Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): When we first started the first reading of this piece of legislation earlier this afternoon I started my contribution by saying that for me it was a matter of public safety. As legislators and members of Parliament our primary duty is to ensure that our people are safe and actually we have a real duty to ensure that our children are paramount within that. I was concerned and troubled that an amendment bill had come to the House to fix up the primary legislation and the primary legislation was enacting a child sex offenders register. It caused me some alarm that we did not get that primary piece of legislation correct in the first place and that in the intervening months—it has not been a huge amount of time—it has allowed 107 sex offenders to not be eligible to go on the register. For me that was hugely concerning. During the passage of this bill under urgency we have learnt that there have been other errors. There have been omissions and there have been very pointed questions posed by members of the Opposition to examine and to make sure that we actually get this amendment right so that we actually can feel comfortable that we are addressing what we need to do. I recall that at the time we were debating the primary legislation there were a couple of cases where families were absolutely beside themselves because they had convicted sex offenders in their area. They knew about them and they were in areas where they were close to children. Those families were looking to us to provide them with some comfort because there can be nothing more distressing than being in fear for the safety of your kids. So during the passage of this legislation under urgency in the House—which we have also questioned; the need for urgency—it has become apparent that throughout the passage of this amendment bill through the House there have been some problems with process. There have been some issues with definition and there have been some concerns about policy and unfortunately I do not feel that all of these concerns have been addressed adequately. However we are required to support this bill because we want those 107 child sex offenders currently not eligible to be on the register to actually be on the register. We also want to ensure that others who may fall into the gap that is created by those issues with sentencing dates and the phrase release conditions" as opposed to "conditional release" which was in the original legislation—that those issues are tidied up so that we actually have a piece of legislation that functions well to ensure that those people who are required to be on the register are on the register. But I am not comfortable that we have got it completely right because even in my last contribution in the Committee of the whole House I discovered that the Minister at 5.34 p.m. this afternoon was making an amendment to the proposed amendment because we have not even got the date of sentencing correct. We have it in the legislation—in the amendment—as "October" when it should read "October 2016". So I am not comfortable that we have actually done everything we can and I have been expressing this view through all of the calls that I have made in this House. Urgency is required for a purpose yes and I believe that it is useful and right that we use urgency when it is required. But in this particular case I think that we should have allowed for some further examination. We should have allowed for a select committee process we should have allowed for submissions to be made and we should have allowed for some examination and questions to officials which did not occur in the first select committee stage because it might have been that the Social Services Committee was not the most appropriate committee to review the primary legislation. Those are the arguments that have been traversed across the House this evening. I do not want to hold up the passage of this bill but I did want to continue to register my concern that we may not have got this entirely right. Urgency should be used for an appropriate purpose but I am not sure it was entirely appropriate in this case. I hope we have got it right because actually the safety of our kids is the most important job that we can do. Thank you."