Andersen GinnyGINNY ANDERSEN (Labour—Hutt South): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. First and foremost I would like to acknowledge the work that has been done to date. When I first joined the Justice Committee it was Amy Adams who had done work in this space before and I acknowledge that work that's happened. I know that Jan Logie has worked tirelessly in this space for an incredibly long time and has been a really useful person as the select committee process went through. I'm proud and pleased to see that Marama is continuing to take on that role in her new ministerial duties. I'd also like to acknowledge my fellow female select committee members Meka Whaitiri and Clare Curran who were very diligent in scrutinising some of the detail and ended up I think making this bill a better bill and a stronger bill than it was initially and by taking further consideration to victims.I will quickly spell out what this bill does in order to make the clear points that I wish to. It aims to tighten the rules around evidence regarding a complainant's sex life to ensure that they are protected from irrelevant and unduly invasive questioning which we know does happen. It will also allow complainants in sexual cases to give their evidence in other ways and this has been a significant factor in the past. Pre-recording of evidence we know from research makes it far more likely for complainants to give evidence and for that trial process to be far less traumatising. It also requires judges to intervene if there is inappropriate questioning—so this would go to the sexual history to what the victim was wearing at the time whether the victim had had a sexual history with the complainant. I know in some instances judges do do that anyway when questioning becomes unduly forceful but in this legislation it will require judges to intervene at those points in time. It will also extend the availability of communication assistance to any witness who needs it to understand questions further so that they're more familiar with the court process and the cross-examination process that they're undergoing.We received 81 written submissions and 34 of those were delivered in person during the select committee; 57 in general supported and 10 expressly opposed this bill. If I can generalise the victim statements that we heard were harrowing. We heard firsthand people's experiences of the court system and essentially what we were told was that being cross-examined by defence lawyers was almost unanimously described as the most traumatic aspect of the justice process with many saying they were unprepared for how distressing that process actually was. One in particular I remember said that they would not have gone through the process had they known how bad it was.Some victims said that they wished they had never reported the crime because the outcome for them was not worth the efforts and some have even complained that they were worse off because they reported the crime. This goes to the heart of the problem that we are getting at right now that our reporting rates for sexual violence are so incredibly low that we have a justice system that perpetuates that low reporting rate because people feel further traumatised by the cross-examination process amongst other parts. They find it dehumanising and demeaning and so how can we expect our rates of violence reporting to increase while we have a system that does this?I think at the same time as Opposition members have pointed out we need to balance that out with the right to a fair trial and we most definitely heard that evidence. We heard that from the legal fraternity during select committee and many of those submissions came forward and made it incredibly clear that they were concerned about how that would play out. While the New Zealand Law Society supported the efforts to ease the burden of giving evidence on sensitive complainants it did note that the legal profession is divided with respect to whether proposed reforms strike the right balance. Generally professional legal organisations and individual lawyers expressed concern that the bill erodes fundamental principles of law and the defendant's right to a fair trial process and a lot of that went in around that ability to question somebody in a live situation and not have the pre-recording which—as members have pointed out—can sometimes happen sometime prior to when the trial is.I was really heartened by the advice from officials. They were of the view that the system does do further harm to those who are seeking justice particularly in relation to extremely serious alleged crimes recognising that sexual violence complainants often are re-traumatised by the court process and they believed that it was in everybody's interests the whole of society's interests for the process in sexual offence trials to be fair to ensure that those outcomes are robust and I think that is critical in this space.Some of the more interesting submissions we heard were actually from those NGOs or support agencies in terms of the ones that do the wraparound support after a sexual violence offence had occurred and the underlying theme of all of those submissions was a strong need for societal and systemic change in terms of the way we treat these things. We know that we have an adversarial justice system and it's important to hold things up to the light to make sure that they are right but we need to seriously take a look at how we do that when it's stopping the system from reporting cases. So this is just one step of reforming a justice system that needs to not just treat victims like they are a piece of evidence because that is exactly how they are treated in our court system right now. We need a system that enables women men and children to have the confidence to know that they will be treated with dignity when they appear in a New Zealand court of law that they have the right to be treated with respect and I am concerned that that definitely does not happen adequately now.I'm looking forward to this bill being enacted I'm looking forward to getting agreement across the House on something that is so critical and I look forward to a brighter day in New Zealand's judicial future so that we can have a justice system that does do better by victims of sexual violence. This bill does address some incredibly longstanding issues for complainants but not at the expense of the overarching and fundamental necessity of having a fair trial. I do believe it gets the right balance between both of those views that we heard in submissions. Fair processes for all court participants and robust outcomes are the most important we can hope for for having a fair balanced and human justice system. I commend this bill to the House.