Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2)

I move, That the Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.

This bill is an important update of the sexual offence provisions of the Crimes Act of 1961. I thank the United Future party for its consistent support, the Green Party for its consistent support and, indeed, the New Zealand First Party and the ACT party for their votes in favour of this very sensible legislation. The fact that the votes in this House on this bill have been consistently 90 to 27—the 27 being the dissenting votes of the National Party—shows just how far out of touch that once-great party is with the way this country thinks, and every other party in this Parliament thinks. National tried to wring political advantage out of a very sensible piece of legislation right to the end, and the country will stand in judgment of that party, as the TV3/CM poll will show tonight.

This bill brings sexual offences more into line with reality—for example, by recognising that women are capable of committing sexual offences against young males, and that not all offending is by males against females. The bill also significantly improves protection for society’s most vulnerable groups against exploitation by predatory sexual offenders. One of the primary purposes of the bill was to ensure that all sex offences be expressed and applied in a gender-neutral manner. Although the majority of sex offenders are, in fact, male, the loophole that has allowed women to escape prosecution for sexual conduct with under-age males has shown beyond doubt that the previous assumption in the law—that all such offenders are male—is simply wrong. This bill frames sexual offences in a gender-neutral manner, to ensure that the law now provides equal protection to both male and female victims, and equal sanctions against predatory conduct by both male and female offenders. In particular, the enactment of this bill will mean that females may be prosecuted if they have sexual relationships with young men or boys under the age of consent.

The one exception to terminology in terms of gender neutrality is, of course, the retention of the term “rape”. The term “rape” has been maintained for the traditional offence that it has described, but the other offending is described as sexual violation through unlawful sexual connection. That covers all the other horrendous offences against either men or women involving sexual violation. The same penalty applies equally to all those offences, and this House would expect that the court system in New Zealand would apply those penalties equally, regardless of the gender of the victim or the offender, and regardless of the type of serious sexual violation that is so described.

Protections against predatory conduct for our society’s most vulnerable groups have been significantly enhanced. The penalty for sexual connection with a young person aged 12 to 16 is raised from 7 years’ imprisonment to a maximum of 10 years’ imprisonment. The existing 12-month time limit on bringing a prosecution for such offending is removed, and those people who commit those offences now no longer have impunity after that time limitation under the existing law has expired. In addition, a new offence of sexual grooming is created, to protect young children from habitual sexual offenders who identify then cultivate relationships with potential victims. The new offence will ensure that those who are grooming children for sexual abuse are able to be prosecuted before the actual abuse takes place. I once again thank United Future’s Marc Alexander for initially raising that issue with me, and for his party’s strong support in bringing that clause and this legislation into effect.

The bill also strengthens protections for those who are vulnerable because they cannot give or refuse consent, by clarifying the circumstances that do not amount to consent. That includes strengthening the position of the law with regard to drug rape, and I would like to thank Dianne Yates for bringing that issue, which is a serious issue in our society, to the attention of the House so that the law can be applied to deal with that situation. The bill also strengthens the provisions for those who are vulnerable to the exploitation of a relationship of power, and extends the offence of incest to provide greater protections for the young and the vulnerable. Incest will now apply to a range of sexual offending, and not simply to sexual intercourse. This bill greatly strengthens the protections that children deserve to have within the sanctity of the family.

Despite the fact that the bill greatly improves the law and legal protections for children against sexual exploitation by predatory offenders, we have heard the usual tirade of disingenuous politicking from the National Party on this bill. Tony Ryall, for example, complained that the select committee did not have time to properly consider the bill. Mr Ryall was, of course, a member of the Law and Order Committee that had nearly 8 months to consider this bill—8 months! What on earth was he doing during that time, if he claimed he did not have time to properly consider the bill? But Mr Ryall, of course, was the Minister of Justice who, prior to the 1999 election, decided not to reform sexual offence laws because he would rather just bury his head in the sand than deal with an issue that clearly makes him uncomfortable. Existing penalties for having sex with 12 to 16-year-olds were apparently sufficient for him. He would not increase those penalties. Those penalties have now been increased. He did not seem to mind that there was a lopsided similarity of age defence that could make teenage boys criminals, but not teenage girls. That was OK with him, apparently. He did not see the need to change that. He thought that the loophole allowing women to escape prosecution for sexual exploitation of under-16-year-old boys could stay there, as far as he was concerned. He made no use of his opportunity as Minister of Justice to change that law, but his party is the first to criticise the efforts of this Government finally to do something about that situation that was long overdue. This Government has been determined to move on the unacceptable loopholes in the previous legislation, whereas Tony Ryall and the National Government were not prepared to do that.

In terms of public consultation, as well as the select committee process, there was a broadly circulated consultation document. That was part of a PC agenda, the National Party predictably said, and—equally predictably—with no foundation whatsoever. In its desperation to beat up public controversy and moral outrage, the National Party has railed against measures that it admits were never even in the bill. Tony Ryall has put out a press statement attacking something that was never in this bill. He attacked this Government on the issue of incest, when this Government, in this legislation, has strengthened the provisions to protect our children against incest, including by more broadly defining the family unit that they may be in.

This bill sends an unequivocal overall message to any paedophile that exploitation of our children and young people will never be tolerated. That is a key part of the Government’s overall agenda against exploitation of children. We have already introduced post-sentence extended supervision of up to 10 years for child sex offenders. We have made it easier for judges to impose preventive detention. We have passed new censorship laws to increase tenfold the penalties for dealing in child pornography.

This bill adds further to the protections for our children and the penalties facing those sexual predators who would abuse them. I commend this bill to the House.

The National Party opposes this bill. Within 12 months our position will be vindicated. Within 12 months this legislation will be amended. Within 12 months the next National Minister of Justice will be bringing in legislation to tidy up the errors in this bill because—as Mr Tamihere says—with a word here and a word there, we end up with something that we never expected.

There has been insufficient public involvement in and discussion on many of the bill’s proposals. Major changes are being made to the rules around sexual conduct with minimal public consultation. Mr Goff personally discussed with officials a discussion paper that was circulated to about 25 Government departments and agencies. In that discussion paper Mr Goff personally ticked off a proposal from the Ministry of Justice that brother-sister sex over the age of 20 should be legalised. He personally ticked off that proposal. He never said to the officials: “That’s against Government policy—don’t even go there.” Did he say that? No, he did not.

Then Mr Goff also included in a discussion paper one of the things that I think he will always be remembered for—that is, saying that it is OK for 12 to 15-year-olds to have sex. He wanted to put into the law, and he would be prepared to support, a defence that would decriminalise 12 to 15-year-olds having sex. When he was telephoned by the media about that matter last year, he defended the bill. He defended the proposal that the Labour Cabinet and caucus agreed on—that they would decriminalise sexual behaviour between 12 to 15-year-olds. But once ordinary New Zealanders had a chance to see Mr Goff, and the Helen Clark agenda, they railed against it and, within hours, Mr Goff was forced to back down. There is a feeling amongst middle New Zealand families that this Government is interested more in the rights of minorities than it is in ordinary New Zealanders. This Government is more prepared to listen to the noisy carping of the liberal few than to ordinary New Zealanders.

This bill has had completely insufficient consideration in the Law and Order Committee where the Government majority pushed through the deliberation. We say that this bill will lead to serious unintended consequences and risk disturbing settled case law and legal concepts. This could have been avoided if the committee had had more time. The bill may have been in the committee for 8 months, but it was not considered for 8 months. In fact, if this bill is so urgent, why has it sat around in the House for 7 months since the select committee reported it back? And if the Government is so tough, why did Labour vote against every one of our amendments to increase the penalties in this bill?

National has identified a number of areas where we say there are concerns. We forced the Government to back down on the similar age defence, which would have effectively decriminalised some under-age sexual conduct. We are very concerned about the proposals for sexual conduct with a dependent family member under the age of 18. That means that it will no longer be an offence for, say, a foster parent to have consensual sexual conduct with his or her 18-year-old foster child for whom the parent may have cared for many years. In our view, it is more appropriate to maintain the prohibition until the age of 20 to allow sufficient time to lapse and the dependant’s relationship to wane.

The Government is passing sexual grooming amendments. That provision was first proposed by Simon Power in 2000, but the bill grants an immunity to such groomers if they live with their victim. Most submitters to the select committee wanted the age to be 20, but the Government dropped it to 18. This provision, for example, could lead to judges making wider interpretations—unintended views—on who dependent family members are, because the law invites them to consider what different cultural perspectives are involved in child rearing. In fact, this is part of the confusion. The senior adviser to the Government described a whānau as being people who live on a marae!

The bill proposes a far-reaching, reasonable belief defence for sexual conduct for people over the age of 12. It says that a bloke of 45 can have a defence in law, provided he reasonably believed that the 14-year-old girl he was having sex with was 16 or older if, for example, he had checked her—false—ID. There was no consideration in the select committee on how to fix the genuine mistake situation, which the Government was worried about, through using mitigating factors at sentencing, nor has there been a public discussion about the merits or otherwise of the effect of those changes. What we do know is that a discussion paper went around a small clique of Wellington agencies and that this bill is what we have ended up with.

National is very worried about the changes to the protections for people with disabilities. While we can understand trying to change the phrase “severely subnormal”, in doing so, the Government is using new and unproven wording, which the Law Society says is a forensic lottery. Indeed, the officials’ advice to the committee was to leave it to the courts to address that problem.

No person coming before the select committee asked Parliament to define “consent”—not one person. The bill deems certain conduct as not amounting to consent. Concern was raised by submitters as to the lack of precision in these new provisions, and the definitions of what is not consent risk causing more confusion than clarity.

The National Party would have liked the opportunity to support the sensible changes proposed in this bill, but we are saying that there will be unintended consequences as a result of this legislation. The select committee was told that. The Opposition parties in force told the Government that there would be problems, yet this bill continues to come before the House. We are shocked by the discussion paper that preceded this bill. We are shocked that this Minister agreed to those matters being included in a discussion paper, and we are shocked that this Minister was prepared to defend the inclusion of those matters in the bill.

The National Party in Opposition wants to make it very clear today that we in this Parliament will be back within 12 months making changes to this bill. People involved in the sector advise us that the bill still involves significant risks, not in terms of the protections it may offer but in terms of interpretation and in terms of the results of the protections it may offer. We say to the House that when those problems are identified we will all have to move much more swiftly than this Government has done to deal with those issues.

As the chair of the Law and Order Committee I commend the speech of the Minister of Justice on the third reading. I think it was a very good summary of the issues.

I will take only a very brief call. I believe that this bill is well overdue. I am delighted to see it go through to its third reading. I want to thank all members of the committee, including its Opposition members, the Hon Tony Ryall, Brian Connell, and Ron Mark. I particularly want to thank my deputy chair, Marc Alexander; the Government members, Georgina Beyer, Ann Hartley, Mahara Okeroa, and especially Dianne Yates; and Sue Bradford. I can assure members of this House that we gave this bill exceptionally comprehensive consideration, and did our very best.

I think the Minister of Justice has summed up the issues around this bill very succinctly and very well. I commend the bill to the House.

I rise again to offer the New Zealand First contribution on the third reading of this bill, and I want to reiterate for the record the points we have made. New Zealand First has given its support to the overall intent and purpose of the bill.

We acknowledge the work of Dianne Yates in ensuring that the drug rape issue was brought to this House. She is an MP who put a lot of work into researching the issue and bringing the facts to the Law and Order Committee, and an MP who was prepared to allow her member’s bill to be put to one side—accepting, of course, that its provisions would essentially be incorporated into this Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2). It was one of those times we get to see frequently in select committees, when MPs across parties are able to work together for a common good to ensure that we get good legislation. It is probably a little sad that we rarely hear talkback hosts promoting MPs on such occasions—when they work cooperatively across party lines in order to produce better law for the country. I guess it is more fashionable and popular to talk about how we squabble in the House and behave like schoolchildren than it is to acknowledge and give credit to people who do what Dianne Yates has done, with the assistance of the select committee.

But New Zealand First has to say that this bill as it currently stands is inconsistent with three of the Government’s stated aims for the bill: to ensure that the law relating to sexual offences reflects changes in societal attitudes, to ensure that the law is streamlined as much as possible, and to ensure that offences provide for all victims of sexual abuse, regardless of their sex and the sex of the offender. This bill was touted as being gender-neutral. It was touted as being put before the House to ensure that differences on the basis of gender were eliminated and that there was uniformity in the interpretation of the law.

Yet this bill is presented at the behest of what is clearly a very powerful group within the Labour caucus, a group that did not have the unanimous support of that caucus but that has been able to force its will against every other party in the House. How bizarre is that? I listened to Mr Goff’s statement on the third reading, in which he said that the National Party was out of step because it was the only party that was not voting for this bill. I have to remind Mr Goff, on the record, that the Labour Party is out of step on this bill, in that it is the only party that does not believe that the crime of rape should apply to men who commit crimes against other men.

💬 Marc Alexander: Neither does National.

That is not what its members said at the select committee. The Government has chosen to keep the crime of rape the preserve of a crime committed by men against women. It has chosen not to accept as rape things the public would consider to be rape: the violation of a woman with an object, or the violation of a man or a boy with an object—as happened in Napier in the infamous “broom handle case”. Most men would consider the insertion of a broom handle into the anus of a boy as being an act of rape. The ACT party agrees that it is so, the Greens agree, and New Zealand First agrees, but Labour does not seem to—for whatever peculiar reasons it has. We do not accept Labour’s rationale.

We will support the bill, because in general its thrust is in the right direction, but we predict that there will be amendments to it. We predict that this is not over. We said quite clearly in our minority report that in the light of further evidence continually being brought to the committee, and in the light of continued discussion and a general feeling of discomfort throughout the entire committee, there was a need for further, wider public consultation. Clearly, the other parties did not have the weight of numbers needed to force that to happen, so we are where we are today. That is to be regretted. We have said so before. I truly believe that we will be back addressing aspects of this Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) further down the line, possibly in the next term of Government. Whether Labour members will be sitting in the Government’s ministerial cars at that point in time is a question yet to be answered, but whoever is in Government will be looking for the support of New Zealand First and will need to understand what we are saying today.

I cannot let the third reading pass without again referring to comments I have made previously. This Government has a habit of passing laws and then telling the nation that it is making communities safer because it has passed laws, when it has no intention whatsoever of resourcing the police so that they are able to enforce those laws. To pass laws that one has no intention of enforcing is meaningless. It is deceiving the public; to say that the Government is truly concerned about public safety and well-being is, in fact, to lie to the public.

The Government wants to pass laws that sign us up to some spurious UN protocol. We had the bizarre situation where the Deputy Prime Minister himself criticised a poky little United Nations committee, put together by a bunch of Third World punters, when it dared to suggest that New Zealand was not acting in accordance with UN principles by passing the foreshore and seabed legislation. This Government was quite keen in that case to come out and say to that committee: “Pull your head in; we’re not actually beholden to you people in the United Nations; we don’t have to listen to everything you say.”, yet here is the Government once again toadying and kowtowing to a United Nations convention that we do not even need to acknowledge.

What is that convention about? It is about protecting the rights of children, stamping out child abuse, and stamping out the exploitation of young girls as prostitutes. How does that sit with reality? The reality is that any member of this House can go tonight to Manchester Street in Christchurch and find a child prostitute. They are on the streets in Christchurch, and in the Minister of Police’s own electorate, as was revealed in the papers. Does anyone in this House truly believe that the passing of this legislation will stop that tomorrow? Obviously, they do not.

What will stop it tomorrow? Quite clearly, resourcing the police is the first step. If we recognise and accept that child prostitution is unacceptable in this day and age, and if we are truly to abide by those funny little United Nations conventions, then we must mean what we say. We must have a Government that will resource the police—such that they can put detectives on the street, such that they can identify the people who are putting those young girls out there, such that they can identify the men and the boys who are using those services because they are cheap and affordable, and such that they can identify the people exploiting those young girls, prosecute them and bring them to the courts, convict them, and jail them. Anything less than that makes clause 6 of this legislation spurious, meaningless lip service.

I am waiting to hear someone—maybe Mr Tim Barnett or someone else from the Labour caucus—stand up and say: “Yes, we have taken this seriously and we do mean to make sure that this law is enforced, that there will be more police on the beat, that the police will be targeting prostitution, and that we intend to put all those people—the pimps who put young girls out there and the men who exploit them—out of business.” But I do not hear that, just as we do not hear the Government announcing that it will give more resources to the police to enforce the lowering of the drinking age. There has never ever been a time in this House when the Government has allocated to the police force the resources necessary for it to enforce the laws being passed—and here we go again.

I conclude by saying that New Zealand First has lent its support to this bill. We acknowledge the work done by Dianne Yates and the Minister’s attempts to modernise these laws, but we say there is still work to be done. Part of that work involves enforcement, for without enforcement all the work that has been done to date is meaningless drivel.

I am pleased to support legislation that is tough on sex offenders, or anything that increases the penalties. I still do not think that many of these penalties are tough enough. The Minister himself spoke during the Committee stage about offenders like Peter Liddell—and I am sure he would include amongst them Lloyd McIntosh. They are offenders whom I believe we should lock up and throw away the key. Fortunately, there are not many of them in New Zealand. We could probably count them on the fingers of two hands, but the damage they cause is horrendous, and there is no way they can be rehabilitated or supervised for 24 hours a day if they are released. Their history and behaviour proves that no sentence is tough enough for them.

I agree that this legislation is not perfect. There are things in it that I do have issues with. But it is not so imperfect that it should be voted down, and I do not agree that it should be delayed any further by sending it back to the Law and Order Committee. I do not think that would achieve anything. There is too much in the bill that is already covered by the courts. We have come a long way in this country in terms of the way courts deal with sexual abuse cases. Some of the excuses that are given in court are dismissed out of hand by the judges.

Ron Mark referred to the so-called broomstick boys in Taradale. I do not have the case in front of me, but I believe they were actually charged with something that was relatively minor. Their lawyers went just for grievous bodily harm—they tried not to have it as a sex offence at all. I cannot remember what the boys got convicted for but they had very, very good legal representation, and because they were convicted of a sexual offence, I put them in last year’s edition of the Paedophile and Sex Offender Index. I got slammed for that by a prominent QC, who accused me of double jeopardy. My argument was that if those boys had been Mongrel Mob members and had done exactly the same thing, no one would argue that they should not be in the index. Just because someone gets good representation does not mean they should be treated any more lightly. My point is that the judges who handled that case and the appeals agreed with the prosecution that it was the victim who was paramount in this case.

I am pleased that the definition of family has been extended. I am puzzled as to why Mr Tony Ryall keeps saying that it will include everybody who lives on a marae. Actually, there are not many people who live on marae. People visit marae, and they have functions there. I am not very knowledgable about this, but Rātana is probably one of the few marae that people live on. There would not be many. So what is the problem with classifying those people as family? Should children on marae not be offered the same protection as children living on, if you like, a Pākehā marae, such as the Centrepoint community? Anyone who remembers that case will remember the appalling excuses offered by the men involved when they tried to get off the child-sex crimes committed there.

What I see as going hand in hand with extending the definition of family—and it is true that the majority of sexual abuse is committed by someone who knows the victim very well and who has groomed that victim—and as one of the keys to enforcing this legislation, is to have a national database of convicted sex offenders. That list would not be freely available to the public but it would, regardless of whether the offenders are named or have name suppression, be available to parents or people who are in position of responsibility for children. Those parents and carers could, through a bona fide source, have access to the names of people who need to be trusted with children. If anyone wants to take out a loan, borrow money, or get something on hire purchase, they have to agree to a credit check being done on them to make sure they are safe with other people’s money. There is no reason why we cannot do the same thing here.

If people want to be trusted with other people’s children, they should agree to a check being done on them to make sure they can be trusted with children. I do not see why it is such a big issue. We charge parents with the job of protecting their children, and they should be given as much knowledge and information as they need to be able to do that in a responsible fashion.

An article in the Ponsonby area newspaper just this week reported that the principal of Ponsonby Intermediate is having dreadful concerns because of parents not picking up their children on time, at 3 p.m. or 3.30 p.m. Sometimes it is very difficult for parents, especially with Auckland traffic, to be there on time. The principal has been told by the police that about eight convicted paedophiles live in the immediate area, but she cannot inform the parents of those children that they need to be there to pick up their children. She cannot be responsible for them, and we need to be able to give parents this information. We need to end this State, this Government, “we know best” attitude that the Department of Corrections has. Its attitude is: “Leave it to us. We can protect the communities.”

Having said that, I know there is no single remedy. There is no silver bullet that will end the sexual abuse of children. But we need to do more to educate children so that they know that if people touch them in a way that is not appropriate, they can tell someone and they will be believed. Sadly, attitudes in society still show that there is more sympathy for someone who has been falsely accused of a sex crime than for someone who is a victim of a sex crime. Yes, false accusations and false convictions are a terrible, terrible thing if someone gets convicted and they are innocent. It happens in all areas of crime, not just in sexual abuse. But for some reason, and I have no idea why, the public’s sympathy is aroused when someone is let off a case. I think there was such a case in Palmerston North recently, involving a teacher. If he was innocent, then it is great that he got off, but there are hundreds and hundreds more victims who never get their day in court and who never get to see a prosecution. That is especially true if the victims are under 2 years old, because it is very, very difficult to bring the case to court and get a conviction.

I do not agree with reducing the age from 20 to 18 when someone is part of a family. I did vote for the National Party’s amendment to tighten up that provision, especially in light of the grooming clause, because it makes it very easy for people who have a home-stay student, or someone similar, in their home, to groom them, and then, when that person is 18 years and 1 day old, they would have much more chance of getting away with their crime. I am not saying they would get off, but they would have a better chance of getting away with it.

If we are to have zero tolerance to crime in this country, then we really need to deal with the issue of sexual abuse. It is not an excuse, but research has shown that those people who are sexually abused more than four times do go on to lead a life of crime. It is not an excuse, but it is a reason. Sooner or later, at some stage, that child whom we feel sorry for, that child who has been abused, turns into the criminal we fear and want to lock up forever.

I agree with Ron Mark’s very good point about bringing in this legislation without the necessary police resources. We need to have more police in the child protection squads. There is an excellent child protection squad in Auckland that works in conjunction with Starship Children’s Hospital, but its members admitted to me 2 weeks ago when I visited them that if all the child sex abuse that was going on in the community was brought to their attention they would simply go under because they could not cope with it.

I congratulate Marc Alexander on his Supplementary Order Paper on grooming, and I hope that the passage of this bill augurs well for the future when my Sex Offenders Registry Bill comes back before the House.

For the record I want to express the Green Party’s support for this bill. We think that it was long overdue for the rape laws to be updated. The bill does, as many members have said, strengthen children’s protections in that area. As many have said, it is a complex area and the bill is certainly not perfect. We are disappointed that Sue Bradford’s amendment was not supported by the Government. Nevertheless, we will be supporting the bill and we are very pleased that it does have quite wide support in the House.

The Law and Order Committee heard 26 submissions on the Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2), including eight from private individuals, five from the legal profession, and seven from organisations that are involved in one way or another with protecting people from sexual harm. We have heard some harrowing personal stories, we have heard legal opinion, and we have had comment from Victim Support carers in relation to this bill. This legislation is definitely a step forward. It stuns me that there is only one party in this Parliament that has decided not to support a very important piece of legislation, albeit with its imperfections. The penalties for sexual connection, indecency, and sexual intercourse with a child under 16 will increase to 10 years in jail. Who could disagree with that? False and fraudulent representation will be added to the grounds for negating a defence—again, a sensible measure. This bill lifts the arbitrary under-21 age limit for a “reasonable belief in age” defence. New offences include the exploitation of persons under 18 for sexual purposes, and of people for the removal of body parts or for slavery. Clause 131 is designed to provide protection for young persons from sexual abuse within the family.

The family is the one place that should be a guarantee of safety to its members, especially its most vulnerable members, and this legislation goes part-way towards trying to define that and to defend that right. Yes, there are aspects we could quibble with. What the hell is a whānau in the context of this legislation? That does open the legislation up to misinterpretation. We all asked about that, and no matter how many answers we got, we were none the wiser on that one. Rape is still a legislative prejudice, reinforcing the outdated notion that only a man can rape. That is something that I think we have to come back to at a later date. At the end of the day the penalties will be the same, so at least that aspect of it has been addressed. But this bill advances justice, and there is no question of that. The truth is that if we have to wait for the perfect bill before we support it, no law would ever be advanced. We would still be tugging our forelocks, scratching our bums, and wistfully looking out for our savage enemies as we pluck wild berries and go off on hunts. Advances in civil society are incremental. Most people would be happy with one step forward, but this bill is a good 2½ steps forward.

The “child grooming” legislation that the Government picked up was based on a suggestion from me, because this was a good opportunity to do so. I applaud Phil Goff for doing so. Sexual grooming is an insidious, predatory behaviour aimed at creating a climate of trust—an environment, or relationship with a vulnerable child that will ease the possibility of committing a sexual offence later. The advance of technology has exacerbated the problem of identifying such grooming, with the use of the Internet and chat rooms, and of text messaging, and so on. All those arenas are easily accessible to sexual predators. The United Kingdom Sexual Offences Act 2003 was in some ways the forerunner of the legislation that we have advanced here today, and it contains a specific grooming offence that focuses on situations whereby an adult who has met, communicated, or been in contact with a child under 16 travels with the intent of committing an offence against that child later on. So again I am delighted that the Government has moved on my initiative to make the grooming of children by paedophiles punishable by up to 7 years in jail. My original suggestion was for a term of 5 years, so I could not be happier that it has gone up. I think that is a tremendous step ahead in terms of protecting our children—our most vulnerable.

The law change will create a whole new crime that gets in before a criminal actually lays a finger on any child. This is the way it has to be, if we wish to get those perverts before they start to ruin young lives. I say this: this legislation actually starts to redress some of the imbalance that we have always had in the past. We have had to wait for the ultimate crime to be committed before we could do something about it. This measure is proactive. It gets people and criminalises the activity that leads to crime. It is a huge step forward on behalf of potential victims, and a huge step forward on behalf of the law-abiding people in this country who demand to be protected from crimes before they happen. The change enabling the police to arrest a person before any sexual activity has taken place would cover situations whereby an adult establishes contact with a child under 16—for example, through meetings, phone conversations, text messages, and chat rooms—gains a child’s trust, and arranges a meeting with the intention of committing a sexual offence. Anybody who has spent any time with young victims who have been susceptible to the crimes of paedophiles knows just how long and how damaging the effects of that crime are when it is visited upon them. The amount of healing that needs to take place in order to get the victims back into a safer place again is horrendous. This measure is a big step forward in looking after kids in society, and I congratulate the Government on picking up that initiative.

I also want to thank the members of the committee, who spent an inordinate amount of time on looking at the various aspects of the bill, including Dianne Yates’ contribution, and that has to be acknowledged. I am a little disappointed that the Labour members refused to allow a motion by Tony Ryall in the select committee to reappraise the considerable amendments to this bill, but that is a small quibble. We all had the opportunity to really get our teeth into this legislation. I also want to make a special commendation to Liz Butterfield from NetSafe in Auckland, with whom it was my privilege to go and discuss the amendments that were finally advanced by Phil Goff, together with members of his justice ministry. We went up there and had a very good discussion. We spent a lot of time dealing and grappling with the issues. I hope that Liz Butterfield and NetSafe will feel that their contribution has been reflected in the Supplementary Order Paper that we now pass. Their work in advising myself and the Minister’s department, and in raising the relevant issues, cannot go unmentioned or unacknowledged.

I am sad to see that National is the only party that sees fit to block this bill. That is a tragedy, because this bill does go a long way towards helping to redress some of the outdated and outmoded legislation that we have inherited from, I think it was, the 1960s. United Future commends this bill to the House and wholeheartedly supports it, along with every party other than National.

This bill corrects inequities in the present laws on sexual violation. It clearly defines consent and incorporates the intent of my member’s bill. I thank the New Zealand Drug Rape Trust, the police, and the individuals who have taken cases to court that have not been upheld. I thank members of the Law and Order Committee for incorporating that provision in the bill.

The bill clearly defines “sexual connection”. That definition includes male on female sexual violence and object violations, as well as retaining the word “rape”. I point out to the Green Party and Ron Mark—who has been a soldier and who should understand this—the fact that there is a genocidal intent in some rapes, where the intention to impregnate is an added crime, does mean that the word should be retained.

I thank everybody who was involved with the committee. I thank the officials, the Minister for listening so carefully, and all those who have been involved.