Barnett Tim: Manukau City Council (Control of Street Prostitution) Bill — Second Reading 
Barnett Tim: Manukau City Council (Control of Street Prostitution) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:634;Page:5667] 
TIM BARNETT (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I am very proud to speak in the second reading of the Manukau City Council (Control of Street Prostitution) Bill. My credentials for doing that are that I was the sponsor of the Prostitution Reform Bill and that I represent Christchurch Central which has—probably outside Auckland Central—the largest though modest in size presence of street prostitution in the country just one block from my office and a couple of blocks from where I live. 
Other speakers so far have explained their difficulties with the bill or their support for it in fairly practical terms. I would like to take the House into a wider context around this issue. Back in 1949 the United Nations passed a resolution—a convention paper—calling for the decriminalisation of prostitution. Nothing much happened around the world until in the 1980s with the advent of HIV countries around the world started to develop laws to address HIV. Every country was advised—internationally worldwide—to do three things. One was to decriminalise gay sex. The second was to provide a clean needle service to prevent the spread of HIV through dirty needles. The third was to decriminalise prostitution. New Zealand has a proud record in that thanks to the fact there was a Labour Government at the time. We did the first two things in 1986 and 1989. Rather than move to decriminalise prostitution we provided funding to the Prostitutes Collective. Through that the debate began and thanks to Maurice Williamson and others in this House today the issue stayed alive. 
Back in 1996 the planning for prostitution law reform came into Parliament and Katherine O’Regan was the key driver there. In the year 2000 the bill had transferred into my name. It was put into the members’ ballot and drawn and it passed into law in 2003. Between 2000 and now—and I am sure right through to at least 2008 when the review of that law will finally report to Parliament—New Zealand has experienced a very concentrated debate on prostitution. This is quite rightly so because we were the first country in the world to take that step. We based the legislation largely on the law in New South Wales where prostitution has now been decriminalised for 10 years. We deliberately decided to decriminalise rather than legalise—legalisation being the approach taken in the state of Victoria—because legalisation maintains the myth that there should be a legal sector and an illegal sector in prostitution. 
By debating and enacting decriminalisation New Zealand identified what is genuinely harmful about prostitution and what is a legal nonsense. Our law is in my view the best law in the world. It is regarded worldwide as being among the best laws—if not the best—in this area. Some members say they voted for the law 3 years ago or they watched the debate 3 years ago and have not seen much change. With great respect to fellow members not many people in this House actually spend a lot of time in brothels or wandering the streets to identify what is really happening in the lives of sex workers. Behind the scenes an awful lot has happened. The debate has moved from being a debate around the entire sex industry to a debate around street prostitution. This is an advance. 
The law now focuses on the people most likely to be hurt by prostitution and they are the sex workers. It is a law focused on reducing harm to sex workers and also on reducing harm to clients and to communities. With great respect to Gordon Copeland who wears his powerful spiritual beliefs on his sleeve I listened to him speaking for 10 minutes in this House and not once did he speak about the welfare of the weakest the most vulnerable people in this situation who are the sex workers. Gordon Copeland may well be an eloquent spokesperson but only for some of the people who live in South Auckland. I heard nothing from him about how legislation and agencies should address the suffering the vulnerability and the future of sex workers in our society. 
What the law passed in 2003 actually did was to make a whole lot of things tougher. The penalties around coercion are now twice as high as they were before. The penalties around practising safer sex were introduced; there was nothing previously. There was no obligation on the client or on the sex worker or on the operator to promote or practise safer sex. That is now in place. The penalty for the clients of sex workers aged under 18 is now 7 years’ imprisonment—doubled from the old law. There are now employment obligations—both the right of a sex worker to be under an employment contract and also effective bans on bonding fining and some of those hideous ways in which people were previously trapped in the sex industry. 
Of course street work actually escapes some of that. Street work will always be operating at the very edge of the law. It is an individual activity. It is not based in a building it is not based on an employment contract or an employment relationship the clients are more private and it also accounts for about only 5 percent of the entire sex industry. Therefore the law will always struggle to have such a direct and immediate impact. However we did in 2003 remove the old legal ban on street workers who had a prostitution or a drug conviction from being able to work in brothels. That ban was removed so that some could move off the streets. 
Some previous speakers have recognised that we allowed the development of safe houses which under the old law would have been banned. Now they are not banned. We also as I mentioned earlier made it tougher for the clients of sex workers aged under 18 to operate. We also removed the convictions associated with soliciting. On 2 nights when this House was discussing prostitution law reform sex workers were being removed in large numbers from the streets of Auckland. That was what was happening only 3 years ago in this country. Those workers were being removed and now as a result of the convictions they have they are prevented from being able to move on from prostitution into the wider world. So there are ways in which this law reform will impact on street work. It will not be immediate but it will happen over time. The other obvious point to make is that nothing in prostitution law reform has either increased the demand for prostitution or increased the supply of people undertaking street work. It was the America’s Cup in Auckland that led to an increase in the demand for prostitution services; it was not the prostitution law reform going through. 
In terms of Manukau—and I have visited the streets of Manukau as others here have done—there are myths and there are realities. I heard from Gordon Copeland that he had been told that in Northcrest there were I think about 73 sex workers on the streets. Well between his speaking and now I actually rang the worker in the Prostitutes Collective who goes into that community once a week and who knows all the sex workers in South Auckland by name. She said to me that between three and five sex workers are operating in Northcrest and she was able to give me their names although I did not want their names. Therefore the reality is that the number is small. 
The reason why there are people on the streets who seem to be engaged in sex work but are not is that the pattern of sex work in South Auckland is about bunches of people on the streets some of whom are younger people some of whom are engaged in sex work and some of whom are not. So any number counting that does not understand the culture of the activity on the streets will assume that they are all involved in sex work whereas in fact they are not. So the issue of numbers is a complex one but going by the counting done by the Prostitutes Collective—and its members are the people on the ground in South Auckland—week by week not by Gordon Copeland on a one-off visit the numbers are not increasing and they have not increased since the law reform. In fact I have had a report that somebody who was employed by Manukau City to do the counting counted for 3 or 4 nights running and added up the figures only to find that that total figure was presented as a one-off by the city council. 
The other point to mention about South Auckland is that the people who will be most affected by this legislation are a very particular group in our society. The figure for South Auckland is maybe 50 or 60 people involved in sex work; one of those is of European descent about 10 are Pacific Islanders and about 50 are Maori. I cannot think of another piece of legislation that is designed and targeted to impact more on one vulnerable group in our society than this insidious little piece of legislation is. I can imagine that there are many reasons for people wanting to support this legislation—maybe local democracy is one of them—but at the same time if we have one law in South Auckland and Manukau City relating to street prostitution and a different law in the rest of the country what does that say about our ability to have consistent criminal law around the country? 
Those people who dislike prostitution and who were frustrated by the law reform going through Parliament 3 years ago should wait for the most comprehensive review of prostitution law reform that has ever been undertaken by any country which will report in 2 years’ time. I say to those who have concerns about other social issues in Manukau that need addressing that those issues can be dealt with. This legislation would do nothing to achieve that and I urge this House to vote the bill down. Thank you.