Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a privilege to be standing here this afternoon speaking about a bill which has the potential to change the way the legal system deals with victims of sexual violence and it's something that no one should have to encounter. As Jan Logie said before and I commend Jan for the long time she's spent on this work this has been a long time coming—and it has been a long time coming. I would also note that the Hon Amy Adams and Andrew Little have worked very well together in this space in the past.We have taken such a long time to get here; it's really important that we get this right. I haven't previously been involved in the select committee or working on this bill and I took a lot out of the speech from Ginny Andersen because it's always very good when people have been on a select committee to get up and give an account that you have given to us this afternoon in terms of what you went through in the select committee.So National supports this bill to the committee of the whole House. We support the vast majority of measures in this bill and we really do want to support it but we do have issues with two of the measures in the bill and they're the issues that the Hon Simon Bridges laid out to you this afternoon. He spoke about legal concerns from the perspective of him being a lawyer in a past life. I'm not a lawyer but we do have a number of lawyers who sit in this House as members of Parliament and what I would urge this Parliament to do is have a really sensible discussion when we get to the committee stage of this bill—let's have that debate. I don't want to see this as one of those committee stages where there are parties that are opposed to this bill—where you know we get into a battle and we disregard these arguments. Let's actually have the arguments properly because you know the committee received advice about the current law already allowing witnesses to give evidence in an alternative way and a number of submitters highlighted that a Court of Appeal judgment in 2011 detailed the rare and exceptional circumstances that would make that course of action appropriate. We don't feel that it's appropriate that this needs to happen in all cases. There are ways of doing this that might suit various trials in different ways.But what I'm most concerned at and you heard it from Simon Bridges—but we also have heard it from others today—is that there's considerable potential for an adverse unintended consequence in relation to the proposal given that the existing right of recall under section 99 of the Evidence Act will remain on the statute book and that is the ability to recall a witness. So in other words it will remain possible that a witness including the complainant will be recalled to be cross-examined later at the trial despite having already been cross-examined. This would actively work against the bill's stated aim to reduce the extent to which a complainant may be re-traumatised by the process of that cross-examination. Now as I said I'm not a lawyer but if I thought that that had the potential to happen then that's one of the things that makes me stand off supporting this bill in the long term.I would also like to say that yes I agree with everything that's been said about no matter what a woman wears no matter what's happened in the past an incident is an incident and it should be treated alone. However we believe that evidence about the complainant's sexual experience with the defendant should not be subject to the same heightened threshold that will apply to every other part of the complainant's experience. So that's a concern we have and that's something that we would like to discuss in the committee stage.So I just want to make a plea in my speech this afternoon that we do have a sensible conversation when we get to the committee of the whole House because we would really enjoy it if we could get unanimous support for this legislation across the House but National's not quite there yet and we have some things that we'd just like further discussion on. Thank you.