Williams Poto; Rurawhe AdrianThird ReadingHon POTO WILLIAMS (Minister of Police): Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. I move That the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. Firstly I'd like to thank all members of the House for their very valuable contributions tonight on what is a very important bill. At the heart of this is how we protect our children from child sex offenders and trying to amend—do a fix up—of a previous bill that came to the House in 2016 which I well remember the discussion and the debate on at that time. I want to thank all the members for raising issues that they have and for also ensuring that we pass the bill in its best form by asking pertinent questions. The bill as it was passed—the primary legislation—was about keeping our kids safe and it was about the imbalance of power that our children have in times when they are harmed by others. Often it's very difficult for a child or in fact it's virtually impossible for a child to raise these issues of harm at the time and what tends to happen is as an adult those offences become so problematic that they—[Member coughs]—apologies—raise them as older people. What the primary legislation and the amendment to this seek to do is to deal with—[Melissa Lee and then Sarah Pallett give the member a glass of water]—thank you my dear; oh thank you both of you—historical sex offences to deal with cases where for one reason or another those matters couldn't have been raised at the time. I'm very grateful to the House for fixing up a problem that wasn't intended when that first piece of legislation went through. I understand the use of urgency is not something we take lightly nor is looking at the issue of retrospectivity and often when we are having debates in the House one of the things that we raise is whether legislation should be retrospective. We've done so in this case because of the unique nature of sexual offending towards children where the ability to raise concerns at the time is often very limited. I have to say that what was unique about this case is that we were able to largely have consensus across the House. I'm grateful to members for their participation in our dialogue leading up to the bill coming to the House and I'm also grateful that there have been times when we haven't always agreed. As I said in earlier readings of this particular bill dissension is not a bad thing. It does allow us to examine different perspectives and we should allow for that healthy robust debate to occur never more so than in bills such as this where we are looking at the protection of our children. I want to refer to a comment that one of my colleagues made during one of the readings earlier on that this is a bill that puts a person on a private register—a register that's only accessed by Government agencies. The reason for that is not necessarily about monitoring although monitoring is a feature of that. It's also about the ability to reach in and provide support and I think that's an important aspect that we can't forget: that all people have the ability for rehabilitation and change. If we are to take that as a feature of how we want to work in the future in this House it does speak to our ability to be compassionate and to help people when they reach out for help. All of those values are wrapped up in this little piece of legislation which is my first bill that I've taken all the way through the House and I've done it on one day so that's pretty momentous. Just in conclusion it's been a big day for officials and I want to thank them very much for the work that they have done. It's been a big few weeks for the police ascertaining the people that were captured by the Supreme Court decision and I thank them very much for their work. I thank my colleagues and I commend this bill to the House. DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.