Williams Poto: Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Register) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 01 June 2016. Volume:714;Page:11628. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I had the pleasure of sitting on the Social Services Committee for some of the submissions. I do not believe I was on the select committee when the report was deliberated on and brought back to the House. Suffice to say the select committee process was fairly harrowing. There was some very sensitive material that came up and some high emotion by those people who were presenting. In my contribution I want to traverse the range of concerns that came up through the whole spectrum of issues.I start with a contribution that really sets the tone for the community concern that we get this right. This is a quote from the submission: “I’ve had calls from many people over the years worried about a sex offender being in their neighbourhood—from headmasters teachers concerned members of the public and so on—many many from desperate parents whose children have been raped by sex offenders and when these offenders have been released the victims are petrified scared of their own shadows cannot sleep. All they want to do is make sure the offender is not in the area they live. Surely that is not too much to ask?”. I start with that because it does demonstrate the level of concern that there is in our communities that we do everything we can to address public safety.It is very interesting because there was a range of views that were presented at the select committee including views from people who had been offenders and who were concerned that they could appropriately present their concerns that the register was not going to be the most efficient way to deal with safety for our community. We looked as a select committee across the various other Parliaments and countries to see which ones had sex offender registers and the effectiveness of those registers. It could not be said categorically that the register provided the kinds of assurances that our community and this submission that I have just read actually speak to.Some of the other views that were presented at the select committee said things like: “A register is actually a list of people who have already offended and it is not proven as an effective way of protecting children from offending.” One of the pieces of evidence that came to us was about the reoffending rates of sex offenders and I think the jury is kind of a little bit out on this. By and large most of the submitters said that actually sex offenders do not have a high rate of recidivism. So what a register may do in that instance is actually just list somebody who has offended but it may not necessarily indicate that that person would reoffend and therefore be a threat to the community. Another submitter said that 95 percent of sex offence cases against children go unreported. That is a high level of cases that are not reported. So having a register does not actually provide any mechanism of protection whatsoever.There is also the notion of double jeopardy where you have committed an offence you have completed your sentence as judged by the judicial service and then going on a register may potentially put you in a position where your freedom of movement could be restricted so in a sense you are in double jeopardy. Another submitter said that 90 percent of offenders will not be on a register because they have not been caught yet. So there will be offenders at large who have not been caught who this register will not actually protect the public from. Those who are seeking a more robust rehabilitation process said that the register is detrimental to successful reintegration into the community.We have already heard in the debate on the previous piece of legislation where poor sentencing and ineffective rehabilitation resulted in the tragic case of Blessie Gotingco so if we are to do anything about ensuring the protection of our children then surely we must look at how we sentence and how we rehabilitate people. That is where obviously when things go wrong they go badly wrong as in the case of the Gotingco whānau.There is the notion of specified agencies within the bill and my colleague has already mentioned those including Housing New Zealand the Ministry of Social Development the Department of Corrections and the like. One of the submitters said that there is a possibility that one of the public servants within those agencies may actually use the information that they have about a potential sex offender. For example you may be a Housing New Zealand worker and you may see that you are responsible for rehoming a sex offender who is on the register and you see that that sex offender is possibly going to move into your street or into a street that your family member is on. It is human nature to want to warn your family member or warn members of the public. It is human nature and can we absolutely guarantee that public servants will not be tempted to do that? Given the height of emotion around this particular issue I am not sure that we can.One of the submitters said that the boards of trustees of local schools should actually be included in specified agencies. Some people would say: “Yes that’s probably fair enough.” Others would say “Well absolutely not.” because then that puts the board of trustees in the position of having to hold that information private knowing that it has a sex offender in the area of its school and around its children. There is the potential that being on the register actually punishes you for life and I have already mentioned some of the arguments around that.It will increase the workload of the police and my colleague Jacinda Ardern made a really really useful point that there is $146 million out of the police budget out of the rehabilitation budget—$146 million over 10 years. I have the privilege of providing some input into the child protection diploma that a particular organisation Child Matters puts out when it is in Christchurch delivering to Christchurch students. I do a paper on legislation and the role of legislation in protecting children and the last time I presented this paper was when this bill first came to the House. So it was an opportunity to talk to people who would be front-line workers in child protection about what they felt about the implications of this bill. We talked about the role of the register to protect children and we also talked about the role of rehabilitation and good support and reintegration into a community and how that could work but overwhelmingly every single one of those students said: “$146 million would go a long way to supporting us to rehabilitate and to work with sex offenders and actually solve some of the problem.”Ria Bond: What about the victims?POTO WILLIAMS: It would go a long way to solve some of the problem because that $146 million is coming out of the police budget. That is money that we do not have for burglaries. That is money that we do not have for family violence. That is money that is taken out to actually monitor a register. I do not know and I agree with those students that there is a much better use for that money than to provide a database. As I say there is lots of emotion around this bill. It is a very sensitive topic and I look forward to the fulsome exploratory debates that will happen during the Committee stage. Thank you.