Brown SimeonSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Mr Speaker and thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill. I just want to start by putting on the record that the National Party will be supporting this legislation and we also support as we already have the use of urgency around this piece of legislation. I do want to acknowledge the Minister of Police for the work she did last week to ensure that we were informed and consulted on the piece of legislation a very important piece of legislation. I just want to acknowledge you and your officials for the work that they have done. The child sex offender registry legislation is a very important piece of legislation. It registers child sex offenders ensures that police and corrections can monitor their movements and has above all else to protect our young children from those who seek to commit incredibly awful offences against them. It has a purpose of reducing sexual offending against these children and it is to reduce this risk through monitoring—an incredibly important piece of legislation. Of course Parliament has—as the Minister has already outlined—had one go post the registration Act being put in place to clarify the intent that this legislation was to ensure that irrespective of when offences were committed this legislation to put someone on the registry could be applied. That is something about which the Supreme Court has in a split decision said that this legislation and the clarification passed in 2017 were not clear enough. This as the Minister has outlined has meant 600 people have been deregistered out of what I'm informed is approximately 2400 people on the registry. So this affects one quarter of the child sex offenders on the registry. This is no small matter. This is something which is incredibly serious and incredibly important. This legislation which we are considering today ensures that those people are not removed from the registry and also ensures that those sentenced in the time between the judgment being issued and the day at which this legislation is passed are able to be registered by application to the court. I think that's incredibly important because there have been approximately a month and a couple of days and this means that those who would have committed offences before 2016 but were sentenced in that short period of time are able to also be registered. That will also continue to support the protection of New Zealanders. The National Party will be raising a couple of questions and one of the important questions we do want to raise is regarding new section 11 in clause 5 in the piece of legislation which does mean that this bill does not apply to the appellant in the Supreme Court decision in line with the general principle of section 33(1)(c) of the Legislation Act 2019. We will be asking some questions during the committee stage regarding this issue because we do also note that the Supreme Court was split on the issue of whether this individual should have been removed from the registry as well. In fact two justices said that he should be taken off the registry regardless of the point of law that was being raised and two justices said he should remain on the registry with one justice not giving a judgment on that particular issue due to the fact that that justice believed that because the law didn't apply retrospectively in this case it was not relevant. So we will be asking some questions around whether new section 11 should be in fact actually removed with this legislation allowing for this case to be dealt with on its own merits separately rather than Parliament also passing judgment on this particular issue. I think it is important that the House recognises the fact that the individual in this case was convicted of and pleaded guilty to incredibly serious offences: 1260 video files and 1890 photographs of child pornography were found stored on his computers. These photographs were classified in the summary of facts according to the SAP scale which ranks images of child pornography from level 1 up to level 5 and the images in the appellant's computer included images in each of the five categories on this scale. This is a very serious case and we will be asking questions around whether new section 11 does need to remain in the legislation. As National has said we will be supporting this legislation. We do support the use of urgency because this is to do with the public safety of New Zealanders particularly of children and for anyone in this House—this is something which could affect anyone and their children. As a father of two young girls I take this issue very seriously and I support this law. I support the registry and support us urgently fixing it so that these people are not kept off that registry. Thank you Mr Speaker.