Meager James; Tuiono TeanauJAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Can I begin my contribution tonight just by acknowledging the member responsible for the bill: Greg O'Connor. We had quite a bit to do with Greg throughout the passage of the bill in the last four to five months and it was a pleasure having him join us at the Justice Committee—the very busy and hard-working Justice Committee I might say. It's a real pleasure to see one of our many many bills that we're considering at the moment pass through the select committee stage and be presented here to the House to finally debate it—one off our list and there are about 12 or 13 more to go. So we'll be working our way through those over the next week while but it was a real pleasure to have Mr O'Connor with us not just for his latent cricketing ability but also for the fact that he comes to this bill with many many years of what you might now call lived experience in this area. The fact is that the member for Ōhāriu has been operating in this area in the past previously and knows what it's like to deal with the individuals subjected to this legislation. He knows that the purpose of this bill ultimately is one thing and the member discussed it very well. The purpose of it is that it's all about protecting children. That is the single purpose of this bill and it was outlined relatively well by the member that while it is a small bill it does make some significant changes and there are some section 7 New Zealand Bill of Rights implications that the committee grappled with which I'll touch on in my contribution. But I just wanted to acknowledge the way that Mr O'Connor engaged with the committee provided his input into the bill and provided his actual experience and recommendations as to why some of the concerns about officials may not be justified. One of those that I think was raised well during the committee process was this question of enforceability and this idea that we could pass these laws and we could require registered sex offenders to provide this information but there was no way of enforcing it once they were offshore and we would have to have international enforcement agreements. If I recall correctly it turned out during the committee process that the same issue of enforceability may well exist on our own shores in that registered sex offenders onshore in New Zealand are also required to provide similar information but the ability of law enforcement here to follow that up and to check on that may well in itself be enforced. So we felt as a committee that any issues around enforceability could be addressed and could be solved through operational processes and that that should not get in the way of supporting a bill like that through the committee and into the House today. Can I acknowledge the work of the Justice Committee and—with your indulgence Mr Chair—try and take our processes through as to how we came to the conclusion of supporting the bill unanimously through to the House today. As this is one of our first contributions on the second reading my understanding is that we are to discuss what happened in the committee: the bill as presented the changes—significant changes—we made the submissions we received and anything that we wanted to bring to the attention of the House. So can I acknowledge the work of the Justice Committee members—Labour the Greens Te Pāti Māori National ACT and New Zealand First colleagues—for their contributions and for raising very serious and real issues and trying to work through them in a detailed and methodical way. Can I also acknowledge Minister Erica Stanford whose Supplementary Order Paper (SOP)—well it was a Supplementary Order Paper at the time; I believe that now we have amended them to be called Amendment Papers themselves—was put forward to the committee and was actually adopted without any real contest. That SOP or Amendment Paper aimed to ensure that individuals listed on the register were subject to Customs Service border alerts which was a small hole that the previous member but now Minister identified and put forward to the committee and we were very glad to be able to work that into the process too. Can I just also acknowledge the work of the officials and our clerk Liam who essentially held our hands as new committee members through this process over the first wee while. So as I said this bill is about protecting children. It is a very simple straightforward bill. It requires registered child sex offenders to provide additional information when they are travelling overseas for more than 48 hours and it actually struck me as quite interesting that we didn't require this already. I would have assumed that we would have had some sort of system where those individuals that we see as posing a significant risk to the community post-incarceration would be subject to these kinds of restrictions and requirements to report their whereabouts their intentions for travel and where they were going to go. I think it surprised many on the committee to realise that this wasn't in place already and the member has done a very good job in identifying that hole in the law and seeking to remedy it. As I mentioned before there were some concerns raised by the Attorney-General at the time the Hon David Parker—who I acknowledge has been in the Chamber today—and I will go through the issues because I think they are important to raise. I think it's also important for me to try and explain why I think we get through this issue of—and it may be just that we disagree on whether or not the restrictions are an unjustified limitation on those individuals' rights. But I have a view on this which is that this legislation has been before the House in 2015 again in 2017 in 2021 with amendments and now in 2024 it is hopefully passing through the House with support and at some point we must recognise that what does qualify—putting the Hansen test aside—as being demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society should at some point be able to be endorsed by the Parliament itself. It should not be up to a technical test on a breakdown of Oakes and Hansen on the minimal impairment and proportionality and rational connection but at some point Parliament should be able to decide for itself over multiple iterations of the same types of limitations in legislation that it as the holder of parliamentary sovereignty has deemed it to be worthy of a democratically justified limit. Those limits that were raised by the former Attorney-General and officials were around the right for offenders to benefit from the ability of a lesser penalty where two penalties were available. The second infringement raised was the issue around double jeopardy in that once you have been convicted and sentenced for a crime and you have served your time and are released into the public and then Parliament comes along and applies another law which is further seen as a penalty it could be seen as double jeopardy and I think the courts have made that case out relatively well. The third one was this issue of retrospectivity and the uncertainty when the bill first came through as to whether or not it would apply to just those offenders being released from the date or who go on to the register from when the bill commenced or if it was every offender on the child sex offender registry. I think the bill was a little unclear at the start about that and officials made the very good point that when you are legislating and you are going to imply that it has retrospective effect that retrospective effect should be made explicit in order to reduce the damage or the infringement on those rights. So the select committee report outlines the committee's views on those three issues fairly clearly. They were ones that we grappled with throughout our committee and I'm sure knowing what is ahead of us on our legislative timetable that it may well be that we return to the well of New Zealand Bill of Rights Act analyses quite a few times in the next years but that's the nature of the Justice Committee I think. When Parliament decides or the House decides to put forward proposals in the justice sector they are inevitably going to infringe somewhat on people's liberties and freedoms and we are going to have to have that balancing test around there. I just want to conclude my initial contribution while in this reading to just very very quickly go over some of the statistics around our submitters. So from memory I don't think we had any oral submitters. It may have been in the interregnum between the two terms of Parliament because this bill came before us in the previous Parliament and is continuing on now. I understand from the report—I believe that Mr O'Connor made an oral submission in the Ministry of Justice's submission's support of the Attorney-General's report but otherwise there were not that many submitters who expressed a view on the bill. I think there were about 10 written submissions eight of which were in favour one I think was neutral and maybe one or two more were opposed. So the bill appears to have at least support from those members of the public institutions that did raise concerns. I'd like to acknowledge the submission from I believe the Law Society who raised a number of very important points—that was Caroline Silk. This was around the infringement on freedoms retrospectivity and consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and hopefully we've done enough to address some of those concerns. Finally in the last few seconds of my contribution just to summarise the main changes that were made around the bill in clause 2 we did extend the commencement date to allow the New Zealand Police time to manage their operational requirements to implement the bill and we did strengthen some of the information-sharing requirements or clarified what it was that departments could do—what information Police and the Customs Service could share about child sex offenders when they are leaving the country. So I commend the member for bringing the bill to the House. I apologise that he couldn't quite get his last one across the line. I think he haunts me in the hallways with cries of Jock McKenzie saved the land throughout the country!" but I'm happy to support this bill today and I think one from two is not a bad hit rate. So I commend the bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The question is that the motion be agreed to."