Mark Ron: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Mark Ron: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20025] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to go through a couple of points and I also start by thanking the Minister for taking a call. Members come into this Chamber so often for the Committee stage and the Labour Ministers tend to sit there and do nothing. I actually saw one here one evening doing her knitting at that table as opposed to doing the work she is paid $140000 a year to do. I congratulate the Minister on taking a call. It is a welcome change. 
I have gone through some of the aspects of Part 1 that New Zealand First cannot vote against. As difficult as some of those clauses may be to read for some of us we have had to deal with that in the 21 hours the committee sat. I take issue with the Minister when he said we had enough time. Twenty-one hours to consider the bill particularly as the debate unfolded and we had more and more questions was not sufficient time. Twenty-one hours is less than 2 days. Yes the bill has been in the House for a year and it has had 21 hours—less than 2 days—for discussion analysis and taking of submissions. As we got deeper into the bill and further towards its close most parties here said they needed more time. Unfortunately the Government chose to use its strength and numbers and run over the top of people and that was sad. 
What is good about this bill? If members look at the new definitions of what is legally recognised as genitalia in clause 3 in Part 1 they will find that the Government has simply done what it has had to do. We have recognised transsexual and transgender situations that have occurred. Ironically the law has never protected those people. Georgina Beyer’s view at the select committee was valuable and important to us. I do not think looking to my right here that my colleagues in the National Party can seriously say that they object to rape being made unlawful against people who have had sexual reorientation surgery. Certainly they cannot vote against that. To be raped has to be abhorrent for a person who has had sexual reorientation surgery as for anyone else in New Zealand. So clearly one has to agree with that part of the law change. 
What we do take issue with is the definition of sexual connection that rape with an object is not rape. I have to ask the Government again whether those young boys in Hamilton who took to the young boy with the broom handle raped him. This Government and the Labour ladies except for a couple I know who obviously argued against the commonly held view in caucus say that raping men with a broom handle is not rape. They say that it is a lesser crime. They say that the young boy in Hamilton who was violated with a broom handle who was raped was not raped. Why? Because the Labour ladies want rape to be an exclusive crime that can only ever be perpetuated against a woman—not against a male—with a bodily part and not with an object. 
Ask the young woman who laid complaints against the police that she was raped with a police baton. Is that not rape? No according to the Labour ladies whom John Tamihere so accurately described in the media they do not think that being raped with an object is rape. 
 We have tried to argue that. We have tried to get them to change the legislation. I guess it just means that in a future coalition Government that New Zealand First is leading we will have to come back to that issue and amend the bill. I know there are members in the Labour caucus—Georgina Beyer Dover Samuels and Mahara Okeroa I believe—who do not agree with the Minister’s view and definition of rape. Yet they are being forced to accept their party’s decision and sit there quietly. At least they know how to display unity; Mr Tamihere does not seem to be able to. But they know that their party is wrong they know that it is taking a politically correct approach to this and they know that rape with a broom handle a beer bottle or rape with a police baton is rape—end of story. But this legislation states that it is not. 
Let us look further down in the legislation at all the information and the detail that pertains to dealing with people under 18 for sexual exploitation. We will support those law changes. I make no bones about it we will support the Government in passing this bill. But now I have a question from New Zealand First. This Government has a habit of passing laws and imposing more workload on the police but never doing a risk analysis or an assessment of what extra resources will be required for the police force and giving the police those resources. 
It is one thing to pass this legislation here today and say it is a crime to exploit young people under the age of 18 to put them into prostitution or to hire them—to use them. But this Government does nothing about resourcing police so that they can get young women who are being exploited as prostitutes or as child prostitutes in the Manchester Street area in Christchurch off the street. It does nothing. Ask the police how many extra policeman they will get to reinforce this law they will say that they will get nothing. They will have to do this plus 2.7 million hours of traffic duty. 
If one asks the police whether they ever got extra resources to police the lowering of the drinking age they will say no. If one asks whether the police got any extra resources to police the decriminalisation of prostitution they will say no. Then how will the police do this? The Minister in the chair Ruth Dyson should look at the great list of new sections in the bill. Clause 6 “New section 98AA inserted” is a page and a half of what the Government will make illegal when it comes to exploitation of under-age women and under-age men. Where are the resources? This means absolutely nothing if the resources are not given to the police to enable them to get out and police the law to prevent the crimes to catch the perpetrators to prosecute them and to put them in jail. 
What this becomes is lip service to preventing child prostitution. The Government can say that it is complying with the United Nations charter against exploitation of children and it can preach that all over the country but it means nothing if the police do not get the resources to put this law into effect. What it tends to do is to reinforce our view that it quietly condones it that it thinks it is OK and that it actually does not care. It gets away with telling the public that it does care and that it is going to stomp it out because it passed a law. But it means nothing because it does not allocate resources to bring the law into effect and that smacks of the “h” word which we are not allowed to use in parliament. 
I move to clause 7 “New sections 127 to 138 substituted” which inserts new section 128A “Allowing sexual activity does not amount to consent in some circumstances”. Subsection (3) is Dianne Yates’ contribution—and a good contribution it was: “A person does not consent to sexual activity if the activity occurs while he or she is asleep or unconscious.” That gets to the heart of the issue that Dianne Yates brought to the House and those are the aspects of the bill that New Zealand First wants to support and see passed into law. But again we want to see the police and the resources put into the justice system to enable prosecutions against people who break this part of the law to be brought to court and to enable these people—whom I describe as pet food because that is the only purpose they serve in this life—to be put in jail. 
 It means nothing. Dianne Yates’ good work for all those years means nothing if the Government does not resource the police accordingly and if the Government continues to insist that what the police should be doing is issuing traffic tickets. They have spent 2.7 million hours doing that—386 hours per policeman and policewoman regardless of whether they are sitting in police headquarters shining their seats or are out on the road dedicated to doing traffic duty and not this kind of stuff. This is real hard-core crime. 
We will be looking with interest at the Budget to see just how many dollars and how many policemen and policewomen will be devoted by this Government to ensuring that clause 6 is enforced—not just passed and enacted. There have been no prosecutions for exploitation of child prostitutes in Christchurch. I am looking forward to hearing next year that there have been 15 20 or 30 prosecutions particularly in the Minister of Police’s electorate because the bottom line is that if there are child prostitutes in his electorate how many more are there throughout the rest of the country?