Turei Metiria: Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turei Metiria: Education (Trustee Ineligibility) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:623;Page:18519] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Greens will be supporting this bill going to a select committee; we believe that it definitely deserves consideration at the select committee. But let us just be clear about some of the broader issues around this bill as well. Legislation for individual circumstances that arise is not always a good thing to pursue. That does not mean it is not good in this case but we need to be aware that this bill arises out of one specific incident. We need to be very careful as legislators that we do not just indulge our power to make laws for specific circumstances as they arise. But that said this bill and the issues behind it are very very serious. 
First I shall consider the issue of double jeopardy. If we as a society truly consider rehabilitation to be an important of the process of justice and if we are truly of the mind that once a person has been convicted of a crime and served his or her punishment that person should not then be continually punished throughout his or her life then we do need to give careful consideration to the way that the laws deal with people who have ongoing criminal convictions. Hence the support in this House for the clean slate legislation that was passed just recently. Those are very important issues of principles of justice that we must not forget in our consideration. 
None the less there are always public-good exceptions to those principles—particularly when we are talking about the protection of our children—and here in this bill lies one of those. Already in the education sector there is police vetting of and restrictions on the employment of criminals. For members of boards of trustees it is also very important. I myself have been on the board of trustees of a primary school in an urban area. It is certainly true that board members do have considerable contact with the children in their schools if they are involved in the activities of the school itself. They are around during school time having meetings during school time and at the end of school when children are still around. There are issues of safety. Members of boards of trustees who have these kinds of paedophile convictions really do need to be kept away from our children. 
Many members tonight have said that in their view the first and most paramount concern of any society and of this House is the protection and welfare of our children. While I understand that the many who have said that feel that it is an honest reflection of their beliefs we have to remember that children are not properly protected in our legislation in our society or necessarily by the legislation passed by this House. Other areas of serious concern for children exist where they are under threat and at risk of death and serious injury. For example I bring this House’s attention to the failure to address the issues of section 59 of the Crimes Act where it remains lawful for an adult to beat a child with a piece of hose or a piece of wood if it is considered to be justifiable in the circumstances. That is not a situation where this House is protecting children. Those sorts of issues also need to be addressed by this House. They are just as serious as those raised in this bill. We must not forget that we have an obligation to protect our children from all of the circumstances that place them under threat. 
I might also raise for this House another particularly serious concern in terms of the safety of our children and that is that this country has one of the highest rates of child road deaths in the Western World caused by cars running over our kids. Yet we continually refuse to deal with the issues of traffic reduction and road safety to protect our children from being killed on the roads. 
The Green Party will certainly support this bill going to the select committee and I look forward to dealing with those issues constructively in the select committee. But let us not forget that our children are under threat from serious injury and death from a wide variety of measures that this House still continues to refuse to deal with. We must make sure that we are consistent if we truly consider that the health and well-being of our children is paramount in our lives and society.