Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Madam Speaker. I believe it's my call and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bill the Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Bill. This was a bill that came to the Justice Committee in the previous Parliament—Dana Kirkpatrick: Point of order Madam Speaker. I believe that Labour took their call early in the piece.DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is part of the split call. There is still—Dana Kirkpatrick: Which split call?DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Garcia had half the split call and Arena Williams—so there was a change in order earlier in the evening when someone didn't stand up. So Labour has taken one of their calls out of this. But this is the other half of the split call.Dana Kirkpatrick: So Paulo Garcia's call was 10 minutes and he only did five?DEPUTY SPEAKER: He had a five-minute call.Dana Kirkpatrick: There seems to be some confusion Madam Speaker.DEPUTY SPEAKER: OK. I'll let Arena Williams carry on with her speech. If you'd like to just come up and talk while she's doing that we'll sort it through.ARENA WILLIAMS: Thank you Madam Speaker. This was a bill that originally came to the Justice Committee in 2022 when it was ably chaired by the Hon Ginny Andersen. That committee did a huge amount of work on seeking the New Zealand Police's advice and I thank the advisers from New Zealand Police for their extensive advice about a few issues that the committee was particularly concerned about. Those were the enforcement issues around this bill the proportionality issues that have arisen in the Attorney-General's report and the practical steps for change. So I am going to speak to all three of those issues. But also I want to thank the current Justice Committee for working through some of those and other issues with the Amendment Paper from the Hon Erica Stanford which deals with those Customs issues and the previous chair of the Justice Committee Vanushi Walter who was really helpful in guiding the committee's thinking around those issues of proportionality and how as parliamentarians we might engage with them.These crimes that this bill deals with are some of the most heinous. Not only are they against the most vulnerable people in our society who deserve our utmost protection who are vulnerable children often in impoverished countries in the most dire of circumstances but this is also about the most privileged offenders in Western countries using not only their power to travel but their financial wealth to exploit people in other countries and go home and wash their hands of their offending. It is the most heinous kind of crime and none of us should turn our eyes away from it. And so we worked through firstly these enforcement issues which arise at several points in different ways in the Attorney-General's reporting on this. There's a comment from the initial Attorney-General report about how when considering the way that the penalties would change because of this and how offenders would have a right to the lesser penalty when this applied there was an issue the Attorney-General identified that the stated evidence is limited as to the effectiveness of sex offender registers in improving public safety. And so this change would still engage that kind of test of proportionality which applied to the original sex offender legislation.The Justice Committee chaired by Vanushi Walters and chaired by Ginny Andersen considered those issues—when you look at whether child sex offender registers are effective at a population level as different to whether they're effective at an individual level. At a population level it is very hard to track whether there is an effect of child sex offender registers because they don't stop anything. You can't tell when someone is breaching them. You also can't tell what effect they're having on people. You might say Well if they were keeping people from offending they were never going to offend anyway."—and if people were offending and they were still registered on the register then that shows that they were going to offend no matter what kind of registration there was against their name. So at a population level it is very hard to track but I agree with colleagues around the House who have made the point that at an individual level there is a deterrence effect here.The points raised by the Hon Ginny Andersen were correct in that when you think about deterrence for crimes like these deterrence by itself is usually very ineffective and it needs to go alongside all of the other reasons why we would criminalise something and how we would apply that to people's individual experience. But in a crime like this where someone has planned to travel overseas where someone has contacts in another jurisdiction to make their offending possible and where there is a closing web around their victims that they personally have created this factors into their decision-making about how they will continue to offend. And so it is useful for us to consider that within the proportionality of this punishment the Supreme Court did consider these kinds of punishments to be actual punishments that weighed on people's abilities to enjoy their rights as being proportionate.Madam Speaker it's only a five-minute call so there are issues around the enforcement of proportionality but the practical steps for change do continue here and we need to constantly be meeting our obligations under the UN convention that New Zealand has signed up to and look to our neighbours in Australia about the kinds of advancements that they have made which are in line with the legislative change we are making tonight. So I want to congratulate my colleague Greg O'Connor on the excellent policy work that he has done here. I also want to congratulate him on his cross-partisan work with the Hon Erica Stanford to bring in those changes which affect Customs. I commend this bill.DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you. Now we're just doing a cross check. We believe things went out of order but are in order. We've just been notified that the National Party wishes to make this last call a split call so I call Rima Nakhle for a five-minute call."