Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I would like to reflect on something Mr Ngaro said. He made a statement I can agree with and that is not always the case I have to say. But he did point out—he talked about a different scale of offending within overall—I hope I do not misunderstand him. He talked about an example where a 19-year-old might have consensual sex with a 15-year-old. It is undesirable behaviour and something that needs to be dealt with—it is not condoned—but it is a very different scale of offending from someone who assaults an infant or a young child.Therefore we would deal with those people differently. We would assess the risk of their reoffending differently given the circumstances. Unfortunately that is what this legislation abjectly fails to do. I am going to quote here: The legislation currently before this committee"—this was written in November last year—"assesses offenders' risk on the basis of offence type rather than their risk of reoffending."The ever-reliable Kim Workman offered us a supplementary submission to the select committee on behalf of Robson Hanan Trust and made the very valid point I thought that we have in this legislation an expectation that people who commit particular types of offences therefore share a similar risk profile and that is demonstrably untrue. There are people who will commit certain offences who are highly likely to go on and reoffend in that same style of offence; there are other people who might commit an offence who are most unlikely to reoffend for whatever reason.On one of my first excursions into visiting people in the community with some interesting record I went to a relatively remote place and spent some time with a man who had done time for attempted murder. On the way out there I thought: "This is an interesting situation to go into." The fact is having got to know and talk to that man the likelihood of him reoffending was probably zero in regard to that particular offence; similarly with some sex offenders.The submission from Mr Workman was titled "Risk assessment of sex offenders: A short history". He talked about 1995 as a bit of a turning point in how we deal with risk assessment generally. It was in the context of decisions having to be made by parole officers but it is perfectly valid for this as well. The key finding he comes to is that this is a one-size-fits-all approach. It does not facilitate or encourage person by person individually profiling the risk of reoffending of each individual as we go through. That is fundamentally the wrong approach.It causes me to reflect on the much better solution that was offered by the New Zealand Law Society which opposes this bill. The law society continues to oppose this legislation; not dismissing the fact that we do have a problem in this country but suggesting a much better alternative. Rather than this blanket approach—"You have committed offence X therefore you go on to a register potentially for life"—the law society suggests simply giving judges the authority and the wherewithal to make single judgments in specific cases: "Yes on balance the likelihood of this person reoffending is very very high and therefore they ought to be identified in an ongoing way in the interest of community safety." That is a far more sensible approach than this one-size-fits-all blanket approach: "You have offended against law X therefore we are assuming you will continue to offend." There is simply no justification for that sort of blanket approach to risk assessment.New Zealand—and Mr Workman notes this—has developed quite a good reputation. We have not got it right yet clearly—we get it wrong on occasion—but we are seen as having been at the forefront of modelling new and improved ways of assessing the risk of people reoffending and this legislation is a retrograde step. We could potentially support any mechanism that we believed was going to reduce the likelihood of offending against our children—that might protect our children. Sadly we believe that the only protective element is in the name of this legislation. The New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse which has done a lot of research around sexual and domestic violence could find no compelling evidence anywhere in the world that suggests that having a register actually does enhance the protection of children or that it would be effective in any way. That was the theme to a lot of the—dare I say it—better informed submitters. We heard anecdotal references to research or reading or something somebody had heard somewhere that indicated that registers do have some facility to protect or to lower the risk to children. We could see no such substantive evidence."