Ryall Tony: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee Third Reading 
Ryall Tony: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:20067] 
Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay Of Plenty) 
: 
 The National Party opposes this bill. Within 12 months our position will be vindicated. Within 12 months this legislation will be amended. Within 12 months the next National Minister of Justice will be bringing in legislation to tidy up the errors in this bill because—as Mr Tamihere says—with a word here and a word there we end up with something that we never expected. 
There has been insufficient public involvement in and discussion on many of the bill’s proposals. Major changes are being made to the rules around sexual conduct with minimal public consultation. Mr Goff personally discussed with officials a discussion paper that was circulated to about 25 Government departments and agencies. In that discussion paper Mr Goff personally ticked off a proposal from the Ministry of Justice that brother-sister sex over the age of 20 should be legalised. He personally ticked off that proposal. He never said to the officials: “That’s against Government policy—don’t even go there.” Did he say that? No he did not. 
Then Mr Goff also included in a discussion paper one of the things that I think he will always be remembered for—that is saying that it is OK for 12 to 15-year-olds to have sex. He wanted to put into the law and he would be prepared to support a defence that would decriminalise 12 to 15-year-olds having sex. When he was telephoned by the media about that matter last year he defended the bill. He defended the proposal that the Labour Cabinet and caucus agreed on—that they would decriminalise sexual behaviour between 12 to 15-year-olds. But once ordinary New Zealanders had a chance to see Mr Goff and the Helen Clark agenda they railed against it and within hours Mr Goff was forced to back down. There is a feeling amongst middle New Zealand families that this Government is interested more in the rights of minorities than it is in ordinary New Zealanders. This Government is more prepared to listen to the noisy carping of the liberal few than to ordinary New Zealanders. 
This bill has had completely insufficient consideration in the Law and Order Committee where the Government majority pushed through the deliberation. We say that this bill will lead to serious unintended consequences and risk disturbing settled case law and legal concepts. This could have been avoided if the committee had had more time. The bill may have been in the committee for 8 months but it was not considered for 8 months. In fact if this bill is so urgent why has it sat around in the House for 7 months since the select committee reported it back? And if the Government is so tough why did Labour vote against every one of our amendments to increase the penalties in this bill?  
National has identified a number of areas where we say there are concerns. We forced the Government to back down on the similar age defence which would have effectively decriminalised some under-age sexual conduct. We are very concerned about the proposals for sexual conduct with a dependent family member under the age of 18. That means that it will no longer be an offence for say a foster parent to have consensual sexual conduct with his or her 18-year-old foster child for whom the parent may have cared for many years. In our view it is more appropriate to maintain the prohibition until the age of 20 to allow sufficient time to lapse and the dependant’s relationship to wane. 
The Government is passing sexual grooming amendments. That provision was first proposed by Simon Power in 2000 but the bill grants an immunity to such groomers if they live with their victim. Most submitters to the select committee wanted the age to be 20 but the Government dropped it to 18. This provision for example could lead to judges making wider interpretations—unintended views—on who dependent family members are because the law invites them to consider what different cultural perspectives are involved in child rearing. In fact this is part of the confusion. The senior adviser to the Government described a whanau as being people who live on a marae! 
The bill proposes a far-reaching reasonable belief defence for sexual conduct for people over the age of 12. It says that a bloke of 45 can have a defence in law provided he reasonably believed that the 14-year-old girl he was having sex with was 16 or older if for example he had checked her—false—ID. There was no consideration in the select committee on how to fix the genuine mistake situation which the Government was worried about through using mitigating factors at sentencing nor has there been a public discussion about the merits or otherwise of the effect of those changes. What we do know is that a discussion paper went around a small clique of Wellington agencies and that this bill is what we have ended up with. 
National is very worried about the changes to the protections for people with disabilities. While we can understand trying to change the phrase “severely subnormal” in doing so the Government is using new and unproven wording which the Law Society says is a forensic lottery. Indeed the officials’ advice to the committee was to leave it to the courts to address that problem. 
No person coming before the select committee asked Parliament to define “consent”—not one person. The bill deems certain conduct as not amounting to consent. Concern was raised by submitters as to the lack of precision in these new provisions and the definitions of what is not consent risk causing more confusion than clarity. 
 The National Party would have liked the opportunity to support the sensible changes proposed in this bill but we are saying that there will be unintended consequences as a result of this legislation. The select committee was told that. The Opposition parties in force told the Government that there would be problems yet this bill continues to come before the House. We are shocked by the discussion paper that preceded this bill. We are shocked that this Minister agreed to those matters being included in a discussion paper and we are shocked that this Minister was prepared to defend the inclusion of those matters in the bill. 
The National Party in Opposition wants to make it very clear today that we in this Parliament will be back within 12 months making changes to this bill. People involved in the sector advise us that the bill still involves significant risks not in terms of the protections it may offer but in terms of interpretation and in terms of the results of the protections it may offer. We say to the House that when those problems are identified we will all have to move much more swiftly than this Government has done to deal with those issues.