Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): As a member of the Justice Committee and as a backbench MP—actually let me just start as a backbench MP by expressing my deep admiration and envy for the luck of my colleague and friend and chair Ms Ginny Andersen. Luckily the bills she draws are exceptionally worthwhile otherwise one would really be wanting to spike her on the way to the ballot box.But leaving that personal—and yet deeply felt—moment aside; Ginny we don't hate you but do it again and you're in trouble! Apologies Mr Speaker. This is a really important piece of legislation and having worked with Ms Andersen—I believe when she was in the process of formulating this bill or thinking about it; actually I think it had been around for a while. But in the process of thinking about it through the Harmful Digital Communications Act that we worked on the amendments to that with Louisa Wall; this topic of grooming and the misuse of the digital space to exploit particularly young women but also young people and particularly young people from the rainbow community came up again and again and again and it affected all of us quite deeply. So it is a real pleasure to stand here as a member of the committee that was able to then work on this bill with Ginny. And I think it does talk—as Ms Ghahraman said—to the Government's wholly new steely determination to deal to sexual and family violence; not to wring our hands or to engage in mere talk but to actually roll up our sleeves and settle into trying to change something that is deeply rooted in a toxic attitude to sexuality. Unfortunately it's a toxic attitude towards masculinity that has infected so much of our culture to the detriment of so many of our young women but to the detriment of so many of our men. I think when we talk about sexual offending we need to recognise that. Sexual offending comes from many places and I think this is important to recognise when we look at why it is important to have what is really a kind of a precursor or an add-on offence.We have the big ones right? We have rape we have sexual exploitation we even have arranging to meet and meeting a young person with the purpose of committing a sex offence. Why is it important to go back and take a look at the precursor behaviours? The reason is because they are so insidious and they are so deeply rooted in the culture of toxicity towards sexuality—and the sense of entitlement that lies behind it—that we really really do need to take these multiple steps. And I really commend and admire the Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Marama Davidson for what she is doing to try and craft a whole-of-society response and we on this side of the House are wholly behind our Minister there in the work she is doing.Let's think about grooming. Grooming is the act as has been said by many of my colleagues—the process of trying to convince a person to engage in sexual conduct. And if you spend any length of time in the criminal courts—or indeed the family courts—working with sexual offending it becomes extremely familiar to you because it is so common as a tactic.So it starts small. First the person attempts to inveigle themselves into the lives of a likely victim. And let's make no bones about it; these people do actually seek out deliberately. They deliberately seek out vulnerable children often those who they know have been abused previously compliant children isolated children—and they befriend. They befriend the parents first then they befriend the child. Touching innocent touches normal touching such as any child should be able to accept from an adult an arm around the shoulders gradually progresses. And it is normalised and it is normalised and it is normalised and then the sexual touching begins and the sexual talk. And before you know it the poor child—as in the example of my colleague Teresa Ngobi—may even believe that they welcome the advance they may even believe they are in control of the relationship; they are entangled and enmeshed and it is all downhill from there. And unfortunately we have multiple examples of that happening. It is a deeply deliberate behaviour by sex offenders. Now I'm not going to say in all sex offenders because I think there is quite a lot of evidence about sex offending that says some of it is about often men—usually men—who have not themselves got good boundaries around what is sexual touching and what is affectionate touching. And we all need affectionate touching but where you're told that the only touching that is appropriate if you are a man is sexualised touching then we have a recipe for disaster. But for many of them that is a deliberate act. And that is why I think that what Ginny Andersen is doing here is so relevant. This is an offence that targets people when they start to communicate and they start that very common grooming process. Kudos to Ms Andersen—when she saw the whole situation and she got the submissions back she did not limit it to digital which was her initial intention; she moved it wider to all forms of grooming because it is often a mixture. It is often a mixture. It is subtle. It can take months. It can take years. We need an offence that captures it all. But the particular reason that I am wholeheartedly in favour of something where it might seem like a small tag-on—and as an ex-prosecutor I suspect that this will be what will happen. We'll have the actual offence of assault on a child under 12 sexual assault on a 12-year-old—and then we will tag on to it the offence of grooming. And that will be where Ms Andersen's section stands; it will be a tag-on. It is relevant though because it does something that I often criticise the Nats for wanting to do futilely. I think this is one of the very few times I have seen in my vast career in this House—it is one of the very few times I have seen a piece of legislation that aims at deterrence and might actually get there. I've many times said deterrence is a fool's errand because most offending happens in the spur of the moment. It's done by people who are being stupid and stupid people are rarely amenable to reason. And the exceptions to that are white collar crime—there's an offence that actually can be deterred because most of those people are thinking long and hard about what they do—but the other possibility is sexual offending because a lot of sexual offending is actually premeditated over months and years. And these men know what they're doing. They may even target multiple children at the same time. That is why this is such a great thing to do. I actually have some hope that when this passes as I hope it will this offence properly publicised will actually put the fear of God into sexual predators. Those sexual predators who are currently looking for their next victim or set of victims to offend against my hope is that for those people this will actually put a little kink in the sails and they may in fact pull away from doing this because if there is a record of the contact that they are trying to make with their would-be victims then it should be reasonably easy to get them on that. And my hope is that by doing that another small chink in the armour of sexual offending falls away and we can shine light into a very dark dangerous and sad place for so many of our children and our young women. So on that note I really do want to commend Ms Andersen. It was a pleasure to work on the bill it was a pleasure to see her pivot as she did to this inclusive and more useful form and I commend it to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The next call is a split call. I call on Joseph Mooney for five minutes.