Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): I thank you for your forbearance in the matter of gender pronouns. I know these things are very important these days. I often think with my teenagers that you know we were brought up to believe it didn't matter who you were and whether you were a man or woman or gay straight or whatever. But for the generation today it really matters so you get told off when you get the wrong pronouns now and I am having to learn it is important. We have evolved. Right I do want to just pick up on what Ginny Andersen's just been saying because I do think that this is something where it's really important for those who will want to dig into this bill and want to investigate it because it is actually very significant philosophically to dig into that victim impact statement further. So I just want to go back: the Victims' Rights Act which introduced victim impact statements back in I think 2003 possibly 2002. I'll just double check that—it's 2002. That was a step change for the criminal system. It brings with it—for those who don't know a victim impact statement the traditional process or the normal process is that once the person is found guilty when I was a prosecutor many years ago in Whangārei the victim's advisor would then work with the victim who had now gone from being a complainant to a victim and they would come up with a statement and the statement had to be quite carefully worded. You weren't allowed invective. You weren't allowed to be needlessly abusive. You had to keep your submission within bounds. And if the person did not do that then the judge was directed to pay no attention to those parts of that statement. There were then a series of processes for the delivery of that statement where the person could appear in court. But some victims are not capable of standing and addressing a courtroom. We did allow some victims to speak via CCTV and all of those sorts of provisions were quite crucial. But we also allowed other people to read them and when you read the newspaper. you'll often see the victim's advisor delivered so-and-so's statement. So that's what we invented back in 2002 but when we brought it in today when we were looking for it and Ms Upston will remember—when we were looking at this quite vital part of the rights of personhood of a victim in this context because that's what it is it's not just about the usefulness of the statement because that is the cloak we've kind of put over it but really; it's an assertion of the rights of personhood of the victim. It was difficult to find where we would put it because the excuse for getting a victim in to give a statement normally is that it's going to be useful to the sentencing process. We don't have a sentencing process here. We had no room to play with. We had to essentially invent an option that the victim would be there at the disposition hearing when the decision is made that the person be committed for treatment. And that in itself has always seemed to me really quite significant and a bold move by the member in writing this bill. It recognised that final piece of the puzzle or that—it's not the final piece of the puzzle; the middle piece of the puzzle which is allowing them the right to stand and have their say in a courtroom that they otherwise do not have pretty much unmediated provided they stayed within those bounds of civility. I would like the member to discuss why that was important to her from the beginning and to people who were the victims who came to her for representation in this matter.That would be one thing I would really appreciate hearing on and I think we all would. I think this is going to be something where academics are going to drill. Academics are going to have a field day with this bill because it is that significant. I certainly would were I still in the ivory towers rather than the wooden building with the faux Grecian—lovely Grecian!—columns.