Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a real treat to get to rise and speak in support of Louisa Wall's bill the Harmful Digital Communications (Unauthorised Posting of Intimate Visual Recording) Amendment Bill this evening. I do need to echo the voice of others in this House to congratulate her for her luck but actually more importantly for the quality of the bills that she has been bringing to this House that make a real substantive difference to the lives of a huge number of people in this country and it's a pleasure to be able to speak in support of another one of those bills tonight. I wasn't lucky enough because I wasn't on the Justice Committee and I'm not our justice spokesperson so I haven't got to follow this. So it's particularly lucky to get to speak on it tonight. It was very interesting in that I think the public support for this bill as well as it being cross-party is quite clear in the balance of the submissions where there were 75 submissions made and only one was in opposition I understand. I think that demonstrates that this is a bill whose time has come. What the bill does which has been outlined by others is that it amends the Harmful Digital Communications Act of 2015 to make it an offence to post any intimate visual recording of someone else without their consent. Intimate visual recording" is already defined in the Act as any picture or video of someone's naked or undergarment-clad genitals buttocks or female breasts where that person would normally expect privacy. The current offence in the Act covering this issue requires a number of steps before the offence is made out which is where we've had the real problem. It has been difficult to establish and therefore the main bar to prosecution at the moment is that the offender under the current legislation has to share the material with proven intent—an incredibly difficult thing to do—and the victim must prove that they have actually experienced harm which is again a very difficult thing to do. An objective standard of proof applies to whether harm was actually experienced by that victim—tricky. The new offence in this amendment bill would involve a simpler test where it is established that sharing without consent implicitly recognises an intent to cause harm. That to me is just logical and it is fantastic to see this problem being solved this simply I think. The select committee has made an exception for scenarios in which posting of an intimate visual recording may be necessary involving educational legal medical scientific or law enforcement purposes; so they've made sure that removing the intent to cause harm doesn't result in too broad a reach. I understand that as introduced the bill had a concept of express consent and that this was an area that the committee spent quite a lot of time on and it's very obvious to me that the committee was very thoughtful in the consideration of this bill and this was one of those points. My understanding is that they've decided to move away from that because the concept of express consent doesn't exist in our law at the moment. Therefore we don't have case law interpreting that and that could potentially undermine or be in conflict with existing case law relating to consent. I'm really interested in understanding more about that and the reliance on our current definitions of consent and I note that in the last term of Parliament the Parliamentary Under-Secretary initiated a body of work within justice to start reviewing our legal definition of consent because there are serious concerns about the fact that it's basically impossible to get a conviction of rape or sexual violence in this country if the victim has been drinking. We have a definition of consent that is negative rather than positive and I'm not saying that having a positive definition is the answer but it definitely feels as if it is time in this country to be exploring that issue properly so that we can uphold the intent of the legislation in practice. I also want too to point out that the member along the way was raising the fact that she would have liked to have seen ACC provided for where there are convictions but that this isn't in the schedule for ACC. She said she would point anybody listening who would like to see the expansion of ACC to everybody who's experienced sexual violence to the Green Party petition that was launched today campaigning for that very thing because it's just a reality that there are too many barriers in the way of survivors of sexual violence getting the help that they need and surely as a country we're at the point where that's our priority and we don't need needless bureaucratic harmful barriers in the way of doing it. I also would like to commend the work that the committee did around the age of consent and clarifying that consent cannot be given by somebody under the age of 16 because they are not in a position to be able to understand the implications of that image being shared. I also note that while that doesn't apply for 16- and 17-year-olds actually as the committee pointed out the posting of an intimate visual recording of a 16- or a 17- year-old could still be considered objectionable under the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act. So there is an interesting kind of graduation in our legislation coming in with this. Also from a Green Party perspective we were pleased to see the reduction in the penalty from three years' imprisonment to two years' imprisonment. Part of the work that was also initiated last term was looking at alternative pathways for resolution of sexual violence cases because our court system is just not working for so many people. We've had the discussion tonight about how long cases are taking to get through the courts and the harm that's happening in the meantime but it is also just that quite often when there's a history with the person or the person's family and they've been loved or they've been part of your extended network actually going up against them in a court case in a really public way is not how people want to resolve that issue. So that work to create alternative pathways for addressing the harm of sexual violence I believe is really really important to sit alongside our formal justice system. But the Greens would also like to see our formal justice system being led far more by the values of Te Ao Māori and those approaches to justice as an investment in prevention and rehabilitation across our system. That is work that this Government I know is very active and engaged in and we really look forward years in the future to when we look back at this time and think that that was some real progress—our getting to the point where sexual violence wasn't the feature of our society that it is now which is an aspiration I hold to very deeply. Finally just acknowledging the really important provision of enabling interim court orders to take down the material before a court case decision has been made because as we've said these processes are taking far too long and we can't allow harm to just compound in the meantime. So being able to take those images down is really important. So congratulations and it's fantastic to hear really thoughtful and considered speeches across the House. I love it when we all turn our minds to what's best for the people in our communities. Kia ora."