SpeechHon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Can I start by acknowledging—I'll acknowledge the member Matt King for the bill that you've had pulled from the House. It's important to have the debate. I also want to acknowledge Agnes Loheni actually who is in the House tonight who put out quite a powerful statement this morning—I think it was this morning; it was when I read it anyway—calling for men to stand up against domestic violence after the brutal murder of a Hamilton mum. You know I don't think anyone could not have read that and felt moved and feel support. You want people to speak up and I'm speaking up tonight to support your call for more men to stand up and speak out against domestic violence.At the same time I'd like to acknowledge that we do not have as far as I know a separate crime in the statute book that is called the murder of a woman and therefore you get held to account in a different way. We have laws—as members have spoken of on this side of the House tonight—and we have a justice system and we need for that justice system to be exercised well and for there to be the effort put into the causes of crime and to ensure that we have a holistic approach to this rather than a carve-out for certain crimes that we give names such as coward punch and somehow that falls into a different category of where there is a different sentence applied to it. Yet there are other murders and manslaughters that occur of other people in our society using different ways of creating those crimes that are somehow different and treated differently.This is a carve-out. It's quite frankly a nutty piece of legislation. It's unfortunate because if the member had appeared and given a speech in the House tonight that actually talked about overcrowded prisons backlogs in the courts making sure that our police were well equipped making sure that we were ensuring that we were addressing poverty and the reasons why domestic violence occurs and why people go out and cause these crimes then the member would have more respect when he got up and spoke in the House about these things. I guess describing this as being tough on crime—it's a subcategorising of manslaughter a piece of legislation that will complicate the law. It won't work as law. It basically I guess—and you know it would be useful when the member gets up at the end of this first reading and actually gives his summation of what sits behind it that he doesn't believe that judges can be trusted to make the right calls and that there's something wrong with the justice system that we have to subcategorise a crime that should already be dealt with within our existing justice system.So I quite frankly find this really disappointing. Over the last 10 years there have been about 12 cases in New Zealand where a person has been convicted of manslaughter in cases of death caused by a single hit. Wouldn't it have been great for him to get up and talk about domestic violence and about the impact that that's having in our society and where drunken men hit women and kill them? Instead this is about drunken men hitting other drunken men and somehow that needing to be carved out in our legislation. Can't support it. Think it's a wrong bad piece of legislation. Commend his attempt but unfortunately can't support it.