O'Connor GregVANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you Mr Speaker for the opportunity to take a call in relation to this very important bill. I want to start by making some acknowledgments and the first is actually the previous speaker Karen Chhour who delivered I thought an excellent speech and made some very good points about what needs to happen once—we hope—this bill is passed. She said we need to ask the questions. That is really powerful and that is of course something that we'll all need to think about post this bill passing within this room but also out in communities. I want to acknowledge the member who brought this bill to the tin Ginny Andersen—now the Hon Ginny Andersen—and to just recognise her work in this area. By that I mean this is not the first piece of work she's brought before the House that concerns the lives of people who are vulnerable so I am just acknowledging her and acknowledging the member who is ushering this bill through the House Angie Warren-Clark because she is another member who in the past has done a lot of work in the family violence space including with Women's Refuge in the Bay of Plenty area. So just a fantastic team who I think is appropriate to bring this bill before the House. In 2010 the word catfish" started being used more frequently and I suspect that was because there was a movie by that name that was circulating at the time. The term "catfish" really is about people who create a fake identity or sometimes multiple fake identities online. Interestingly for some background the term derives from the fact that they used to ship codfish in tanks from Alaska to China and they'd keep them in vats in a ship. And by the time the codfish reached China the flesh was mush and tasteless. So someone came up with this idea that if you put catfish in the vat with them then the catfish would keep the cod agile they'd keep them on their toes they wouldn't know what was happening. And so it was this terminology that encapsulates actually quite a broad group of people. For some people it's purely about anonymity and having an anonymous identity online to be themselves. For other people it's about fraud and there have been many people who've been subject to various types of fraud because of catfish-type behaviour. For others it's more sinister and it's important where it is more sinister especially where children are concerned that our legislative schemes are responding accordingly. This is a really fascinating bill in many ways because it's a bill that entered the Justice Committee actually looking quite different from the way it looked when it came out the other side. So I must also thank the Ministry of Justice officials for coming back to us several times and working with us to identify the true legal gaps in play so that we weren't duplicating in terms of legislation. So the bill as it came into select committee did three things. It introduced two new offences: new section 126A in clause 4 which would make it an offence in certain circumstances for someone over the age of 18 to digitally communicate with a young person under the age of 16. And the older person would have to have intended to mislead the younger person about their age and subsequently arranged to meet them. It also introduced new section 126B which would make it an offence for someone over the age of 18 to digitally communicate with a person under the age of 16 intending to cause harm to the young person or being reckless as to whether the young person is harmed. And the third thing it did was it proposed to amend the penalty for an existing offence in the Act that relates to actually meeting a young person following sexual grooming—to increase that penalty from seven years to 10 years. Now we had a number of really thoughtful submissions before the select committee and I may come back to a few of those if I have time. But again I really want to credit the Ministry of Justice advisers who came back to us to ensure that we understood the existing offences under the Crimes Act and the Harmful Digital Communications Act. I think what became clear to the committee as we traversed that space with the ministry officials is that much of what was in the bill at that stage was already covered by existing legislation. So the challenge for the committee was twofold. First we had to identify the actual legal gap that we wanted to address and we had to decide whether we were comfortable with criminalising something which up until that stage and indeed this stage now was essentially pre-offending conduct—so the act of grooming. The second test that we had to think about was our comfort level about the scale of penalties and whether they were comparable in terms of other like offences. We did identify a gap and one big gap in the existing law was that the law required an individual to travel to meet with the person that they'd groomed or arrange to travel to meet with them or they needed to already have provided inappropriate material to that young individual. The committee's view was that grooming itself should constitute an offence. The second issue was that the legislation that had been developed up to that stage particularly under the HDCA—the Harmful Digital Communications Act—was geared to the changing online environment and actually the Crimes Act provisions were also geared in that direction. The committee had a long discussion about whether in-person grooming should also be a criminal offence and this was something we received submissions on. We landed on the fact that it should—it very much should. The committee worked very hard—again with the advice of officials—to replace clause 4 of the bill which had provided for the two new offences with one new offence. The new offence would essentially make it illegal for someone over the age of 18 to communicate by words or conduct with a person under the age of 16 and in committing the offence there would need to be an intention to facilitate the young person engaging or being involved in conduct that would be an offence either in terms of the crimes against morality and decency sexual crimes or crimes relating to sexual exploitation of the person. So that was the narrow gap that the committee had decided that we were going to criminalise. We did also look at the penalties scheme. So the initial penalties that we had proposed for the two offences imposed two penalties—one of five years one of seven years—but when we looked at like-penalties under the Harmful Digital Communications Act it was very clear that the appropriate scope of penalties was a maximum term of imprisonment of three years. So we amended our new proposed offence so that it would have a maximum penalty of three years. And in addition we recognised that purporting to lift the penalty for the offence that was already a criminal offence from seven years to 10 years was inappropriate. So we essentially proposed deleting that clause in the bill.A novel issue that we discussed in the room was the fact that we needed to ensure that police officers who were profiling themselves as under-16-year-olds to enable them to gather evidence counted as under-16-year-olds for the purpose of the bill. So that is in there as well. Now to close my remarks in relation to this bill I just want to go back to the point that Karen Chhour made. YouthLaw Aotearoa made the very valid point that the big issue from here is going to be reporting. A lot of young people will not report. They will not report because they have been groomed. They will not report because some of them may have photos circulating of them already or held and they will be in fear of those being released more broadly if they report. There is an obligation on our policy leadership on our community groups on our parents and all those who support out there to ask the question exactly as my colleague has suggested. I'll close by again thanking the members involved. This is an extraordinarily important issue and bill. I thank the committee for their wonderful work in relation to this bill and I would commend this bill to the House.DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a shared call—five minutes."