Chadwick Steve: Prostitution Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Chadwick Steve: Prostitution Reform Bill — Second Reading 
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STEVE CHADWICK (NZ Labour—Rotorua) 
: 
 I rise to support this bill and to maintain a consistent argument. As a mother a midwife and a health worker for many years I have seen how the law in its current form provides a very poor framework. This bill will help very much to clean up the sex industry. The current law simply inhibits the passing on of information on safe sex and that is the fundamental problem if we are to clean up the industry from a sexual health perspective. I want to speak from that perspective tonight. We have already had evidence of the police moving to use safe-sex materials as evidence in court of prostitution-related crimes and that has happened as recently as December of last year.  
The incentives in the current bill are really about changing the environment of fear that exists for workers in the sex industry to one of protection. The current law as we see it now is a blokes’ law. It is a condom law that protects the bloke and not the sex worker in a two-way transaction that is willingly entered into by two people. The law penalises a sex worker if he or she is found soliciting but lets off the paying customer who seeks that service and happily pays for it. I favour the decriminalisation model and it is for those reasons that I want the bill to go on to the Committee stage. The bill puts the right incentives in place and stops the nonsense of using evidence of safe-sex practices against the worker.  
I also want to mention that the United Nations has undertaken work here on the impact of HIV/AIDS in sex work and has done a report on the global impact of sex workers on HIV/AIDS. The report states that the legal status of sex work in a given region has a significant bearing on the effectiveness of AIDS programmes that target sex workers. Where sex work is illegal legislative frameworks are often orientated towards penalising individual sex workers. In such settings sex workers are less likely to seek health services and are more likely to conduct their services underground.  
I spent a night with the Prostitutes Collective in Rotorua and went to massage parlours and brothels. I did not see any evidence of coercion fear or abuse from the sex workers. I talked to the sex workers—this is a very responsible collective. Those workers want this law. They know that this law will give them the protections that will clean up the industry and will get people who are working on the street back into registered licensed premises. I think we need to listen to that attitude. I think more of my colleagues in the House need to go out with the Prostitutes Collective in order to see how the law as it currently applies is not working and how that collective is urging us with great responsibility as parliamentarians to support this bill.  
I also have the letter that all members have received from the Family Planning Association the AIDS Foundation the Public Health Association the Prostitutes Collective the National Council of Women the Maori Women’s Welfare League the New Zealand Federation of Business and Professional Women and the Young Women’s Christian Association of Aotearoa - New Zealand. Those organisations state that they want this bill because it safeguards the human rights of sex workers protects workers from exploitation promotes the welfare and occupational safety and health of sex workers creates an environment that is conducive to public health and prohibits the use in prostitution of persons under the age of 18 years. I did not meet one sex worker—one prostitute—who supported the idea that young children should ever enter that profession. They themselves had entered through different means and different approaches and I as a mother do not want my children to take up that option. But the Prostitutes Collective is responsibly helping sex workers to leave the industry and that is what it is being set up to assist. It also says that fundamentally the law as it stands is an ass because it is used against sex workers.  
I support this bill going to its next stage.