Brown Peter: Prostitution Reform Bill — Procedure Third Reading 
Brown Peter: Prostitution Reform Bill — Procedure Third Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6604] 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 There is an old question: “What did the bishop say to the massage parlour owner?” Actually he did not say very much because they were both on  
Holmes  
the other night and Paul Holmes kept interrupting the bishop. So the question becomes: “What did the massage parlour owner say to the bishop?” And she summarised this bill in one short sentence. She said something along the lines that this bill enables the sex industry and the selling of sex to be treated exactly the same as the selling of food. That is what she said. 
I cannot really quite see how the selling of sex will be the same as selling food if this bill comes in but I can see that this bill will make sex a legitimate commodity to sell. Anybody who sells a commodity legitimately has an agent a marketeer and a public relations guy—and that is what a pimp will become. This bill will legitimise pimping. It will give huge incentives for pimps to have more and more young women under their wing under their control in order to sell their bodies. They will make huge money from that and that is what this bill will allow. Pimps work in devious ways. This bill will make them legitimate business people but they will coerce entice induce and persuade people. The bill states that it is illegal to coerce someone but it does nothing about persuading enticing and what have you in order to get young women in particular—but also young men—to become prostitutes. 
This has been a very good debate because no muck has been slung to any great degree between MPs on one side or the other. We have stuck very largely to the issue. Equally the people opposing this bill have not been moralising. We have spoken honestly about the concerns we have for the people who are enticed into the prostitution industry and for young people in particular. The people opposing this bill recognise that this industry will not disappear. We cannot legislate it out of existence; we know that. We are grown people despite the antics of some of us from time to time. We know that the industry will exist and will exist for quite some time but we want it to be contained and controlled and we want to encourage people to get out of it. This bill does none of that. It opens the door wide for people to get into prostitution—to be enticed and coerced into it. I know that is to be against the law but who will police that when somebody puts a bit of pressure on someone to become a prostitute? 
I have spoken to the mother and father of a young woman who was enticed into this industry and I tell members it is a heart-wrenching situation. One does not know what to say to them. The young girl—I do not know how old she is; I have never met her and I do not know her name—does not know where to go in terms of her future. She does not know what lies ahead of her and the parents do not know how to help her. They have no idea of how to help their young daughter. 
If we want to do something for the youth of this country we should set examples that are clean honest open and legitimate. Passing this bill tonight will send the exact reverse message of that. This bill will normalise the sex industry to a very very large degree. We will send a message to some people that it is OK to sell their bodies or someone else’s body. It will be OK to pick someone up meet them and sell their body to somebody else for sex. That is all legitimate under this bill. Young people in this country need better examples than that sort of thing. 
I am an ex-seafarer as I have told this House from time to time and I have seen prostitution first hand all over the world. I have seen it in places where the regime has been liberalised for quite some time and I have seen it where countries have gone down the sort of road that this bill provides for. If this bill goes through I say the industry will expand. Members should make no bones about that. It has done so in New South Wales and I believe it will expand quite significantly here. There will be more drug abuse; the industry will be a front for that and for child prostitution. Why is that? It is because people will be able to make money out of it. 
If we take the police out of the equation we open the door to all sorts of sinister operations. There will be more trafficking of women—not only people coming into this country but also women being trafficked from one area of New Zealand to another. That is what happened to the young lady I was talking about earlier. There will also be more violence against prostitutes. In my sea career I have seen prostitutes fighting for a client on board a ship in a hotel and in a bar room. We should not pass legislation that opens the door to those sorts of practices. Why do prostitutes fight? They fight because there is a market out there and in some cases there are not enough clients to fulfil the economic requirements of the prostitutes. There will be more criminal activity because anybody who can make any money from this industry will get into it. There will be more degrading acts performed for lower fees. That is what a lady from Australia told the Justice and Electoral Committee. Prostitutes will have to perform more and more degrading acts for fewer dollars. 
Russell Fairbrother 
: That doesn’t say much about men does it? 
PETER BROWN 
: It does not say terribly much about men; the member is quite correct in saying that. But the member may also be keen to know that there are male prostitutes and they will get involved. Young men will get involved in prostitution. 
Russell Fairbrother 
: I expect they need protection. 
PETER BROWN 
: They do need protection. If the member thinks this bill will provide it he is not living in the real world. He has entirely missed the point of what I have been saying and he has missed the point of some very good speeches in this House tonight if he believes this bill will provide that. I say to that member that we know that the status quo is not good. My New Zealand First colleagues would support a formal investigative inquiry into it—not a political inquiry but a formal investigative inquiry. That member over there on the Government benches shakes her head. 
This bill has been band-aided as someone said earlier with bits stuck in and bits taken out. Those things all came before the select committee and they were all voted against. The proposer of this bill wanted to have decriminalisation and an open slather environment to use blunt words. This bill is currently a mini-version of the Victorian model. It started out based on the Sydney model and it has ended up like the Victorian model. The sponsor himself told the House if I recall it correctly that the Victorian model was not acceptable because it led to two tiers in prostitution: the legitimate and the underworld. 
This bill is not good enough for the young people of New Zealand. I ask members to please vote against it.