Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. A key focus for this Government has been protecting children from harm, particularly family and sexual violence. That is why last year we passed the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act, which imposes additional reporting requirements on convicted child sex offenders who have finished their sentence and are living in the community.

The principle of keeping our children safe from abuse was clear; however, the Act required a number of complicated technical provisions to ensure convicted offenders were required to report personal information to police, sometimes for life. It has become apparent in operationalising this Act that a small group of offenders who were intended to be covered may not be able to be put on the register. We believe the public expects these offenders to be covered by the register, so we are acting with urgency to make Parliament’s intention clear and remove any doubt that these people are subject to registration.

This amendment bill amends the principal Act to reflect the original retrospective policy intent of the legislation. There is no new policy involved. It was intended that the retrospective provisions of the principal Act would apply to all child sex offenders who had been released from prison and were subject to release conditions under Department of Corrections oversight when the Act came into force. It was also intended to include all those child sex offenders who had been convicted of a qualifying offence prior to the Act coming into force but were yet to be sentenced.

The laws that govern release from prison and release conditions are complex, and rightly so. There is a range of legislation that governs how and when a prisoner is released from prison based on the prisoners assessed risk, the sentence imposed, time served, and the circumstances of the offender and the offence.

As with any new legislation, there is a settling-in period, when the application of the legislation comes under scrutiny. This led to the identification of a small group of child sex offenders for whom eligibility for registration could be challenged. This amendment bill confirms that these child sex offenders are subject to registration. It will reassure the public that a wide range of child sex offenders are registered and are subject to the proactive monitoring and management by police and Corrections, as originally intended. It is important we pass this bill today under urgency to ensure that these offenders are subject to reporting obligations, as per the register, as soon as possible.

There are two key issues that are being addressed through this bill. First, the application of the principal Act to those released from prison and subject to release conditions. This issue relates to those child sex offenders who, when the Act came into force, for a range of reasons could no longer be required to serve time in prison but were still required to report to a probation officer and fulfil certain criteria. Examples of release conditions are: to attend counselling or to not be alone with a child under the age of 16 years. The intention of the Act was to link the ability to retrospectively register an offender to the release conditions that relate to that prison sentence. Whether or not the offender has completed the custodial part of the sentence is irrelevant for the purposes of this Act. This bill addresses each of the different release types separately. This is to ensure that all release types are covered by the amendment. This part of the amendment bill will bring 107 child sex offenders back onto the register.

The second issue relates to the application of the principal Act to those convicted of a qualifying offence before the principal Act came into force but who had not yet been sentenced. The principal Act does not make it sufficiently clear that registration applies to all offenders who are sentenced after commencement of the Act, regardless of when they were convicted. Sixty-seven offenders had been convicted but not yet sentenced when the Act came into force.

This Government is committed to improving the well-being and safety of all children in New Zealand. This bill will ensure that a technical issue does not place children at risk from a number of unregistered child sex offenders who were always intended to be subject to registration. It is the up-to-date personal information regularly reported by registered offenders that enables police and Corrections to proactively assess and manage the risk presented to children by child sex offenders living in the community.

I would like to make it clear that all of those who were not necessarily registered have been monitored closely by police, and there have been no further convictions against children due to that monitoring. I want to thank those parties that will be supporting this legislation, and for working with us on this. I commend this bill to the House.

The seriousness of this issue was shown by the fact that the original bill was actually brought before the House by Minister Anne Tolley, and now it has been escalated to the Deputy Prime Minister. I mean, it is not her fault that we are here, because she was not responsible for the primary Act, but the fact that she is shepherding this bill through now, I think just shows that a mistake has been made—quite a serious mistake has been made. The Minister of Police said that no sex offender has been convicted of any offence due to confusion within the original bill. That does not mean that no harm has been done. We are all very hopeful that no harm has been done, but we cannot prove that, and, as we know, a conviction does not mean that something has not gone on that we have not been privy to at some point in time.

Let us get back to the original intent of this Act. What it was was that there was a register—and this is the reason Labour supports this, and I must say first and foremost that we are supporting this wholeheartedly; of that there is no doubt. So we are supporting this. And we supported the original Act as long as the register was not made public—so it was private, and this is what this is about. But the reason this register is in place in the first place is that it provides New Zealand Police and other agencies, like the Department of Corrections, with access to personal information that allows them to proactively monitor individual sex offenders when they are back in the community. The hope is that what this will do is mitigate—you can never eliminate, but will mitigate—the risk of these offenders offending again. You can argue whether they should be in the community in the first place, but I am assuming that is a debate for another time.

I suppose my point is that this Act gained Royal assent on, I think, 14 October 2016. It is actually less than 6 months later, and we are back here actually changing a pretty fundamental part of this. It is a legal interpretation, and the Minister has outlined this very well, but, initially, the Act said “conditional release”. That is a pretty important part of the legislation and, as it has turned out, lawyers—or some smart lawyer somewhere—have argued that, in fact, if the statutory date of sentence has passed, then there are certain offenders, as the Minister has outlined, who are not covered by this. So what has happened is we have had to go through and change the terminology in the Act to reflect the purpose and what we are trying to achieve here.

But I suppose the reason why I have a little bit of disquiet is that this is not some small sort of technical matter where a comma was missed out or phrasing was incorrect or a legal definition has been challenged in the courts where we thought we had it right. This is a pretty fundamental piece of legalese that should have been picked up by the original Minister of Police at some point in time before the Act actually went out there. I am not too sure when this was actually picked up by the courts or by lawyers, or when it came to the current Minister of Police’s attention, but it took a while. It took a while, and I suppose the thing that is a bit disappointing for me is that all the way along this process the officials did not pick this up. I am assuming that Crown Law had a say in this, but the fact is that no one picked it up and said: “Hold on a second here. There is a difference between conditional release and people who are on release conditions.” As the Minister has outlined, there is a very big difference in this.

What we have ended up doing is coming back, less than 6 months before this is out there, on a really important piece of legislation. And the reason I say it is important is that New Zealanders care a hell of a lot about this piece of legislation compared with, for example—with all due respect to my colleague Michael Wood—tax legislation and provisions relating to look-through companies. I mean, of course that is important, but this affects the very fabric of our community, and the fact that this amendment bill is going to be passed today shows how serious this is and shows how serious this Minister takes this. But this Minister is only reflecting the will of the community. We could have a first reading with this amendment bill, like we do with the vast majority of bills. We could have it go to a select committee, we could call for a whole lot of submissions, and we could hear them. We could write reports, and it would come back to the House again. It could go through the various stages, and in 6 or 8 months’ time, it could come out the other side with exactly the same result because it is retrospective legislation. But the fact that we are debating this in urgency actually shows the seriousness of this.

In fact, I could be wrong, but I think the last time we debated a bill right through from first reading all the way through to the end of the third reading was when we changed the excise duty on tobacco. I know I could be wrong on that, but that is the sort of thing we do and what we use this type of urgency for, because we know it has got to be done immediately because there are unintended consequences—well, in fact, they are not unintended. There are consequences that we are very aware of if we do not get it through in a matter of hours. This is what we do in here, and this shows why this bill is so serious, because the consequences of getting this wrong are dire. They are not consequences that anyone in this House will face; they are consequences that people in our vulnerable communities will face, and, worse, they are consequences that the most vulnerable New Zealand citizens may potentially face—that is, our children.

Let us not make any bones about this. We are talking about a law here that governs what happens to what I believe are the most reprehensible New Zealanders in this country—the most reprehensible. These are the people who abuse children. In fact, there is probably a level above this, and those are the people who kill our children. It does not get any worse than that. But these people have done what I think is the most unspeakable act—that is, taken the innocence away from our children.

We are supporting the bill. We are going to support it all the way through to the end. There was never any doubt about whether we would support this or not, because it is incredibly important. But what I would urge the Government to do on pieces of legislation—whether it is tax legislation or whether it is social legislation, police legislation, or anything else—is to just be a little tighter and a little more careful in the way this stuff is drafted before it is even brought to the House, because what we are doing today is tying up—I do not know—4, 5, or 6 hours of Parliament’s time on an amendment bill that actually would not have needed to come before the House in the first place if this had been done properly.

So, just wrapping up, I do want to reiterate that Labour fully supports this bill, and the sooner it is in place the better, because what we really need to do is protect our most vulnerable children from those who are the worst in our society. Thank you very much.

I rise to speak on the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the Minister for her proactive approach. As soon as the problem was identified, she came to the House to get it rectified, which is the most important thing because we want to ensure that our communities feel safe from sex offenders.

The intent of this legislation was to ensure that a register would be maintained where child sex offenders could be identified, and that could be communicated among the agencies so that all the details of those offenders can be readily available for agencies. The register provides information to a dedicated police unit as well as to Department of Corrections staff, which assists those staff to identify and manage the risk posed by convicted child sex offenders who have been released from custody or who are serving non-custodial sentences or an order in the community.

It has been noted from time to time that unless we have got this information readily available for the authorities, the offenders can reoffend, and we do not want reoffending to happen. When this information is readily available to the agencies, it will ensure that we can keep track of these people who move easily in society. The law also already makes it compulsory for them to inform the authorities of the change in their circumstances. When they move to a new address, or if there is any other kind of change, they have to inform the authority between 48 and 72 hours so that the register can be updated. If we do not have this kind of register or information available, then it will be hard to find the sex offenders who move freely in society, and they can reoffend.

The law governs the release from prison as well as the release conditions. There are complex situations that are dealt with in this law. When the Act was passed last year, it was intended that it would apply to all sex offenders who had been released from prison or who were subject to release conditions when the Act came into force. It also specified that those who had been convicted when the law was passed but who had not been sentenced would also be included in this register.

So it is an error that we need to fix, and with the passing of this legislation in urgency, it will ensure that the register can be maintained up to the requirement and that the clarification is made. I commend this bill to the House.

Before I get into the technical parts of the bill, I would just like to retell the story about why I have decided to be a man who stands up and speaks out about sexual violence. When I was the principal of Kaitāia Intermediate School, I heard of 13 instances in 3 weeks where children in the Kaitāia area had been sexually abused. I called a meeting of teachers, principals, and support agencies in the community. There were about 35 to 40 people in the staff room when we had this meeting, and I said: “This is the reason I have called the meeting: 13 instances of sexual abuse in the last 3 weeks.” I have to say that they were not all sexual abuse instances that occurred at Kaitāia Intermediate School, although some of the children were. There was a deathly silence and a bit of fidgeting and then someone finally said to me: “Well, what do you want to do about this, Kelvin? Why have you called this meeting?”. I said: “I don’t know. I just want to blow this issue out of the water. It is unacceptable.”

There was a bit of silence and a bit more fidgeting, and someone finally said: “Well, have you given any thought as to what might fall out of the woodwork and whether we are resourced to deal with this issue?”. I said: “No, sorry. I haven’t really given it that amount of thought, but we’ll adjourn this meeting and we’ll come back in a couple of weeks when I have given it some thought.” But, of course, there are many excuses and many reasons why meetings do not get reconvened and, basically, the issue faded off. I think people were quite happy to not actually have that meeting reconvene. What actually fell out of the woodwork was that the deputy principal at a school 6 minutes down the road was sexually abusing young boys. He is now 50 kilometres away from here—30 to 40 kilometres away from here—in Rimutaka Prison, where he deserves to be.

Also, in November of 2013 when I was enjoying a 2-year weekend from Parliament, not having been re-elected in 2011, I was sitting watching TV when the Roast Busters issue came on. I was sitting there, and our former colleague Carol Beaumont was on one of the news shows saying that this was really unacceptable behaviour by these young men. I thought there and then: “She’s not getting any cut-through. Where are the men in Parliament? Where are all the men in Parliament—the Prime Minister, all the leaders of the parties? Why are we not, as men, or why are they not, as men, jumping up and down about the issue of sexual violence?”. It was there and then, while sitting in my La-Z-Boy at home, that I made the vow that if I ever got back into Parliament, I would be a man to stand up and speak out about sexual violence.

So, having got back into Parliament, we organised the hīkoi from the harbour bridge up to Cape Reinga, walking 440 kilometres in 16 days. Last year we walked seven marathons in 7 days around Kaitāia. Another group walked a marathon around Kaikohe, and another group walked around Ngāti Whātua land just to raise awareness around sexual violence. Sexual violence is one of the greatest inhibitors, if not the greatest inhibitor, of human potential in the country. Therefore, it is essential that we stand up and we do what we can to stamp this rampant disease—for want of a better word—out of the country. Sorry, there are probably better ways to describe it.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: To the bill.

To the bill—we are here debating this bill because there was a mistake made by the Government last year, not some 6 months ago. We should not be here, and we should not be making mistakes that may allow a sexual offender to not be held to account by the law and, in this case, to not be added to the sexual offenders register. I take what the Deputy Prime Minister is saying—that this is not about adding new provisions to an Act. But the reality is that this should all have been addressed the first time around, and here we are, going through this again.

One in three girls in New Zealand is sexually abused before they turn 16, and one in seven boys; I have to make it known that boys also are sexually offended against by both men and women. One in five New Zealand women—young people between 16 and 24—is four times more likely to be sexually assaulted. Sexual offending is responsible for just about every form of mental unwellness going. It is essential that we do not keep coming back into Parliament to fix up mistakes around these sorts of bills—that we get it right the first time.

My heart goes out to anybody and everyone who has been sexually violated in some way, and I just take my hat off to the survivors, who are doing the best they can in the circumstances that they find themselves in. That is why we as politicians, as parliamentarians, have to get this right and we have to do it right and get our laws right at the very start. It is unfortunate that we are here. It is unfortunate that, as my colleague Stuart Nash said, in the previous process somebody, some official, some members of Parliament never picked up the gap in the legislation that would allow some people who have been convicted but are yet to be sentenced for an offence to miss out on being on the register.

I do not intend to speak for much longer, other than to just reinforce what I am saying. We as parliamentarians need to get this right. I urge my male colleagues from across the House to stand up and be counted when it comes to speaking out about sexual violence. Just incidentally, this week is Light It Orange week, 4 to 10 March, which is about domestic violence, and there are elements of sexual violence amongst much domestic violence. I do commend this bill to the House. We do support it. But let us get it right the first time. Kia ora.

I stand in support of the Child Protection (Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. Last year the Government passed legislation that established the child sex offender register. Since the legislation was passed and since the establishment of that register, there have been some concerns raised that it may, in fact, not be providing for the registration of some offenders, as was initially intended. The public’s expectation is that all offenders whom Parliament intended to be registered are in fact registered.

The intention of the original bill, which was passed last year, was that it would apply to all child sex offenders who had been released from prison and were subject to release conditions, as well as to those child sex offenders who had been convicted but not yet sentenced. However, 107 offenders who were intended to be on it have, in fact, come off the register. Those child sex offenders should be on that register, and this amendment bill confirms that.

There are two key parts to this bill. One is that it clarifies that those who have been released from prison but are subject to conditions, such as attending counselling or not being in the company of a child under 16—and the second part of that is that those who have been convicted of this offence before the original Act came into force but who have not yet been sentenced—should be on the register. There are 67 offenders who qualify for that.

There is very little more to say. I am completely in support of this amendment. I congratulate the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Police, the Hon Paula Bennett, on acting so quickly to make Parliament’s intentions clear. I commend this bill to the House.

When Mr Brownlee, the Leader of the House, put forward the urgency motion earlier, he said the necessity was a matter of the potential, at least, for confusion in the legal interpretation of the primary Act—the Act that is sought to be amended today. He went on to say, if I understood him correctly, that when the primary legislation passed through the House last year, it enjoyed the unanimous support of the House. In that, Mr Brownlee is slightly confused. The Greens actually opposed the legislation.

To be fair, we did support the bill going to the select committee. We supported the bill at its first reading, to go to the select committee. We did that because—I would agree with the points made by Mr Nash and others—sexual offending against children is probably one of the most abhorrent forms of offending in the eyes and hearts of New Zealanders generally. We recognise that. The stated purpose of the primary Act was to make our children safer from people who would predate on them in a sexual way. The Greens entered into that with goodwill and with an open mind, willing to listen to the arguments made by experts, by submitters, and the like. We went through the select committee process, and having heard from those experts, having heard from the communities, and having heard from people best positioned to give a clear, evidence-based analysis of the legislation—the bill as it was then—we determined that in fact the legislation would not make our children safer, and for that reason we opposed it.

I think it is interesting that it has been identified that we are here today, not many months after the bill received the Royal assent, to correct an error. When the primary legislation, the bill as it was then, had its first reading in September 2015, there was some surprise in the House when the Minister—if I recall correctly, Minister Tolley—presented the bill and indicated her intention to send the bill to the Social Services Committee. That genuinely puzzled a number of us, and certainly the Greens commented on it. Again, as I recall, Jacinda Ardern, for Labour, also questioned at some length why the bill had been sent to the Social Services Committee.

The parliamentary website tells us that the Social Services Committee considers matters related to housing, senior citizens, social development, veterans’ affairs, and Work and Income support. We struggled at the time—and we continue to struggle—to understand why the Social Services Committee, with that mandate across those portfolio areas, ought to be considering a bill that was clearly a justice bill. After all, it was imposing penalties, conditions, and the like on people who had offended against children. I am normally far too modest to quote myself, but I will on this occasion.

💬 Hon Jacqui Dean: Oh, go on then.

Thank you, Jacqui; I will. In the first reading of that bill, I made the point that “it is a genuine concern that committees build up a level of expertise and experience in their area around specific matters of interest. The Law and Order Committee and the Justice and Electoral Committee are accustomed to working on legislation around offending, around courts, around corrections, and with police,”. We expressed concern. I said then: “I really am puzzled as to why you would not send it to one of those committees.” I do wonder. Had the bill—18 months ago, or whenever it was—gone to a more appropriate committee, advised by officials with clear and current expertise in these matters, we might not be here in the House today trying to undo the error that has occurred, or the oversight; call it what you will.

This bill we are looking at today seeks, in effect, to broaden the net. The intent of the Government at the time was to ensure that a certain group of offenders were captured by the provisions of the legislation, that they would suffer the penalties imposed, and that they would be obliged to go on to this register, with all of the implications inherent in that. For that reason, I think that it is worth again looking back to our objections to the original bill, because, in a sense, this is simply compounding what we see as the harm that that legislation will do.

One of our first objections to the primary legislation was that there was very clear guidance from both the regulatory impact statement and from the Attorney-General, in the section 7 New Zealand Bill of Rights Act report, which said that the primary legislation—the Act, as it is now—was actually based on very thin evidence indeed that registers are effective in reducing reoffending and improving public safety, specifically the safety of our children. That was very thin evidence indeed, and that became more apparent through the course of the select committee submissions.

A larger concern, in terms of human rights concerns, is that the Attorney-General’s report found that the bill, as it was prior to becoming an Act, was unjustifiably inconsistent with two sections of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—those being section 9, the right not to be subject to disproportionately severe punishment or treatment, and section 26 of the same Act, the right not to be punished multiple times for the same offence, and the fact that the bill had some retrospective application of requirements. All of those were deemed at the time by the Attorney-General to be unjustifiably inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. And by expanding the catchment, in effect, of the legislation today, I think we are compounding those errors of passing legislation that is unjustifiably inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, as this bill most certainly is.

At the time the Law Society also commented on the efficacy—or otherwise, rather—of sexual offending registers. They pointed out that the literature available identified significant adverse impacts arising from registers, including such things as perpetuating the idea that the most likely offenders against children are strangers—the old “stranger danger” concern or accusation. Undoubtedly, those sorts of offenses do occur, but they are a very small part of the overall suite, if I could call it that, of sexual offending. Sadly, most often sexual offenders against children are, very sadly, known to those children. They are often close family members, people in the neighbourhood, or people who are trusted by the families of those children, and that, of course, makes the offending all the more abhorrent. But the notion that we should put these people’s names on a list and thereby ensure they do not reoffend actually perpetuated the myth that, most often, children were at risk from strangers.

The Law Society went on to say that it re-stigmatised sexual offenders. There were claims made from some quarters at the time that sexual offenders can never be redeemed, can never be cured, and can never have their behaviour altered permanently in such ways that they do not reoffend. That is fundamentally wrong and untrue. There is ample evidence that sexual offenders can resile from that offending, that they can come to a realisation of the danger and the impact of their offending, and that they can make a personal commitment to no longer offend. There are numerous cases where people have made that commitment to themselves and are properly supported within communities—they can become people we can actually trust to live in our communities. The bill that we passed—the Act—completely overlooked the reality that people can actually come back from that offending.

The Law Society at the time also objected to the fact that this legislation sort of creates this imaginary homogenous group of offenders. In fact, sexual offenders, like all other offenders, are individuals. They are unique in terms of the drivers and the reasons they offend, their personal backgrounds, their attitudes, and the like, and to suggest that some sort of blanket rule is going to somehow manage or deal with that offending is simply not based on any evidence that we could find at the time or since then.

The Greens will continue to oppose this amendment legislation, consistent with our opposition to the original legislation. Thank you.

I will agree with Mr Clendon on one thing, and that is that the original legislation should have gone through the Justice and Electoral Committee, which does specialise in this kind of legislation. Without intending any criticism of the Social Services Committee, it is not as used to dealing with this sort of legislation as the Justice and Electoral Committee is. I think that if that had been the case, it may well not have been necessary to have this amendment bill here before us today. But that is water under the bridge. We cannot go back and change that. What we do have to do is to put things right.

But I do want to disagree with Mr Clendon on his comments concerning human rights—not because human rights are not an issue here; of course they are. To impinge upon human rights by creating a register for one section of society certainly is a very serious matter. New Zealand First has a long history of protecting the human rights of people of all kinds. But this particular infringement—if I can put it that way—on human rights is actually justified. When it is justified—properly justified—it is always acceptable to limit human rights reasonably in relation to the harm that the group or person may do. So there is a balancing effect to be put in place here, and I think that the original legislation actually does do that. All it does, after all, is create a register to assist the police and Corrections to monitor the people who are subject to the registration. That actually helps the people themselves as much as it helps the community, so I think that the benefits gained, in this case by registration, far outweigh the human rights limitation that will be imposed in the circumstances.

I also want to say this: New Zealand First has an absolutely zero-tolerance approach when it comes to child sex offenders. We will do whatever it takes to make sure that their offending is absolutely minimised, and that is why we supported the original legislation and why we will support this amendment bill. After all, it is only a system of registration. I think it has got the potential to be effective, and even if it is only effective to a small degree, it would still be worth having. We must do all that we possibly can to minimise child sex offending in the community, and a system of monitoring and registration for that purpose is justified. And I do not think there is any good argument why that should not happen. So we do not accept the Greens’ position against registration in the first place. We think it is a good thing and it should happen.

After all, this particular bill only applies to amend the retrospective application of the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act 2016 so that all child sex offenders will be registrable as intended under the principal Act. Under that Act, it was intended that registration would be for all offenders subject to imprisonment, to include post-sentence orders relating to qualifying offences and those yet to be sentenced when the Act came into force who would have been registrable offenders if they had been convicted after the commencement of the Act.

It was intended to do all those things, but it has now been revealed—to my surprise, I might say—that that legislation was thoroughly defective and there are, in fact, three groups, which are identified in the bill, and I am not going to go through all of them, that are not covered. They number, we are told, approximately 130 individuals. That is a very serious issue. That is a significant number of people who should be under the Act. So New Zealand First certainly does want the Act amended to correct this. It is important that child sex offenders who are serving a qualifying sentence or are still subject to any conditions or requirements relating to that sentence or were yet to be sentenced for a qualifying offence when the Act came into force on 14 October 2016 must go on to that register.

There is a need to bear in mind that the purpose of the Act is, in the first place, only to provide police and Corrections access to personal information that will make it possible for them to proactively monitor individual child sex offenders’ risk of reoffending while in the community, and it provides an opportunity for the sharing of registered child sex offenders’ personal information with other Government agencies. The point here is that that will assist greatly those agencies to carry out their duties in terms of monitoring offenders in the interests of public safety. So the importance of that cannot be more greatly emphasised—could not be overstated. We are talking about the safety of our children and we are talking only about registration, which is a relatively minor infringement of individuals’ personal rights, which the benefits greatly outweigh.

We must, as MPs, be vigilant to make sure that the law that was intended to operate as in the principal legislation actually does operate in the way it was intended. We found that it does not. This bill is absolutely necessary to correct that, and New Zealand First will therefore have no hesitation whatsoever in supporting it.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this bill. The subject matter is one of the most complex matters that our society faces on how to deal with this situation, balancing the concerns of our communities with the rights of people who have been imprisoned for their actions yet want to go on to continue to live in society.

Having these registers is important because it enables our communities to be protected. It also enables those people who are, for whatever reason, offenders or who have been offenders and have the propensity to offend again in the future to have around them the observation and support that would stop them from reoffending and thereby be able to live more freely in our society.

Like a number of MPs—perhaps many MPs—I have had constituents come to me who have become aware of sexual offenders living in their neighbourhood. Without the jurisdiction and the observation and the work of Government agencies to ensure that those people behave and live in appropriate ways, those families often feel that their homes become a prison.

It is important to realise in this very complex area that there is a balancing of rights. This piece of legislation says the young and the innocent should have the balance of rights go their way. What this amendment bill is doing today is picking up a couple of areas that have been identified as needing attention and needing work, because out of all the people on this register—and there are over 1,600 people—there is nearly 10 percent, or 107 people, who are not on this register and ought to be. So what this bill is doing is attending to that. I think, at times, that these sorts of things happen through the passage of legislation, and it is important and imperative for this House to address that today. Thank you.

I rise to take a short call on behalf of the Green Party to again oppose the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act, which is now being brought back to fix mistakes that were made previously. I have got to express my frustration with the time in the House being spent on this and also the tone of the debate, as if this is about the human rights of sex offenders versus the human rights of our children to be safe. It is not. It is about what is effective in making sure that we put our resources towards what we know will be effective.

Child sex offender registers—we do not have information that tells us they are effective. What we have here is political grandstanding in covering an intention to protect our children. We have resources being taken away from the frontline work and resources being put into an exercise of window dressing, from my perspective. We have been told that this register will cost $146 million over 10 years, when we are hearing from providers who are trying to work with people who have concerns about their own behaviour—or have already been through a court, to be able to support them to change their behaviour—who are chronically under-resourced and are now being asked to provide the private data of those people, which they are desperately worried is going to prevent them from getting the help that they need. And then we have this register and the time of this House being spent on something that we do not have evidence will work. That is not protecting our kids. That is not what we should be doing.

There were specific points that were brought up through the select committee process around that: that we do not have good evidence internationally where this has been brought in that it has been effective; also, that it will perpetuate the idea that strangers are the danger rather than the most likely and the most common pattern of offending, which is the people we know and within our families—the people who have been convicted through the courts whom we should be concerned about, when we know that we have got a, basically, 1 percent conviction rate in our courts. If we put our attention and our sense of safety there, around knowing those people who are on the register, we are missing the 99 percent.

It is also about treating sex offenders as a homogenous group. The problem with that is not that it is missing the personal nuances of the individual situations but that, actually, New Zealand has done internationally leading work on assessing offenders’ risk based on their risk of reoffending rather than on the type of offence. It is world-leading work because it is actually grounded in evidence, and we know that it will help keep us safe as a society. This completely turns that on its head and goes back to assessing risk based on the type of offence that has been committed, which is not real and is not helpful.

It is not even that we just do not have the evidence for this, but that it is actually going counter to the evidence that we do have of what is going to be effective. We are wasting our time in this House, going backwards on something that, I do believe, everyone in this House is committed to, which is the welfare of children. I really wish that people, including Government members, would just go back to the evidence and put aside the political soundbites for a minute and think about how we can tangibly, practically do the right thing to support our kids. It really is not this legislation.

Particularly, it really does, for me, go back to the resource—particularly when the Law Society told us, when it presented on this, that the outcomes in terms of looking at tracking and protection would be better achieved by allowing judges or the Parole Board to make decisions to impose registration and reporting requirements at the conclusion of an individual’s sentence. That is where the evidence suggested it was warranted, rather than again—which is what this does—just going by the class of offence without any understanding of the dynamics or the risk. Putting $146 million into that is a shame.

Before I call the next speaker, I just want to remind members from both sides of the House, having listened very carefully to the last two speeches, that we are now discussing the amendment bill. I would ask members to focus on the amendment bill—not general discussions about whether or not the substantive bill should have been passed. This bill and processes around it are OK as the substance of their contributions, but not whether we should have previously passed another bill.

I do want to support some of what Jan was saying, because it is frustrating that we are now back here discussing an amendment to legislation we just recently had in the House given that there was lots of debate on that original legislation. There was lots of frustration for those of us who were on the Social Services Committee at the time. We were thinking that it was not the most appropriate committee for that legislation to be in in the first place. I do wonder whether or not we would be in this position now if it had gone to the right select committee in the first place.

It is interesting that it is the Minister of Police who is pushing for this amendment when it was the Minister for Social Development who dealt with the original legislation. There is a breakdown there, and we in the House have to acknowledge—I think very fairly—that this is reflective of the shambles that that Government is in when it comes to dealing with matters in this House. We should not be back here less than 6 months later, I think, making amendments because a bill was not dealt with appropriately to begin with—mainly, I think, because it was not sent to the right select committee initially.

We did support the original legislation, and we will be supporting the amendment legislation that we have in front of us. We are supporting the amendment legislation because there has been a stuff-up here and it has to be fixed. Essentially, the bill is amending the retrospective application of the 2016 legislation so that all relevant child sex offenders will be registerable under the Act as intended. Specifically, the bill states: “The Act was intended to provide retrospective provisions that, at the commencement of the Act, would provide for registration of all offenders subject to sentences of imprisonment or post-sentence orders relating to qualifying offences, and those yet to be sentenced when the Act came into force, who would have been registrable offenders if they had been convicted after the commencement of the Act.” The additional groups that have been added are “child sex offenders serving short-term sentences (2 years or less imprisonment) who had reached their statutory release date before 14 October 2016”—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member. Reading the explanatory note of the bill is actually not part of the debate.

OK, sorry—I was leading somewhere, Mr Assistant Speaker. Most notably, on the additional groups that I was touching on, it appears that the National Government failed—in the original legislation—to include many people who were sentenced before the Act came into place, and any child sex offender who was no longer serving their sentence but still subject to release conditions. Release conditions are things like residential restrictions, not being able to go near certain places or associate with certain people, or being able to work only in certain areas—essentially, the conditions that serious sex offenders are on for most, if not all, of their life post-release from prison.

We do support this amendment legislation. I have to reiterate some of the frustrations that the previous speaker—that being Jan Logie—did discuss. The original legislation caused frustrations for many of us in the House because of the fact that we did feel that resource could be spent better in other places to actually address what the legislation’s intention is, which is managing the risk posed by serious child sex offenders and protecting our children from harm. We did feel that $146 million over 10 years could have been spent in better places.

But today we are dealing with an amendment bill. Going back to my original point, I just want to state that we would not be in this position if the Government had sent this bill to the correct select committee rather than sending it to the Social Services Committee, which was not the appropriate place for it to be considered in the first place. And so here we are, back in the House less than 6 months later, making amendments because of mistakes in the bill that were overlooked. Thank you.

Well, we do go around the garden on this thing, do we not? It is a pretty simple issue. Of course, the Minister, when she introduced this amendment bill this afternoon, stated that there are no changes to the intention of the original legislation. That is quite clearly the case. We are putting some amendments through because the interpretation of the intention was not necessarily how we wanted it to be. I think that is very simple. It could have been picked up by any member of the Social Services Committee—or, in fact, in the House during the Committee stage or during the readings of the legislation—so I think it is very unfair to blame the Government for that when everyone had the opportunity to have a look at the issue that has now arisen. I have got a great deal of pleasure in commending this amendment bill to the House, and may it get through very quickly.

I spoke on the original legislation when it came to the House, and I can recall the fulsome debates that we had—and some of them have been relitigated in the House tonight. But there was lots of debate around the necessity for a register and the cost, and, as parties, we were able to articulate our particular positions and why we thought it was important or not to have a sex offender register.

I also recall that, at the time, many of us were quoting a very real experience that was occurring in our community, in that there was a sex offender who had been released into the Māngere area. This was used as an example, to demonstrate the absolute heightened sense of fear and insecurity that those parents felt about the location of that person within their community—within the vicinity, I think, of a school or a preschool at the time.

I bring this up because there is nothing that is more important to us, as members of Parliament, than ensuring the safety of our people. Public safety has got to be one of the most paramount areas of concern to us, and the safety of children is at the top of that particular list. We must ensure that we debate these matters to the satisfaction of the people of New Zealand, so that they feel comfortable and confident that their legislators are getting this absolutely right.

We have heard that the primary legislation as it was passed has meant that there are, in effect, potentially 107 sex offenders who are not eligible to be on the sex offender register. That must cause a great deal of anxiety for some communities—those communities that expressed concern during the discussion of the primary piece of legislation—and we cannot ignore those concerns. We cannot dismiss them, despite the fact that we are back in the House to fix that up, because it actually speaks to the original angst that sat behind the legislation and was expressed by many parties in the House.

So what is it that we are actually doing here today? We are here to fix up that piece of legislation, to incorporate those people who were originally missed out of the original legislation—those sex offenders serving a qualifying sentence who are still subject to conditions or requirements relating to that sentence or were yet to be sentenced for a qualifying offence under the Act. The date of the Act—14 October 2016—is an important feature of that because there were people who were sentenced prior to that date and people who were sentenced after that date who were not captured by the original legislation, which is why we are here today fixing this up. So I just want to reiterate my first point, which is that this is about public safety and ensuring that we capture those 107 offenders who are not currently on the legislation, as we are required to do.

The second point I want to make is that we have argued and debated already in this first reading about why we are actually here in the first place fixing up Government legislation, and whether the Social Services Committee was the most appropriate place for the legislation to be examined. That may or may not be the case, but it does speak to the requirement that we have to examine very closely each and every word, nuance, and piece of text that this legislation is seeking to correct, because it could have the impact of detaining somebody—you know, restricting somebody’s freedom, restricting their ability to be active in the community, as this piece of legislation will do.

So we must actually call upon ourselves to examine how we examine legislation, whether it is in the select committee process or when we are examining legislation as part of the Committee of the whole House. We should actually take some responsibility to ensure that we look at legislation really closely—that is our job—but it also speaks to the suitability for the Minister for Social Development actually being responsible for this piece of legislation, because the original primary legislation actually had three components to it. Not only was it about social development but it was also about the sharing of information between Housing New Zealand and the Ministry of Social Development, and it was also about the impacts of justice and the requirements for the police to monitor people who are on the register. So my point in that is that there were three primary agencies who were involved in the development of the legislation, and I do agree that perhaps the examination should have gone to the Justice and Electoral Committee or to the Law and Order Committee. There is a significant aspect of the bill that sat in that jurisdiction, but there were also the implications around social development and housing within it.

I just want to finish by making a point about urgency. Now that we are in urgency, wanting to correct this piece of legislation, we should actually take the time to make sure that we get this piece of legislation absolutely right. I know there was some talk about truncating the process. We will not be able to actually allow members of the public to examine this. I guess, in many ways, that is kind of appropriate, but I just want to go back to my previous point—that in the examination of the primary legislation something was missed. Not only was it missed, not only are we doing a tidy-up but we are actually inserting clauses that were missed completely. So it is absolutely critical that we take the time during the Committee of the whole House on this piece of legislation to make sure that we get everything in there that we should, so that we are not coming back here with other people—107 sex offenders; I find that number actually quite staggering considering the requirement of the primary legislation. But I am hopeful that we will actually examine this legislation fully and that we are not having to come back and do another fix-up in the future.

I rise in full support of this amendment bill, which is clarifying this House’s intent when it passed the parent Act—the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act—and so we should take urgency to correct it. It was always this House’s intent that all sex offenders, where there are conditions to their probation, be included in the Act. This is a public safety bill. The protection of children from these predators is of the utmost importance. Therefore, we must take the time to clarify this House’s intention that those who had already been released from prison and were subject to release conditions when the original Act came into force should be on the register.

Further, this bill clarifies that those who were convicted of a qualifying offence before the original Act came into force but were not yet sentenced should be included on the register. That is so that the specialist register team can keep an eye on those offenders and can monitor their whereabouts, so that we can understand what they are doing.

As a colleague opposite said, this also acts as a deterrent to those child sex offenders when they are based in the community. I took the opportunity to visit Community Probation and Psychological Services, and I talked to some of the probation officers to hear some of their experiences in dealing with those offenders. That was certainly one of the messages that came through—that those offenders feel, after being monitored, that they have a conscience on their shoulders. They are aware that they must stay within the conditions that they are given on their probation, and that, therefore, acts as a deterrent.

As I said before, preventing the harming of children is of the utmost importance, and, therefore, we should take the time to clarify the parent Act. We should take the time to make very clear to the public what we intended: to keep those predators on a register so that they can be monitored. With that, I commend this bill to the House.