Dalziel Lianne: Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 24 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:8248. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to continue speaking in the second reading of this important bill the Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill. It is important that we consign the provocation defence to history. It is anachronistic and as I was saying as the House concluded its business the other night when we were dealing with this matter this particular defence allows the charge of murder to be reduced to a finding of manslaughter. The word “manslaughter” was reported in some of the feminist literature of the time as being made up of two words: “man’s laughter”. That is because in the days when I knew about this defence when I was a law student there had been a very high-profile case where a husband Dr Minnett had killed his wife Leigh Minnett not actually very far from Parliament. The claim that he had made was that he had been so outraged and incensed a rational response to an attack on his masculinity that his wife’s affair had brought about within him that he was compelled to go and get his gun out of the wardrobe to shoot and kill her. As a young law student I of course found it utterly reprehensible that he was essentially able to get away with murder. 
The interesting thing is that I found one of the old  
Broadsheet 
 articles on the killing of Leigh Minnett and I thought I would just read into the record the last little bit of that particular article because I though that it really did sum up what was so wrong with the defence of provocation. It states: “The worst that can be said of a woman is that she sleeps around. Leigh was publicly tarred with this brush. The worst insult to a man is just the opposite: that he can’t get it up and it’s not worth getting up anyway. This is such a dreadful thing to say that it excuses even killing the speaker. The double standard has never been more clearly demonstrated than it was in the shooting of Leigh Minnett.” That is a really compelling statement and it is why the defence must go. 
Since that time though we have found the defence used in other circumstances. At this point I want to refer to the killing of Ronald Brown. I referred to him in the first reading debate on this bill but want to mention him again because his case will be—now we know this—the last case where the defence of provocation was successfully pleaded. His case sums up everything that is wrong with the defence but from a different perspective from that applying to Leigh Minnett where her husband was given a lawful excuse as it were to take her life and evade a conviction for murder which really should have been applied in that case. In this case the defence was that an individual’s sexuality was threatened. The person who took Ronald Brown’s life was fearful that he was going to be the subject of a homosexual advance. Again I say there is nothing that justifies the taking of another life and certainly to plead that in these circumstances is reprehensible in the extreme. 
I would have liked to say that the reason that the Ronald Brown case did not attract the media attention that Sophie Elliott’s murderer attracted was that the accused person in the Ronald Brown case did not give evidence at the trial. But deep down I do not believe that was the reason. I believe that the media should reflect on what they have done in terms of the coverage they gave to Sophie Elliott’s murderer. These two cases stand in stark contrast to each other. I think that people need to look into themselves and to ask themselves the question of whether the public interest was served by dishing up the narcissistic personality-disordered individual whom we had presented to us night after night on our television screens and by almost no mention being made of the individual who took Ronald Brown’s life. I think that that did not serve the public interest. I believe that what occurred was disrespectful to the family of Sophie Elliott and to her memory. I also think it was disrespectful to the family of Ronald Brown and to his memory as well. 
Nothing will reverse what happened in any of the cases where this defence has been pleaded. But I do think it is important for people to say there may be something that this Parliament can offer up to the victims’ families and that is the knowledge that their experience in the courts will now galvanise the response of this Parliament into what I hope will be a unanimous vote of support for repeal. The facts that we are now up to the second reading and that we will shortly move on to the Committee stage and the third reading tonight means that this day 24 November will go down—it is technically 24 November; though we know that it is really 26 November the date will be shown on our record because we are in urgency as being 24 November—as the day before the day that we acknowledge internationally violence against women. I think that tying this fact to the campaign that we have all been involved in on both sides of the House in the It’s Not OK campaign means it is really special that we are able to take this defence off our law books at such a time. 
I believe that we will have plenty more opportunity to debate this bill as we go through the Committee stage and then on to the third reading. I think the Law Commission’s report on this matter contained a very powerful statement when it referred to whether we should have a generic partial defence to murder. My very strong view is that we should not. The report said this: “This has the potential to reduce homicide to a lottery: it is an invitation to jurors to dress up their prejudices as law”. We must remove the reality that our jurors had been given an invitation to dress up their prejudices as law with this defence and I welcome its removal from our law books.