Ardern Jacinda: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration (Preventing Name Change by Child Sex Offenders) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration (Preventing Name Change by Child Sex Offenders) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8512. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): I am going to give a very straightforward contribution in this House on this particular bill and debate. You will not hear anyone in this Chamber argue for a moment that we should be lured away from the focus of protecting children. Everyone in this House agrees that we should be putting in place as far as our powers allow protections to prevent children from being harmed to as far as we are able prevent those who target children and seek to harm them and to protect children from those individuals. We share that intent. Intent however is not enough. It is not enough to symbolically stand up and say: “We all believe this and here is a law a bill that proves that we believe this.” Intent is not enough if the bill that this Parliament is debating will absolutely not deliver that shared view or that shared intent. This is the New Zealand Parliament; we cannot simply usher through pieces of legislation because they purport to do something that they do not. I know that the Attorney-General will agree with me because he has made it absolutely undeniably clear in his report on this bill that the bill which has been titled the Births Deaths Marriages and Relationships Registration (Preventing Name Change by Child Sex Offenders) Amendment Bill actually does not even achieve the objective of the title. This bill will not stop sex offenders changing their name. If that is meant to be the purpose of this bill—and yet we have had the Attorney-General tell us it will not achieve that outcome—why are we supporting it? Why would we waste this House’s precious time with a bill that will not achieve the stated objective?I want to read from the Attorney-General’s report. The Attorney-General states: “Notwithstanding its wide drafting”—so this is him pointing out that actually the bill does not target those it is meant to as well—“the Bill does not prevent or only partially prevents a ‘child sex offender’ from changing their name. At common law a person can lawfully use a new name without registering it so long as the new name is not used for fraudulent or improper purposes. The new identity is established simply by using the new name and by repute and the change comes into effect when the person starts using the name. Similarly a person is not legally obliged to give their ‘registered’ name address or other information unless there are statutory requirements specifying otherwise.” Statutory requirements might be for instance registering to be a teacher in which you are required to have a criminal check and disclosure around criminal history anyway. The Attorney-General goes on to say: “I consider the prohibition on child sex offenders changing their registered name will have a minimal impact on the ability for a child sex offender to use other names.”This bill will not do what the bill sets out to do. It is farcical to have a Parliament pretend—act under the pretence—that we are protecting children when clearly we are not. In fact putting up that pretence is dangerous. This is a point I wish to offer up in this House because someone might say: “Well even if it doesn’t quite do it if there’s a small chance it might maybe you should do it anyway.” Putting through a bill that purports to prevent someone from changing their name when it does not creates a false sense of security and that is a dangerous thing. The individual who in the past committed child sex offences and was found to have changed their name did so unlawfully. They fraudulently changed their name as in they used a false name when they tried to take a job as a teacher. They acted unlawfully. This bill would not have stopped that. So by passing a bill that makes it seem as though we have covered everyone who might do that perhaps we might not take our police vettings as seriously. Perhaps we might not do the checks and balances via the teachers council that we need to undertake. We cannot afford to drop our vigilance and I would put forward that this bill means that we could as a result drop our vigilance and put children at risk of being harmed when what we all collectively want to do is prevent that harm from happening in the first place. We cannot support a bill that the Government’s own Attorney-General patently does not support.