Moroney Sue: Urgent Debates — Roast Busters Case—Independent Police Conduct Authority ReportText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Urgent Debates — Roast Busters Case—Independent Police Conduct Authority Report[Sitting date: 19 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2453. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I want to pick up where the Minister who just resumed her seat Minister Tolley has left off because the reason we are debating the Independent Police Conduct Authority report into the teenage rape case released today in the House at all today is that the Speaker has deemed that there is ministerial responsibility for what has occurred. And you would never know it listening to the speeches from the National Party members that actually there is ministerial responsibility on this issue. They need to take it an awful lot more seriously because so far their contributions have all been about what the police should have done and the police this and the police that and Child Youth and Family this and Child Youth and Family that. Ministers take some responsibility because until that happens we will not crack this one. We will not crack this one.This was the case that shocked the nation. Why did it shock the nation? Actually sadly not because people did not believe it was happening. People know that in their communities this type of thing is happening. It shocked the nation because people thought: “How could this have happened? How could this group of young men have been subjecting a large group of young women to sexual abuse to rape had been so confident about their right to do that that they gloated on social media about it and the young women had sought justice from the police and nothing happened—nothing happened. For 2 years this went on and nothing happened. How could that be?”. That is what shocked the nation sadly. Sadly the nation was shocked about that rather than about the fact that it happened at all. Why is that? Because what this case exposed was an underbelly of sexism that we all know in our hearts exists in this country and we have not addressed it. We have not addressed it because we want to blame someone else. We want to blame the police; or Ministers want to talk about what Child Youth and Family did wrong. Yes those agencies did let those young women down but there is ministerial responsibility. How could it be that at the height of the Bazley review after everything that was exposed in the Louise Nicholas case and how her issues were ignored by police and the implementation of that review it happens all over again?I want to stand up on behalf of New Zealand women and say that we have had enough. We have had enough of our issues not being taken seriously. We have had enough of the duck-shoving that goes on around this. No more. We must address it now. The Minister who just resumed her seat has done a little bit of rewriting of history and I think that is a great shame. I think it is a great shame that that has occurred in this debate because one of the fundamental things at the base of this case is what the law says about sexual assault. What the law says and what the police policies uphold is that the police actually do not need a complaint in order to prosecute for sexual assault. And yet there have been two Ministers already on their feet today in this House making the same mistake all over again. The Minister of Police at question time said that the only way these victims could get their issue addressed is to raise yet another complaint or to add some more detail to their complaints that have already been placed before the police. But that is wrong because the policy policies say that they can pursue a prosecution for sexual assault without a complaint having actually been lodged. So it seems that the Ministers have not learnt a thing through this exercise. They have not learnt a thing. We had the Minister who has just resumed her seat Anne Tolley who was the Minister of Police at the time saying the day the issue I guess exploded on to the media that the police had done a full investigation and she said that the reason they could not prosecute or they had not prosecuted those young men involved was that they had had no formal complaint. Well it turns out that she had been advised wrongly but imagine for a minute that that was the case. Even if that was the case that there had been no formal complaint the police’s own policies say that they did not need a complaint in order to pursue those charges of rape or what these days the law calls sexual assault. That should have happened.I really want the House to understand that even the Ministers’ responses today after all of the reviews and decisions and all of the debate and discussion are still not understanding what is required to happen here. I will not feel that we have done our job until these issues are addressed. Because yes I want to make sure it never happens again. But I also want to make sure that what has already occurred gets addressed that justice is done for these young women because these young women have already been subjected to enough. Do they really Minister need to make yet another complaint in order to have their issues addressed? Because that is not what the law says and it is not what the police policy says and it is not in fact what the Minister of Police himself told me in answers to written questions in November last year. That is why I was asking the Minister questions today. In November last year you gave me answers to questions that clearly outlined that the police had not done their homework investigated this properly and pursued all the options. Why has he sat on his hands and done nothing and waited and waited and waited for many more months until today’s report came out? And even then he says that the young women have to do something more still to get their issues addressed. Minister stand up for victims stand up for the women in New Zealand because we really have had enough.In the Minister’s response in this debate he talked about the Loves-Me-Not programme which is being rolled out by Lesley Elliot. It is a fantastic programme. I think we all agree on that. And I am not going to shy away—I am not going to shy away—from saying: “Where is the funding to support this programme?” because if we cannot ask that question in this debate then what on earth are we doing having this discussion at all? I am going to ask about the funding because we need to—by our actions by the prioritisation that we give to funding by everything that we do—denounce what has happened in this case. I want to say again that there is something in our society that made these young men feel so confident about their right to abuse those young women in that way. They did not feel guilty about it. They did not feel upset about it. They did not feel any contrition about it. They gloated about it. They gloated about it and that is the sort of thing that we have got to stop.I do not think that anything that occurred in the 2 years before the media had to expose this case—I by the way will not dignify it with the name that it has become known by because that is the name that those young men chose to make themselves feel heroic and to denigrate once again the young women whom they were abusing. I refuse to actually dignify it by giving it that name. This was teenage rape that was occurring. That is what we should call it. I am not going to use that other phrase to refer to it. I do not feel any comfort from anything that I have heard from the Government today on this issue. I do not believe it has learnt a thing and I want to see a much stronger response.