Martin Tracey: Urgent Debates — Roast Busters Case—Independent Police Conduct Authority ReportText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Urgent Debates — Roast Busters Case—Independent Police Conduct Authority Report[Sitting date: 19 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2450. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (Deputy Leader—NZ First): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. It is a sad day actually. It is a very sad day. This is a sad topic and I am sure that all of us would prefer not to be here discussing it. I first of all want to acknowledge the Minister of Police for his contribution. It was a sincere contribution and I believe he meant every word he said. I believe that he is as moved by these circumstances and this case as everybody else in New Zealand has been. But what are we going to do about it? I also want to acknowledge that the police officers in the New Zealand Police are fathers are mothers are aunts and are uncles and they can in the first person place this inside the possibility that it could happen to a family member of theirs. So none of us are happy about it but what are we going to do about it?This report has quite clearly shown us that we have severe failings inside the police force. I would go further to suggest that we actually have failings inside the whole of that system and inside legislation. Roast Busters this particular case that the report is focused on broke out into news. It became a major focus for the country. However in my own area the exact same circumstances have occurred to young women—young women who then took a case forward to try to find justice through the court system. After a year of walking forward telling her story again and again and again with her parents walking alongside her and school counsellors walking alongside them it ended up with “He-said she-said. Go home.” What are we going to do about it?It is not a National Party problem. It is not an Opposition problem. It is our problem. So what are we in this House going to do about it? What cross-party accord what cross-party work will we do to make whatever legislative change we need to make to have women believed in the first instance no matter what their age? So when they walk in and say this was done to me it will be believed in the first instance. Everything must have balance. We have legislation in place. We have laws in place. If a person makes a false accusation they can be held accountable for that. So how will we make this shift? How will we as a society send out the message that you cannot do this to people whether they be young men or young women—that you cannot in a moment of vulnerability take advantage of them and because it becomes he-said she-said you will be fairly free and clear?We pick up on the Green Party member’s call for an independent task force. We would like to talk about it. We would like Parliament to talk about it. We cannot allow this report to then lie there for us to wail and beat our breast and then leave it alone. This has gone on for years. Young women feel guilt and they do not report when something happens to them. Many young women find themselves in a situation where have gone out at the weekend they may have had a drink too many and something has happened to them that they have not been able to give their consent for. It then takes them days to find enough courage to come forward to report it. By that time the evidence has gone. What will we do to create a situation where young women do not feel ashamed in the first instance when they know that someone has taken advantage of them?The Minister mentioned Lesley Elliott’s programme Loves-Me-Not. It is a brilliant programme and I am not going to play politics with it around who should fund it or who should not fund it. I am not going to go there. Let us not go there. Let us just say it is a brilliant programme and we need it to be in place. Let us go just there—that we need it to be in place. But let us also look at other things like the Healthy Relationships programme which again balances for both genders so that young men and young women at year 9 and year 10 know what a healthy relationship looks like. They also get the knowledge and the information that if this happens to you you tell somebody straight away. Let us not pussyfoot around. Let us give our young people the knowledge and the skills to actually step forward to the school counsellors and then the school counsellors go forward to the police. We need to have confidence that although the police might empathise and might feel terrible—I believe they feel terrible for these young women—they also feel empowered to take the case forward.I cannot go into the minds of the police officers who did not go and speak to the young men or the young men’s families. I cannot go into their minds and figure out why it was—whether they were overloaded or whatever that story was. But possibly do they feel empowered enough? Do they feel that if they had taken those cases forward they would have been supported? Have we asked them? Why? I would love to know the motivation why the records were not kept why the records were not well reported and why we did not just take notes around that. So yes the Minister can say that we hope that this is a personal failure or an individual failure by certain police officers but it is not just this case and that is half of the problem. This is actually across New Zealand. We have such a wide issue here. We need to do something about it.I want to pick up on Jacinda Ardern’s comments around sexual connection for those under the age of 16—section 134 of the Crimes Act—and that it is an offence. The report acknowledges that in certain circumstances here both the victim and the offender were under the age of 16. So what is the answer to that? If these young men had been spoken to if their families had been spoken to if the report had been taken seriously—these are now two juveniles. These are now two children who are engaging in a sexual relationship—sorry I take that back; I beg your pardon. They are not engaging in a sexual relationship; a sexual act has taken place. They are not engaged at all. The young woman was not engaged. Surely that is a situation that borders on the lines of abuse or neglect. Where were the Child Youth and Family workers then? Where is the confidence on behalf of the police when they come up against a case like that again of how they will treat it in the future? How can we make sure the understanding is widespread that if you run up against a case where both parties are under the age of 16 it will be treated in a different way but treated seriously so at least the young woman and her family see and the young man gets the message that this is a serious issue and this is unacceptable behaviour?New Zealand First joins with the other parties of the House. This is one of the most disturbing cases we have had in recent years. Unfortunately it is high profile but it is not isolated. This is happening in small numbers everywhere across New Zealand. Young women are coming forward after an incident has happened in the weekend—sometimes days after sometimes weeks after—and reporting to school counsellors across the country behaviour that they now feel unable to deal with. We in this House have got to figure out a way to deal with this on a much better level and on a much bigger scale. We need to support it financially. We need to support it emotionally. We need to support it. It has been too long. We all believe that it is not appropriate. We all believe that this is not the way we want our world to work. We do not want young women to say: “That is just how it is.” So I would hope that we might have a cross-party conversation about the independent task force and I hope that the Government might participate in cross-party talks to sort something out.