Wall LouisaLOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. I'd just like to start with some international context for this piece of legislation and then relate it back to Aotearoa New Zealand. So there are groups internationally called Girls Not Brides and Ending Child Marriage and their definition of child marriage is any formal marriage or informal union where one or both of the parties are under 18 years of age." Each year that's 12 million girls. That's 23 girls every minute—nearly one every two seconds—who are getting married. In New Zealand that equates to approximately 80 child brides a year and of interest 388 or 48.6 percent of those women are actually married overseas and they come into our country. So actually in addition to this whole issue about child brides we also have issues about the immigration status of those women.What happens to a number of those women if they end up in domestic violence situations? That's been another issue that we have been pursuing as the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians (CWP). Globally today there are 700 million women who were child brides. Of those 250 million were married before 15 years of age and I think we should all think about what happens to those women who are married. What happens to them is that they are at risk of violence abuse exploitation for life. Of the babies born to women who are child brides 60 percent are at greater risk of dying in the first year of life.New Zealand's I guess contribution to this international campaign did start in 2010 and the Hon Maggie Barry is 100 percent correct that Jackie Blue engaged with Shakti; so I too want to acknowledge my colleague Priyanca Radhakrishnan who was working for Shakti at that point in time. Some of us may not know but there was a John Hudson Sunday story that did a big exposé about this issue in New Zealand and there were 12- 13- 14- 15-year-old girls who were being married in New Zealand in cultural and religious marriages. And one of those young women a 14-year-old had been raped and her parents had made her marry her rapist. She suffered torture beatings isolation. She escaped and was seeking refuge with Shakti and we started then having this discussion because Shakti then engaged with people like Jackie who talked to the National Council of Women and a whole lot of other people. I have tried to look back to when we first referenced this to the UN but actually this issue is relevant in New Zealand; so our contribution to this global campaign of Girls Not Brides Ending Child Marriage is incredibly significant tonight.I do want to acknowledge that to date this has been the one and only piece of legislation that we as parliamentarians across the House have agreed on. So Jo I want to commend you as the co-chair of our CWP group and also as somebody who put her name to this bill. It doesn't matter how you got it although I think that inheritance is a great legacy; the fact is that this bill is in your name and you are incredibly passionate about advocating it not only within your party but across the House and I know you've done a number of media interviews about what we're trying to achieve.So essentially what we're saying is that marriage should actually be between adults but in lieu of it being between adults because in New Zealand we do allow 16- and 17-year-olds to get married because of the issues of consent and the issue of coercion and the fact that from the evidence that I talked about just before we know that some parents are making their children their girl children marry older people there is an issue. What this process will ensure is two things. One is informed consent—so the judge has to be convinced that that 16-year-old or 17-year-old girl young woman absolutely knows what she is entering into in wanting to marry somebody else and that judge will determine based on that interaction whether or not that young woman wants to get married and has the capacity to give informed consent. Why do we do that? Because of some of the harms that I outlined earlier.I have to say I've been at some events though where women have come up to me and have said "I got married at 16 and I've had a wonderful marriage." And that's fine. That's great. We're not trying to stop it which was actually one of the big discussion points when we presented to the select committee: if we really want to end child brides why aren't we saying you can't get married? And one of the reasons that we said we couldn't was that that was a big change—because that went back to 1955. But we felt by adding a layer of credibility into the system where a judge through the Family Court could make the determination about that young person giving informed consent therefore assenting to the application for a marriage licence reassured in that process and that that would also guarantee that no harm would come to that young woman.I also have to say that the other advancement in this piece of legislation which the select committee actually have been incredibly helpful on is saying "It's not just marriage. This also applies to civil unions and also to those who are in de facto relationships." And I guess that really highlights again the constructive process that our select committee engages in because we were able to have those discussions people were able to bring to the table pieces of information that actually we just hadn't considered because in other legislatures around the world—or in other democracies—they have only marriage; they don't have civil unions or formal recognition of de facto relationships in their laws.Just finally I do want to pick up on one of the points that my colleague the Hon Tracey Martin talked about in terms of this whole concept of a multi-member bill. Now the multi-member bill concept came about because as a cross-party group of women we were thinking "How can we get this bill into the House if everyone agrees with it?" We didn't have a Minister who was prepared to propose it but we thought "How can we do it?" Obviously we had somebody put their name to it and it was in the ballot. But I consulted Mary Harris the then Clerk of the House about how we could enter a multi-member bill into the Parliament. The way that we could do it—it's just that no one has ever done it—is that if we had a bill that we all agreed on every political party in this House would nominate one of their members for their name to be on that bill. And if every political party did that we would then seek the leave of the House for that bill to be tabled and then it could be debated.The fact that it's never happened before doesn't mean that it can't; it actually just means we haven't found the right bill. And so I guess our experience from this cross-party endeavour is: let's try and find a bill where we can find every political party supporting it we can all put one person's name on it and we can agree as a House for that bill to be tabled in this Parliament and let's create—it's fun—consensus around really important issues like this one. So that's a challenge to all of us: let's start thinking of some bills that we all think are incredibly important and that might not be on Ministers' work programmes and rather than put them in the member's ballot let's see if we can work constructively as a Parliament.Just finally I do want to commend Jackie—hopefully she's watching. I know you won't mind Jo. She will be interested in what's happening.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I just encourage the member to use the sponsor's full name.LOUISA WALL: Oh sorry. Thank you. So Dr Jackie Blue wherever you are I'd just like to say that this bill has progressed to this point not only because you were able to work with the community to construct the bill not only did you have somebody in your National caucus who was prepared to take it on but also because when you'd left you came back to the cross-party women's group and talked to us about this being a piece of legislation that we could work on together which we have done. And so without further ado I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora."