Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Fakaaue lahi. Fakaalofa lahi atu to my colleagues in the House. You know I can't really say that it's a pleasure to stand up and speak to a bill in this circumstance but it is a relief to see us collectively joining together to take action to prevent a tragedy like what we've heard happened to Mason Pendrous and the cost to his family happening to another family again. I do send condolences from the Green Party to his family and the friends and co-residents who will have been so deeply affected by this terrible terrible tragedy.This bill—I think it's great to see this happening so quickly and for us to be able to all come together to get these changes in place ahead of the beginning of the academic term next year. What this bill will do is set up a regime that will become mandatory shifting it from a voluntary code of practice that was put in place in around 2005 that the Minister of Education subsequent to the death of Mason found on investigation to be being applied to a very variable standard across the country and clearly not providing the protection that we would've expected as a country.I do think it is worth noting that when that voluntary code was initially set up there were monitoring measures put in place but as time went on and there was a drive to save money as is often the case those monitoring measures were scrapped. At the same time—as has been the trend of a lot of core Government services over time—they've increasingly been contracting out hostel provisions and the monitoring was gone and the incentive towards profit actually grew without the checks and balances around the provision of pastoral care. So we now again in this House have to fix up the tragic mess that has come from that loss of our responsibility for ensuring clear standards across our public services in effect and protections for our people.It has been stated by several people in the House about—like I remember I was in a hostel in my first year at university which my family decided was the right thing for me. I personally wanted to go flatting but my family decided there wasn't a safe option and they put me into a hostel—Hon Phil Twyford: Very wise.JAN LOGIE: —very wise—and it was under the expectation that it would be a safe environment and that there would be protections there. I wouldn't say that it was a universally safe experience for me as we know is often the case. When you bring together at times hundreds of young people out of their home for the very first time into environments where you are starting often to be drinking and to be experiencing the world in a very new way it can be a very precarious time in life which I think requires a heightened duty of care of those within those institutions to protect the young people in their care. As has also been pointed out many parents are paying with the understanding that that heightened duty of care exists and that the pastoral care is what they are paying what's often 20 grand a year for their children to be having a room and board. So it has been deeply saddening to see that that expectation has not been meet and has been kind of sacrificed in the interests of profit for some institutions clearly which is one of the reasons in the discussion about putting the code of practice into legislation and having consequences for not breaching it and ensuring that there is a monitoring. I'd like to say that the Green Party shares the view that we do not accept that any costs for meeting these obligations should be passed on to the students that we have an expectation that that is core to providing this accommodation in these circumstances and that if that's a little bit less profit then actually that's in the nature of providing the service and it is not to be passed on to the students and their families.I would also just say that I understand that the first stage of this will enable the code of practice to be put in place from the beginning of next year and then there will be a longer piece of work to develop an enduring code which I expect would be reviewed regularly but the initial one will primarily be based on the voluntary code. There's been discussion about the need for this to be—part of this is around identifying problems and being able to respond effectively and those things are very important and we've seen a failure of those. I also hope that within this is a duty to prevent problems and that it will speak specifically to the prevalence of sexual violence within our student hostels. There's preliminary findings from the largest prevalence study around sexual victimisation in a university setting that was published earlier this year in the media. It was showing that around 36 percent of young people within our university environments will be sexually assaulted while studying and that student hostels are key sites where that happens. We need to step up our response in terms of prevention and I note that a lot of the universities have been doing that and I really hope that that will be embedded into these codes because it is unacceptable. If we are committed as I hope everyone in this House is to ending sexual violence in our country then we know that universities are a place where we need to have particular focus around prevention and improving our response. So in conclusion the Greens are very pleased to be supporting this bill and want to acknowledge Mason Pendrous's family for their commitment to considering future families and preventing this tragedy from happening to anybody else and the Minister and everyone in this House for hearing their call and responding with that commitment that none of us want to see this ever happen again. We want young people to be safe and thriving as they reach out and spread their wings in life.