Ghahraman GolrizGOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I rise and to begin would like to congratulate my friend and the chair of our Justice Committee Ginny Andersen for having her bill the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill drawn from the ballot and progressed in this way—it seems with consensus across the House at this reading as well as at its first reading.This is a bill that creates two new offences as others have said to try and capture the types of activities that for years in the courts we've described as grooming"—communications that are intended to mislead a young person about the offender's age and subsequent meetings and arrangements with the young person with the aim of and the result of sexual abuse. When I practised law we did have an understanding—those of us who worked at that front line of the justice system and all of the service providers and people entrusted with the work of dealing with sexual abuse of young people—that grooming is a really big part of that. All of these types of activities whether it was by text message whether it was in person and increasingly in online spaces are complex and often far more hidden than what parents supervisors and others might have access to. It existed for example as part of a trial to show that the offending had taken place and by that point we're talking about far more serious offending. It existed at the sentencing stage as an aggravating factor. It again showed the lengths that the offender had gone to to facilitate their offending and the premeditated nature of the offending that would have eventuated in each case. Again by that point we're talking about far more serious offending and assault and rapes and other types of sexual exploitation of young people. It wasn't quite adequate to say that we're capturing it at that point because of course it meant that we didn't have a way of capturing this type of activity as harmful in itself and we didn't have a way of capturing or intervening with an offender at that point including in terms of rehabilitation but in particular in terms of keeping young people safe from the much more serious offending. So this makes sense but it increasingly makes sense in the context of the lives that young people now lead almost as much online as not and in terms of the ways that they are increasingly vulnerable to sexual exploitation in those online spaces with all of the different pressures to share their information to share images to appease their peers—and when I say their peers I mean obviously including the type of person who may not in fact be their peer but is online passing as what a person under the age of 16 might see as part of their community. That's where the harm comes in and that's where the vulnerability comes in and all of those pressures needs to be captured by our justice system.I do want to just say though that what we know about any kind of activity—in particular the type of activity that aims to victimise and marginalise a vulnerable community—is that criminalisation in and of itself isn't enough. So what I would hope is that we will continue to do the work—and I know that we have for the first time ever in this Government a Minister for domestic and sexual violence the Hon Marama Davidson—of capturing that community support empowering the service providers and the people who have been doing this work of keeping our different communities in particular young people. But again young people across different communities have different vulnerabilities have different support systems and have different mechanisms that we as a Government and Parliament need to resource highlight amplify and support in order to ensure that young people are safe. Criminalisation has its place in terms of the type of offending that this bill captures but for example I would notice again with dismay that New Zealand still doesn't have standardised courses in school that include consent education or sex education at all. Our sex education that we provide in schools is not standardised. That's a failure of successive Governments and it persists. So we have different community groups come into schools and provide it but we have no idea what standard is being provided what information is being provided whether or not it captures the needs of young rainbow community members whether it resonates with our young migrant background communities or Māori or whether it even includes issues of online sexual exploitation. In particular it doesn't include consent and that is a huge gap.So we're talking about protecting young people in online spaces against predatory behaviour but we haven't necessarily empowered them to know what that looks like and what they can do when faced with it. So resourcing that education in an inclusive and accessible way would also work to do the work of this bill. But we also know increasingly that people become isolated in online spaces including young people and again young people are impacted in different ways depending on their background depending on the other aspects of their community. Whether it's lower socio-economic background whether it's children whether it's Māori whether it's migrant communities whether it's religious minorities we know that they become isolated and have different needs and have different means. When this House came together and I had the privilege of working with women across this House to sponsor a bill on female genital mutilation we were moved to do that by members of the communities that are actually impacted by that kind of harm. So we know that that type of empowering action—that culture—exists within all of our communities and we can empower those voices and those communities and those young people by resourcing and bringing their voices into this House and keeping their work going in their communities as part of this work.This is a good bill; I do commend it to the House. I would just say on behalf of the Green Party that there is much more we can do beyond formal criminalisation."