanaunga from the Maori Party will not support the bill but such is life—more on that in November. Kia tatou katoa.