SpeechDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei) (remote): Kia ora e te Māngai o te Whare. I have to say it is a particular pleasure to speak to you today on this bill to commend this bill to the House—on a personal note—because this is in fact my first re-entry into the House. Earlier this year I had the misfortune to take a tumble on a tramp with my family. Clearly I should have heeded the teenagers' suggestions and allowed them to stay on their digital devices safely at home. But the upshot is that I am personally deeply grateful for the fact that we are now in a hybrid parliamentary system and I am able to contribute here remotely and do my job for my constituents in Whangārei and in fact for all of the people who are going to be helped by this very important bill.So I want to start first by congratulating my sister by congratulating our wāhine toa Louisa Wall and I want to start by congratulating those absolutely brave young people old people everyone who came before us as submitters. There was so much trauma and pain that they needed to tell us about and they did it superbly. They were so brave. Their voices were raised their voices were heard and our voices now amplified them throughout the land to create an important law.Now there are a number of things that I want to cover and I am going to cover them in some sort of order and this is going to be it. So the first thing I really wanted to talk about was just how important this Act is on a general level. This is a remarkable piece of legislation and I've said this in second reading but I think it's worth saying again it's a remarkable piece of legislation for what it does for the whole panoply of sexual violence offences in this country. When we were investigating how this Act was going and whether this bill was necessary we looked at the other pieces of legislation that cover off this type of offending. And what we saw there was that there is a sense that if you're going to be offended against digitally it was only women who were not at fault or had not taken agency who were going to be protected by the law in many ways. So for example we start with section 216G of the Crimes Act which is the upskirting offence where you will be prosecuted if you post unauthorised digital communications involving someone's intimate person but only if they didn't know about it. Then you look to the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act where again you will be prosecuted for posting indecent images but only of people under 18. So again it's a case of talking about consent and these are children we consider too young to be able to take ownership of their sexuality.Then you look at the bill that Louisa actually brought to us and the Harmful Digital Communications Act was there for women who had consented to the making of the images. Oh yes. But they then were forced to jump several barriers. The threshold of proof that was put in place there was punitive. And that is in three respects. So first you have that requirement that the offender be intending actual harm. And the reality of course as the previous speakers have said—and I really want to mention the speech of our chair at the Justice Committee Ginny Andersen—is that a lot of the people who are posting these images don't do it considering that they are going to do harm. They aren't considering anything of the victim's wants or feelings; this is a profoundly selfish—laddish" was the word used earlier—piece of behaviour. It is a case of people who think they look cool doing this stuff. They think it's some sort of trophy. This is laddishness to the extreme and it was never going to be captured by this particular Act.Then you get those appalling people who actually do this sort of thing for profit. And again we have instances where we were being told that people weren't being prosecuted because oh yes he did it he admits he did it but he did it to make money so it doesn't count. And then turning to the other ways in which this Act was just failing and particularly failing women particularly failing our young people particularly failing our rainbow community—and I echo Ginny's statements when she said that she suspects the figure is far higher because one of the things we heard was from Women's Refuge who said that 40 percent of the women who come to them have had this happen to them—40 percent. How much of this shaming are people are women burying? Because I know women and girls particularly girls in my life who have had this happen to them and it is appalling in its impact. But the way in which the Act then proceeded was to ignore the way in which this actually happens. It first required the reasonableness test: "Was it reasonable that you were harmed by this behaviour?" and then next "Were you actually harmed?" And this is where we fall into a trap in the courts. While the courts are working really hard to pull themselves out of outdated ideas the fact remains that we still have a judiciary who tend to underestimate the violence done by sexual offending. A bit of a laugh and a bit of a lad is still something that is seen as a real thing by some of our judiciary. We will work to change that but in the meantime we're changing the law. So it is a very very proud moment and I am very very grateful to be able to stand to talk to you about this now as we address some of the underlying misogyny that has been running through our law for so long. Well no more. Because what will happen now is that we are as the previous speakers have said going to take notice of the obvious of the innate of the clear harm done any time someone decides to be so thoughtless reckless or just plain cruel as to post images of someone else without their consent.I do want to address also the way in which we went about the question of age because that was something that came up a lot. There were people who felt that we should have a firmer mechanism for recording the consent of these people who were making these images. It was felt that if we put in a requirement that if you wanted to post something you had to have someone's written consent—that would magically sort things out. But actually when you are talking about young young people being targeted for this in such vulnerable moments of sexual intimacy we didn't believe that we could actually rely on written consent being given fully or safely. It was too open to manipulation and we have seen that happen to women too often. So instead we decided to go with an age limit and we have tied the age of 16 to the age of consent in the Crimes Act. Now that still allows for the indecent images provisions to come in if it is necessary under the video classification Act but we feel this is the safest and most sensible way to protect our young people and to ensure that in their vulnerability they will not be exploited.It is something where we struggled with the possible age of the offenders because the fact is an awful lot of this is going on with some very very young offenders and in particular young men. I am the mother of three young men so I have a fair amount of awareness of their thinking. But it seems to me that we can still go ahead with this bill despite the youth of some of the offenders because we can trust a world-beating our world-leading Youth Court and the discretion of our police to ensure that our young people are not inappropriately criminalised when in fact an educative approach is appropriate. And for those under 17 of course they will inevitably end up in the Youth Court and there it is a social response an educative response which is used—and with great success on most occasions.So to start to conclude it is quite something—as someone who has spent a very long time on the other side of the lawmaking process on the side that involves wigs and gowns—to come here today and to know that problems I have battled with on that other side of the lawmakers in the courts are going to be addressed for our women for our young people for our rainbow community comprehensively and in a way that will enable them to take ownership of their sexuality with pride and know that we are not going to tolerate the shaming—the sheer shaming of our young people. Your sexuality is there to be enjoyed it is there to—[Time expired]"