Pallett SarahSARAH PALLETT (Labour—Ilam): Thank you so much Mr Speaker. I rise this evening again. Sorry you must be getting sick to death of me. But this is a really important piece of legislation the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion (Safe Areas) Amendment that I rise in support of. Again I find myself congratulating and acknowledging my colleague Louisa Wall for a really important piece of legislation.I am a member of the select committee and I do need to acknowledge again the incredible hard work of that committee. This was a really difficult piece of work and it was undertaken with a degree of collegiality and respect even though we were coming from different points of—well different perspectives. Like some of us held very different views on this piece of legislation. I'd just like to genuinely acknowledge and thank my colleagues from across the House for the way in which we were able to engage and try to create the best possible piece of legislation. The history behind the need of this legislation I think has been well litigated and we don't need to repeat it. But actually I think what's happened is we've been able to look at it in a great deal of detail and I think we've created something that's better. So I'm really proud of the work that this committee has done and I'm really proud of every single member of the committee for the way in which we've worked.I'd also like to thank the 890 submitters we had. We heard oral submissions from 97 of them. So there was a significant body of work in there. I'd just like to reassure people who might be listening that we do read every single submission and we do listen to every single person with respect and honour their perspective even if we don't agree. But I just wanted to say here that what this piece of legislation is not is it's not actually relitigating the right of pregnant people to access abortion care. We've actually had that conversation. The House heard from thousands of submitters over many months and agreed in a conscience vote that abortion is a healthcare issue. So although I understand completely that there are some people who feel strongly that this isn't the case my point here is merely to say this isn't the point of the bill. What it's about is it's just trying to ensure that safe areas are set up around specific abortion facilities so that when people are accessing what I would absolutely describe as a midwife in a previous life before entering the House as absolutely essential healthcare they can do so free of harassment intimidation or threat. I'd also like to add it's not just about the people accessing the care; it's about the providers of that care. It's really important that they're able to go about their daily business and go to and from work without having to fear or be subjected to abuse and harassment.Every organisation it's worth knowing that provides healthcare supported the bill. But some people did say when they were submitting that they didn't feel that it was necessary because anti-abortion protesters were arguing that they don't mean any harm they just want to pray peacefully and quietly and offer sidewalk counselling. But unfortunately although I completely accept that that's absolutely the case for a group of people they are peaceful in intention and they are well meaning the effects of some of their actions are far from peaceful to the person on the receiving end. I can say that there is a need for this legislation because I've seen and experienced it myself. There's a genuine fear in healthcare providers and among people accessing abortion care that the influence of misinformation and rabble rousing can and eventually will lead to violence.This is a live issue. If you have the opportunity to watch on Netflix a really good documentary called Reversing Roe which I do recommend it explores in detail the threats and violence that abortion providers have experienced in the United States. I would say Yip that's the United States. It's not here." but we've seen for ourselves the influence of misinformation and of I would suggest an agenda driven from outside New Zealand and the effects that that can have on what we might hope would be peaceful protesters. But the right to protest is incredibly important and when we were doing this piece of work we were trying to make sure that above all we had that balance and that we'd weighed up the right to protest freely against the right of every individual to access healthcare in a safe manner. So as Louisa Wall has mentioned before we did a substantial amount of work and this is the bit where I am going to get a bit technical and I apologise but I don't really apologise—I love it. We had to respond in a positive way because the Attorney-General as you've heard was of the opinion that in the bill as it stood clause 5 appeared to be inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression. Every single person on that committee takes that opinion extremely seriously and so we felt the urgent need to make sure that we did adjust the bill to make sure that it was compliant with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We have had the reassurance from the Attorney-General that what we have done has achieved that so we don't need to worry about New Zealand Bill of Rights Act compliance which is incredibly important. I'm going to have to read out a few bits here so forgive me. What we've done is we've prohibited certain behaviours rather than having protected persons. So just to describe the sorts of things that are now prohibited in this bill now with the amendments from the committee a person must not "obstruct a person in a safe area who is approaching entering or leaving any building in which abortion services are provided;" which is pretty simply understood. Also they can't "make a visual recording of another person … in a manner that is likely to cause emotional distress to a person accessing providing or assisting with providing abortion services;". This is the one area where the complaint by the individual who was recorded would need to be made because one of the things that we have been trying to do was to remove the necessity of the victim of the harassment and abuse from having to come forward and make the police reports and potentially go to court because whilst there is nothing inherently shameful at all about accessing abortion care for many people it's a process that they would just like to put to bed when it's over—like any healthcare provision but especially so here—and actually being made to bring a complaint forward is something that would prohibit people from actually coming forward when they were in fact subjected to abuse. So the things that can't be done are "advising or persuading the individual A to refrain from accessing or providing abortion services" because quite frankly they have the opportunity to access that advice from multiple different areas before the day when they actually need to go and access abortion care. The people who are excluded from that are people who are either with that individual—so they aren't prohibited from actually talking to them about the abortion care they're about to receive—or of their provider themselves. But the most important thing that I wanted to address I think was that we needed to make sure that people's express need to pray peacefully in what we would describe as the safe area—which I would just like to emphasise is a maximum of 150 metres from the property where abortion care is provided and that's a maximum on a case by case basis. So every single facility or unit will have to if they wish apply for and go through the process of applying for that safe area to be tailored uniquely to their particular needs. So we needed to make sure that the voices could be heard from people who perhaps wanted to exclude private property but more importantly we just made sure that we had the best and safest coverage for everybody. What is completely not prohibited in any of this piece of legislation—and we felt this was really important—is the private peaceful prayer that doesn't in any way reference abortion care. So if you were for example standing with a poster that was of what you alleged to be an aborted fetus that would be prohibited behaviour regardless of whether you were praying or not. But if not—if you were standing peacefully and no reference was made to abortion care—that would not be prohibited. So I feel that that really achieved a balance of rights there. Now it's clear that I could talk for a while on this piece of legislation—SPEAKER: Not much more.SARAH PALLETT: —much more; no I'm going to stop—but I just wanted to thank everybody again for all of the work that went into this legislation and commend it heartily to the House. Thank you."