Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you so much Mr Assistant Speaker for this opportunity. I would like to commend Jo Hayes for bringing this bill to the House but also for getting agreement. It sounds like most of the parties in this House are going to agree to this bill. It is a very very good bill.One forced marriage in Aotearoa New Zealand is one too many. What we know is that we have at least 80 forced marriages in this country right now. This bill is really good in that it will give the consent over to the Family Court but I worry—and I hope that the select committee will actually discuss this—what of those families who do not utilise our systems right now? What we know from Shakti and from other organisations that deal with a lot of these under-age marriages is that a lot of them do not even happen with marriage celebrants. They do not come through churches. These marriages happen either at home or in other—they do not actually happen with folks who are registered. That would be one of the questions that I hope the committee will come up with some possible responses to.As I say it is one thing to think that in this country we do not have under-age marriages. But you know one of the things that really shocked me a few days ago was when I was reading an article that told me that the country I was born and raised in had 50 under-age marriages as young as 15 years of age. It shocked me because I did not know that there were that many people that many young people especially young women in my home country which has an overall population 100000—50 of them. Some of these people as young as 15 and 16 are getting married even here in New Zealand. But I wanted to say that it is for a similar reason as some of the reasons we have heard from organisations like Shakti: a lot of these young women are getting married that young because they are pregnant.New Zealand is one of those countries that has signed up to a lot of international conventions. We have said that we will protect our young people. All of our young people have human rights—and that is also one of the things that I commend you for Jo Hayes with this particular bill.One of the examples that Shakti gave in one of its submissions was an example of a young lady who has been in New Zealand as a New Zealand citizen since she was 4 years old. She is now 18 but she sought assistance and help from Shakti because her family had her engaged as young as 12 years of age. At 12 years of age she was supposed to go back to Afghanistan and marry another cousin. This young girl became suicidal. There are unfortunately quite a number of young people like her.There is another case of a young woman who came to this country in a forced marriage. She was 16 when she was brought here. She was married had a child but similar to what Tracey Martin and my Green Party colleague spoke of before it was slave labour. She had to do everything in the house. It got to a point where she got so sick of it that she went and jumped into the river. She did not know how to swim but fortunately for her someone saw her rescued her and took her to Shakti. This particular woman is now living an independent life.So again forced marriage has no place in Aotearoa New Zealand. I just want to make one point though: a forced marriage is different from an arranged marriage. An arranged marriage is usually one where the families take a leading role in choosing the partner in a marriage but both of those individuals concerned usually still have a choice as to whether or not to go through with the marriage. There are some cultures in New Zealand that have arranged marriages. I wanted to just make sure that we cover off—that we are not actually in this bill talking about arranged marriages. Thank you.