Bridges Simon: Child and Family Protection Bill — First Reading 
Bridges Simon: Child and Family Protection Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:8836] 
SIMON BRIDGES (National—Tauranga) 
: 
 I do not intend to take all of my remaining time at all. Prior to the break last night I was making the point that it has been an excellent thing for me in my very short time as a member of Parliament to see this Parliament united against domestic violence. Certainly it is a topic deserving of our concern given the very serious problem we have in this country. 
As I said I will not take all of my time but I will just speak on one issue addressed in this Child and Family Protection Bill in relation to amendments to the Adoption Act 1955. The Adoption Act is reasonably comprehensive law as I understand it but it does not really live up to some of the international obligations that we have today. 
Charles Chauvel talked in this House about the phenomenon of child trafficking. Clause 30 of the bill before the House makes it quite clear that we are living up to our international obligations and in particular meeting our obligations under the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children child prostitution and child pornography by creating a new offence with this bill. We are increasing the penalty from a very low 3 months’ imprisonment to 7 years’ imprisonment. We are also making this legislation extraterritorial so that the offence will no longer apply just in this country but throughout the world. Certainly in my view that is very much a worthwhile thing to do. 
Human trafficking is a serious international problem. We may feel we are insulated from it and to some extent we are but my research has made it quite clear to me that human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world. The total annual revenue for trafficking in persons is estimated to be worth between US$5 billion and US$9 billion a year. The Council of Europe has stated: “People trafficking has reached epidemic proportions over the past decade with a global annual market of about $42.5 billion.” 
We could go into all the details but what we are dealing with here in relation to children is probably the saddest and the worst set of examples that we can think of. The trafficking of children often involves the exploitation of their parents and their extreme poverty. Parents may sell their children to traffickers in order to pay off debts or to gain income or they may be deceived about the prospects of training and a better life for their children. In West Africa trafficked children have often lost one or both parents to AIDS and thousands of male and sometimes female children have been forced to become child soldiers in that continent. The US Department of Justice in a study in 2008 found that more than 30 percent of the total number of trafficking cases that year involved children who had been coerced into the sex industry. 
The adoption process is fraught. As I say often a number of illegitimate factors are at work—coercion pressure financial incentives—that create this serious global situation. For example thousands of children from Asia Africa and South America are sold into the global sex trade every year. Often they have been kidnapped or are orphans and sometimes they are sold by their own family. I am talking about a wider problem than perhaps this bill deals with but nevertheless by living up to some of our international obligations in this area we are doing a good thing through this bill. 
I have highlighted only one of a number of things that this bill does in relation to children and family violence. It has been a pleasure to be part of a united effort from all members of the House to combat this issue not only in our country but also extraterritorially in the world we live in.