Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): At 5 to 9 on a Tuesday evening this House sort of lives up to its one-time reputation as the fastest legislature in the West. It has been significantly less than 12 hours since we first saw this bill. It will pass and then only requires Royal assent to become law. We think that that is unfortunate. Having said that I must comment on the tone of this debate this afternoon—albeit it is unfortunate we could not have a real debate including a select committee hearing public input and all of those good things—but it has been respectful and I contrast that having earlier today read the Hansard with when the principal legislation was debated in this House.There were rather some unfortunate and one would even say objectionable comments made at that point about the position of various parties not least of all the Greens. I am pleased to say that although the Greens' position has been critiqued—I see the Hon Judith Collins assuring us that it was not her. I will not go there but thank you for that reassurance. Today the Greens' position has certainly been critiqued—that is fine; we take that on board—but it has been a moderately respectful debate and I think that is a good thing.This bill that is about to be passed corrects problems—it corrects mistakes that were made—and indeed it almost made another mistake but that was caught at the last minute literally. But we believe that it is correcting a primary piece of legislation that is fundamentally flawed. We believe that because—the point I have made earlier in the debate—this is a one-size-fits-all approach. It is a blanket approach to say that every single person who has been convicted and sentenced to a particular class of offending is forever doomed—or at least doomed for a very long time—to be tarred with that brush. It has been called a predictive model—that is to say that this person has been convicted of an offence of this nature therefore they are almost certain to reoffend and we must impose these very intrusive restrictions on them.I recall—again I was reminded reading the Hansard today—that it was referred to by one submitter as correctional quackery" which is to say it is a practice in corrections that is based really on quackery. It is not actually evidence based or substantive. There is no proof that this is the appropriate way. When the original Act the primary legislation was passed not all that long ago the Law Society made a very strong submission that the purpose of the bill—the outcomes that we are all pursuing—is about the safety of children. Nobody can argue with that as a purpose as an aspiration but we could achieve that much much better and at much less cost by creating an opportunity for the parole board and judges to determine at the completion of a person's sentence that they are still representing or constituting a serious risk to children in the community and therefore should be subject to some form of very intensive supervision which could even include a register of the sort that we currently have.But it is this blanket approach which is not really backing Corrections is it? Saying that a person can be convicted serve a sentence undertake rehabilitation treatment but nevertheless we are saying "Well that's going to fail." before they have even begun. It is suggesting that no matter what progress a person might make when they are being treated—and often these people might be sentenced to quite long terms of imprisonment—no matter what Corrections or anybody else might do with those people and no matter what efforts are made to change their behaviour they are nevertheless not going to be trustworthy on the day they leave prison. So we do think that it is a wrong approach. It is misguided. In our view the principal legislation is fundamentally flawed and this process we have been through today to correct errors in it does very little to improve on that. It simply broadens the scope. It increases the number of people who will be immediately subject to the conditions of the bill and placed on the register.The final comment I would make is about the privacy concerns we have expressed through this debate and indeed in the original debate on the principal legislation. The Privacy Commissioner at the time made a very strong submission saying that the procedural and governance safeguards for information-sharing arrangements were inadequate. The Privacy Commissioner made a number of recommendations most of which were not picked up and incorporated into the bill and we are quite convinced that (a) the protections built into the legislation are weak in themselves and it is almost inevitable—in fact I would say it is inevitable—that details of individuals who are named on this register will eventually leak. That will have serious negative consequences for them and probably even more so for their families. I have made the point earlier. The families of people who are associated with people whose names appear on the register—when inevitably those are leaked because you have literally tens of thousands of people who will have access to this register—will suffer as well and we think that is unreasonable. So we are continuing to oppose this legislation. Thank you."