Fox MaramaMARAMA FOX (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā. You know this is a third reading and when it first came into this House I had one goal—one goal and that was it—and that was to improve the lives of our children. I actually sat down and tried to figure out how to write a love at home" bill. I was thinking: how do we create that? How do we do the reverse of penalising people who get it wrong but encourage people to get it right? I thought about that for a while. It took a while. We are still thinking about that.What we do is we write legislation with the worst possible scenario in mind and try to protect against it which means we are always penalising dumb stuff that happens rather than encouraging better stuff to happen. We think that by making the penalties stronger or harder that will somehow incentivise people to do better. Has that worked? No it has not. So now we are faced with a bill that everybody wants to work. Everybody wants to get this right. It is widely talked about that this is a largely Māori issue—disproportionately so—and it is. After Moko was killed Alan Duff came out and said the problem with Māori is they have got that warrior gene and they scrap too much—something like that; I am paraphrasing. Sorry Alan Duff. But after him Professor Anne Salmond came out and she said: "Well let's have a look shall we at what is the traditional way of bringing up children in Māori cultural custom." She said: "I'm not going to try and debate with you; I'm going to give you the letters of the settlers who came to this country and let them tell you from their journals and their own letters." One of them said: "No sooner had the child been weaned from the breast of its mother that it was taught to twine its arms around the neck of its father and there they stayed all the day long and their fathers catered to their every need." If they dared to come to the table of a great important hui or the paepae if they asked a question they were afforded just as much respect in the answering of that question as if they were a chief themselves.Hurting our children—physically mentally sexually—is not our way. It is not our cultural custom. If we were able to create a piece of legislation that ensured we always kept our children safe then that is exactly what we would be wanting to do. We do not believe that this does it. We want it to and we want to help but it is not cognisant of the issues that have plagued us. Those issues were borne out today on the steps of Parliament by Papa Stanley who stood up and said that for 69 years he had been waiting to address the issue of abuse. He found himself in State care because the family who adopted him no longer wanted him at 18 months and put him back into State care. Did he come from an abusive home? Did he come from somewhere where he was being sexually abused or belittled? No.I met another man out there today who said he was taken home one day by the police because he was wagging school. He was 8 years old. There was no one home because they were at work and he was taken straight to a boys' home and never went back. I have my own family members who were taken into care by the public health nurse to give their mother respite—6 of them the youngest of whom was a baby; the eldest of which was 11. They never went home ever—not ever. When they had no room for them in foster care after being shipped around after being abused and running away they put the eldest girl—at that time 14—into Arohata Women's Prison. That was a while ago but I heard about the young boy: 8 years old in a Wiri boys' home because there was nowhere else for him to go. This legislation does not change that possibility from happening and we just want to help make it stronger. Kia ora."