Prime Willow-JeanWILLOW-JEAN PRIME (Labour—Northland): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe otirā tēnā tātou katoa ā tātou kua huihui mai i tēnei pō ki te kōrero e pā ana ki tēnei pire kei mua i a tātou i te pō nei.[To the Speaker of the House greetings and also greetings to everyone to all of us who have gathered here tonight to discuss the bill that lays before us tonight.]Thank you for the opportunity to take a brief call. I'm standing because we do not have representation from the Māori Party tonight to speak on the second reading so taking that opportunity I want to acknowledge the many whānau many Māori te hunga takatāpui who I know who are part of our rainbow community—many who came and submitted to the Justice Committee—for having the courage to make a submission and to come before us to share your experiences and to talk to your support for the bill. This has not been my experience not even in my immediate whānau and so it was a privilege to be a member of that select committee and to hear the harrowing stories that were shared with us. I found it particularly difficult to sit there amongst colleagues—we are the most rainbow Parliament in the world. To have some of my colleague sitting there hearing from submitters hearing that there is something wrong" with them I found that really really difficult and if I was finding that difficult and hurtful I can only imagine how hurtful that was for my colleagues who this directly impacts. So I want to acknowledge all of those who sat through the many many submissions many of which were difficult for us at times and to acknowledge your kaha to do that as we tried to navigate that process and come up with the best piece of legislation that we could report back to the House which we are debating tonight and I believe we arrived in the right place with that.As you heard in many of the speeches already this evening you never quite know which issues are going to get the response that we do from the community. So as we opened up for submissions I was watching social media Instagram. People were encouraging people to make submissions—"There are forms that you can use. This is how you do the process."—so I got a sense from that that unlike lots of other legislation that goes through the House where people have the opportunity but they don't take it there were going to be quite a number. Well when we got the final count in it was 107000—the largest number of submissions this Parliament has ever received. It shocked me that it was on an issue like this when there are also so many other important issues that come before us. There were 107000 submissions with 38900 unique submissions—we've heard tonight that there was a lot of use of the template submissions—and more than 3400 submitters requesting to make oral submissions. So that meant that for the Justice Committee—and I want to acknowledge our chair Ginny Andersen—to just get through the process of determining which submissions we were going to hear from and how we were going to organise ourselves I think we ended up in was it four subcommittees to be able to do that. We had 18 oral hearings to hear evidence from 800 oral submissions. It was a huge exercise that we undertook as the Justice Committee and so I just really want to acknowledge all members. I wasn't there for the final deliberations on the report. I was on the Pae Ora Legislation Committee at the same time but my notifications on my phone were pinging and to have heard that we got unanimous support for the report back I'm really proud of everybody who was on the committee that got it to the point that we're at this evening.You know the statement that I really want to make is that after listening to all of those submissions for and against but particularly against there just can be no justification for trying to force someone to change their sexuality or their gender. This bill the purpose of it is to try and prevent harm—and we heard so clearly that it causes harm—and to encourage instead safe and respectful conversations around sexual orientation gender identity and gender expression. I don't believe that this bill will remove all of the harm and all of the prejudice that our rainbow whānau suffer from but it is another thing that we can do in our proud history of upholding rainbow rights and I'm proud to be part of that this evening. Tēnā koutou katoa."