Davis KelvinKELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I agree entirely with the member from the Green Party in that we were given this bill early this morning and we have had little opportunity to really digest what these changes to the legislation mean. I have got the Act here and I am reading section 8 of that Act. It says: A corresponding registrable offender is a person who has been convicted of a corresponding offence in a foreign jurisdiction and—(a) in respect of that offence has been sentenced to imprisonment; or (b) as a consequence has been required to report"—and it goes on. That has now been changed to say a corresponding registrable offender is a person "who as a consequence of a conviction in a foreign jurisdiction for a corresponding offence" and "has been sentenced to imprisonment; or (b) … has been required to report in that jurisdiction information"—it goes on. Really we have not had time to sit down and really work out exactly what the difference is between the Act as it stands and the changes that are being recommended here. There is wordsmithing there is a change of verbs and adverbs and all sorts but really no one has had an opportunity certainly not from the Opposition side of the House to sit down and digest what these changes actually mean and whether they are actually going to address the problem that we are trying to solve. We really do not know. We have not been able to really sit down in our party and those of us talking on this debate asked: what does this actually mean and are we going to address the actual problem? If I take section 9 of the Act it says—this is "Court may make registration order"—"(1) If a court convicts a person of a qualifying offence and imposes a non-custodial sentence in respect of that offence the court may order that the person must be placed on the register and must comply with the reporting obligations of this Act." That is going to be changed to: "If a court imposes on a person a non-custodial sentence in respect of a conviction for a qualifying offence the court may order that the person must be placed on the register and must comply with the reporting obligations of this Act." Really again it is just another case of moving words around on the page but are they actually going to make a difference and what difference is that all going to make? In Part 2 the new provisions replace the term "conditional release" with "release conditions". How that actually escaped the attention of everybody when the Act was passed is quite amazing. I mean "conditional release" means release with certain circumstances before you can be released. "Release conditions" is something totally different. In my understanding they are the conditions that somebody has imposed on them after they have been released. It goes on to clarify that the Act applies to persons released from prison but yet to reach their sentence expiry date. We just have not had time to digest what it actually means. I think it does a disservice to the House that we are going through under urgency trying to work out exactly what on earth it is that we are trying to change. We all agree that we want to keep children safe but I think just as a matter of respect—because we do support the bill—we should have just been given a bit more opportunity and a bit more notice that this was going to come up so that we could actually get in behind it. We probably would have tried to truncate the whole process but because of the lack of respect towards the Opposition we are just saying: "Well hang on. We need to give this the attention and we need to go through all the stages that we are going through in urgency here."This should never have got to this stage. It should have been dealt with the first time that the legislation went through the House. Child sex offenders—it is too serious an issue for us to make the mistake first time around. Hopefully we will not come back in another 6 months and try to change something again because we have not had the opportunity to sort it out this time."