Gallagher Martin: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Gallagher Martin: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
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MARTIN GALLAGHER (Labour—Hamilton West) 
: 
 As the chairperson of the Law and Order Committee I will take a reasonably short call. I take this opportunity to express my thanks to all the members of the select committee. I accept that such is the nature of our democracy here in the Chamber that some robust views will be expressed in terms of the processes around the committee. In terms of the interaction with officials the constructive comments and the constructive observations I thank all members of the committee. I particularly thank the officials some of whom are present in the Chamber for their excellent work and assistance to the committee and for their very tireless efforts in terms of doing their job in assisting the committee to draft what we obviously hope is good law. 
I take this opportunity to single out three people in particular who have played a very constructive role. One is my good colleague the member of Parliament for Hamilton East Dianne Yates. I thank her in terms of the initiatives she took on the issue of law reform in relation to drug rape which this bill implements. I think that the expertise Dianne Yates has in that area has been considerable and profound. Thanks to her efforts we will hopefully have better law in that area. I also take this opportunity to acknowledge the deputy chairperson of the Law and Order Committee Marc Alexander—who is not always charitable when it comes to certain aspects of Government policy and that is the nature of it—he is a very hard-working member of that committee and a hard-working MP. 
I want to acknowledge Mr Alexander’s Supplementary Order Paper which proposes a new offence—that of meeting a young person under the age of 16 in order to undertake an exercise of sexual grooming. As the Minister has said—and I certainly reiterate it—we thank him for pursuing that particular issue. As a result of in part the work that he has done there is a new offence and the provision in the bill will extend the protection of young people from sexual predators by covering situations where for example a person contacts and arranges to meet a child over the Internet with the intention of sexually abusing that young person. So I compliment Marc Alexander on his work on that issue. 
Finally—[ 
Interruption 
]. I say in response to that interjection that as chair of the select committee I will take at least 2 more minutes maybe 3 or 4 minutes. I also praise Sue Bradford. I personally express appreciation to her for her very insightful and very deep understanding of the issues raised in this bill. I think that she made a tremendous contribution in the select committee. It was a privilege and a pleasure to work with her. I also want to praise the speech that she has just made in this House which I assure her I listened to very very closely and I thank her for her insights. 
People have raised the issue of whether this bill needs to be referred back to the select committee. I want to highlight very succinctly one of the many examples that show why we need to get this bill through—and maybe the bill is not 100 percent perfect but it is 100 percent better than what we have. Under the current law a woman is not committing an offence if she has a consensual sexual relationship with a boy under the age of 16 but obviously a man who has a sexual relationship with someone under the age of 16 does commit an offence. Clearly that law is not gender-neutral. Even Ron Mark in the light of his robust contribution would be really keen to sort that anomaly out. That is just one example of the anomalies that this bill corrects. 
I also take this opportunity to honour and praise those people who gave private submissions to the committee recounting their very painful personal circumstances. To sit in front of a group of people whom one does not know takes amazing courage and perseverance and those submitters’ courage assisted members of the committee to look into the eyes of victims and to gain an insight. For those of us who do not have experience in that area—which by the grace of God is our good fortune—in terms of dealing with and talking to victims that certainly gave us some very very valuable insights and I thank those people for that. I look forward to participating during the Committee stage and the third reading debate. I look forward to the reasonably speedy passage of this bill.