Hipkins ChrisCHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka): I am very happy to rise and say that I do support the legislative provisions of this bill. I do not support them going through all stages under urgency today. It is important to remember that the provisions of this bill apply retrospectively. They would continue to apply retrospectively whether the bill is passed today whether the bill is passed in 3 or 4 weeks' time or whether the bill is passed in 6 months' time. Is there a degree of urgency to ensure the law operates as intended? Yes there is. But that does not prevent the bill from being given the scrutiny that it deserves so that we do not end up back here again in another few months to amend another mistake.Lack of scrutiny and Parliament not doing its job appropriately is why we end up with so much legislation to fix up mistakes that were unintended. The original bill clearly did not get the scrutiny that it deserved and therefore we are back here amending the legislation and we are amending it by not giving the amendment the scrutiny that it deserves. I think—Hon Ruth Dyson: So what's likely to happen?CHRIS HIPKINS: So what is likely to happen? We could well end up back here again.The important thing to remember as I said is that this legislation will apply retrospectively. So let us say that today the Government introduced it for its first reading and said that there is a degree of urgency to get this legislation in so that the original law could work as intended and the Parliament through its processes as it has in the past agreed to a very shortened select committee process so that the bill could be adequately scrutinised—let us give it 2 weeks—and the bill then came back to the House after 2 weeks and went through the remaining stages of a second reading a Committee stage and a third reading in accordance with the regular processes of the House. It would make no difference whatsoever to when the bill would take effect from because it is retrospective legislation. But it would mean that it got some proper scrutiny so that we minimise the chances that we would be back here again doing this all over again.The problem with rushed legislation is that when you have only a few hours to look at it and decide which way you are going to go on it and pick up any errors that might be in it you do not know what you do not know and therefore we are going to vote in favour of this bill because we support the intent of it and we support what we have been told about what it will do. But we actually as parliamentarians cannot say hand on heart that we have had time to consider all of the ins and outs and all of the implications and get all of the feedback from the people who might work with this piece of legislation to ensure that it does do what it is intended to do.So this amendment to fix up a mistake in a primary Act or a primary bill is now going through even less scrutiny than the bill with the mistake in it went through. So what is to say we are not going to end up creating more problems? There is no guarantee of that.I think this bill should go through but it should not go through under the process that the Government is pushing it through. I think it says everything about this bill that the Minister who was in charge of the original bill Anne Tolley is not in charge of this bill and is not speaking on this bill to fix it up the mistake that she made in the original legislation.I think that the mistakes made by the Government and the Government's desire to get those out of the way and avoid embarrassment as quickly as possible are not good reasons for truncating the parliamentary process. If this bill is as uncontroversial and as simple as the Government claims it is then it would sail through a regular process without too much difficulty. But it does not need to be going through under urgency because the urgency will have absolutely no impact on the practical effect of the bill because the provisions in it are retrospective.Retrospective legislation is something that I also have some uncomfortableness with but in this case I think it is justified because it is about making sure that information that the Government already holds on offences that have already taken place and have already been appropriately dealt with is taken into consideration to keep children safe.Ultimately on the balance of weighing up everything I would say we should certainly err on the side of doing things that are going to keep children safe. I do not think that children will be any less safe as a result of this bill being properly scrutinised by a select committee over a period of a couple of weeks than they would be if this bill goes through under urgency today. I support the bill I support the provisions in the bill but I do not support the process the Government is using to get this bill pushed through the House.