Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I am very proud tonight to be part of this group of people who are making change as we reflect on the amount of change that we have witnessed going back 32 years to the Homosexual Law Reform Bill.In another life I was a radio interviewer and in the lead-up to that legislation going through I interviewed Norm Jones known as the mouth from the South" and Fran Wilde in a talkback session which remains one of the most torrid of my broadcasting career. Norm at that stage had a stick and he wielded it and attempted to bash Fran Wilde who was sitting across from him with the microphone in between. It was commercial radio and I went to a break. I said things that I could not repeat in this House to the member of Parliament for Invercargill at the time and suggested that if there was the faintest murmur of anger and antagonism he would be gone and I would spend the rest of the three hours taking talkback with only Fran Wilde. That did in fact silence him for a while.But when people have alluded to and talked about courage and the courage it takes to make change I think that it is an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come. Yes as other speakers have said we've still got a long way to go to build a more tolerant and accepting society. But this is a bill that was long overdue. This is a place that took too long to change the wrongs of the past but it has done so now and it is doing so tonight. And I add my apology to the men down the decades who have suffered as a result of the love that they have felt as a natural instinct for another person. Those are the crimes that are not crimes. These are the places where we need to consider the consequences and the unintended consequences sometimes of laws. But these laws when they were enacted and when they were enforced were cruel and the men who suffered under the yoke of these laws lived in fear.I was brought up in this area. My mother was a florist on Molesworth Street. Her business partner was gay. That wasn't a word that was ever used of course in that context. But he was somebody who was a florist. He was beloved of his mother. He was an only child. He was blackmailed. My mother came home very upset and very distressed because one of her best friends had decided to leave the country to go to South Africa the other side of the world—he didn't know anyone—and to start his business afresh because he could not bear the idea that his mother would find out who he really was. He then left the country. He never returned. He never said goodbye to his mother. In those days there weren't the phone calls the Skyping and so forth obviously. So the price that that family paid represents to me the individual human suffering. His mother was beside herself and terribly distressed and couldn't understand it. And he never explained because he couldn't. He didn't want her to feel the shame and the stigma and the fear that came with bearing such a freak. He had that terrible burden. And for me as a child growing up I could see that there was something very wrong about stopping that man from being honest about himself maybe to his wider family but certainly to the bad people that were blackmailing him and using these laws to bring about dreadful tragic and unnecessary consequences.We all I'm sure have stories of this kind. I know that in the era that I've grown up in there's been enormous change and we're not quite there yet. But this bill with the expunging will mean that a person with a criminal record will have it amended to ensure that the conviction does not appear on a criminal history check for any purpose in New Zealand and that person will be entitled to declare that they have no such conviction. That is enormous. I think building on again the courage of the people who lead the change—and I commend Louisa Wall who's in this House tonight on the courage that she showed—you pay the cost and the penalties and the hatred and derision that I know Fran Wilde experienced and also probably Louisa as well at its moments. But you did the right thing. Tonight in this House we are doing the right thing.So in closing I would say to all the men who have lived in fear who have lived with self-loathing and a sense that they are not as good as other people that they have because of this law—even the ones that have passed but for the ones that are there now—the opportunity to live their lives as they ought to live them. We as lawmakers I think should savour this precious evening and all that has gone before it with Amy Adams introducing the bill with the current Minister carrying it forward and with all the support and genuine sentiment and heart and intellectual rigour as well through the select committee process. I commend the select committee for the changes that they made because they were ones that enhanced what this law change was setting out to do.So to those who took the courage and the leadership I commend you. To those who put up with the indignity and the horror of being made to feel the way they did I commend you as well. I acknowledge your strength and again I add my apologies to what has been long overdue. But tonight is the time when we do reflect. We've come a long way and we needed to. So I commend this bill to the House."