Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I just want to acknowledge the last speaker Ginny Andersen for a really great contribution to this debate. It's a real pleasure to get the opportunity to speak on this bill which has been an extraordinarily long time coming. I think back to the Hon Justice EW Thomas in the mid-1990s writing an article slamming our failure to protect rape victims in our court acknowledging that we were harming them through that process and calling for action. In my nine years or more in this House if I'm honest I have never seen a piece of law that has such a strong evidence base as this piece of legislation. We have two Law Commission reports calling for every one of the provisions—every one—in this piece of legislation. We have overseas experience of implementing the provisions that are being contested as well as the others that we can find out what the impacts of and know that that will not cause unintended harm. We have an entire tome of legal research called From Real Rape" to Real Justice. And we have so many surveys and reports telling us in detail of the harm that our laws that we responsible for in this House are causing victims their whānaus and our communities. They are harming us. I would be surprised if there are many members in this House who haven't had a conversation with somebody even including other members in this House about times when they advised or made decisions themselves not to report because we know too much. We are in this House responsible for the knowledge that we hold and we get to change that reality by the decisions we make here to make that process safer.The Law Commission in their work—directed initially I think by the Hon Judith Collins and then reinitiated by the Hon Amy Adams following up on from the work of the Hon Simon Power—led to and acknowledged that our courts were revictimising and lowering reporting rates because of the experience of victims in our court.I was pleased to hear Simon Bridges say that this is not political. The history of this work is not party political but it is personally deeply political for many of us in here and in our communities and it is solidly—solidly—based in evidence.I do just want to take a couple of the comments from the 2018 Gravitas survey of experience of victims in our court process—sexual violence victims in our court process—and one of them saying "Overall it just sucks. It really eff'n sucks and you don't feel like anyone believed you or wants to believe you. It's too much hassle. It takes too long. It was shit." That is the experience and what we are currently doing to people who've already been deeply harmed.The other comment that really resonated for me was: "The law totally let me down. The law in New Zealand totally let me down. The police feel the law let me down. The prosecutor felt the law let me down. But their hands were tied because they had to work within the law. The law does not care about victims of sexual violence." I do want to take issue with Simon Bridges in the comment that the entire legal fraternity and judges are against this. It is just simply not true. The Law Society said there is a division in opinion. The judges have said to me that they want to see this happening. They describe our current laws as antediluvian. The Law Foundation did the consultation with everyone—those who'd experienced the system and those who are players within it defence prosecution and judges and they recommended these changes. And to the point that this may be undermining the basic New Zealand Bill of Rights Act well I think the Law Commission might have considered that in their two reports. I don't believe they would have made recommendations that undermined the right to a fair trial—I really do not.The truth is it got a clean bill of rights vet. Simon Bridges may disagree with that but that feels disingenuous to say that that's not valid and that his opinion is more valid than their work backed up by the Law Commission. The truth is that the law committee heard those—you know the defendant lawyers are very persuasive I've got to say in their evidence and they were disturbed and wanted to make sure that actually there were not bill of rights concerns and they sent the evidence form the defence lawyers back to get a second check and it came back clear.So I want to just reassure everyone in this House that there are no implications negative implications to the right for a fair trial in this. In fact some aspects of this deeply strengthen the right to a fair trial. We are bringing in communications assistance to enable every single person including the defendant to be able to make sure that they understand the questions that they are being asked—pretty fundamental to the right to a fair trial but not a reality at the moment. We on this and being driven by the desire to make sure that we're challenging sexual violence don't see the defendant being able to understand the questions and get support to answer them as a threat to the right of those victims. I think it's pretty sad that some in the defence community see that victims getting protection is a threat to the rights of the accused. It doesn't work like that. A fair trial is a fair test of the evidence. It is not giving free licence to bully to intimidate to rely on myth and to confuse a witness but that is a normative practice in our courts at the moment and that is what this piece of legislation is starting to change.And to those that say this is just going too far I'd say that one of the researchers in this area the hugely respected Jan Jordan criminologist is saying "Much of what is being mooted in this legislation could be viewed as basic rights that should have been recognised years ago." Actually I'm sad to say I would love to have been completely transformative but actually we're just getting somewhere towards catching up with other countries around the world. On that point the prerecording of evidence was trialled in Western Australia in 1992 and then progressively rolled out around the rest of the country after they found that it did not impinge on the right to a fair trial. UK legislation in 1999 Scotland in 2019 and I understand that defence lawyers in some of those countries thought the sky would fall in and that it would undermine the right to a fair trial but guess what. Now checking in with them after it's been implemented the sky had not fallen and in fact there were some reports that that process had benefited their clients because actually some of the evidence when the defendant was being asked inappropriate questions by the prosecution—those questions got edited out so the jury was not unduly influenced the other way. I do not see that as impinging the rights of complainants in our courts. I see that as positive support for the proper rights to fair trial. In terms of the point around the sexual history this is just mirroring what's in the UK. The view that actually there is a threshold and it evens up the threshold for sexual history and history with somebody other than the defendant it's just making that consistent across the two. It is a test of relevance. It is not ruling out as others have suggested all evidence. This has been implemented in the UK and they found that some evidence still gets through of that history. It is critical when one of the key reasons apart from the awful process that people don't report it is that they blame themselves—they think that their own experience of drunkenness or whatever meant that it wasn't rape. We have to send the damn clear message that it is that consent is every time."