Logie Jan: Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11663. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): Talofa lava Mr Assistant Speaker. The Green Party is opposing the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill. I just want to put on record at the beginning of this speech my discomfort of hearing our opposition characterised as not centring on the needs of the victims and not being concerned with the needs of victims. Green Party members are passionate advocates for survivors of sexual violence. I am on record many times talking in this House of the number of people whom I know personally who were offended against as children; of the many more women and children I have worked with as a volunteer in specialist sexual violence services and Women’s Refuge; and of how passionate I am about sorting out the system to ensure that they get the support that they need that we have a functioning justice system and that we have the appropriate treatment for those who offend so that they will not offend again. To suggest that we do not care about this issue and the survivors of sexual violence is blatantly untrue.We oppose this legislation for many reasons but the heart of our opposition is actually based on a real commitment to reducing the prevalence of sexual violence in this country and to making sure that survivors and perpetrators both get the right help so that we can reduce violence. START a very well-respected Christchurch-based NGO—it has spent years supporting children in particular as well as adult survivors of sexual violence—did not support this bill based on the experience of its work. It brought forward to the Social Services Committee a US-based study that found “no support for the effectiveness of registration and community notification laws in reducing sexual offending by: (a) rapists (b) child molesters (c) sexual recidivists or (d) first-time sex offenders.” The regulatory impact statement also notes that there is limited research evidence from other jurisdictions about the effectiveness of sex offender registers. I heard the member from New Zealand First saying that there being no evidence to show this works does not mean that it does not work. Well actually that US-based research does question whether it works.We also have to recognise the potential for harm from this register: the possibility—when we acknowledge that we have a 1 percent conviction rate in this country—that people will see this register particularly if it is public and they will think: “OK they are the dangerous people over there. Anyone else we don’t need to be so worried about. We don’t need to make the efforts around having vigilance and ensuring that people know how to report because they are the dangerous people.” In actual fact they are a tiny percentage of the dangerous people in our society because our justice system does not work.The $146 million—which I might say is about three times what the entire sexual violence sector got out of the select committee inquiry which they had to fight and advocate for decades to get based on strong strong evidence—is being given to an unproven method and $86 million of that will come from Police baseline funding when police are patently unable to do their job of getting cases to court at the moment because of resource pressure as well as a failing legal system. To take money from them and their resources to put into a register when we have no evidence that it is going to work is to me creating more potential harm than not.So the Green Party is absolutely opposing it on the basis of the needs of victims. We need to put money into prevention services right across the country and we need to put money into ensuring that our justice system works. That is where our money should be going in the first instance alongside support for survivors. We were given evidence by the Law Society that said that we could do this with some law changes through parole and sentencing to ensure that when there was evidence of risk we could put measures in place. We have to recognise there is the potential that if this goes through and the Law Society does not support it that it may be a deterrent against sentencing people which we have seen with increased penalty rates. So there is significant harm at play here.