Penk ChrisCHRIS PENK (National—Helensville): Thank you very much Mr Chair. I'm pleased to have the opportunity just to change the course of the debate a little bit only in respect of the fact that I will be speaking perhaps briefly not necessarily for my full allotted time but on the subject of spousal immunity. Various other aspects of the Crimes Amendment Bill have been pretty well covered I think. Not to say that there won't be more to say of course—that's for you to judge and not me. But without a lot having been said on the repeal of section 71(2) of the Crimes Act I just wanted to place on record at this the committee stage the implication of what the House will be doing in—eventually it seems—passing this bill. Just to go through briefly some of the key elements of that under the three main headings if I may. The first is consistency. The second is modernity. The third is efficacy. And then finally I will if time allows just briefly touch on one cost that does go along with this not to suggest necessarily that that outweighs the other benefits. But under the heading of consistency I am indebted to the Ministry of Justice who provided advice to the Justice Committee in relation to this matter. They point out that this repeal among other things would be to bring consistency with other parts of the law including the Evidence Act where spouses and civil union partners don't have immunity from being compelled to give evidence on the basis only of their marital status and elsewhere in the Crimes Act as well spouses can be said to have conspired with each other to have committed a crime and that's no defence in itself.So just to take a step back having covered that consistency point just for the sake of clarity if anyone following this is unclear what we're talking about is an accessory after the fact which is to say a person who's assisted in the commission of a crime but not participated in it such that they themselves would be charged with the crime. So that person who if they're married to or are a civil union partner of—and I use those terms deliberately; a point on which we'll come back to in a moment—knowingly assists someone who has committed an offence and has given them succour or refuge and assisted them essentially to escape arrest after their commission of that. And so we talk about the assistance being after the fact that is to say following the offence having been committed.So just to go to my second point if I may which is modernity. So that's basically making more modern or up to date the concept of our criminal law and this is really the bit that is being repealed which is the spousal immunity which is actually almost exactly spousal as opposed to other relationships which in 2019 we'd regard to as being akin to that. So the wording of the Crimes Act at the moment says that a person whose spouse or civil union partner to whom that applies is the relevant person. In this day and age we have a wider concept of what a person would look like who would be able to enjoy such protection and so part of the consequence of repealing the section of spousal immunity will be that we will remove that narrower sense that one might have expected to prevail in 1961 when the Crimes Act was passed notwithstanding that there've been updates since then but certainly in 2019 I think probably generally speaking there is appetite for having a broader sense of that if it were to remain and in fact it's to be repealed.And then my third point is I promised under the heading of efficacy. So this is just really the reasonably obvious point that if we're removing immunity from what would otherwise be an offence which would be to be an accessory to a crime then we make it more likely—I suppose on the law of averages—that crimes will be detected because what we are doing is we're making it harder for people to harbour those who have committed a crime and for arrests to be escapes and so forth.I'll just finish my time by touching on the cost as I foreshadowed at the start. The relationship of people who are married or in analogous types of relationships is a special one and I suppose we should acknowledge for the sake of the record that there is a cost in that we don't allow people to have that defence essentially—although it's not a defence; it's actually a standalone section in itself—but just to acknowledge that as that deliberate decision we're making but we're saying that the other benefits such as I've outlined do outweigh that and hence we are supportive of that on this side of the Chamber.