Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. The National Party will be supporting these two bills the Victims of Family Violence (Strengthening Legal Protections) Legislation Bill and the Victims of Sexual Violence (Strengthening Legal Protections) Legislation Bill at their first reading and sending them off to a select committee and it'll be obviously for a future Parliament to decide how and in what way they will be carried forward. The bills as the Minister the Hon Ginny Andersen outlined cover three things. Given the scale of the challenges that we have as a country in violence generally and family violence generally it's fairly modest legislation to be honest. It makes two worthy changes and the third looks on the surface to be worthy but the devil will be in the detail.The first change around dealing with children and changing the Crimes Act in relation to the question of consent or lack of reasonable belief in consent isn't an appropriate consideration for children under the age of 12. I think the Minister made the point quite clearly that that's not something that we should be tolerating and it shouldn't be a defence for young children who are victims of crime. So we'll give that a tick absolutely.The second one is around automatic name suppression in criminal procedures. What we have generally when a complaint is made or sexual violence has occurred is that automatic name suppression applies. There are cases where the victims don't want to have the perpetrator of the crime benefiting from name suppression and they want the world to know and so they want to waive that name suppression. The process to do that is very cumbersome so this legislation brings in streamlined procedures to achieve that more swiftly. So we give that a tick as well. These are two things that yes are useful and as to whether it achieves that is something the select committee process will work their way through.The third area is around victims of family violence in the extremely vexed area of the Family Court where I think everybody for a long time has been dissatisfied with the scope for real huge damage to be done to families in the course of dealing with the Family Court's elongated cases. From the outside it does appear too easy for one party or other to drag proceedings out through a whole host of means and also to cause mayhem through a whole lot of claims and counterclaims some of which don't stack up. Parliament frankly on both sides of the House has made attempts to improve it and quite often the attempts to improve the system have only made things worse or haven't solved the problem. So it is a fraught area and one that needs constant attention there. There's a little bit of a danger of dipping in and out on specifics as this legislation does but we are open to considering this. And if it on the surface provides for judges to make civil restraint orders limiting future proceedings where someone has filed two or more proceedings that are totally without merit" that may have the chance to dial back on the vexatious complaints. So on that one yes on the surface of it it looks good and a select committee in the future will have to go through the details and make sure that it actually achieves the desired outcome and doesn't inadvertently make it more difficult for people to defend their side of the story but at the same time actually achieves the streamlining of the system that we want.The only point I'd make—you know we're two days before the House dissolves before the election—is that the Government has talked at great length over the last six years about being focused on the needs of victims and frankly we are quite critical of that. Yes we've seen a big increase in family violence and the three very modest things that these two bills achieve will make some progress but heck there's a whole lot more to do. I am conscious that the Minister referred to the various victim support schemes and victim assistance schemes that they've increased the funding for but it was only a couple of years ago when officials let the cat out of the bag and said that that scheme had been deliberately under-promoted for a number of years under this Government because the funding wasn't available and they were basically just keeping their head down so that victims didn't know that the scheme was available. That was the approach of this Government. I'm glad they've tried to amend that. They also announced with great fanfare $20 million to help victims of strangulation and it turned out that nowhere near the number of victims of strangulation have actually been helped by the scheme. It's been very ineffective and in fact it's helped more perpetrators of strangulation to get access to better defence.Hon Marama Davidson: Every single victim has been helped in non-fatal strangulation.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well a Minister is coming up with details that haven't been backed by the written answers that we've received so the only point I'd say is that yes you've got to back up your statements with achievements. And so yes we support this; we just wish they could do a lot more.Of course the thing that most victims of crime want is not to have been a victim of crime in the first place. So restoring law and order more generally across our communities is the absolute focus—one of the key focuses—of a future National Government if we get the opportunity to serve in the next couple of months. And that starts right at the top. I mean the starting point of your whole justice approach has been—for the six years that this Government has been in power the one sort of clearly articulated goal of reducing the prison population irrespective of what's going on in our community irrespective of the level of violent crime—"Just make sure you reduce the prison population." I think it has been misguided. That has not been in the interests of the victims of crime and so we've seen many cases many cases—it's been well recorded in the media—of people being convicted of serious sexual crimes rapes multiple rapes in some instances and receiving home detention sentences. It doesn't give the victims any sense of justice; it doesn't denounce the act effectively which is one of the goals of the Sentencing Act; and it doesn't keep our community safe. That's why we think one of the more useful things you could do for victims of crime is to ensure that the perpetrators of crime do receive an appropriate sentence which is why we're going to restrict the ability of judges to massively reduce sentences.So that I think would be a more powerful thing to do to address the concerns of the victims of sexual violence. But the Government has not chosen that and it's chosen the things in these bills. Like I say in so far as they make progress we will support them but we wish and hope that they could do more. Madam Speaker thank you very much.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The question is that the motion be agreed to."