Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): It is a huge honour for me to be able to stand and speak in support of this legislation today and I want to start by acknowledging the community presence here today—hi. I know it was organised at late notice on a work day but I think it signifies the importance of this to all of us in the community. I think you do honour to our elders whom we are acknowledging today and also we are recognising that the shame that they have been carrying has been felt by all of us. So thank you for being here and for your waiata. I also want to specifically thank Wiremu Demchick and the campaign to pardon gays in Aotearoa. He presented the Green Party MP Kevin Hague with the petition that was the immediate catalyst for this apology and the expungement that will follow—well done you. It was not a matter of chance I suspect that Kevin received the petition considering the Greens had always voted unanimously in support of progressive LGBTIQA legislation and it is also I assume because Kevin was an out gay man in the 1980s living under the cloud of these oppressive laws and campaigning for decriminalisation. He was one of those men who put his life at risk for this campaign and for our collective well-being. Kevin—who sadly is not able to be here today because he is no longer in Parliament—asked me to let people know that he is watching and he asked me to acknowledge the work of Jen Lawless Rhydian Thomas and Sam Carter who worked in his office assisting with the set-up of this petition as it went along. Today's apology to the bisexual and gay men convicted for consensual adult activities is a statement from this Parliament. It was the parliaments in 1905 and 1961 that introduced or legalised homophobia. Those laws overrode indigenous laws which held that both same attraction practices and people and diverse gender expression were natural. That was the status quo before the Government introduced legislation to introduce homophobia. Parliament passed the laws that made these men and so many others outlaws so it is appropriate that we collectively apologise. On the petition the Justice and Electoral Committee heard from men whose lives were ruined by these laws and heard their experiences of being convicted. We heard of men whose lives were made small when they could have been huge because of these convictions. We heard of people isolated and stigmatised and beaten and abused because of these laws and these convictions and we know that people died as a result of this homophobia. Surely this legislation supported the legitimisation of seeing homosexuality as a mental illness which saw gay people being institutionalised and subjected to ECT throughout the 1960s and 1970s. We know that through the same period when men were being sent to jail they were also being institutionalised tied up and drugged and given electrocution through the State's institutionalised homophobia. We need to acknowledge the harm that has been created before we can undo it and that is a lesson that I hope this Parliament sits and absorbs because it goes beyond this piece of legislation. We need to consider that in many other contexts and we are being asked to at the moment. To those men who were criminalised and irreparably hurt and who have been left in the words of one submitter with self-hatred worthlessness unjustified guilt and shame" I want to say clearly on behalf of the Green Party that the shame does not belong with you. The shame belongs with this Parliament and our society for robbing you of your inherent and inalienable rights. We cannot undo the damage but we have listened and heard. We hope that today represents another step towards healing for you. I also hope this House and our country take today as a moment to reflect. There is still much work to do to eliminate the prejudice fear and hatred that these laws established and embedded in our society. Surely the impact of these laws can be the only explanation for the failure of successive Governments to ensure access to healthcare for trans people for the failure to ensure our young people are not made invisible in our schools and for the failure to ensure the basic safety of our children at school. This Parliament still does not seem to have absorbed the fact that actually we still seem to carry a sense of shame associated with our existence because of these laws. We still need to unpack that dissociate from that shame and embrace our diversity in this country because we would all be better off for it. In the final minutes that I have I want to address the specific provisions in this bill. The bill will create a system where men convicted of indecency between males of sodomy or of keeping places of resort for homosexual activities can apply in writing to the Secretary of Justice to have their criminal record expunged. Families of convicted people will also be able to apply on their behalf and I hope that through the select committee process we will have a chance to consider whether the definition of a "family" in that sense needs to be a biological family or our sense of family to be able to apply for our brothers who might not still be with us. I do want to acknowledge that this was not what Wiremu Demchick and the petitioners were hoping for. They were hoping that there would be proactive action taken by the State to review all of the cases and pardon those who were eligible and that it would not be reliant on people applying for this. I do want to acknowledge that. The evidence from the officials was that they considered that proactively identifying people with convictions would probably be too expensive and might be re-traumatising for the people involved. For the Greens—always—the test of whether something is going to be re-traumatising is to ask. You know I think that is really the best test and it would have been ideal to be able to check that out a little more thoroughly. I am not sure whether this has ended up exactly on the right side of it but this is a good first step. I do want to acknowledge that the Minister of Justice initially said it would be too hard to even do this because these convictions were tied up with offences like child abuse and other terrible sex offences and it was great to hear the petitioners clearly saying: "That is the reason to do this because our people"—our family members—"have been lumped in with people who committed grievous harm against others just for being themselves."On that note again I say the shame does not belong with you. This is the start of more work to unpack that shame for all of us. Kia ora."