Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): I was born in 1983 and 3 years later Fran Wilde and her colleagues in that reforming fourth Labour Government led the charge on homosexual law reform. I have read the Hansard of that period I have read the newspaper articles and I have talked to people who lived through that experience. I have seen the photos of the alleged 800000 people who signed the petition against that bill presenting it on the forecourt of Parliament. I have seen the language. It is unimaginable in 2017 to look back and think that just 30 and a bit more years ago New Zealanders could behave that way and say those things and that the Parliament could be so divided on what is fundamentally a human rights issue. How far we have come since 1986 but also—echoing Grant Robertson's excellent contribution in the House—how far we have still to go. Today's motion and this bill are one step on that journey towards equality respect dignity and human rights. The machinery of this law and the proposal are a bit complex but at their core is a very simple notion. It is the Parliament saying that these laws should never have been the law. It is the Parliament saying that those laws were wrong. It is the Parliament saying to the homosexual community that you should not bear the stigma and the shame any longer and we are going to put right what was wrong. So at the core of this bill is a very simple notion a correct notion and a morally right notion and that is why I am so proud to support it.Allied to this bill is an apology. There was some debate about whether or not the Parliament should do this and whether or not that motion should accompany the bill. I think it was the right thing to do—I genuinely do—because what the Parliament is doing is saying sorry. To the men who were convicted of offences that criminalised love by two men the Parliament says sorry. To the families of men who suffered trauma and despair and some who even took their lives the Parliament says sorry. To the LGBTIQ community generally for the shame and the stigma and for the persecution—State-sanctioned persecution—the Parliament says sorry.I will freely admit to the House that initially when I was confronted with this issue I did struggle with the notion of expungement for a couple of reasons. One is as members have adverted to in their speeches the difficulty of trying to unpick and untangle offences that criminalised consenting behaviour that should never have been a crime from behaviour that should definitely be a crime—sexual abuse and violent offences. The evidence from officials was that that was tricky. So that was the first issue.Secondly I will freely admit that I struggled with the notion of trying to rewrite history. Whether we like it or not—and I for one and I think the Parliament agrees that those laws should never have been in place—those laws were in place. That was the law of New Zealand up until homosexual law reform in 1987. In some ways it is a difficult thing to grasp—that history should basically be revised so that we say that those laws were never actually in place when in fact they were. I struggled with that as a concept.But the thing that got me was the people who turned up at our committee and gave heartbreaking evidence and testimony that just made you want to cry about the ongoing anger and pain and shame and suffering that they and their families have endured because of these laws. I decided essentially that the ongoing pain and harm that has been caused by these laws means that they should go or means that we should act as if they were never in place. We need to expunge them and expunge those records from history.The Parliament has done this before—that is the other thing. This is reasonably novel but it is not completely novel. The Parliament has done this before and we need to do it again. The Parliament has done this before in relation to a narrow niche class of people. I forget the actual legislation but it is from the early 2000s—to do with military offences in the early 2000s. So Parliament has done this before and we can do it again. We can untangle the offences that genuinely should never have been crimes and those offences that still remain crimes but we can do that at the same time as saying to the homosexual community that what was in place prior to 1987 was wrong and it was immoral. It was inhumane and the Parliament says sorry to you for those laws. I commend this bill to the House.