Davidson MaramaMARAMA DAVIDSON (Co-Leader—Green): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I'm grateful for the opportunity to stand on behalf of the Green Party to support the Oranga Tamariki Legislation Bill to offer a short speech. Most of the changes have been canvassed by members across the House tonight. But I think it's important as the only Green Party speech to be clear firstly and briefly that the proposed legislation is to fix three main issues in the large: firstly to fix legislative errors related to interim orders in the Oranga Tamariki legislation; secondly consequential amendments that were missed when previous changes were made to raise the upper range of the youth justice jurisdiction to 17 years old; and thirdly to address some minor drafting errors in the 2017 Act and the Children's Commissioner Act 2003. Putting that up front I did also think that I would acknowledge one of the main Social Services and Community Committee's changes that came through from submissions that were made which included an instance or a hypothetical where from 1 July 2019 17-year-olds charged with serious offences—listed in Schedule 1A of the Oranga Tamariki Act—will have these charges transferred to an adult court at first appearance. The committee made changes to the bill to ensure that related less serious charges can be heard together and that's just about consistency and efficiency.There was some earlier comment which I thought I would include in my contribution to offer perhaps a perspective that hasn't quite been put up yet about wanting to make sure that we keep the impact on victims at the centre of this good justice process and I completely agree. Ensuring efficient and consistent processes is also ensuring easier streamlined processes for victims and their families as well. So the Greens do stand specifically in support of those select committee changes that came through. I did want to add to my contribution that in actual fact this Government was long shall I say chastised by the United Nations for not having 17-year-olds included in the youth justice definition. So this is actually long past time that we are finally putting this into place. We had been on notice continuously reporting period after reporting period for this being the case so I'm glad to see that. But research into cognitive and emotional intelligence abilities actually says that that development continues right into the 20s. So I think I'm just adding a point of difference flavour for the Green Party—that we acknowledge that in actual fact the same amount of close support that is offered to the youth justice people appearing before the youth justice system could actually go further just to make sure that we are providing good support for people in that cognitive emotional development phase. Lastly I wanted to acknowledge that this bill is technical. It has a narrower focus picking up on those three main things that I've already outlined but I did want to put on notice that even as of today after having spoken to the Minister other issues around the work of Oranga Tamariki and particularly the wellbeing of tamariki Māori is happening alongside legislative changes and it came through in ministerial commitments to the Budget as well as her commitments in terms of practice and I am continuing to support her in that work as well. Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.