Meager James; O'Connor GregJAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Thank you Madam Chair. Actually it's good timing because I was going to raise a point around enforcement. The member Greg O'Connor referred to this about there being some questions and some discussion in the Justice Committee about enforcement of the provision. There were some concerns raised that we may introduce these changes and introduce these laws but the enforceability in another jurisdiction may be hard to undertake or to enforce. Of course then we did have officials advise us that there are issues sometimes with enforcement domestically. So I would have thought that enforcement is not necessarily a terminal barrier to this bill progressing because there are reasons that you would want to pass this legislation which aren't to do with the enforcement and the enforceability of it.Having the requirements in and of themselves may be a deterrent for the offenders. In terms of maintaining their commitment to any programmes they might be undertaking to maintain the conditions of their release and having some requirements on them to do the reporting process—failing to do the reporting and the consequences of that may be in and of itself a deterrent so it helps with that factor too. So the enforceability is not as critical a point. I wondered whether the member could comment on that because he I believe approached that issue during the select committee stage and had some pretty reasonable arguments about that as well.Of course part of the reason why we're doing this is so that law enforcement agencies do have knowledge of offenders' movements. I had looked at some of the original advice from Police about how the enforcement mechanisms are undertaken. When it comes to non-compliance domestically it is dealt with on a case by case basis. Some of the consequences may be offence provisions but some of the consequences are also contacting case managers and making sure that case managers engage with the offender. Because non-compliance could be a sign that their rehabilitation may be slipping so actually it could be a good intervention point to make sure that whatever programmes the offenders are on based on their offending are being upheld. So I wonder if the member could address that point and just clarify for us his views on the enforceability mechanisms with other jurisdictions and whether that can be comfortably overcome.The other thing I wanted to raise was—just going back to my original contribution not having time to finish this off—with some of the other differences from existing jurisdictions and trying to bring them into line. For example other countries do have quite significant safeguards in place that we don't have. Australia actually requires the passport of the individual to be cited upon return. Now that's not a requirement that we have suggested putting into here but it goes to something that I want to talk to you later on in Part 2—I'll probably touch on some of the implications of section 7 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—that there were some concerns about how some of the provisions may touch on the rights of offenders. I just wanted to make the point that in this part we have not gone as far as some other jurisdictions may have gone. So that goes some way to limiting the impact on the rights.For this part of the contribution I just wanted to ask the member his views on the enforceability of the provisions and whether or not he is comfortable with what we can do at the moment around liaising with our international partners and also whether or not in the future there might be some things we could do domestically to make sure that the compliance of domestic offenders and the requirements here for their travel can be properly enforced as well.GREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I'll just do that question. Yeah look it's important—sex offenders actually have one of the lowest reoffending rates of all classes of offender. There's several reasons for this. One of them is that often they are caught later in life for historical offending so they may be imprisoned or punished later on in life where perhaps some of those triggers for their offending may not be existing any further. The second thing is they're heavily monitored. It's also important to remember that where an offender is under probation or corrections monitoring that will override these provisions. So some of our more serious offenders are still under supervision orders and some of them quite strong supervision orders as well. Bear in mind we're talking about people on the register which generally means their offending or their punishment has been dealt with.I think I've also mentioned in relation to the internationals that this doesn't compel. But I'm also advised or reminded by the officials that there is a transnational crime unit as well. I've seen that the interjurisdictional issues we often have with Australia or other countries also exist within Australia within the states. It's only in the latter years that they've even had joined-up intelligence systems fingerprint systems—things like that. So when we talk about Australia we actually talk about the states. Canada is a little different. Canada has one criminal code where the Australians have I think eight criminal codes. So it's important that we do understand that.But as far as the enforceability goes—I mentioned before about offenders who perhaps go on sex touring. It's important to remember we do have on our statute books—I haven't got it in front of me—if you do commit an offence child sex trafficking in say one of the Asian countries for example you can be convicted of that offence here. In fact ironically it becomes then a qualifying offence to go on the register. As I've been at pains to point out there will be people who hopefully will be caught by that but really—and I do ask the member to think about this—the danger is much closer to home than that. The danger is someone going to a family wedding in Queensland from here. The Australians will let them in to do that; families these people haven't offended. But making sure that they know that we know—I think that we can't underrate that and that's really the purpose of this.