Lees-Galloway Iain: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Lees-Galloway Iain: Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
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IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) 
: 
 I am very pleased to be able to take a call on the Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2). Despite venturing off into some issues around knife crime and the claim of right review the bill is essentially focused squarely on strengthening the penalties and clarifying the responsibilities around abuse of vulnerable children. The key aspect of this bill is of course that it places a much greater and much clearer obligation on caregivers in charge of vulnerable people not only to provide the necessaries of life but also to ensure that they protect those vulnerable people in their care from any form of injury or abuse. 
This is very very important legislation but it is also a very very important message that must reach parents caregivers and anybody who has responsibility for children in particular who are just so incredibly vulnerable and anybody who is vulnerable to abuse or injury that they do have a responsibility. For any of those people to say that they were unaware or unable to intervene simply is not good enough. They have to make sure that they do everything they can to protect those vulnerable people particularly children in their care. So of course the Labour Opposition supports seeing this bill go to the select committee. We want to hear the debate around some of the initiatives in this bill and we want to hear people’s ideas and views on how we improve the protections available to the people in our society who are at their most vulnerable. 
We know that this bill places an obligation on caregivers in charge of vulnerable people. It also extends the current Act so that “parents who are currently under a duty to provide their children with ‘the necessaries’ will also be required to take reasonable steps to protect them from injury:”. The age of the child for the purposes of this legislation is raised from 16 to 18 years which should be a positive step. 
For every single one of us in this House our stomachs churn when we hear of abuse neglect murder and injury to young people caused by adults who should be taking care of them. So of course we want to see these provisions considered by the select committee and we want to do anything we can to protect vulnerable children. I know that Government members know this. This is not an attempt to attack Government members but this bill is somewhat the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. This is our response when things have gone so badly wrong that a parent or a caregiver abuses a child in their care. 
We need to think about this more and hand in hand with this type of legislation we need to look at what needs to happen to make our families stronger and to give parents the tools the skills and the self-respect in a lot of cases to avoid getting into these situations in the first place. If we are truly to put children at the centre of everything we do we need not only to think about the consequences of things going badly wrong and giving people the message that they should not be committing these types of crimes but also we need to look at how we can work with and support families to make sure that this sort of thing does not happen. 
That means more resources for the types of parenting support programmes that are out there already—things like SKIP or the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters known as the HIPPY programme which are available but which so many parents are not able to access because their resources are so limited at the moment. Let us think about how those programmes are supported by early childhood education and about supporting parents whether it is through things like paid parental leave or other schemes to ensure that parents are at home and part of their children’s lives. Just generally raising standards of living would go a long way to improving the environments in which children grow up and preventing some of the issues that this legislation is trying to deal with. 
When I think of what we can do to support families and to prevent the abuse of children in our communities I always go back to an organisation in my electorate called Te Aroha Noa. Some years ago it decided to move into a part of our city where we knew there were vulnerable families to get alongside those families and to work with them initially by opening a playcentre which grew into fully fledged early childhood education around which adult education support was placed and around which programmes such as SKIP and the Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters have been placed. Te Aroha Noa has now moved into adult community education. It works with the whole family. It gets involved with the family in particular with vulnerable families and young mothers. It works in a part of my electorate where this type of work is definitely needed. 
I honestly think that organisations like that are doing more to achieve what this bill sets out to achieve to protect vulnerable children and families to give them hope and to create the environment in which children are nurtured than a piece of legislation important as it is can do to support those families and create the environment in which children are safe and in which we can start to curb child abuse across our society. 
This is important legislation. I applaud the Government and the Minister for introducing it to the House. I think there will be a very interesting debate at the select committee about what is in this bill. But if we are serious about tackling the issues of child abuse then we have to think about what leads up to the situations that this bill seeks to deal with. We can double the maximum penalty for cruelty to a child we can wield the threat of imprisonment over families and I have no doubt that will have some effect on people’s actions. We can extend the legal duty on parents and caregivers as much as we like but we actually have to start going back to what Mr Power called the drivers of crime and what is behind the issues this bill is trying to deal with. 
This is good legislation but it cannot be in isolation. We have to think about everything else that goes alongside it. We have to think about supporting and getting alongside our families and our communities and getting alongside the people who are trying to prevent this stuff from happening in the first place rather than simply looking at how we mop up the mess after it has occurred. We support this legislation but we do think an awful lot more has to occur if we are really going to tackle child abuse in this country.