Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): I rise in support of this bill. As previous speakers have laid out quite aptly it has three components the first—and probably to the public most shocking—being the year and a day rule whereby our law prescribes the time limit or a statute of limitations as it's commonly known for acts that have caused death to be prosecuted within a year and a day of that act having been committed. Now this kind of limitation is normally put in place to protect the fairness of proceedings. It is true that after many many years proceedings can no longer be fair especially in very serious criminal trials. Witnesses can pass away over time memories fade and it becomes no longer possible to defend cases properly. There's also in terms of natural justice an expectation that a person shouldn't be living with the stress of serious criminal charges hanging over them without certainty. Having said that this arbitrary time limitation does seem particularly short especially in light of the advent of DNA evidence and other modern technological advances that preserve evidence and also mean that we can adequately investigate and prosecute crimes over years of time that we weren't able to do previously.New Zealand obviously has—as the Minister pointed out—experienced this limitation in the case of the Christchurch CTV Building tragedy in which 115 lives were lost during the Christchurch earthquake. The police investigation took three years we spent millions of dollars there was a royal commission of inquiry and the police team in charge of that investigation concluded that their case for criminal negligence was very clear. Even though that was the case even though this could have been a case where negligence by the building team the company that had undertaken that building and the engineer himself could have been held criminally liable—which is actually very rare and would have been extraordinary in terms of bringing justice to those victims—the police had to abandon that case under legal advice because of this provision.So the families were let down but also I would argue a very important opportunity was lost for New Zealand to hold to account those who put profits and expediency of their access to those profits ahead of safety and in fact risked lives. We know that bringing a civil case against a company in those circumstances will only result in a monetary fine or compensation and we know that that can be circumvented through a declaration of bankruptcy—or indeed even if a payment is made it's only made by the company as a whole. Criminal charges in that case would have held individuals to account—the individuals who made those decisions who were responsible for the negligence that resulted in death. We could have had a precedent case whereby those types of reckless behaviours for profit could be deterred in future but that opportunity was lost. I would argue you know putting form before function the law didn't work very effectively in that case and so I am very happy that we're going to be repealing that provision and that something like that can't happen again.The second aspect of this bill is again a very arbitrary line drawn in the sand in our criminal justice system whereby immunity is given to spouses or civil partners from becoming accessories after the fact to a crime. It is a very important function of our system of justice that the police can prosecute those who assist in perverting the course of justice after a crime has happened or who assist the principal in essentially getting away with a crime. To say that a special kind of relationship arises in marriage or civil partnership whereby the police can no longer hold someone to account in those circumstances does seem perverse and contrary to the intention of having accessory after the fact on our law books at all. It is almost always going to be someone in some kind of close relationship with the principal offender that commits a crime like that who helps them to cover up their actions or helps them to get away or helps them to pervert the course of justice. So it is a strange anomaly again that I'm glad we're doing away with to bring consistency and effectiveness to our criminal justice system.The third aspect of this bill is something that the Green Party wholeheartedly supports and I do want to congratulate warmly my friend and Labour Party colleague Angie Warren-Clark for bringing that member's bill which is now taken up by this Government bill and will pass bringing our laws in line with the very secular open society that New Zealand is in the 21st century. I was actually quite surprised that blasphemous libel remained on our criminal books to be honest. It does seem medieval and of course it hasn't been prosecuted since 1922. The churches and church community who it was supposed to protect no longer agree that it should remain on the books and in fact our former colleague the Rt Hon Bill English a devout Catholic supported this crime being removed from the books. So it's no longer really consistent with New Zealand culture and our values. It did remind me when I thought about this that my family and I did live under a different criminal justice system where something like blasphemy was still a crime and could be used in a reverse way to persecute people in a very wide range of circumstances in a way that actually limited their rights to freedom of speech to freedom of religion—or to be free from religion which is also an important right that we do want to uphold in New Zealand. I am very happy that in all three of these amendments to our Crimes Act we're going to be bringing New Zealand into the 21st century. We're futureproofing our laws and we're bringing a special level of consistency that was really lacking from our criminal justice system so I commend the bill to the House.