Porn block: Minister wants to curb online access
Officials have been ordered to prepare law changes restricting Kiwis’ access to online pornography.
Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin says she hopes to introduce the proposals to Parliament before next year’s election.
“Officials are now looking at policy options for preventing harm to children and young people from online pornography,” she told the Herald.
“It’s a priority of mine and I really want to see legislation introduced this term.”
Her statement comes as Network for Learning, which provides fast broadband to NZ schools, revealed it blocked 5.15 million attempts to access porn from the school network in the three months to September 30.
But it also comes just three weeks after Britain’s Conservative Government decided not to implement a 2017 law that would have required internet service providers to install porn-blocking software with all new internet connections, forcing subscribers to “opt out” of the porn block rather than actively “opting in”.
The British law would also have required anyone trying to access any of about 500,000 known porn sites to provide proof, such as driver’s licences or credit cards, to verify that they were not under-age.
British Media Secretary Nicky Morgan said on October 16 that the 2017 law would be replaced by wider laws, yet to be developed, against all “online harm” including terrorism.
Martin, a New Zealand First minister who is also Minister for Children, said last year that she supported the approach Britain was then taking.
In August this year she said she hoped a decision could be made “over the next four to six weeks” on whether legislation was needed here.
A spokesman said Martin had now decided to press ahead with specific anti-porn legislation without waiting for decisions on wider issues.
“The porn work had been linked to a broader reform of media regulation ... it is a priority for her and [she] has asked officials to do work,” he said.
“The aim is to get legislation introduced this term.”
Martin said several different approaches were needed — “some practical, some education and possibly some involving regulations”.
“This includes preventing children and young people from accidentally being exposed to pornography and from deliberately accessing it in a digital environment, including at school,” the minister said.
Five bills proposed by the Christian lobby group Family First, including compulsory porn-blocking software in schools and in Wi-Fi services in public places such as airports and libraries, “will be considered during the policy development process”.
NZ research by the office of Chief
Censor David Shanks last year found 75 per cent of boys and 58 per cent of girls aged 14 to 17 had seen porn online, deliberately or by accident.
Shanks said British regulators were talking to the big porn companies about how to make blocking software effective, and New Zealand would not try to get ahead of Britain.
“They have identified 500,000 commercial porn sites in the world,” he said. “It’s always been our approach that they are breaking ground on this, they are doing the heavy lifting, and that presents us with an opportunity to be fast followers.”
However Internet NZ’s engagement director, Andrew Cushen, said legislating to enforce porn-blocking software would be costly, ineffective, provide “a false sense of security” and an unjustified form of “nanny state”.
He said each household should be left to choose its own filtering software from a range of suppliers.
The director of Family First, Bob McCoskrie, found out that the provider Network 4 Learning blocked 5.15 million attempts to access porn from the school network after N4L said last month that it had blocked 2.2 billion attempts to access all kinds of internet material in the three months to September.
The porn access attempts represented only 0.23 per cent of the total blocks, which were mainly driven by students trying to play online games.
N4L chief executive Larrie Moore said many of the “porn” blocks were also related to games.
“Many websites, especially gaming sites, harbour ads that are categorised as pornography. Each of these ads would be a recorded as a pornography block regardless of whether the user clicks on the ad,” he said.
“Also, if a device has a virus, then the device may try to access inappropriate websites in the background [without a user’s knowledge].
“And if this device is used at home to access inappropriate websites, and then brought to school with its web browser tabs left open to these sites, then these sites will be immediately blocked when the device connects to the school’s filtered internet.”