Nash StuartSTUART NASH (Labour—Napier): The seriousness of this issue was shown by the fact that the original bill was actually brought before the House by Minister Anne Tolley and now it has been escalated to the Deputy Prime Minister. I mean it is not her fault that we are here because she was not responsible for the primary Act but the fact that she is shepherding this bill through now I think just shows that a mistake has been made—quite a serious mistake has been made. The Minister of Police said that no sex offender has been convicted of any offence due to confusion within the original bill. That does not mean that no harm has been done. We are all very hopeful that no harm has been done but we cannot prove that and as we know a conviction does not mean that something has not gone on that we have not been privy to at some point in time.Let us get back to the original intent of this Act. What it was was that there was a register—and this is the reason Labour supports this and I must say first and foremost that we are supporting this wholeheartedly; of that there is no doubt. So we are supporting this. And we supported the original Act as long as the register was not made public—so it was private and this is what this is about. But the reason this register is in place in the first place is that it provides New Zealand Police and other agencies like the Department of Corrections with access to personal information that allows them to proactively monitor individual sex offenders when they are back in the community. The hope is that what this will do is mitigate—you can never eliminate but will mitigate—the risk of these offenders offending again. You can argue whether they should be in the community in the first place but I am assuming that is a debate for another time.I suppose my point is that this Act gained Royal assent on I think 14 October 2016. It is actually less than 6 months later and we are back here actually changing a pretty fundamental part of this. It is a legal interpretation and the Minister has outlined this very well but initially the Act said conditional release". That is a pretty important part of the legislation and as it has turned out lawyers—or some smart lawyer somewhere—have argued that in fact if the statutory date of sentence has passed then there are certain offenders as the Minister has outlined who are not covered by this. So what has happened is we have had to go through and change the terminology in the Act to reflect the purpose and what we are trying to achieve here.But I suppose the reason why I have a little bit of disquiet is that this is not some small sort of technical matter where a comma was missed out or phrasing was incorrect or a legal definition has been challenged in the courts where we thought we had it right. This is a pretty fundamental piece of legalese that should have been picked up by the original Minister of Police at some point in time before the Act actually went out there. I am not too sure when this was actually picked up by the courts or by lawyers or when it came to the current Minister of Police's attention but it took a while. It took a while and I suppose the thing that is a bit disappointing for me is that all the way along this process the officials did not pick this up. I am assuming that Crown Law had a say in this but the fact is that no one picked it up and said: "Hold on a second here. There is a difference between conditional release and people who are on release conditions." As the Minister has outlined there is a very big difference in this.What we have ended up doing is coming back less than 6 months before this is out there on a really important piece of legislation. And the reason I say it is important is that New Zealanders care a hell of a lot about this piece of legislation compared with for example—with all due respect to my colleague Michael Wood—tax legislation and provisions relating to look-through companies. I mean of course that is important but this affects the very fabric of our community and the fact that this amendment bill is going to be passed today shows how serious this is and shows how serious this Minister takes this. But this Minister is only reflecting the will of the community. We could have a first reading with this amendment bill like we do with the vast majority of bills. We could have it go to a select committee we could call for a whole lot of submissions and we could hear them. We could write reports and it would come back to the House again. It could go through the various stages and in 6 or 8 months' time it could come out the other side with exactly the same result because it is retrospective legislation. But the fact that we are debating this in urgency actually shows the seriousness of this.In fact I could be wrong but I think the last time we debated a bill right through from first reading all the way through to the end of the third reading was when we changed the excise duty on tobacco. I know I could be wrong on that but that is the sort of thing we do and what we use this type of urgency for because we know it has got to be done immediately because there are unintended consequences—well in fact they are not unintended. There are consequences that we are very aware of if we do not get it through in a matter of hours. This is what we do in here and this shows why this bill is so serious because the consequences of getting this wrong are dire. They are not consequences that anyone in this House will face; they are consequences that people in our vulnerable communities will face and worse they are consequences that the most vulnerable New Zealand citizens may potentially face—that is our children.Let us not make any bones about this. We are talking about a law here that governs what happens to what I believe are the most reprehensible New Zealanders in this country—the most reprehensible. These are the people who abuse children. In fact there is probably a level above this and those are the people who kill our children. It does not get any worse than that. But these people have done what I think is the most unspeakable act—that is taken the innocence away from our children.We are supporting the bill. We are going to support it all the way through to the end. There was never any doubt about whether we would support this or not because it is incredibly important. But what I would urge the Government to do on pieces of legislation—whether it is tax legislation or whether it is social legislation police legislation or anything else—is to just be a little tighter and a little more careful in the way this stuff is drafted before it is even brought to the House because what we are doing today is tying up—I do not know—4 5 or 6 hours of Parliament's time on an amendment bill that actually would not have needed to come before the House in the first place if this had been done properly.So just wrapping up I do want to reiterate that Labour fully supports this bill and the sooner it is in place the better because what we really need to do is protect our most vulnerable children from those who are the worst in our society. Thank you very much."