Logie Jan: Manukau City Council (Regulation of Prostitution in Specified Places) Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Manukau City Council (Regulation of Prostitution in Specified Places) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 25 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1927. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): It is—in contrast with the previous speaker Tracey Martin—with a certain amount of relief that I rise to take a call on this bill the Manukau City Council (Regulation of Prostitution in Specified Places) Bill. This is the second time that legislation like this has come before this Parliament. As has been very well outlined by Annette King earlier there has been 10 years of consideration of the detail of this issue. This Parliament has spent a huge amount of time listening to the community and considering these issues. It has not in any way as the previous speaker may have suggested been a flippant dismissal of the concerns of the community. There has been a rigorous process of looking at the appropriate role for responding to this problem. My understanding is that the Local Government and Environment Committee has possibly spent more time on this issue than it has on pretty much any other piece of legislation in recent years. This has not been a flippant dismissal.The Green Party was on the committee and supports the unanimous decision of that committee for this bill not to proceed further. I am also aware that some people will be really unhappy with this recommendation. I went and met with some people at the committee and we heard the submissions. I have real empathy for their situation. We were told of businesses losing money residents losing sleep parents fearing their children were having to see and hear things that children should be protected from. I absolutely believe that they are valid concerns. This is a problem that needs a solution. I sincerely wish to see those concerns resolved.I would commend anyone who is listening to this debate to go and read the full report of the select committee to find out the detail of what we considered. It came down to whether legislation was the way to solve those concerns. It was the unanimous view of the committee that legislation is not going to solve this problem. The problem needs a solution but legislation is not the answer. We listened and we really engaged but ultimately our role is to consider whether legislation is the appropriate response and in this case whether a local bill that applies to only one area—albeit an area that covers a third of our population—is appropriate.Local bills need to address local issues and not national issues. We heard previously that several other councils—in response to lobbying I must admit initiated by the Manukau city councillors—indicated that they may see this as an area of concern and want to have a response to it. So it is quite clear that there is ambiguity about whether this is a local issue. We considered all the evidence and came to the conclusion that the problem was best solved at a local level as well as potentially looking at other legislative solutions on a much wider level through the Local Government Act.It was the contention of Manukau and the then Auckland City Council that they could not regulate street prostitution by existing laws. We disagreed with that solution and we have heard that assessment. We noted that the Rodney District Council had specified that street-based sex workers meet the definition of “hawkers” and as such are regulated by its by-laws on trading in public places and require an operating licence from the council. Further Hamilton City Council has created a prostitution by-law that restricts the location of brothels sets out signage requirements and also prohibits soliciting in public spaces and within view of public spaces. So we have evidence that by-laws are able to be used to regulate this.The committee heard from a previous member that there is still the outstanding issue of enforcement. You can put a law on your books but can you enforce it? The question that the committee then had to consider was whether that issue would still exist if we legislated. The answer was yes. We would still have the problem if we legislated of the police needing to enforce the legislation or to enforce the by-laws that we would enable to be created by this legislation. That problem would not go away. In fact we also were told that the police currently have the ability to prosecute on summary offences which covers a wide range of behaviours such as suspected disorderly behaviour indecent behaviour threatening or indecent language and wilful damage to property. They can arrest without warrant when they have good cause on any of those groundsalready. All the behaviour that was described to us by businesses and residents fitted those areas of concern.So the police have the ability already to arrest without a warrant. Why would we create a duplicate law for one specific area of the country or even enable by-laws to duplicate that provision when obviously the problem is around the resourcing of the police to enable them to do that? If that is the problem then we encourage the community and we encourage the council to be lobbying the Government for increasing resources to the police to enable that to happen. But we would go for a more empowerment-based model ourselves. Clearly the answer is not in legislation in duplicating existing powers.Another reason we were told for putting forward this legislation was that it was expensive to introduce these kinds of by-laws. Therefore the council wanted Parliament to spend the time—and it has spent 10 years—to develop legislation. We acknowledge that maybe there is an issue around the cost of developing by-laws and the processes of developing the regulations under that but that is not an issue specific to prostitution or for the Auckland Council. That is a much wider issue that should more appropriately be dealt with through a wider piece of legislation and we would encourage any council to negotiate with its member of Parliament for such legislation to be put forward. So we are not dismissing that concern; we are just saying that this piece of legislation is not the way to deal with it.We were also told that enforcing by-laws can be resource intensive and that proving an offence can be difficult. Again we believe that these challenges would remain if this legislation was introduced. There is nothing in this legislation that would solve that problem. Evidence has always been a really difficult thing in this area. In fact one of the reasons for the introduction of the Prostitution Reform Act was as a public health measure to create an environment where we did not disincentivise the use of condoms because prior to that legislation passing condoms were used as evidence in prosecutions against sex workers. We would not want to see a return to that situation.In some ways legislation is presented as a simple way to fix this problem. There is no simple way to fix this problem. But we would say that the discussions and the work that have been happening at the local level post the introduction of the bill this time have seemed to be really positive. There is work happening at the moment. It follows on from the Ministry of Justice’s report recommendations from 2009 where it went into the Manukau community and investigated the best possible response to solving these acknowledged problems. It came up with a really long list of actions that it recommended take place in that community like having toilets open at night with lighting putting in extra rubbish bins put in and having control around the sale of alcohol in the area.I do need to point out to the members in this House and to anyone listening that although we were told that all of those measures had been implemented what we found was that they had not been and that some had been implemented for only a short period of time and had then been unwound. Really this community has not been served well by its council. The appropriate place for it to be solved is in the community. We believe that more resources from this Government to support the community to do that would be appropriate but not legislation.