Brown SimeonSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to take a call on the second reading of this piece of legislation. As I said earlier National will be supporting this very important piece of legislation as it progresses through all stages of this debate. This is an incredibly important piece of legislation which amends the retrospective provisions in the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) Act 2016. And as the Minister has outlined this in normal process would have just gone to a select committee but currently due to the urgency is now here for a second reading.I do just want to acknowledge though the Minister's engagement on the points that we raised in the first reading and I do want to just touch on the point that I raised shortly. But I do firstly want to just discuss the issues raised by the Green Party in the first reading which—quite frankly I found their position to be outrageous that they have come down to the House here voting against this piece of legislation because it's a breach of bill of rights and rule of law. Now this is the issue that was brought to the Supreme Court—the issue around whether Parliament was intent on actually overriding the bill of rights—and they said the legislation and the wording was not clear enough. So this legislation is simply clarifying the intent of Parliament. We're not debating here the policy intent over whether there should be a child sex registry or not. That debate was had back in 2016. That debate happened five years ago. Sorry—2016? Yeah 2016—five years ago. But here they are coming down to the House to relitigate points which were raised and their principle at that point. What we're debating here today is whether 600 offenders who have been put on the child sex registry should be removed due to the fact that the court the Supreme Court took a different interpretation than what the intent of Parliament was. I just think it's astounding that they are continuing to oppose this legislation on the basis of some form of high and mighty principles when what they're saying by voting against is that they would be happy for those 600 individuals to be removed from the registry and not have to have the scrutiny not have the requirements of police being notified of their movements their addresses and all of those other things. As I said we're not debating the policy; we're debating whether those 600 people should be able to not be on the registry. What they're saying is those 600 shouldn't be on the registry. They're saying those 600 people should be removed from their responsibilities and being able to go about without the responsibilities to keep New Zealanders safe. And this is what this is about: keeping New Zealanders safe from child sex offenders. As a father of two children two daughters I just think it's astounding that a party comes down to the House and wants to play politics when we have such a serious issue. One-quarter of the offenders on the child sex registry are impacted by this Supreme Court decision—one-quarter. That's an enormous number of people—and the potential harm that will be caused if we don't get this right as a Parliament. So I just want to put in the Hansard how outraged I am over that particular issue. The second issue I just want to raise during this second reading debate is the issue—and the Minister touched on it—regarding new clause 11 in Schedule 1 inserted by clause 5 which is in regards to the exception for the particular appellant. The Minister rightly pointed out that the Supreme Court did find based upon new evidence which they allowed to be admitted that they did not believe that this particular person should be able to continue to be on the registry. That was a split decision. Two Justices said that the person should stay on the registry two Justices found the person shouldn't be on the registry and one Justice refused to make a judgment on that particular point. I just think looking at the offending that this individual did where there were 1260 video files and 1890 photographs of child pornography stored on his computer with images of child pornography across all five levels of the Sentencing Advisory Panel scale which measures the extremity of the pornography—and what we're doing is we're essentially passing legislation confirming the decision of the Supreme Court which was split. I actually think that we should be removing clause 11 and actually leaving this particular individual in the same position as all of the other 600 rather than necessarily confirming it and I will be tabling an amendment to have that clause removed and would like to have further discussion of that point. I note the member for Manurewa Arena Williams commented on the severity the shock of the severity of this offending. I think it's very important that that is acknowledged and we need to have that discussion very very soon. So that's a very important point which I would like to have further discussion on. The other point which I think needs to be discussed is the final clause which is around the express override of the bill of rights and the Sentencing Act and we want to ensure that that is express enough so that we don't have to come back and do this again. And there is particular language raised by the Supreme Court which I think—we will have a couple of questions over that during that stage. So thank you Madam Chair for the opportunity to speak on this serious piece of legislation and I do just want to conclude by congratulating Team New Zealand on just winning the 36th America's Cup in Auckland. They won it by 46 seconds. I think that's fabulous news and I think we should be commending them for retaining the auld mug. Go Team New Zealand!