Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Bill

Members, we now come to our final debate, clauses 1 to 3. This is the debate on clauses 1 to 3, “Title”, “Commencement”, and “Principal Act”.

We’ve reached the most exciting part of any bill going through the committee of the whole House stage: the title and commencement clause debate. And I’m going to start my contribution by focusing on what I believe may hold the record for being the longest title of any bill ever entered into this House. I struggle to think in recent memory of a bill with a longer title, and I commend the member for—you know, if he’s going to get a member’s bill through, he might as well get as much through as possible, right? So you get that into the title clause.

But on a serious note, the full title of the bill is the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Bill, which will become the amendment Act. But I did ask the member whether or not he did consider dropping the Government agency requirement or the Government agency part of the title. I think the title would still read perfectly sensibly if it was just the “Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Act 2024”. I think it would still read the same. I wonder whether or not—my understanding is that didn’t come up at all in the Justice Committee; generally, titles of the bills probably don’t come up—but whether or not there’s a particular reason why “Government Agency” has to be in the title of the bill.

I think if a bill can be titled in a way which gives you a correct and accurate impression of the bill, it reflects the purposes of the bill. It’s not contrary to the intentions of the bill. It’s not a frivolous title. I think if you can make those changes, we should. Because we should always be concise and precise with our words. As one of our esteemed colleagues often says, “words matter”. And I’m sure that’ll resonate with members to my left in the coalition. So if we can be somewhat precise in the titles of our bills, I think that would be a good thing to do. I’m sure the member has got some advice from officials as to why that particular term is in there. It might be to do with the fact that there may be another register or registration not belonging to Government agencies that might apply, and we wouldn’t want to get the two Acts confused. So I thought I would just raise that as the very first point. And, look, I haven’t got any good alternatives at the moment. I will rack my brain as to whether or not we should put an amendment up as to other forms of the title of the bill, but I’ll think about that in a second.

Then the next one is that there’s a very good reason why we changed the commencement date. I wonder whether other members can help remind me, because I didn’t pay enough attention to that. But perhaps I was distracted by other members’ vigorous contributions, from his caucus colleagues who are very much in support of his bill and I’m sure are raring to get up on their feet and congratulate him on the success that he’s had in getting this bill through. But from my recollection, there was a particular reason why we changed the commencement date. I wouldn’t want the member to jump too far ahead of me, and maybe some of my other colleagues could help remind me as well.

But if the member could address that point around the title of the bill and why we added those extra words, or those extra words are in, I’d very much appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Look, in an ocean of legalese, there’s still room for common sense and that was actually to give the police—those administering the register—time to advise the offenders that there had been a change—which is only fair—and to implement the change, and just to make sure it was done properly.

The first question in relation to—well, again, at the risk of sort of we’ve always done it this way, that was actually the title of the original bill that we’re amending, and the bill passed in 2016. So the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act was the original bill. So, naturally, as an amendment, we keep the name of the original bill in there.

So, taking that response into consideration, we would have to make an amendment to the original Act in order to change that verbosity that is creeping into our legislation. So I don’t know whether that would be outside the scope of the bill, because that may turn it into an omnibus bill, because we are not only—no, actually, we are amending the original Act, so we could pass an amendment. We could have passed an amendment in previous parts to do it, but not in this part—so I get where that’s going. Thank you for the clarification on that one.

Just on the commencement clause—and, look, I don’t want to take too much time on this, because I know we’ve had a history in the House of spending a lot of time on titles and commencements, and people use it to drag it out and talk about the history of the bill, and this particular word and title. What’s the definition of “child”? What’s the definition of “overseas”? I know the committee doesn’t have much time for that, and I’d be hesitant about setting a precedent about dragging it on too much, because we wouldn’t want that that to go on in the future—you know, being able to speak endlessly about titles and commencements.

Arena Williams: Point of order, Mr Chair. Speaking to Speakers’ rulings 127/3 and 127/4, given that Government members are making contributions about rejecting the title of this clause, those are out of order because you’ve already heard from Government members that they intend to support this bill. But if this clause was voted against by the Government members, it would fail. So we are hearing here from Government members about a rejection of the title clause, which would make this entire thing farcical, or more farcical than it already is.

Hon Member: Speaking to the point of order.

CHAIRPERSON (Teanau Tuiono): Thank you—let me just speak to this point of order. I’m just reading here the Speakers’ rulings that you just referred to, and it refers to “The rejection of a title of a bill by a committee of the whole House”—I haven’t heard a rejection from the member.

JAMES MEAGER: Mr Chair, I won’t take a point of order on that because I think you’re obviously correct. There’s no question that we’re not going to support the excellent bill by the member Greg O’Connor. The question was whether or not there’s an opportunity, based on the feedback from the member, to put an amendment to the House and change the title of the bill. Now, the member’s quite clearly illustrated why that might not be appropriate on this occasion, and I was about to go on and say about how we don’t want to talk at length ad infinitum about the title and commencement clause, because we don’t want to set a precedent of dragging it on for ever.

So the only thing I really wanted to say in the remaining sort of couple of minutes of this debate is that it is important to get some good reasons from officials as to why we don’t have a commencement date coming in the day after Royal assent. I mean, it is quite typical these days to give agencies a significant amount of time for implementation. One question might be: why was the three-month balance reached? Why wasn’t it six months? Actually, I think there’s probably some reasonable arguments from officials during the select committee stage that a longer time to implement this might have been better, based on some of the other priorities that they might have at the moment. I’m not saying that this kind of enforcement of this action is low priority, but there are always questions about why we pick three months, why it isn’t just the day after, why it takes the full three months for officials to get the systems in place. So I think a response of “Yep, they need some time to get it in place, and this seems fine” is OK, but I just wanted to put it on record that we do need to know sometimes why we want to delay the implementation of the law.

This bill was introduced in 2022 by the member, so we don’t want to wait for a moment longer than we need to get this very good piece of legislation out of the House and on the streets—you know, out behind the desk and on the streets, keeping our citizens safe. The sooner we can get this piece of law into force, the better. So the justification for why we need to wait another three months after Royal assent, I think, is worth asking about. Beyond that, I actually agree with members opposite that, you know, we may want to keep these title and commencement cause debates relatively tight, here and into the future.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Motion agreed to.

Clause 1 agreed to.

Clause 2 agreed to.

Clause 3 agreed to.

Bill to be reported without amendment.

House resumed.

Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Bill and reports it without amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.