Walters VanushiVANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you Mr Speaker for the opportunity to stand and take a call to the Corrections (School Notification of Sex Offenders) Amendment Bill—a bill that I cannot recommend to the House. But I do want to start by acknowledging the space that this bill has come from which is really a concern for community safety a concern in terms of sex offending a concern in terms of child sex victims in particular and I think across the House we all share those concerns. But as lawmakers as parliamentarians when we are making law in the House we have an obligation to turn our mind also to what is reasonable and evidence-based what is fair and have a consideration for the relevant community safety issues at a broader level.I think as the member who introduced this bill Matt Doocey made clear this isn't a question about whether schools should be notified or not actually Corrections already do have a process of notification. We already have also a sex offenders register in place. The question is really around the blanket notification and whether that is reasonable whether that is evidence-based and whether that takes into account all the community safety issues that are at play.So I wanted to just at this stage make clear what happens in the current process. So notifications are supported by a district planning panel comprised of a senior district manager psychologists police and probation staff and the discussions that that qualified group of people have centres on a person's pathway into the system their supports but also whether the notification for that particular person being placed in a particular community causes issues and whether notifying would mitigate the risks that are present. So it is a model that actually looks at the evidence and at the circumstances. And I mean I think that that's really the real difference. We have a system in place that has that robust analysis.But turning to the proposals in this bill I think there are a number of issues it presents. The first is around that evidence-based decision space. What the member has with good intent I'm sure done through this bill is propose a blanket solution that doesn't look at the evidence and that doesn't consider the individual circumstances of each offender. My colleague has spoken about the fact that there is a scale of people who we're talking about here. It's not one type of offence it's not even just previous offenders in the sexual violence space and that is problematic in terms of taking an evidence-based approach.The other thing that I've been reading about in terms of what some academics say in this space is there is evidence that blanket notifications don't work because many if not most child sex offences occur where the young person is known to the offender as opposed to them being a stranger.The second issue is really around that community safety piece but looking at the broader issues around community safety. There's an article that I read recently by Lasher and McGrath where they reference a stat that says 24 percent of mental health professionals said in their view that community notification reduced community safety—not even left it neutral but reduced it. And we can speculate at the reasons why. To my mind I suspect it's around a resulting community anxiety that again some colleagues have spoken about that might result in incidents of assault not just against an offender but individuals believed to be the offender. And the same article also spoke about the impact on family members when their address is notified. Let's remember sometimes there are young people living in those family homes as well.Finally I'd just like to say that this bill isn't using a fair and reasonable lens and we've seen the Attorney-General's view on this. He says that it's overly broad that it's insufficiently flexible and that it's lacking safeguards. And we'll remember that when we had the discussion about the register in 2016 we considered mandatory public reporting and disagreed. So I'm sorry that I cannot recommend this bill to the House. Kia ora.