Barnett Tim: Prostitution Reform Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Barnett Tim: Prostitution Reform Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:607;Page:4452] 
TIM BARNETT (NZ Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I begin by thanking John Carter for that arrangement and thanking the whips and the musterers of the various caucuses for agreeing to those arrangements. It is a very sensible way of handling a complex matter. 
In the next 10 minutes or so if it is possible I will give an overview of the legislation and a bit of the thinking behind it referring members to the select committee report and also to the legislation. I will also attempt to make reference to some of the Supplementary Order Papers that I know are before the Committee this evening. 
I will start briefly with the commentary from the Justice and Electoral Committee which has an overview of the sex industry in New Zealand produced for the select committee by the New Zealand Police. What that does is lay out a whole lot of issues concerning prostitution in this nation. In short these are complex matters. They are not as simple as sex workers working on the streets and in brothels as members will see from pages 53 to 55 of the report. There is a great range of locations and situations involving prostitution in this nation. One thing that the Justice and Electoral Committee learnt in its endless debate on these matters was the law’s sensitivity in this area. Whenever one part of the law is changed a whole lot else can happen afterwards. 
There are about 5000 sex workers in New Zealand. It seems as though the turnover of workers is generally quite fast. We were informed that a sex worker spends on average 2 to 3 years working in the industry. Many people enter the sex industry often with a sense that although they are not unwilling there is not a free choice. Poverty issues around abuse addiction and so on are major reasons for many people entering the industry. Also many sex workers reported to the select committee that they had a problem exiting it; they felt trapped in an industry where grey areas of legality and semi-legality surround the occupation they engage in. The individual sex workers who spoke to the select committee made it very clear they were looking for clear sensible and understandable law—a law that did not point to them victimise them and label them in a way they did not think reasonable or fair. 
The law in relation to prostitution in this nation broadly parallels the development of the law in the United Kingdom. Essentially that meant a sudden move to prohibition at the end of the 19th century followed by a succession of changes to the law eventually resulting in what one could call a Clayton’s form of prohibition—a Kiwi form of prohibition—that allowed the existence of massage parlours that purported to offer genuine massage services. In effect they have been a front for a prostitution industry. That means that the act of prostitution itself has never been illegal but a whole lot of activities around prostitution are such as aspects of a conversation between a prostitute and his or her client or intended client the procuring of prostitutes and the running of brothels. Workers in intellectually handicapped centres reported to the select committee that occasionally sex workers were procured in order to provide some relief to people with disabilities. All of those activities have been illegal whereas the act of prostitution has not. 
A very vivid experience that the select committee had was to visit together with the police someone’s flat in Sydenham Christchurch and actually observe a single sex worker working from her flat in a very controlled environment. The police at that time told us that they did not think any laws were being broken. She received all her clients via the phone and had a regular clientele. On investigation we found that she was regularly breaking four laws in her day-to-day activity as a sex worker. So we have to address a range of dangerous elements that go into increasing the threats to sex workers. 
A question that the select committee spent a lot of time examining was the legal options that should apply to the sex industry. We could adopt the status quo. It is quite true that some opponents to the bill will say that the arrest rates are not particularly high and that the law is not really enforced. However as a member of this House I certainly want to know that legislation is of high quality and can survive rigorous examination. Frankly current prostitution legislation cannot. We could choose to legalise which is what the State of Victoria does. That choice would mean adopting a whole State intervention system whereby sex workers and brothels would be required to be registered and the industry would be subject to a very tight examination of the way in which it operates day by day. Or we could adopt what is called the Swedish model. We will be debating that later on thanks to an amendment from my colleague Dianne Yates. That model is one whereby the legal pressure goes off the sex worker and on to the client. The State takes the position of disapproving of prostitution and choosing to target the client. So far that model exists in Sweden and there is some debate on it in other European countries. 
But the model in the bill before us today which has been the model in New South Wales for the last 8 years—and the one I would certainly advocate and that the select committee supports—is decriminalisation. The concept of decriminalisation is simply that one looks at the activity identifies the risks in that activity that are unique to it and designs law that deals with those risks. Then one opens up the activity to all the other general laws that exist in society. If we take the activity of prostitution as an example we see that certain things are almost unique to prostitution including the whole issue of safe sex the coercion of the workers by managers offensive signage and workers getting trapped in the industry because of their convictions and because of public attitudes to prostitution. Those are all issues that require either special laws or special services. 
Combined with that many things within the prostitution sector would improve if the general law were allowed to apply to it including issues of environmental nuisance to do with parking or noise from brothels employment conditions health and safety and harassment in the street. Existing law in the Summary Offences Act can deal with issues such as harassment but at the moment the whole soliciting process corrupts that approach. 
That is the concept of decriminalisation and members will see that as we work through the bill which in a sense is very simple and straightforward. Part 2 runs through commercial sexual services which is what this issue is all about identifies the particular evils and produces particular law to deal with those evils for example contracts for commercial sexual services not being void health and safety requirements limits on signage and particular protections for sex workers. It also includes prohibitions of under 18-year-olds being involved in prostitution—not criminalising the young person but instead criminalising the client—and powers to enter and inspect premises which the health and safety approach obviously requires. 
The select committee was deeply frustrated by the fact that the two major states in Australia went through fundamental law reform but did not actually produce any review process to evaluate how they had done. Larry Baldock and I are able to endlessly exchange our perceptions of what has happened in New South Wales because there is no evaluation process on the ground. Our committee visited Australia informally and I also went there another time to see how the law was developing. We will share that information as the Committee stage goes on. The essence of it is that the New South Wales experience has been a successful one—albeit the environment of the sex industry in New South Wales is very different from that in New Zealand. It is centred on a city that has a population greater than this whole nation. The pattern of the sex industry here is very individual to this land. 
This legislation is designed around New Zealand risks and evils. We also have a series of amendments to the legislation. I particularly commend two of them. One is in the name of Phil Goff and focuses on the issue of people who have a known criminal past being banned from acting as operators in the sex industry. It also makes it a bit easier for local bodies to produce their own plans in order to focus on the particular siting of brothels in their areas. Those are two issues that the select committee wrestled with. We came up with a particular view and on reflection I can quite accept that those two issues are ones we should think about again. We have the Supplementary Order Paper here today to deal with it. There is also a Supplementary Order Paper in the name of Lianne Dalziel. I think that one of the difficulties in processing a member’s bill is that the legislation does not go around Government departments prior to coming to a committee and the Immigration Service did not have sufficient time or opportunity to look at it. In now looking at it some gaps have been found and Lianne Dalziel’s amendment deals with those. 
I will finish in the minute before the dinner break this evening. I certainly commend those two Supplementary Order Papers to the Committee. I do not intend to be a dominant force in the course of the Committee stage but I will respond when I think it is useful. I commend the commentary on the bill and the legislation and I look forward to rigorous debate over the next hours and days.