Coddington Deborah: Sex Offenders Registry Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Sex Offenders Registry Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:610;Page:7495] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I move  
That th 
e  
Sex Offenders Registry Bill be now read a first time. 
 At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be referred to the Law and Order Committee. 
Nearly 10 years ago as a journalist I stumbled into an area of crime about which I had very little knowledge. It was a crime that was protected by a cone of silence. It was criminal offending that if it occurred on the other side of the world in a country like Belgium where little girls were locked in a basement for days to be sexually abused and die the newspapers here would be filled with horrifying reports and photographs but if it happened next door in New Zealand suburbia we would turn our heads the other way and would not want to know. I was writing a book called  
Keeping Kids Safe 
 and I had commissioned a press agency to clip from the national newspapers any stories relating to accidents that children had suffered. I tossed these clippings into boxes roughly filed in alphabetical order. Then in 1996 I decided to put the book together. I discovered that the box marked “S” for sexual abuse had increased to several boxes. 
As I went through these clippings my horror increased as I realised that the same names had kept reappearing over those past 6 years. I knew as a parent that if I saw a name in the newspaper 1 year I would not recognise that name 2 years later when that person had been released from jail and gone back into a job where he or she had easy access to children and was trusted. If members read a name in the newspaper today the name of someone convicted of an indecent assault on a young child do they expect to remember that person’s name in 3 or 4 years time? Sex offenders are not just grubby old men in raincoats loitering in parks around the swings and slides. They run scout and cub groups. They are church leaders schoolteachers justices of the peace—pillars of the community. They organise youth groups and they take children away on camps. They join computer clubs and they take young members home on the pretext of playing computer games. They know where to find young children who are vulnerable often lonely and too trusting. 
I did further research and I discovered that rapists not just paedophiles were repeat offenders and were getting off far too lightly in terms of sentences and were then being let loose on an unsuspecting community. I could not let this matter rest and I published the 1996  
Paedophile and Sex Offender Index 
. I naively thought I would get just a few snotty reviews from the civil liberties brigade. I had no inkling of the torrent of abuse that would descend on me from almost every area of New Zealand society. I was sued and I was accused of driving sex offenders to suicide. I received death threats. I had to hire security guards to follow my youngest child home from school when I could not collect her. 
My critics seemed to believe that the perpetrators of these crimes were just poor misguided souls who sometimes wandered on to the wrong side of the law but who merely needed a little bit of counselling and understanding. I believe that it is this attitude that has allowed paedophiles rapists and sex molesters to carry on with their behaviour with little fear of being caught. There are no excuses for this behaviour. There is no room in my heart for these people. To express any form of sympathy for them makes a mockery of what I feel for their victims. Offenders are not victims and they should not be considered as such when they appear before the court. Today the victims are the people whom the justice system should be protecting. Every time we lock our doors at night walk our children to school worry when they are late returning home from sports practice or enrol in self-defence classes to a certain extent we become victims ourselves. 
Members might ask why I embarked on and continued this project which at times made me feel like the most hated woman in New Zealand. Why did I keep fronting up to interviews and talkback programmes when I was accused of self-promotion? It was because I had had such a flood of feedback from men women and children who had been victims of sex crimes and who had finally found someone who was prepared to stand up and say that we are not doing enough to protect people from sex offenders. 
If people want to take out a mortgage buy something on hire purchase or borrow money they have to submit to a credit check to make sure they can be trusted with other people’s money. Every day Baycorp runs something like 15000 such checks through its system. Why can we not have such a system for those who want to be trusted with other people’s children? When Kate Alkema was murdered on the Hutt River bank the police investigating the crime estimated that there had been something like 60 sex attacks in that area in the past 2 years. If 60 swimmers had got into difficulty at a beach in a 2-year time-span there would be signs everywhere warning the public about dangerous tidal rips. Why can we not give women information about sex offenders so that they can try to keep themselves more safe? If members knew that a repeat dangerous offender like Taffy Hotene had been released on parole in their neighbourhood would they let their young daughters walk home in the dark from a bus stop? Kylie Jones’ family in Auckland was not allowed this information because Taffy Hotene’s right to privacy was considered more important than Kylie Jones’ right to life. Every time I hear of a rape or a murder my blood runs cold because so often the name of the accused is someone who is in my book or in my records. 
So what will my bill do? Well it is only one facet but a major part none the less of a strategy that I believe this Parliament needs to implement to protect the community from sex offenders. The bill as it stands is sparsely written and deliberately so because I think it is important that the public do have their input into and their say on this legislation. In essence the purpose of this bill is to establish a registry of persons who have been convicted of sexual offences and to include mechanisms to keep the registry up to date so that the police have reliable information available to them at all times on the whereabouts of sex offenders. Despite what many people believe—and someone even came to me today to state this—the police currently do not have access to a national database of sex offenders. It is very ad hoc and at times has even been as hit and miss as someone just walking past the senior sergeant’s door hearing a name being spoken from within his office and recognising that name as someone who had been locked up or arrested several years ago and had got out again. 
A fundamental principle underpinning this bill is that protection of the privacy of sex offenders must give way to protection of the public from such offending. In other words the community’s interests come first. I believe that the bill maintains a balance between these competing concerns because it does not apply to offences and offenders in the distant past. As the bill is drafted at the moment it does not go as far back as I would like but I have deliberately had a bill drafted that is not too extreme so that hopefully it will not be voted down in the early stages and so that people can have more input at a select committee. The bill strictly limits access to the registry. This database should be seen as a crime-fighting and law enforcement tool. There are strict penalties for misuse of information and offenders can access their own files to correct erroneous information. 
I believe that this is legislation whose time has come. The climate has changed considerably since I published my book in 1996. I believe that the New Zealand public is ready for this law.