O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): I will agree with Mr Clendon on one thing and that is that the original legislation should have gone through the Justice and Electoral Committee which does specialise in this kind of legislation. Without intending any criticism of the Social Services Committee it is not as used to dealing with this sort of legislation as the Justice and Electoral Committee is. I think that if that had been the case it may well not have been necessary to have this amendment bill here before us today. But that is water under the bridge. We cannot go back and change that. What we do have to do is to put things right.But I do want to disagree with Mr Clendon on his comments concerning human rights—not because human rights are not an issue here; of course they are. To impinge upon human rights by creating a register for one section of society certainly is a very serious matter. New Zealand First has a long history of protecting the human rights of people of all kinds. But this particular infringement—if I can put it that way—on human rights is actually justified. When it is justified—properly justified—it is always acceptable to limit human rights reasonably in relation to the harm that the group or person may do. So there is a balancing effect to be put in place here and I think that the original legislation actually does do that. All it does after all is create a register to assist the police and Corrections to monitor the people who are subject to the registration. That actually helps the people themselves as much as it helps the community so I think that the benefits gained in this case by registration far outweigh the human rights limitation that will be imposed in the circumstances.I also want to say this: New Zealand First has an absolutely zero-tolerance approach when it comes to child sex offenders. We will do whatever it takes to make sure that their offending is absolutely minimised and that is why we supported the original legislation and why we will support this amendment bill. After all it is only a system of registration. I think it has got the potential to be effective and even if it is only effective to a small degree it would still be worth having. We must do all that we possibly can to minimise child sex offending in the community and a system of monitoring and registration for that purpose is justified. And I do not think there is any good argument why that should not happen. So we do not accept the Greens' position against registration in the first place. We think it is a good thing and it should happen.After all this particular bill only applies to amend the retrospective application of the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act 2016 so that all child sex offenders will be registrable as intended under the principal Act. Under that Act it was intended that registration would be for all offenders subject to imprisonment to include post-sentence orders relating to qualifying offences and those yet to be sentenced when the Act came into force who would have been registrable offenders if they had been convicted after the commencement of the Act.It was intended to do all those things but it has now been revealed—to my surprise I might say—that that legislation was thoroughly defective and there are in fact three groups which are identified in the bill and I am not going to go through all of them that are not covered. They number we are told approximately 130 individuals. That is a very serious issue. That is a significant number of people who should be under the Act. So New Zealand First certainly does want the Act amended to correct this. It is important that child sex offenders who are serving a qualifying sentence or are still subject to any conditions or requirements relating to that sentence or were yet to be sentenced for a qualifying offence when the Act came into force on 14 October 2016 must go on to that register.There is a need to bear in mind that the purpose of the Act is in the first place only to provide police and Corrections access to personal information that will make it possible for them to proactively monitor individual child sex offenders' risk of reoffending while in the community and it provides an opportunity for the sharing of registered child sex offenders' personal information with other Government agencies. The point here is that that will assist greatly those agencies to carry out their duties in terms of monitoring offenders in the interests of public safety. So the importance of that cannot be more greatly emphasised—could not be overstated. We are talking about the safety of our children and we are talking only about registration which is a relatively minor infringement of individuals' personal rights which the benefits greatly outweigh.We must as MPs be vigilant to make sure that the law that was intended to operate as in the principal legislation actually does operate in the way it was intended. We found that it does not. This bill is absolutely necessary to correct that and New Zealand First will therefore have no hesitation whatsoever in supporting it.