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

I present a legislative statement on the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

First, some acknowledgments. I would like to thank the officials for the hard work that they have done to get this bill to the House. I would like to thank the parties across the House, and in particular the spokespeople who worked with me to ensure that their caucuses were able to have line of sight of this particular legislation. But, mostly, I would like to thank the more than 14,000 police staff, who work every single day to keep us and our communities safe.

On 9 February, the Supreme Court made a decision that meant that offenders who were on the sex offender register for whom offences had occurred prior to the passing of the 2016 legislation but who were sentenced after that bill was enacted were no longer on the register. The retrospectivity of the legislation that we had passed as a Parliament was no longer applicable. The effect of that decision meant that nearly 600 offenders who were on the register were deregistered or in the process of being deregistered. What was really clear was the intent of Parliament when we passed the original legislation was that they would be included. However, the Supreme Court made it clear that the clarity of our legislation was not sufficient to ensure that that was the case.

Sometimes as parliamentarians, we don’t always get it right, but this bill is to actually give life to what we intended back then in 2016 with the primary legislation. Our primary role as parliamentarians is to keep our community safe, and, most importantly, to keep our children safe. One of the things that this does is to ensure that those people who need monitoring because of the fact that they have been charged with an offence under the legislation—we want to make sure that they continue to be safe.

The impact of sexual abuse, particularly on children, is a devastating thing, and we want to make sure that that doesn’t happen to our tamariki. The reason for having a register is to ensure that police are able to monitor those people to make sure that they know where they work, that they are clear about whether they work with children or not and are clear about their plans for travel, and that they know their names, their addresses, and suchlike, and without that, we cannot be sure that appropriate monitoring is in place.

The other thing that I need to say about that is that this is not a public register; it’s a register that is just for the use of Government agencies to assist in the monitoring. Now, there’s a reason we need to proceed with urgency. Because, as I say, those nearly 600 people have, in effect, been deregistered, the police will no longer have line of sight of where they are. So if we can proceed with this bill under urgency, we are then able to pop them back on the register, and then the police will be able to continue to have that monitoring function.

But the use of urgency shouldn’t be taken lightly, and I want to thank my colleagues from the Green Party for raising these issues with us. When we had our consultation across the House, I knew that this would be a matter of concern for them. I just want to thank them for their consistency. We understand your position, in the Green Party, and we thank you for your consistency, but we thank you mostly for engaging with the process and in the discussion.

There has been some discussion about the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act as section 7 is applied here, and I want to make it really clear that what we are indicating is there is sometimes a trade-off between the application of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and safety. I don’t think there is any stronger imperative than to ensure the safety of our children, and we want to make sure that the police are able to get people back on the register.

I just want to make some final statements, because this is not a piece of legislation that requires a lot of discussion. It’s fairly clear what we need to do, but I do need to say that we are part of a justice system that allows people to take appeals and have reviews, and that is what has happened in this case. This particular person took this matter to the High Court. When that was not successful, they took the matter to the Court of Appeal. When that was not successful, they took it to the Supreme Court, and even there, there was not unanimous decision-making on that. The Supreme Court ruled three to two.

So this is an issue that we know is vexatious, I guess, and sometimes, as politicians, we don’t always get it right. But what I want to say today is that today is the opportunity for us to correct this and to make this right. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. I just want to start by putting on the record that the National Party will be supporting this legislation, and we also support, as we already have, the use of urgency around this piece of legislation. I do want to acknowledge the Minister of Police for the work she did last week to ensure that we were informed and consulted on the piece of legislation, a very important piece of legislation. I just want to acknowledge you and your officials for the work that they have done.

The child sex offender registry legislation is a very important piece of legislation. It registers child sex offenders, ensures that police and corrections can monitor their movements, and has, above all else, to protect our young children from those who seek to commit incredibly awful offences against them. It has a purpose of reducing sexual offending against these children, and it is to reduce this risk through monitoring—an incredibly important piece of legislation.

Of course, Parliament has—as the Minister has already outlined—had one go, post the registration Act being put in place, to clarify the intent that this legislation was to ensure that irrespective of when offences were committed, this legislation to put someone on the registry could be applied. That is something about which the Supreme Court has, in a split decision, said that this legislation and the clarification passed in 2017 were not clear enough. This, as the Minister has outlined, has meant 600 people have been deregistered, out of what I’m informed is approximately 2,400 people on the registry. So this affects one quarter of the child sex offenders on the registry. This is no small matter. This is something which is incredibly serious and incredibly important.

This legislation which we are considering today ensures that those people are not removed from the registry, and also ensures that those sentenced in the time between the judgment being issued and the day at which this legislation is passed are able to be registered by application to the court. I think that’s incredibly important, because there have been approximately a month and a couple of days, and this means that those who would have committed offences before 2016 but were sentenced in that short period of time are able to also be registered. That will also continue to support the protection of New Zealanders.

The National Party will be raising a couple of questions, and one of the important questions we do want to raise is regarding new section 11 in clause 5 in the piece of legislation, which does mean that this bill does not apply to the appellant in the Supreme Court decision, in line with the general principle of section 33(1)(c) of the Legislation Act 2019. We will be asking some questions during the committee stage regarding this issue because we do also note that the Supreme Court was split on the issue of whether this individual should have been removed from the registry, as well. In fact, two justices said that he should be taken off the registry, regardless of the point of law that was being raised, and two justices said he should remain on the registry, with one justice not giving a judgment on that particular issue, due to the fact that that justice believed that because the law didn’t apply retrospectively in this case, it was not relevant. So we will be asking some questions around whether new section 11 should be, in fact, actually removed, with this legislation allowing for this case to be dealt with on its own merits separately, rather than Parliament also passing judgment on this particular issue.

I think it is important that the House recognises the fact that the individual in this case was convicted of and pleaded guilty to incredibly serious offences: 1,260 video files and 1,890 photographs of child pornography were found stored on his computers. These photographs were classified in the summary of facts according to the SAP scale, which ranks images of child pornography from level 1 up to level 5, and the images in the appellant’s computer included images in each of the five categories on this scale. This is a very serious case, and we will be asking questions around whether new section 11 does need to remain in the legislation.

As National has said, we will be supporting this legislation. We do support the use of urgency, because this is to do with the public safety of New Zealanders, particularly of children, and for anyone in this House—this is something which could affect anyone and their children. As a father of two young girls, I take this issue very seriously and I support this law. I support the registry and support us urgently fixing it so that these people are not kept off that registry. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity. I think there’s a few areas I’d like to outline in terms of acknowledging the work that’s gone on to date to bring this bill to the House under urgency. First of all, I’d like to acknowledge the work that officials have done. I appreciate that when there are issues that need to be fixed quickly, there are a lot of hours that go on late in the night to be able to bring pieces of legislation to the House quickly in order to rectify when there are inconsistencies. I’d like to acknowledge the work that has happened to date.

I’d also like to acknowledge the Minister, who has undertaken to consult with parties across the House before this bill has reached the House. I’d like to congratulate her. While we’ve not got complete consensus on passing this bill today, it’s good to see that there have been discussions going on when there’s a matter of urgency that primarily affects New Zealand’s public safety and also that of our children. I’d also just quickly like to acknowledge the New Zealand Police. I know they’ve got a particularly strong policy unit—small, but strong—and I know that they have done an incredibly good job, as well as the initial work that was undertaken in 2016 to bring this bill to the House in the first place.

We have a bill that was passed back on 14 October 2016, when the Act came into force, and that established here in New Zealand a child sex offender register for the very first time. I understand it was modelled on one that was in Victoria, Australia, and there was considerable debate about how that would play out, how it would be administered, and how that would operate. Sometimes when that legislation is drafted, the intent of Parliament is clear at the time, but, as we have seen in this situation, the Supreme Court has made a ruling that has raised an issue, and that issue was raised just recently, on 9 February this year.

The Supreme Court has released a decision, and that determined that the registration provisions that were passed back in 2016 do not apply where the qualifying offence was committed before the Act came into force but the individual was not convicted and sentenced until after the Act came into force. That looks specifically at the issue of retrospectivity. So this bill, under urgency, clarifies the intent of Parliament: that these people should be included on that register. It is important to be able to do that, as already mentioned, for public safety here in New Zealand.

It is important to clarify Parliament’s intent back in 2016 that the Act would apply to persons who have committed a qualifying child sex offence irrespective of when that offence occurred. On just that note, can I just say that in the Minister’s initial speech to the House and from the other members that have spoken to date, it’s quite refreshing to have no one, for a change, in the House pointing the finger and saying whose fault this was, or saying that there’s some sort of detail that someone can be held accountable for. As the Minister has said, oversights are sometimes made, and it’s important that we correct those and put the safety of New Zealanders and our young people at the forefront. It is nice to be able to see that occurring today.

I think there is long-term work in New Zealand to be done in the space of making sure that our children are fully safe, healthy, and protected. There is an ongoing stream of work in a wide range of areas, and this is just one of them. The reason why we are bringing this bill to the House and why this is such a critical issue is that it is essential for the wellbeing and the sexual safety of children, their social circles, their whānau, their wider interactions, and for ensuring that those who are convicted and sentenced for historical child sex abuse are eligible for registration. I know—as already mentioned by Simeon Brown, the previous member—that that will resonate with parents across New Zealand, to make sure that we have a system in place that makes sure our kids are as safe as possible.

I won’t take up any more time. This is a bill that puts right something that needs to be fixed, and that is primarily for the safety and the wellbeing of New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s with great pleasure that I get to stand and take a call on this, the first reading of the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. Can I just open by acknowledging Minister Poto Williams and the way that she has approached this. She brought Simeon Brown straight in to negotiate and look at a solution and work through this, so I want to acknowledge her.

I want to acknowledge Simeon Brown for the way that he has briefed and kept our caucus up to date in terms of what has happened, and I want to echo some of the comments that Minister Chris Hipkins made and just briefly touch on the fact that the reason why this ended up in the Supreme Court with a split decision is because the Supreme Court felt that the intent of Parliament was not clear enough around how we handled the retrospective side of the charging and then sentencing after the legislation had been passed. But the only thing that I would say in comment to that in terms of my own personal feelings on it is that both the District Court and the High Court were very clear about the intent of Parliament. It was a split decision in the Supreme Court.

So I want to acknowledge the police advisers and the policy team and policy unit that Ginny Andersen referred to, and the officials that obviously would have had to work very hard to be able to identify and ensure that the piece of legislation that we’re now using urgency to take through the House was actually going to fix that gap and send a very clear message—the intent of this Parliament—to our courts. So I want to acknowledge them for the work they’ve done around that. I think that the one thing that brings us all together as parliamentarians is always to try and protect and look after the most vulnerable in our society, and I think that we’d all agree that the children that are targeted by sexual predators would be considered some of the most vulnerable in our society. I think if we’re ever going to use urgency in this House, then the best use of urgency is to pass a bill like this, and we are fully committed to making sure that we pass this legislation today.

My colleague Simeon Brown raised a very important point, and that is the fact the clock is ticking. We do want to get this legislation passed so that there’s not too much work in getting child sex offenders back on to that registry. I think that he also raised the very valid point—it sounds like we’ll get to debate and have a discussion on it through the committee stage—and that is the original appellant. I personally feel very strongly that this person has been convicted of serious child—I don’t know if it’s sex offending. But they were certainly in possession of child pornography, and, actually, they should be going back on that registry.

I just want to say that we stand in strong support of this, we support those comments that there’s been very strong cross-party work and collaboration done on this, led by the Minister, and we’re very happy to be in the House tonight to support and pass this legislation. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to stand and take a call on the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. As the Minister and others have spoken to, this in many ways is really about a legislative fix and clarifying the intent of Parliament. I agree with my colleagues who have spoken about the fact that this, while not ideal, does happen from time to time, and I commend the Minister on her work in speedily responding to the Supreme Court decision, in a way that’s very appropriate, given the seriousness of the issues that we’re speaking about today.

I also just want to say how heartened I am by the support for this bill from colleagues across the floor and the comments about the need to protect our most vulnerable, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Of course, the principal Act in this case is the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act 2016, which came into force in 14 October 2016. This is a bill that amends that Act. The principal Act’s purpose is really about reducing sexual reoffending against child victims and reducing the risk posed by serious child sex offenders. It does that, essentially, by ensuring that key Government agencies have the information they need to actively monitor those offenders who are out in the community, and it also does that by providing up-to-date information that assists the police to more rapidly resolve cases of child sex offending.

So what this bill does—and a few of my colleagues have spoken to this—is ensure that the law explicitly includes those persons who committed a qualifying offence but who were convicted and sentenced after the Act came into force. So they committed the offence before, but were convicted and sentenced after.

At this stage, I always think that when we’re talking about children and young people, and the bills that are proceeding through the House, it’s important to reflect on our international obligations in relation to children. So I just want to speak and reference very briefly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and, in particular, article 34, which states that “State parties undertake to protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For these purposes State parties shall in particular take all appropriate national, bi-lateral and multi-lateral measures to prevent: (a) the inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity; (b) the exploitative use of children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices; [but also] (c) the exploitative use of children in pornographic performances and materials.”

The rate of child sex abuse in New Zealand is horrific, with some organisations whose commentaries I’ve read—they place it at one in five New Zealand children, which is extremely horrific. The organisation HELP estimates the rates at between one and three for young girls who would experience some sort of sexual abuse before they reach the age of 16 and one in seven young men before they reach adulthood. This is horrific and it’s absolutely something we need to address. So we need to ensure that the legislation we have in place to address this situation is robust and does protect these young people.

I think often people, when we’re reflecting on this really horrific thing that happens to many young people, focus on the act itself. But for many young people, they face years and years of psychological distress, stress, anxiety that also follows them through to adulthood. So it is very important that we ensure our legislation is robust, but also ensure that Parliament’s intent is very clear in regards to this important legislation. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak to this bill, as what will be the lone voice of opposition, on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand today. I think that there is absolutely no doubt across this House, and indeed in our good nation, that we do care about the rights and welfare of our children and young people, that the crimes to which this bill applies are some of the most heinous, damning, and damaging of crimes known to our criminal justice system and, indeed, to our society. The rates of abuse are high in New Zealand; we all know that. We have some of the highest rates of abuse in terms of sexual violence and domestic violence, and our children and young people experience both at some of the highest rates in the OECD, and we must absolutely do all that is in our power as lawmakers to keep those children and young people safe.

However, as lawmakers we also have a duty to uphold the rule of law, and the rights of New Zealanders. This bill represents what the Supreme Court found to be retrospectively applied legislation and punishment, and that it undermined sections 25 and 26 of our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. That has been echoed by a damning and clear finding by the Attorney-General in the report attached to this bill. So it is disappointing to hear members talk about the rights and welfare of children, indeed human rights conventions at the international level, whilst we know that this bill is undermining New Zealand’s own commitment to our fundamental domestic and international rights when it comes to the rule of law and to the fairness of our justice system.

So the rule of law is predicated on laws being known, transparent, clear, and knowable in particular to those that will be sanctioned pursuant to those laws. Retrospectively applied legislation breaches all of those central tenets of the rule of law. To be punished, in particular, in the criminal justice context by law that was not in place, that was not knowable at the time that you committed the act, is one of the most fundamental breaches of the rule of law. The might of the State is supposed to be brought into line by our principles of lawmaking and, indeed, by our robust human rights laws.

So to move to the breaches, section 25—which encapsulates the minimum standards of criminal procedure—contains a specific ban on retrospectively applied punishments in our criminal justice system. Section 26 does the same. So we’ve said, through passing this bill at all in 2016—that was the previous Government—that we’re happy to breach those rights. The select committee process in that context, I know—and I’ve read some of what happened there—was clear that this wasn’t a good bill back then. It was passed, in any case. Now we want to broaden its application by breaching the rule of law and further breaching our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. In fact, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act does allow Parliament to breach its laws, but the balance has to fall on what is reasonably required.

Now, the Attorney-General’s findings are clear, and this is where I want to come back to all that’s been said about our duty to protect children and young people. Because the Attorney-General, the Supreme Court, and, indeed, the select committee in the previous Government, were clear and are clear—this does not contain a measure, the keeping of a register is not a measure that keeps children and young people safe. There is very little evidence that it works at all in the jurisdictions where it has been applied. Children and young people are most often abused, in terms of the types of offending that this piece of legislation encompasses, by those who are very well known to them, in their own homes. They are very rarely abused by strangers. So that’s one thing, but in any case we have the evidence. These registers have existed and been applied in other jurisdictions for many years. It’s a measure that we’ve taken; we’ve decided to take it. It’s neither here nor there, I guess we could say, if there’s no evidence that it works. But to persist with it, to lie to ourselves, to lie to victims and the public and say that we’re doing something that is essential to protecting children and young people whilst we weaken the rule of law as a Parliament is, I would say, unacceptable.

There are measures we can take to protect children and young people in New Zealand, and I am proud to have been part of a Government where, last term, with the first ever Undersecretary for Domestic and Sexual Violence—that’s my colleague Jan Logie—we did commit in a Wellbeing Budget a record amount of resource to combatting domestic and sexual violence, including offending against children and young people. That was $320 million we committed to a cross-ministry approach, that there would be cooperation with service providers on the ground, with Māori, with Pasifika communities, with migrant communities, that we would do what we know actually works to keep children and young people safe. That is what we need more of. We don’t need more and more policy that’s designed to make politicians look tough on crime.

So this isn’t a good piece of legislation. It weakens human rights in New Zealand, it undermines the separation of powers, where we’ve heard from our Chief Justice, our President of the Supreme Court, telling us that this amounts to a breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. So the Attorney-General, the Supreme Court, we’ve heard from the Human Rights Commission on this, and we’re doing it anyway, with very, very little good. So I don’t commend this bill to the House, Mr Speaker.

Mr Speaker, thank you. I’d like to start off by acknowledging the work that the Minister has done on this piece of legislation as well as talking with us across the House so that we can all work together as best we can to put through this law. We do appreciate that. I’d also like to acknowledge the work that the New Zealand Police policy team, which I know is a small but very active team, have done on this piece of legislation.

ACT are renowned for not supporting matters that come before this House under urgency. We need to have a good reason and criteria for accepting it. We will support urgency if there is good reason in our mind to support it. And, generally speaking, we don’t support retrospective law, either, but as our supporters would expect of us, we should take every bill as a bill on its own and make sure that we can produce and stand in front of the House in agreement as a party as to how we will go forward. This case meets our criteria for urgency: there is immediate concern, there is very good reason for it, and it is in the public’s interest; it’s actually in our children’s interest.

The purpose of the parent 2016 legislation is, and I quote, “to establish a Child Sex Offender Register that will reduce sexual reoffending against child victims, and the risk posed by serious child sex offenders”. So the Act’s intent, of course, is to ensure that high-risk offenders are on the register so that the authorities can keep an eye on them, keep an eye on their whereabouts and how they are interacting with society, and the purpose of it all is to keep our children safe. The reality that we’re seeing is that there are more and more victims coming forward, with some horrendous stories about things that have happened to them in the past and it’s been dealt with in the future. The register, therefore, is meant to capture the offences that have been committed in the past but are not before the courts until later.

The Supreme Court doesn’t think that the legislators made it that clear—that those convicted in the present for crimes committed in the past should not be placed on the register for the designated time frame. So there’s an essential element that was missed in writing this law, and as the Minister said before, the House doesn’t always get it right with our laws, and I’m going to add to that: especially the rushed ones. There are unintended consequences that often are caused when urgency occurs, and the position now for all of us is to fix this so that Parliament’s intent can actually be realised. And I expect that the confusion around section 11 that’s been proposed will have something to do with the Supreme Court’s ruling, but I too look forward to clarification on why section 11 is in there once we come to the committee of the whole House.

So, while we too don’t agree with retrospective laws, we need to make a mature assessment of what Parliament is here to do, and that’s to make good laws for New Zealanders, and we are not prepared to trade off our children’s safety and their futures against an error in legal writing. These are clear issues where we have to decide what is more important in regard to this law: our children or allowing an error in law to continue. We choose our children and, in doing so, commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was expecting a Labour member to stand.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I was too.

Yes, it’s sort of like Groundhog Day, I think we had the same situation last night. We are talking about a particular bill where members have talked about intent and effect, and that sort of happened last night, as well, on another bill.

I’m here to support, fully, the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. I’d like to start off with a commendation to the Minister: thank you to the Minister for the conciliatory way that the Government has actually consulted our party and right across the House, and also the work that her agencies have done to bring this bill to the House and progressing this bill under urgency. I support the urgency motion, as well. Other members who have spoken earlier have talked about the reason why often in this House we do not support the urgency motion or the retrospectivity of bills, because of the way that sometimes intentions don’t always end up in good effect of the bill. I think that is the reason why we are often very cautious. But in these circumstances, it is necessary and I support the Minister fully on this side of the House, together with my colleagues.

I was rather surprised that the Green Party is actually not supporting this. They were talking about the Human Rights Act and all the other kinds of things, and they’re talking about how they want to support the rights of the children as well, and the very fact that we want to protect our most vulnerable—our children—and yet they are not supporting this bill.

I am actually quite shocked by that, considering the fact that recently the Supreme Court ruled D v Police [2021] SC 2 that National’s 2017 amendments, in a 3:2 decision—it wasn’t as if it was actually a unanimous decision; it was a 3:2 split on that bill; there were some members of the Supreme Court who actually felt that the intention was very, very clear, but it was actually the majority of three against two who said that the intention wasn’t as clear. This is the reason why we need to make sure that this bill—I am putting my fingers crossed, my legs crossed, my eyes crossed, my everything crossed—that we do actually get the wording right, because sometimes as members of Parliament, as Government, we intend for the bill to work, and when it goes out into the real world and the Supreme Court decides that it is not as clear, we have to come back and do this process again. This is the third time that this has been done for this particular bill, and I’m not going to delay the process.

It is one of the most heinous offences that we can potentially face, an offence against our children, our tamariki, particularly in the lewd way that people possess, whether it’s pornographic material or abuse of our children, and we need to make sure that we protect our most vulnerable—and that is our children, who often don’t have a voice. When offences are committed, it shouldn’t matter when they are offending versus when they are convicted. The reason why we are here is because when the offence actually happened before this Act came into effect versus when they were actually sentenced, it shouldn’t really matter. The retrospectivity that we actually passed in the previous incarnation of this bill should have captured all of them, but because in one case it didn’t, all 600 potentially are going to be deregistered and we now have to do this. I think it is a real shame.

I praise the work of the police and the Minister. As I said, I cross my fingers that we have done the job right today. Hopefully we will do the job right today, we get the words right, and it is clear that our intention is clear, and we’ll let the whole world know that that is our intention. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will actually hear our voices. I hope that the legislation works this time round. I commend the bill to the House.

Call number nine is usually a split call, are we going to get back on track? OK, this will be a 10-minute call then, not a split call.

Mr Speaker—and I am grateful to the members across the House. I rise to speak and commend this bill to the House. It’s been my privilege in my adult life to do extensive work in the subject of sex offending. The treatment of sex offenders is something that I have briefly touched upon in my academic life. I also really strongly tautoko the work that the Greens and the Labour Party did last term in terms of the way in which we are tackling sex offending and sex offender treatment, the general protection of our victims, because one thing is very clear: this is a massive problem in our society.

I do want to say something. This is not a recent problem. If you go back to the early 1980s, when we were first doing proper empirical studies of child sex offending, the figures found then were one-in-three to one-in-four girls, about one-in-nine boys. Those remain the figures that we still find today across the OECD. This is an epidemic of very, very long standing. And I want to say that because I think it goes some way to answer the Greens’ concern as to the retrospectivity of this law. There is justification; when we have a problem of this magnitude we need to take it very, very seriously. And one of the issues with this—in fact, I really want to break what I’m going to say today into two parts.

I want to talk about the incidence of child sex abuse and the fact that although we know the rates are so high, we actually still know very little about the actual rate of offending. The studies we have do not accurately cover the full extent of what is going on. So if you look, what we find is that in a recent study of high school students in New Zealand in 2011, about 20 percent of girls and 9 percent of boys said they had experienced sexual touching, unwanted sexual touching, or been asked to perform an unwanted sexual act in the last 12 months. But more than half of them said that they had not previously reported this, and that is absolutely the norm. The fact is that more than half of child sex offences are never reported during childhood to anyone—not to mum, not to auntie, let alone the police. And the general feeling is that across the board with sex offences, only about 10 percent are ever reported to the police. So when you are talking about child sex offences, over half of them don’t come to light until the victim is an adult. This is a massively unreported crime. Icebergs and tips of icebergs don’t come into it.

When we’re then looking at it, you then have to factor in: how do we then deal with the sex offenders we know about? And what you have to look at then is the fact that we have some expertise in this country in sex offender treatment, and we know through Te Ohaakii a Hine—National Network Ending Sexual Violence Together and other programmes, including some in Whangārei—of which I am well aware because I have family members who work in them as the directors of them—what we need when we’re treating sex offences is a wraparound response. We need people to keep tabs on the person’s interaction across their whānau. We need that ongoing, in-depth response in order to help people avoid their triggers, because what we know about sex offending is it’s frequently compulsive offending. If it is a teenage offender—I do want to make this point: teenage offenders are not as much to be feared. If someone is offending in their teenage years, it is very often not going to be something that becomes seriously recidivist. If someone is offending in their mid-to-late 20s, then the research says you really do have to be worried about this person. So we need this in-depth response.

Now, when you look at what the register that we are talking about actually does—and this is where I also come back to our colleagues in the Greens and say this is a muted and appropriate response in terms of its impact on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. When you actually look at what the police register then does, we are not talking about plastering a neighbourhood with pictures of the person and their name. We are not talking about that sort of punitive, unpleasant, and, frankly, unhelpful reaction. We are talking about the police walking alongside offenders to assist them to ensure they do not put themselves into difficult situations. That is the reason that I commend this bill to the House: it is proportionate, it is addressing a serious and longstanding need, and it should go ahead in my submission.

According to my list we’ve got two Labour speakers and one National spot left, so we’ll go Arena Williams.

One thousand, two hundred, and sixty video files and 1,890 photographs of child pornography were stored on the computer of the offender whose case the Supreme Court considered, which is the reason why we are debating this bill in the House tonight. As a mother of two small children, I’m so proud that our Minister of Police has acted quickly and efficiently and has worked in a cross-parliamentary process to address what has been an error in drafting here, which has caused a major problem—one that does not affect many people but affects the lives of a few families so deeply, and I commend the Minister’s work in this area.

One thousand, two hundred, and sixty video files and 1,890 photographs of child pornography is something that all of us in this House should take extremely seriously. I’m disappointed to hear from some colleagues in this House that they would consider what we think is a small and a muted approach to the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to be a violation which wouldn’t deal with these offenders to whom this bill applies.

We’re talking about a small window in time: between the time this amendment was enacted to the time when it took effect, where there were a small number of offenders who were charged and for whom the court ordered their registration on a register—which as my colleague the member for Whangarei has noted, is not a public register—and for their details to be notified to police, and whether the bill applied to them. Now, this bill that the Minister of Police has introduced would fix up this issue and would make sensible in-roads into making it mandatory for those people who were charged within that small window of time to register and to give police their details.

We on this side of the House think that that would be justified in this context, and it’s absolutely needed to provide police with the tools that they need to crack down on this kind of offending, which we all agree is egregious and we must allow our police to make in-roads into this. I just want to clarify, for the members opposite who would not support this bill, what registration actually does. It requires the offender once charged and once ordered by the court to provide personal information to police for the purposes of police monitoring their conduct within the community. It is not a public register. It is not something which is available to their neighbours. It is simply a tool for police to enforce the conditions which offenders have been asked to adhere to.

Once a registration order has been made, the registerable offender is required to report that relevant personal information to police, and the relevant provision in the Act is section 16(1). I’d like to give some more context to that section. It says that for the purposes of the Act, the relevant personal information to be reported by a registerable offender consists of the following information: “(a) his or her name, together with any other name by which he or she is, or has previously been, known: (b) in respect of each name other than his or her current name, the period during which he or she was known by that other name: (c) his or her date of birth: (d) the address of each of the premises at which he or she generally resides or, if he or she does not generally reside at any particular premises, the name of each of the localities in which he or she can generally be found:”.

It also requires the registration of “(e) the name, sex, and date of birth of each child who generally resides in the same household as that in which the offender generally resides: (f) in respect of each child who generally resides in the same household as that in which the offender generally resides, the name of the principal caregiver:”. It’s information in that vein which is absolutely vital to ensuring that police have the tools they need to protect our communities.

I don’t want to stress this point, but as a mum of two young kids, it’s so important to me personally and so many other people in my situation that police are provided with that information, which is so necessary in terms of doing their work. I want to know that police have that information available to them and are able to use that in a way that protects the communities they are bound to serve.

For this provision not to apply to some people simply because there was a drafting error—so that it didn’t apply in that small window of time—would be wrong and I think it is on all parliamentarians here to make sure that this bill can correct that today.

The numbers articulated by the previous speaker, Ms Williams, are as confronting a case for this bill to go through as any comment, I think, that has been stated in what has been a very thoughtful first reading. I just want to add probably my only intervention on to this, and add to comments that were made by Mr Brown around the question about the individual who was the subject of the Supreme Court hearing.

But before I do, I’m struggling with the range of emotions that bubbled up listening to Golriz Ghahraman. I understand the Greens’ stand on principle, mostly, but I also know that in the last 3½ years, Green Party whakapapa has been set aside in the interests of pragmatism, coalition agreements, and other matters where somebody standing in the shoes of a Minister might need to act differently from when they would as a member of the Green Party. The waka jumping legislation is a very good example of that. I’m overwhelmingly disappointed that we can’t have some unanimity across the House on this very important point, because there are times when points of principle matter more than the rule of law, because we are the lawmakers. If the rule of law is wrong, we change it.

Now, this is a much more vexed issue—and I think that was the word the Minister was looking for, rather than “vexatious”. I don’t think she was referring to that in the context of the court discussion. I’ll be very careful in my words around the courts because there is a strong convention that this place doesn’t critique court decisions. But I do want to remind the House that when we were here I wasn’t the police Minister; Paula Bennett was the police Minister when we changed this in 2017. I want to quote her from her first reading speech: “The principal Act does not make it sufficiently clear that registration applies to all offenders who are sentenced after the commencement of the Act, regardless of when they were convicted. Sixty-seven offenders had been convicted [at that point] but not yet sentenced when the Act came into force.”

Now, it is absolutely clear to me what the intention of this is, and, obviously, the Supreme Court was split on that point. Section 6 of the Sentencing Act now just simply will not apply, and to the degree that this is a form of punishment, as articulated by Golriz Ghahraman, I don’t actually see it like that. It is part of a consequence of being convicted of heinous crimes. But, actually, the registration is not—it’s not public. It’s not something that we can go and look at and the police will use. So, in that sense, it’s not a punishment per se, but to the degree that it is, here is my question for the Minister, and I’d like her to—and Simeon Brown would also like her to—address this in the second reading. If this is a belts-and-braces fix because of the Supreme Court, why would we then provide an exemption for one person, the person who, as Ms Williams has just told us, was in possession of 1,800 hideous videos, 1,200 still images of victims from who knows where?

I don’t understand. If we’re patching it up, why aren’t we patching it up for everyone who was in this situation, regardless of the fact that this person took the case all the way to the Supreme Court? We know this was wrong. We know what our intention was in 2017. And I’d really like to hear the explanation, as far as the Minister can give it, but I do think the legislature is required to at least understand why we’re, effectively, passing a law that sets aside a punishment.

Now, we’ve done this in Parliament in my time, but on incredibly rare occasions: World War I deserters, iwi wrongly imprisoned and convicted in the 19th century—I can’t remember the fellow’s name; perhaps Mr Henare may remind us. They were the right things to do, even though, effectively, we were expunging punishment. I don’t feel comfortable at all supporting a bill that does that for a child sex offender. So this is troublesome. There may be a reason, but in the absence of that, I think when we come to the committee of the whole House something might need to be done about it.

On that note, I do join with members, mostly, across the House in strongly supporting this bill.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill, and I want to begin by acknowledging the work of the Minister the Hon Poto Williams. I’ve known the Minister for some time, and I just want to acknowledge her work over many decades before she came into this House and in this House to address sexual and domestic violence, and in particular her maiden speech where I remember she spoke about James Whakaruru and that this is just one of many examples of the Minister putting her principles into action in the actions that she takes in her role in this House.

I’d just like to begin by acknowledging some comments from the previous speaker, the Hon Michael Woodhouse, just in his commentary around this action not being a punishment. I agree with his comments around that, and the particular comment I’d make is that anyone claiming that there’s one action we can take to prevent sexual abuse against children perhaps isn’t looking at the fact that we need multiple tools in the tool box. And this is one small tool in the tool box of breaking the cycle of sexual abuse against children in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The purpose of this bill, as many speakers have noted tonight, is to correct a drafting error that occurred. And I just want to acknowledge members opposite who have worked alongside the Minister and our team to ensure that we can pass this legislation tonight. I want to acknowledge that officials in particular have worked extremely swiftly over just over a month to correct this wrong that occurred through the Supreme Court, and the amazing work that they have done to ensure that we can implement this legislation tonight, just over a month after that Supreme Court decision.

In my previous role before coming into Parliament, some people may not realise but I had a role working for the Anglican Diocese of Nelson as a health and safety coordinator, and part of that role involved child protection matters. So for two years I worked in a role that had been not unknown to me, but where I didn’t have expertise going into the role during what has been a particularly difficult and gruelling time for churches in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly as we participate in the royal commission of inquiry into State-based care and faith institutions. This is a sobering and difficult topic to talk about for many of us in this House. Many of us have friends and whānau who have been affected in this way.

I want to make a particular point about the need for retrospective legislation, just based on my experience as a church member where, unfortunately, many cases of sexual abuse often take years, if not decades, to make their way into an allegation that may go to police or some other form of authority. And this is why, for me, the pragmatic approach, which is to include retrospective legislation, is the right approach. For many victims and survivors of sexual abuse will take a very, very long time to come forward, and that may well mean that we are currently sentencing people in 2021, for example, who may have committed an offence 20 or 30 years ago.

The purpose, as other members have spoken of tonight, of the sex offender register—it’s not a public register as some people in our country have called for—it’s a particular tool in the tool box to assist offenders so that they don’t reoffend. The Police state that there’s around 20 percent of offenders who leave prison that may go on to reoffend. And while that may be a low risk, actually, that’s a risk that I think is a risk we need to take action on and follow.

One of the important parts about breaking the cycle of this type of offending is also to ensure that we don’t see more and more children being offended against, because, unfortunately, the evidence is that sometimes those who have been victims of sexual violence go on to offend themselves. So breaking the cycle is an important piece of ending sexual violence in Aotearoa New Zealand and ensuring that we are putting supports in place to support people so that agencies can work together to actually help people not go on to reoffend.

So the purpose of this bill is very much around keeping our children, our tamariki in Aotearoa, and our whānau safe. While I note that some speakers tonight have raised concerns around the retrospective legislation, I agree with speakers who have noted that in some instances, as a Parliament, as the lawmakers of New Zealand, we actually have to take steps to protect our children. And I’m very, very happy that we’ve been able to work so quickly to write the wrong that came through the Supreme Court decision. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.