Logie Jan; Mallard TrevorJAN LOGIE (Green): I rise to take a short call on behalf of the Green Party to again oppose the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act which is now being brought back to fix mistakes that were made previously. I have got to express my frustration with the time in the House being spent on this and also the tone of the debate as if this is about the human rights of sex offenders versus the human rights of our children to be safe. It is not. It is about what is effective in making sure that we put our resources towards what we know will be effective.Child sex offender registers—we do not have information that tells us they are effective. What we have here is political grandstanding in covering an intention to protect our children. We have resources being taken away from the frontline work and resources being put into an exercise of window dressing from my perspective. We have been told that this register will cost $146 million over 10 years when we are hearing from providers who are trying to work with people who have concerns about their own behaviour—or have already been through a court to be able to support them to change their behaviour—who are chronically under-resourced and are now being asked to provide the private data of those people which they are desperately worried is going to prevent them from getting the help that they need. And then we have this register and the time of this House being spent on something that we do not have evidence will work. That is not protecting our kids. That is not what we should be doing.There were specific points that were brought up through the select committee process around that: that we do not have good evidence internationally where this has been brought in that it has been effective; also that it will perpetuate the idea that strangers are the danger rather than the most likely and the most common pattern of offending which is the people we know and within our families—the people who have been convicted through the courts whom we should be concerned about when we know that we have got a basically 1 percent conviction rate in our courts. If we put our attention and our sense of safety there around knowing those people who are on the register we are missing the 99 percent.It is also about treating sex offenders as a homogenous group. The problem with that is not that it is missing the personal nuances of the individual situations but that actually New Zealand has done internationally leading work on assessing offenders' risk based on their risk of reoffending rather than on the type of offence. It is world-leading work because it is actually grounded in evidence and we know that it will help keep us safe as a society. This completely turns that on its head and goes back to assessing risk based on the type of offence that has been committed which is not real and is not helpful.It is not even that we just do not have the evidence for this but that it is actually going counter to the evidence that we do have of what is going to be effective. We are wasting our time in this House going backwards on something that I do believe everyone in this House is committed to which is the welfare of children. I really wish that people including Government members would just go back to the evidence and put aside the political soundbites for a minute and think about how we can tangibly practically do the right thing to support our kids. It really is not this legislation.Particularly it really does for me go back to the resource—particularly when the Law Society told us when it presented on this that the outcomes in terms of looking at tracking and protection would be better achieved by allowing judges or the Parole Board to make decisions to impose registration and reporting requirements at the conclusion of an individual's sentence. That is where the evidence suggested it was warranted rather than again—which is what this does—just going by the class of offence without any understanding of the dynamics or the risk. Putting $146 million into that is a shame.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Before I call the next speaker I just want to remind members from both sides of the House having listened very carefully to the last two speeches that we are now discussing the amendment bill. I would ask members to focus on the amendment bill—not general discussions about whether or not the substantive bill should have been passed. This bill and processes around it are OK as the substance of their contributions but not whether we should have previously passed another bill.