Power Simon: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Power Simon: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Volume:675;Page:21336] 
Hon SIMON POWER (Minister of Justice) 
: 
 I will respond to a couple of comments that have been made by the Opposition members during the course of the debate on the Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2). The first point is that one of the reasons that this bill was sent to the Social Services Committee was that the Justice and Electoral Committee had an enormous amount of work before it. The neglect and ill treatment of children and any changes that could be made to the law to protect them or to extend duties for those who should be required to protect them seemed pretty logical subject matter for the Social Services Committee to determine. That decision and the fact that the Government was prepared to look for a select committee that had a like mind in respect of the issues contained in the bill I think emphasises how serious the Government was about turning this matter round quickly and not having it sent to a committee where four or five other big pieces of legislation were rightly consuming the committee’s time. 
I thank the members of the Social Services Committee for their attention to this bill. Despite some of the comments that have been made by their colleagues who were not on that committee I thank the Opposition members on that committee for their thoughtful contributions and for the seriousness with which they have taken this matter. 
I also take this opportunity—because I did not do so in my opening remarks—to reconfirm that this bill deals also with a change of definition to the claim of right defence. It also deals with some changes to the issues of sexual grooming. Clause 5 amends the offence of sexual grooming of an under-16-year-old by enabling a constable to covertly engage with a sexual offender to bring that particular person to answer for his or her alleged offending. Lastly—and I think Jami-Lee Ross may have been the only member to refer to this matter; I stand to be corrected—part of the Government’s response to an emerging trend of knife crime and in particular young people and their use of knives is contained in clause 8 which indicates that an offence that currently carries a penalty of 2 years’ imprisonment will now carry a penalty of 3 years’ imprisonment. 
I will comment just briefly on the ACT Party amendment that has been tabled. I understand the reasons for the ACT Party wanting to table that amendment and the abhorrence that I suspect those members hold for the type of offending this bill is trying to cover. Loosely speaking those members want to place that offence into the three-strikes regime portions of the Sentencing Act. I certainly understand that motivation and I respect it but according to the select committee report it spent some time considering this matter while it was working on the bill. It had this to say as part of the report back: “We considered whether or not these provisions should amount to an offence subject to the three-stage regime under sections 86A to 86I of the Sentencing Act 2002. All such offences”—that is the offences from those parts of that legislation—“require a positive violent or sexual act by the perpetrator which is fundamentally inconsistent with the offence provisions” contained in the bill that the Committee is now considering. In effect the distinction could be summarised as being a duty or an omission in respect of that duty versus the commission of a serious violent or sexual offence. In other words the committee’s view was that the fit was not quite right in that regard. The Government accepts the advice and will be following the advice of the committee.