Sex Offenders Registry Bill

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Are all the microphones still live?

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Yes.

If that is the case, I suggest that we have to have silence in the House. I suggest that members who are interested in this bill stay and sit in their seats, and those who are not interested in it leave; otherwise, it is a hopeless situation for the member who has been called to speak on an important bill, and is entitled to be heard properly.

I agree with the member. I have said I have called for an investigation into this. It will be reported to me at 9 a.m. I am very, very angry indeed. This is a fault that should not have occurred, but the member is perfectly correct. From now on there will be no interjection whatsoever, because every member has the right to be heard.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I really have to ask that it be more than that. A United Future member is holding a conversation, and, obviously, is not listening to you, because every word that she has just said has gone over the air. For members’ own protection, members who are going to sit in the House should be silent until all the microphones are no longer live; otherwise, some member will be extremely embarrassed to discover that his or her conversation has been broadcast.

The member is perfectly correct, and from now on until the end of the evening there will be absolutely no interjection.

I move, That the Sex Offenders Registry Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be referred to the Law and Order Committee.

Nearly 10 years ago, as a journalist I stumbled into an area of crime about which I had very little knowledge. It was a crime that was protected by a cone of silence. It was criminal offending that, if it occurred on the other side of the world, in a country like Belgium, where little girls were locked in a basement for days to be sexually abused and die, the newspapers here would be filled with horrifying reports and photographs, but if it happened next door, in New Zealand suburbia, we would turn our heads the other way and would not want to know. I was writing a book called Keeping Kids Safe, and I had commissioned a press agency to clip from the national newspapers any stories relating to accidents that children had suffered. I tossed these clippings into boxes roughly filed in alphabetical order. Then in 1996 I decided to put the book together. I discovered that the box marked “S”, for sexual abuse, had increased to several boxes.

As I went through these clippings my horror increased as I realised that the same names had kept reappearing over those past 6 years. I knew, as a parent, that if I saw a name in the newspaper 1 year, I would not recognise that name 2 years later, when that person had been released from jail and gone back into a job where he or she had easy access to children and was trusted. If members read a name in the newspaper today, the name of someone convicted of an indecent assault on a young child, do they expect to remember that person’s name in 3 or 4 years time? Sex offenders are not just grubby old men in raincoats loitering in parks, around the swings and slides. They run scout and cub groups. They are church leaders, schoolteachers, justices of the peace—pillars of the community. They organise youth groups, and they take children away on camps. They join computer clubs, and they take young members home on the pretext of playing computer games. They know where to find young children who are vulnerable, often lonely, and too trusting.

I did further research and I discovered that rapists, not just paedophiles, were repeat offenders, and were getting off far too lightly in terms of sentences, and were then being let loose on an unsuspecting community. I could not let this matter rest, and I published the 1996 Paedophile and Sex Offender Index. I naively thought I would get just a few snotty reviews from the civil liberties brigade. I had no inkling of the torrent of abuse that would descend on me from almost every area of New Zealand society. I was sued, and I was accused of driving sex offenders to suicide. I received death threats. I had to hire security guards to follow my youngest child home from school when I could not collect her.

My critics seemed to believe that the perpetrators of these crimes were just poor, misguided souls who sometimes wandered on to the wrong side of the law, but who merely needed a little bit of counselling and understanding. I believe that it is this attitude that has allowed paedophiles, rapists, and sex molesters to carry on with their behaviour with little fear of being caught. There are no excuses for this behaviour. There is no room in my heart for these people. To express any form of sympathy for them makes a mockery of what I feel for their victims. Offenders are not victims, and they should not be considered as such when they appear before the court. Today, the victims are the people whom the justice system should be protecting. Every time we lock our doors at night, walk our children to school, worry when they are late returning home from sports practice, or enrol in self-defence classes, to a certain extent we become victims ourselves.

Members might ask why I embarked on, and continued, this project, which at times made me feel like the most hated woman in New Zealand. Why did I keep fronting up to interviews and talkback programmes, when I was accused of self-promotion? It was because I had had such a flood of feedback from men, women, and children who had been victims of sex crimes, and who had finally found someone who was prepared to stand up and say that we are not doing enough to protect people from sex offenders.

If people want to take out a mortgage, buy something on hire purchase, or borrow money, they have to submit to a credit check to make sure they can be trusted with other people’s money. Every day Baycorp runs something like 15,000 such checks through its system. Why can we not have such a system for those who want to be trusted with other people’s children? When Kate Alkema was murdered on the Hutt River bank, the police investigating the crime estimated that there had been something like 60 sex attacks in that area in the past 2 years. If 60 swimmers had got into difficulty at a beach in a 2-year time-span, there would be signs everywhere warning the public about dangerous tidal rips. Why can we not give women information about sex offenders, so that they can try to keep themselves more safe? If members knew that a repeat dangerous offender, like Taffy Hotene, had been released on parole in their neighbourhood, would they let their young daughters walk home in the dark from a bus stop? Kylie Jones’ family in Auckland was not allowed this information, because Taffy Hotene’s right to privacy was considered more important than Kylie Jones’ right to life. Every time I hear of a rape or a murder my blood runs cold, because so often the name of the accused is someone who is in my book or in my records.

So what will my bill do? Well, it is only one facet, but a major part none the less, of a strategy that I believe this Parliament needs to implement to protect the community from sex offenders. The bill as it stands is sparsely written, and deliberately so, because I think it is important that the public do have their input into, and their say on, this legislation. In essence, the purpose of this bill is to establish a registry of persons who have been convicted of sexual offences, and to include mechanisms to keep the registry up to date so that the police have reliable information available to them at all times on the whereabouts of sex offenders. Despite what many people believe—and someone even came to me today to state this—the police currently do not have access to a national database of sex offenders. It is very ad hoc, and at times has even been as hit and miss as someone just walking past the senior sergeant’s door, hearing a name being spoken from within his office, and recognising that name as someone who had been locked up or arrested several years ago and had got out again.

A fundamental principle underpinning this bill is that protection of the privacy of sex offenders must give way to protection of the public from such offending. In other words, the community’s interests come first. I believe that the bill maintains a balance between these competing concerns, because it does not apply to offences and offenders in the distant past. As the bill is drafted at the moment, it does not go as far back as I would like, but I have deliberately had a bill drafted that is not too extreme, so that, hopefully, it will not be voted down in the early stages, and so that people can have more input at a select committee. The bill strictly limits access to the registry. This database should be seen as a crime-fighting and law enforcement tool. There are strict penalties for misuse of information, and offenders can access their own files to correct erroneous information.

I believe that this is legislation whose time has come. The climate has changed considerably since I published my book in 1996. I believe that the New Zealand public is ready for this law.

The Government has foreshadowed major changes in dealing with child sex offenders, and it will support this bill going to the Law and Order Committee as one aspect of a series of measures that are necessary to minimise the risk of sexual offending, particularly offending by paedophiles against children.

This bill proposes a registry so that police have reliable information on the whereabouts of sex offenders. I think the outstanding feature of the register is that it requires those who are categorised or covered by the bill to regularly update the police on addresses. I think, however, that the important decision made by the author of the bill, Deborah Coddington, is that this register ought to be available for the purposes of policing, and available to relevant agencies, but not publicly available, which would allow the names and addresses of sex offenders to be published with wider public access. I think there is a very good reason for doing that. Where the names and addresses of such offenders are known, it does tend to promote vigilantism, and is counterproductive to working to prevent reoffending by sexual offenders, because the most likely way of promoting further offending is to drive those offenders underground and out of contact with the control and support mechanisms—the supervision mechanisms—that are necessary to keep them from reoffending. So I welcome Deborah Coddington’s acknowledgement of the need to avoid those particular outcomes.

We certainly do need a proper database for those who are serious and recidivist sex offenders. The police currently collate such information in collaboration with other agencies, but it is fair to say it is not systematised, and there is room for improvement in practice. Indeed, in acknowledgment of that, a pilot scheme was started at the beginning of this month in Dunedin, where there is interagency management of child sex offenders during their parole and supervision period. There is collaboration between the various bodies and full sharing of information. I expect that that pilot programme will be successful, and if successful it will be rolled out across the country. That will considerably improve the management of sex offenders in the community.

Up-to-date information about known offenders and where they live, however, is, by itself, of somewhat limited use. It may help the police to solve crimes more quickly, and it is worthwhile for that reason alone, but what it does not do is act to prevent future offending. Prevention requires the active management of sex offenders in the community, and that means a combination of controls such as supervision and court-reporting requirements, and availability of, and support in undertaking, regular counselling and relapse prevention programmes. That is why the Government is now working on ensuring the maximum effectiveness of the police database, as part of a wider package of measures to ensure that the risk posed by recidivist offenders is actually minimised.

I think one can properly categorise sex offenders into various tiers of risk. The top tier—the worst offenders—are much more likely today to receive preventive detention. The circumstances in which preventive detention can be imposed by a judge were significantly extended in the Sentencing Act passed last year. Preventive detention is a penalty that is a lifelong sentence. It is a sentence that now applies from a younger age, to a much wider range of offences, and without the need for an offender to have previous serious offences in order for that sentence to apply to an individual who has offended seriously. It allows for any offenders, if and when they are ever released back into the community, literally to be controlled for the rest of their natural life through reporting and supervision, and allows for the possibility of recall if behaviour indicates that the offender is at risk of reoffending. It is a draconian sentence. It is a sentence, however, that gives full control, and gives priority to the safety of the community where that very clearly is justified.

Currently, however, there is no active management regime for the second tier of sex offenders. These people are also habitual offenders, and, under the principle that when one has served one’s time, that is the end of one’s sentence, there is too little attention given to the identifiable likelihood that those individuals will go on to offend again, if they are not managed appropriately in the community. The register does not, on its own, address that gap. That is why the Government has proposed an extended management regime that would allow authorities to exert control and monitoring over that tier of offenders for up to 10 years after their release from prison. The legislation will be introduced before the end of the year, and I hope the select committee will consider that bill alongside Deborah Coddington’s bill. This is a radical change in control and supervision of offenders. It is, however, a change that has been implemented recently in the United Kingdom and in Canada, and I believe that it is a change that is merited because, again, priority must be placed on protection of the community from people who are known as habitual offenders.

Those offenders who are subject to preventive detention, therefore, or subject to the new, proposed extended supervision regime, would be required to keep their whereabouts notified to relevant agencies. That would be a standard condition of their release. This bill’s provision for collecting and maintaining up-to-date information, therefore, would not be relevant to those two groups of the most serious offenders, because that information would already be routinely required. A register, however, may be useful in implementing similar tracking requirements on the next tier of sex offenders. My view, at this point, is that it ought to apply to relatively serious or recidivist offenders, but not to offending that is minor or that is deemed to be one-off offending.

In considering the establishment of any registry, a key issue is balancing the benefits that the registry may deliver, in terms of crime prevention and crime resolution, with what the registry may involve in terms of the resources required to put it together. Costs would depend on how a registry was implemented, and how accessible it needed to be and to whom. This bill, as the author has indicated, is not prescriptive in this regard, and I think that is a sensible approach, but the select committee will have to give some consideration to what the implications for various agencies’ information systems might be.

Sex offenders, and, in particular, child sex offenders, have an appalling effect on their victims. They cause traumas that blight the lives of children for years to come. We need to consider today regimes that address and minimise that offending far more effectively than we have done in the past. Tougher sentences to deal with the worst offenders are now available, and, as we saw in the sentencing of Nicholas Reekie, are being used. But sanctions imposed after the offence has been committed are less valuable than measures that are effective in preventing offending. Cooperation and information sharing between agencies are essential to the proper management of those at risk of offending, and we have begun that process. Extended supervision of those who have offended and are at risk of doing so again is essential, and the Government will act in an unprecedented way to ensure that happens. A register of offenders, to ensure an effective and up-to-date database, could also be an important aspect of management and control, and for this reason the Government will support the referral of this bill to the select committee. I look forward to the consideration of the bill alongside the legislation proposed by the Government, which will be in this House before the end of the year.

The National Party supports this bill going to the Law and Order Committee, and I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate Deborah Coddington on the bill and on the drafting of it.

There is no excuse for rape. There is no excuse for rapists continuing to prey on the vulnerable, and genuinely destroying the lives of people for whom there can never be any true redress. Unlike property crimes, unlike a lot of crimes that, as a lawyer, I have seen in my practice, there can be no insurance against rape. No amount of money can compensate a rape victim, and I hazard to state there would be very few rape victims who are not, on a daily basis, reminded of the crime committed against them. They will never go away. Unfortunately, we live in a society where there are, in fact, rapists—sexual offenders we call them now, but they are rapists—people who abuse children, who abuse the elderly, and who abuse others. These people are almost always likely to be recidivists. I am sorry if that offends the civil libertarians here, but those people almost always will be recidivists. It takes a certain mindset to commit that sort of offence against another human being.

I welcome the fact that we will be looking at this issue. I am almost certain this bill will pass through to the select committee. I hope that it will not, as a bill, become watered down by concern for those who are, in fact, rapists, recidivists—the sorts of people whom none of us would wish to have living anywhere near us. As a mother, I can say that the greatest fear for most parents would be that their child was the victim of a sex offence. It would, for many people, be worse than death, and that is because of the inhumanity it displays. People like Jules Mikus prey on women; they, prey on women with young children. Yes, we now find that he himself, as a child, was the victim of a sex offence by his own father. Of course, sex offences that are just left to rot like that will often have a bad result further on down the track. What actually happens in cases like his is that very, very innocent, young lives are destroyed, and no amount of work that this Parliament can do will ever bring back their innocence. It is a shame, and a shocking, shocking situation.

I welcome the comments from the Minister of Justice about the work of the police under this bill. I am concerned, however, that our police are already under-resourced and will not have the resources actually to follow up on this work. I fear that the concerns expressed by Deborah Coddington and others in relation to this bill will come to pass—that is, that the police will be asked to keep registers, but will instead spend a tremendous amount of time, as they do now, pulling drivers over for faulty backing lights and faulty brake lights. I fear that they will not be given the resources or the power actually to do their job. That is a concern, and I hope the select committee is able, when it looks at this bill, to make recommendations accordingly. I am pleased to commend this bill to the House.

New Zealand First will support this bill going to the Law and Order Committee. The idea of doing something to ensure that we can keep track of sex offenders when they finally come out of prison is a very good one. As the previous speaker has said, those of us who practise law and who come across sex offenders realise that once people are sex offenders they almost certainly continue to be so. It seems to be something in their system.

One of the saddest aspects of sex offending is that it is sometimes encouraged by other members of the family. The worst case I had was a case where a stepfather had interfered with a child, and his wife and his stepmother both criticised the child for telling the school that she had been interfered with. The grandmother had been interfered with, the mother had been interfered with, and they felt that it was part of tradition that the child also be interfered with. That was no excuse, of course. Strangely, the probation officer thought the defendant should be released on probation, but I started my submission by suggesting that the sentence should be at least 5 years, which Justice Thomas, as it happened, agreed with. We have to be realistic sometimes. It is strange how probation officers can see cases like this and somehow feel that people like that offender should be excused because of the situation in the family. We almost wonder whether we can ever resolve sex offending, when sometimes victims from the past, like the grandmother, virtually encourage it, and castigate new victims for revealing what is happening to them. It is a dreadful situation.

Time and time again, when one appears in court for sex offenders, one knows that they will go to jail, obviously, but one also knows that nothing is going to happen in jail to stop them from being sex offenders when they come out. It is a terribly hopeless feeling when, as counsel, one knows that something should be done, and the judges know that something should be done, to try to get rid of the problem of sex offending, but, ultimately, all that we can possibly do as a society is to have something like the Sex Offenders Registry Bill so that at least we have a warning as to where these people are. In a way, it is just a cheap way for Parliament to try to resolve the problem. The problem ought to be resolved before the event. But once the event has happened, something should happen in the jail system to try to have this problem reduced, and something should be done in the sex offender’s family so that when the sex offender is released he—and it is usually a he—does not go into an environment where sex offending is par for the course. It is a tragedy that there are sections of our society where we see that happen. People often say that lawyers do not know what is happening in society, but lawyers really go down to the bottom of the barrel many times, and there would be many lawyers with stories worse than the one I have just recounted.

It is interesting to see that Australia also is setting up a paedophile register. That worthy journal the Cairns Post, of Friday, 4 July 2003, indicated that the Australian justice system is setting up a register: “Ministers meeting in Melbourne pledge to develop complementary legislation for the registry of convicted paedophiles. The Federal Justice Minister, Chris Ellison, welcomed the agreement.” I look forward to there being cooperation between New Zealand and the Australian states to make sure that people who offend here do not feel they have a safe haven in Australia to go to, and vice versa. Australian sex offenders should know that the Australian registry is available in New Zealand, if possible, so that Australians do not come over here and start conducting their dreadful behaviour in New Zealand.

As I said, New Zealand First supports this legislation going to the select committee.

On behalf of United Future, I welcome the introduction of this bill, and commend Deborah Coddington for bringing it to the House. Along with other legislation, like the Victims’ Rights Act, we are now seeing a tide turning and a shift to a new paradigm—a paradigm where victims are now able to start putting forward legislation to protect themselves, and this bill forms another part of that. I do not wish to name some of the paedophiles and sex offenders. It would be a roll-call of evil, and they should not be given the spotlight, which is something I am sure they enjoy secretly and quietly.

Sex offenders are not just criminals in the normal sense. They are not like burglars or any other form of criminal. They have an ingrained characteristic that cannot be taken out, any more than axle grease can be taken out of a baked cake. As such, they constitute a threat and a continuing threat to the public—to the vulnerable, the innocent, and the children.

The Sex Offenders Registry Bill has as its purpose: “to establish a registry of sex offenders to assist the police in their investigations of sex offences, to reduce sexual offending, and thereby contribute to public safety.” It is a noble purpose, and if it does no more than just place a database in the hands of the police so they are able to access the information, it will do a lot.

Although I understand the sparseness of the bill, and the intent of that, I believe that we must strengthen it through the select committee process. In particular, I think that clause 5, which deals with people who have been convicted of two or more sexual offences, needs to be broadened. We need to look at the pattern of offending. We need to look at the risk of reoffending by these individuals, and at added safety, if parole should ever be applicable to them.

Also, when it is time to look at the ability of the sex offenders registry to do what it is supposed to do, we should perhaps think about widening the scope of the legislation to allow accessibility to those most at risk. It is a way of warning them about the predators in their immediate vicinity. I am suggesting that schools, kindergartens, and day-care centres have access. I suggest that those who are most vulnerable have access to information to help protect them. It is right, of course, that the police should be the first repository of this sort of information so that they may act on it, but I think that, as has already been stated, people who have children would like to know what precautions they ought to be able to take if there is an offender in the nearby vicinity, in the vicinity of a nearby school, and so on. People who have children and who live near where offenders are residing also have reason to be forewarned so that they may be able to help protect their children.

On behalf of United Future, I thoroughly commend the introduction of this bill. I look forward to its introduction to a select committee and to being able to work with Deborah Coddington, to strengthen the bill, and to invite public submissions. I am sure the public will see in this bill another branch towards victims being allowed to protect themselves, whereas in the past legislation has failed to do that.

I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party on the Sex Offenders Registry Bill, and to inform the House that the Green Party will be supporting this bill to a select committee. Like all members in this House, Green members are concerned about crimes of rape and sexual violence, and we find them abhorrent.

I have to say though that we support the bill with some sense of caution. There are a number of issues that we think need to be seriously addressed in the select committee, and we hope that the committee will take them very seriously. The Minister of Justice has already referred to some of the dangers inherent in such a register in terms of the dangers of vigilantism and the possible detrimental effect it could have on rehabilitation. I say that not from some ideological point of view, but because I think it is the concern of all of us to reduce reoffending and the number of victims in the future. It means that we have to take very seriously the question of how we promote rehabilitation very seriously.

The Minister also mentioned that the register on its own was of fairly limited use, and we think that is the case. The police already have access to a certain amount of information through parole records and their own records, so we are not clear how useful this register will be. We look forward to hearing the police submission at the select committee, so that the details of how it will work can be worked through.

The Greens also have a number of real concerns about the specifics of the bill. I would like to foreshadow to the House that we may not be able to support the bill through subsequent readings if some of those concerns cannot be addressed by the select committee. We have concerns about who the bill applies to. First, let us remember that this bill does not just talk about the Mikuses, the Reekies, and such people. It covers offences like incest between a brother and sister, whether of whole or half-blood. That is not to say that we support incest—we certainly do not—but I am not sure that those are the kinds of offences that Deborah Coddington was intending to cover with the registry. I understood it to be concerned with serious sexual offences.

Of course, section 136 of the Crimes Act talks about conspiracy to induce sexual intercourse, and anyone “who conspires with any other person by a false representation … to induce any woman or girl to have sexual intercourse with any male who is not her husband.” That could cover quite a large host of things, and again while I am not saying that those are acceptable behaviours—they certainly are not—I am not sure that those are the kinds of things that Deborah Coddington wanted to cover. I think that the committee needs to look at those things quite seriously.

We also have concerns about who the bill applies to in terms of including people who have not been convicted of an offence, but who have admitted an offence while being questioned by the police and have been cautioned. Again, there are questions about the seriousness of the offence and how likely people are to reoffend. Also, there is the power the police have to bargain an admission when they are in a position of power. So I think that those things need to be looked at. It is our belief that that particular part of the bill contravenes the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and we think the select committee needs to look at that.

I guess our concern is that the bill represents a very blanket approach. Marc Alexander talks about the need to look at patterns of offending in people, and I think that is true. The bill is a fairly blunt instrument, and in that sense it may not fulfil the hopes of its author, although I understand very clearly the very real considerations that have driven Deborah Coddington to put the bill forward.

I want to express the support of Deborah Coddington’s ACT colleagues for this bill. We believe she is doing what she came to Parliament to do. It is what she said she would do to achieve the changes directly that she was crusading for as a journalist—throwing sunlight into dark corners and trying to make sure that there is more sunlight in a lot more young lives.

We are against name suppression. We believe that it shelters the well-connected, that it does not contribute to upholding the law, and that it does not uphold our traditions of open courts and transparent justice. Convictions are in open court. If a reporter is present at a sentencing, it can be recorded and reported for ever, but if the justice establishment gets away with that formal process and a conviction is not reported, the system clams up thereafter to protect the guilty. There is no right to a criminal record, even though every entry in it might have been delivered in open court. So ACT has reservations. We are concerned that this bill is not reopening justice, it is not Megan’s Law, and it does not supplant Deborah Coddington’s book. It really helps the police and law enforcement only, because only officials approved by the Minister are able to have access to this register.

Why then do we support the bill when it is so limited? Why do we run the risk of exhausting Parliament’s ration of attention to this issue? Because it is a start—it is better than where we are now, and it might take New Zealand society back in a more healthy direction. It is a hesitant recognition that all of the social work, all of the counselling, all of the insiders’ claims of “Just leave it to us, we know what we’re doing”, and all of the official resources will not restore the assumption of trust that New Zealanders had in their fellow New Zealanders. Trust will not be restored until the community as a whole has active, informed confidence that the entire community shares the abhorrence of crime, and of this particular kind of crime. We need to tell offenders that it is not condoned.

Those offenders nurse some very strange delusions. One paedophile, whose parole application I had to think about earlier this week, said that he was just expressing his affection for the 6-year-old boy he had anally violated. This register says to those offenders: “Don’t delude yourself. Society is not secretly condoning your vice by giving you secrecy. Justice will be open.” Although this bill is only a start, ACT is delighted to be able to support it.

I thank all parties for supporting this bill. Believe me, there are hundreds and hundreds of people out there who will be thanking them, too. I especially want to thank the Hon Phil Goff, who, I believe, has done a huge amount as Minister of Justice to move towards protecting people in society from sex offenders. This is only the first stage of the bill, and I hope that it continues on a steady, strong passage through the House.

I want to conclude with another aspect to the advantages of this bill. When similar legislation was passed in Ontario, Canada, in the year 2000, I was emailed by a recidivist sex offender there who told me that he was one of the first people to register on its registry because he was sick of going to jail. He could not trust himself not to reoffend, but he finally felt that he could get on with his life. He knew that people were watching over his shoulder all the time, and that was a huge deterrent to his reoffending. I keep in touch with him, and to date he has not reoffended.

On the issue of various degrees of offending mentioned by Nandor Tanczos, all I can say is that to victims of sex abuse, they are all serious. I recommend that this bill be referred to a select committee.

Bill read a first time, and referred to the Law and Order Committee.

The House adjourned at 9.51 p.m.