Collins Judith: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Collins Judith: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20018] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 I have been listening to all the speeches given on this bill this morning and I have to say that they have been very considered and very sensible. But they have actually left me very confused as to why all those speakers who have talked about the inadequacies of the bill are in fact putting their principles to one side and voting for it. That is despite the fact that although the bill contains some very good things it has some very very poorly addressed matters as well. 
 When I listened to previous speeches I thought there must have been a huge rush to get this legislation through. Then I found out that the bill came out of the select committee in October 2004. It is now April 2005 so the bill has been sitting around in the office of the Minister of Justice for the last 6 months and he has done nothing. He has had 6 months to talk to each of the parties represented in this House about the very sensible changes that they have asked for—changes that he no doubt agrees with. So what has he been doing in that time? 
What he has not been doing is listening to the very very sensible suggestions made in the House today. This is why my colleague the Hon Tony Ryall asked the House this morning for leave to refer this bill back to the select committee in order to get that work done. Instead we had Mr Gallagher say that the bill was better than the current law. Well he has to say that because he is only a man in the Labour Party and he knows his place. He is putting his hands up in horror; I say to Mr Gallagher that I am sorry but I do not believe that all men are evil. I actually believe that there are a lot of really good decent men so Mr Gallagher is OK with me and I say good on him for standing up. 
Of course the ladies in the Labour Party are very staunch on protecting women all right—until it is not in their best interests. Then what do they do? They roll over every time a good-looking bloke bats his eyelashes at them. They say: “Tickle my tummy John.” and he does. 
There are a couple of reasons why the National Party will not just give in to that sort of behaviour. We will not support the bill in its current form for various reasons but we do say good on Dianne Yates for bringing the issue of drug rape into this arena. And I also say good on my colleague Simon Power who I need to tell Mr Alexander back in 2001 was calling for that offence of the grooming of little children to be dealt with by the Minister of Justice. But in 2001 and 2002 that Minister of Justice completely dismissed that view. It was too politically correct—we could not have that! 
There are a couple of reasons why National opposes the bill. One is that under this bill it will be all right for some bloke to sexually groom a foster child—a child who has been living in the foster parent’s home or who has had the foster parent living in his or her home—until that child is 18 when miraculously that child will be able to consent to a sexual relationship. So he may not be able to groom the child on the Internet but by goodness he can groom the child in his own home or in the child’s home. He can do that and that is OK for Mr Goff—as long as the kid is 18. If that child has been brought up to think of that person as either a father or almost a father—his or her closest friend—that child will be in a very vulnerable position. 
Some people are children in many ways at 18 and are very very vulnerable. Many of us thinking of all the 18-year-olds we have known and thinking back to the time when we were 18 ourselves know just what a vulnerable time it is. An 18-year-old is often just as vulnerable as a 17-year-old and sometimes just as vulnerable as a 16-year-old. We have pointed out to Mr Goff that those are problems but he has just sat back for the last 6 months done nothing about them and said that he must know better. 
But this is of course the same Minister who thought it would be OK to allow 12 to 16-year-olds to have what he called “consenting sex” while ignoring the fact that under-16-year-olds cannot consent because they do not have the legal capacity to do so. He thought that that provision would be OK. It was only the work of my colleague the Hon Tony Ryall and other members of this House that stopped that nonsense in its tracks. 
One of the other reasons why we are opposing this bill concerns the “reasonable belief” provision. I am shocked to hear that Mr Alexander is going to agree to that sort of nonsense. I am shocked to hear that New Zealand First will support a bill that says a 45-year-old man can have sex with a 15-year-old prostitute who happens to be wandering around Hunters Corner Papatoetoe in George Hawkins’ electorate and that he can in fact get away with it if he has a “reasonable belief” that she is 18 or even 16. Of course there will be “reasonable belief” because supposedly under the Prostitution Reform Act she must be 18 or else she could not be a prostitute! So there will obviously be a reasonable cause of belief. Any lawyer could tell the House that—and I do. I understand that Mr Alexander thinks the prostitute will have an ID with her. Oh come off it! The police cannot even ask for an ID of a girl who is prostituting herself on Hunters Corner in Mr George Hawkins’ electorate. What makes the member think that that 45-year-old will ask to see her ID? 
I normally agree with Mr Ron Mark. Most of what he said today I agree with but I do not understand his statement that he is going to support the bill; Mr Mark must be far more generous than I am. He has pointed out that child prostitution is happening in Christchurch. Taking that on board I went down the other week to Christchurch to talk to members of the Prostitutes Collective about child prostitution. What did they tell me? I say to Mr Alexander that they told me they had talked to Tim Barnett about my coming to visit; they had to get their orders from Mr Tim Barnett. They said to me they did not like the fact that we had made it public there was child prostitution and the reason they gave was that it had brought more people into the area. The other thing they did not like about it was that it had really brought down the value of prostitution. Apparently prostitution is not very good as a living in Christchurch now that there are so many young prostitutes on the streets—because of this hopeless Government’s attitude toward child prostitution and child abuse. 
Ron Mark 
: It’s a career option. 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: Of course it is a career option as Mr Ron Mark says. It is a disgusting situation when we have 14 15 and 13-year-olds wandering round the streets in places like Papatoetoe in George Hawkins’ electorate and prostituting themselves with 45 and 55-year-old men yet we are being told that this bill means that those men will stop and ask for ID first. What a load of nonsense! 
Sometimes in this House we have to say that a bill is mostly OK. But the Government has had a 6 months’ opportunity to fix this bill and it has sat on its hands. The parties that are supporting the bill when they know they should not are weak. They have given in—they have forgotten all their principles and all they are doing is rolling over because Mr Goff has asked them to. I just think they are hopeless and they should not even bother to waste this House’s time by telling us anything.