Kuriger Barbara; O'Connor GregCHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Members before the dinner break the committee was considering Part 1 of the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Bill.GREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Madam Chair. Well I had intended to stand and summarise the bill but Mr Meager has done that for me very well—far quicker off the mark than I am these young blokes. You've got to be pretty quick I tell you. I would also like to thank Mr Meager. I think he and his committee have done a very good job of bringing this to this stage of the bill helped by Vanushi Walters in the previous Parliament. Also I'd like to welcome and thank the officials who have worked on this bill who are back here after dinner; we'd sort of thought they might have got home before dinner but a bad case perhaps of filibustering seems to have broken out in the Chamber. You never know when it's going to happen. They can come like a fly like the flu like COVID-19. Look this is a very serious piece of legislation; a relatively simple piece of legislation but many of the speakers who've spoken in the previous stage have expressed surprise that we didn't have this before because what this does is bring into line the requirements that a sex offender in New Zealand has to report their absences and where they'll be what address they'll be and importantly whether there's going to be children at that address. If an offender in Wellington wants to go to Hawke's Bay for the weekend that's what they're required to do. However they can jump on a plane to Sydney to Nuku'alofa to anywhere else in the Islands to Queensland and they're not required to make the same disclosures. In fact I'm advised that about 20-odd offenders do that each year. I was up in the Cook Islands earlier this year and I mentioned this piece of legislation to the Cook Islands parliament . They were very interested in it because they see people—family members generally—who are coming back; they see a vulnerability there. This legislation isn't about the stranger in the park" which we tend to think about when we're thinking of a sex offender; the person hanging around the school. That's not the "why" for this legislation—when those people are caught they're relatively rare. This is for the 90 percent of the cases where the offender and the victim are known to each other often because the offender has targeted has through predatory behaviour put themselves in a position. But even that's relatively rare. Often it is actually a close family member who will be the offender. This is my experience as a detective when I've interviewed these people and a lot of the time they're not the heinous criminals they are often portrayed as. They're often quite pathetic individuals.The best thing about this legislation is it's removing them out of harm's way which this legislation is intended to do—to ensure that we know where they're going to be which is one of the best defences we have and that does work. They don't want to go back to jail. It's a heck of a time for a sex offender in jail—some would say rightfully so—but they don't want to go back. y making sure that we as a country are in protecting our victims—and it's all about protecting the victims—we are also making sure that they don't put themselves into that position. So the bill has come here. This is Part 1 and Part 1 amends section 21 of the principal Act and it simply means now that section 4 requires that a registrable offender who intends to return to New Zealand would need to report each address at which they intend to stay while overseas the dates in which they intend to travel to and out of the country and information will be required for each country the offender intends to travel to and remain in for more than 48 hours. Anticipating perhaps some of the questions: one of them may be about how enforceable this is. Well like each of the Australian states—each Australian state has its own legislation—while there's no requirement on the host jurisdiction to actually do this what we do have is good cooperation between police forces. We have liaison people in Sydney in the Police. When I say "we" old habits die hard. The Police have liaison people in Sydney and in Canberra as they do in a couple of places in the United States the UK Europe who through their relationships will be able to ensure that inquiries are made when necessary. I'm happy to answer any questions particularly on Part 1."