Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): As we have heard this afternoon the purpose of this bill is to establish a Child Sex Offender Register that will reduce sexual reoffending against child victims and the risk posed by serious child sex offenders". I think the deeper purpose of the bill is of course to protect our children from a particularly abhorrent form of offending which is sexual offending against children. The register in itself is purported to be a mechanism to achieve that outcome. Nobody in this House I am one hundred percent convinced from any political stripe or colour would argue with that very worthy intention—to protect our children from this form of offending. Sadly we have no confidence at all that the establishment of a register will take us one step towards protecting the well-being of children particularly not when one does consider the financial cost of it. We think the opportunity cost of spending on this form of response or this mechanism is simply taking funds and resources away from programmes and interventions that actually would have a much much higher likelihood of protecting our children and ensuring their well-being. We see this as a particularly expensive means of delivering at best a false sense of security and we have heard that phrase used already. Members of the public might believe and in good faith that having a list of names will somehow protect children from or prevent this form of offending. Sadly there is no good compelling international evidence to that effect. The false sense of security I refer to—too often people assume that children are attacked or offended against by somebody unknown to them. The very sad truth is that most sexual offending is done by people who are known to that child which makes it all the more offensive obviously. Nevertheless it is true that this is a form of offending that is often concealed under the guise of family or friendship. The whole "stranger danger" concern while not entirely discredited by any means is certainly to be downplayed. That is not the trouble. That is not typically the source of the offending. As I have said we see this register as being a particularly costly way particularly in an environment—I think Jacinda Ardern in her very useful contribution mentioned the circles of support and accountability which are a means of ensuring that when people are released from a custodial sentence there is a group of people who share responsibility for looking after that person in the sense of keeping them out of situations where they might offend doing some monitoring of them and encouraging them into positive behaviours. At the same time that we are about to invest—or spend I would call it rather than invest—close to $150 million over 10 years some $15 million a year on this register one very good community entity delivering a programme of Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) has stopped delivering that programme for want of about $25000. That is most unfortunate—25 grand against $14.6 million a year for a programme the CoSA programme with again as Ms Ardern said an extremely high unusually high rate of success in reducing reoffending. Where are our priorities? We believe that that money could be much better spent elsewhere than in creating this register which in itself is going to achieve very little. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act section 7 critique from the Attorney-General which the Minister referred to did say that the Attorney-General's position was that the bill as originally drafted did compromise section 9 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to the extent that the punishment was disproportionate—the fact that a person could find themselves on this register for life with no means of appeal or review to be taken from that register. That is particularly so when you consider the level of intervention into a person's life. It is extraordinarily intrusive. There will be very little privacy for people who are on this register to the extent that if they even choose to spend a night or two away from home they are obliged to give advance notice of that to say where they are going who will be in that house and whether or not children particularly will be present. If they are online their digital world or footprint will be entirely available to authorities—so it is an incredibly intrusive means. The so-called compromise or the way of meeting the Attorney-General's concern was this right of appeal after 15 years. On the face of it that seems not unreasonable except that after 15 years there is no obligation on the Crown or the Department of Corrections or the Parole Board or whomever to prove that that person is a risk but in fact that person has to prove their innocence. There are very few points in our statutes where people are obliged to prove innocence. How does one prove that they are not going to offend tomorrow? How many of us can prove that we are not going to commit some form of criminal behaviour tomorrow? It is an unreasonably high bar and I think it really does not meet the objection of the Attorney-General in terms of compromising the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The Human Rights Commission said in its submission that the implementation of this register would be costly and suggested the money would be much better spent on preventative and treatment measures. That is a position we entirely agree with. Treating offenders is costly. It is long term. It requires very close supervision. It requires ongoing highly skilled treatment. It is not cheap but it does get outcomes. We think the money would be much better spent there and also as I think one other speaker mentioned in terms of community education in educating people how to keep their children safe and what risky or inappropriate behaviour looks like because it is not always apparent or obvious to people. The Law Society equally came out expressing serious concerns. In fact it expressed opposition to the bill as it was drafted on the grounds that it did not see a particular likelihood of it succeeding and it proposed what we consider a much more appropriate response which was to give judges and the Parole Board the authority or the right to put individuals on a register if it is deemed that those individuals do present a significant risk and that risk is likely to be ongoing. What we have now is more or less a blanket approach. Anybody convicted who serves a term of imprisonment for example will immediately go on to the register for periods of 8 years or 15 years or up to lifelong—whatever it might be. We think the Law Society came up with a much more workable and a much more appropriate level to say: "Yes we know that some people are going to continue to be a high risk. Let's put those very few individuals on a register and continue to monitor them." We have heard some extraordinary claims from some organisations I will not bother to name that sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated. That is patently wrong. There is a small minority of offenders who do not respond to treatment and will continue to be risk factors over their lifetime but there are also many more instances where that sort of behaviour can be changed where people can be removed from that sort of behaviour and can become trusted citizens again. Finally I would say that we support Labour's intervention in terms of the name of the bill. It does nail down very clearly that this is intended to be a register that will be shared only within and between Government departments. Our confidence in the likelihood of that information remaining secret actually is very very low when one considers that the agencies that currently will have access to that information include police and the Department of Corrections which both have a culture of securing information as well as people. We also have the Ministry of Social Development which sadly does not have a great history of protecting private information. We have the Housing New Zealand Corporation. Again I do not know how many people work in that organisation. I suspect it would be many hundreds potentially thousands and I do not believe that within that organisation there is a particular culture of securing information well. Alongside those agencies there are the Department of Internal Affairs the Customs Service and "any public sector agency … that the Minister after consultation with the Privacy Commissioner identifies as a specified agency". What that says to me is that literally tens of thousands of people potentially will have access to this register and we do live in a village and in villages people gossip. I think it is inevitable that individuals' names at least will be leaked from this register and the likelihood is that blocks of the register will at some point become available. Again as Jacinda Ardern very rightly pointed out when the names of people are released that increases the risk factor. The Greens with some regret cannot support this legislation."