SpeechMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's wonderful to get an opportunity to speak on this bill tonight unexpectedly so here I am. I rise in support of the Crimes (Child Exploitation Offences) Amendment Bill at its third reading. First of all I would like to start off by thanking my colleagues from the Justice Committee for all their hard mahi in considering this bill as well as everyone who has provided a submission. I was not part of the select committee when this bill went through the committee but I have followed the debate on this very important bill. I would also like to acknowledge the member Ginny Andersen for her work on this bill and Angie Warren-Clark for taking on the bill and shepherding it through the House. Ginny Andersen was of course also the chair of the Justice Committee and I know there were quite a lot of technical parts to the bill that the select committee had to work their way through. It is a really important bill because it will make the world safer for our kids. As a parent—and I'm sure everybody else is in the same situation—with the extent of social media and electronic communications it is a little bit of a worry about what our kids are exposed to. So what this bill does is it builds on the work of the Government to protect kids online including ongoing work to design a modern flexible and coherent content regulatory framework as announced by the Minister of Internal Affairs in June 2021. The Harmful Digital Communications (Unauthorised Posting of Intimate Visual Recording) Amendment Bill received its Royal assent in March 2022 and what that bill did was it made it an offence to post intimate visual recordings without the consent of the person in the recording. The change aims to improve access to justice for victims and survivors of image-based sexual abuse. The Government has also funded the Keeping It Real Online campaign and that was created and launched in response to the increased online risk of harm to children and young people who were spending more time online of course during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Now what we're doing as a Government is we're working harder and smarter to keep our communities safe break the cycle of offending and tackle the root causes of crime. What the bill does is it strengthens existing legislation which is really important because it will better protect children from harm. So to keep things concise we support this bill because it will protect New Zealand children from harm and that's especially important as the popularity of online platforms increases amongst our young people and with that of course the opportunity for people to cause young people harm. As the popularity of online platforms increases so too does the incidence of harm in particular harm experienced by young people. I do remember that during the second reading the member Mark Mitchell was recalling some stories of his daughter experiencing some online harm and abuse and saying how he saw this legislation as an opportunity for younger people to be safer in that particular forum. There have been some other research and surveys conducted. For example a survey in partnership between Netsafe and the Ministry for Women found that the experiences of teenagers with online harm was that about seven in 10 teens have actually experienced at least one type of unwanted digital communication in the past year. It also found that almost 19 percent of teens surveyed experienced an unwanted digital communication that had had a negative effect on their daily activities the most common of which involve being contacted by a stranger. Following the select committee process the Justice Committee decided that any new offences should cover digital harm as well as any other type of communication or conduct with a person that leads to harmful prohibited behaviour. We've heard from previous speakers what the bill does. It is inserting new section 131AB into the Act making it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16 so I won't go into those amendments any further. I'd just say that this was a complex piece that the select committee had to work its way through and they it did very well making the world a little bit safer as online harm has become a growing issue over the last years with the rise of social media. This bill will do an excellent job of addressing it and putting a stop to it and it will keep our children safe so I commend it to the House. Thank you Madam Speaker.