Meager JamesJAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Thank you Madam Speaker. It seems like just yesterday we were debating this bill so it's a great pleasure to be back up and continuing the cross-party support fest that we're having this afternoon because we have another bill which has been well-received by the House and well-supported across the House. So it is a real pleasure to be able to speak to this particular bill. This one is of course one of the many bills that's come through the Justice Committee and I wanted to thank the members of the Justice Committee—the busy and effective Justice Committee—for their ongoing collegiality and hard work as they work through these bills.It's interesting because we had actually a number of bills in this space. As the previous speakers mentioned the bill was actually brought to the previous Parliament just before it dissolved last term on 29 August and has made its way through to this Parliament—so it's been picked up by Paul Goldsmith. One of the things I wanted to point to was throughout the debate on this bill it's one of a few family violence and sexual violence bills that we have considered as a committee and it became known as the litigant abuse bill" because of the title. We had very similar titles. We had the Family Proceedings (Dissolution for Family Violence) Amendment Bill we had the Victims of Sexual Violence (Strengthening Legal Protections) Legislation Bill and then we had this bill. And because of some of the confusion around which particular bill we were addressing this bill became known as the "litigation abuse bill".And that's important because one of the changes that the select committee actually made throughout the process was to change one of the terms in the bill from preventing "abuse of the court" to what it actually is intended to do and that is abuse of individuals harassment of others through litigation through use of the court's processes. And that's the real intent of the bill is to protect victims of family violence and to protect individuals from harassment from intimidation from annoyance from estranged spouses or former partners or other family members by using and abusing the processes of the court. So that's the key part or the key purpose of this bill.The other thing that this bill does is it makes a couple of further changes. The bill originally removed a provision around vexatious litigation and we decided to actually make sure that that term wasn't removed from other pieces of legislation because it's still important that those processes or that vexatious litigation can be prevented. This particular piece of legislation won't prevent that because that's the instance when you are maybe a self-represented litigant or you are repeatedly processing applications on your own behalf and you become vexatious not necessarily with the intent to abuse or harass others.There were a number of submitters who thought the bill didn't go far enough and who made some very strong and valuable submissions around whether or not we could expand the bill to cover off instances of stalking because New Zealand doesn't have a stalking law. It's interesting because I think that was met with a lot of approval across both sides of the committee to the point where I'm sure it wouldn't be out of turn to say that were considering drafting a member's bill around stalking. And then lo and behold Ginny Andersen beat us—or pipped us at the post to use a better analogy—before the end of the year. And then of course Minister Goldsmith has also indicated that the Government may be interested in picking up a stalking bill as well.So there is some further good news to come from this particular piece of legislation. It's been well-supported across the House. I look forward to seeing its passage through second reading through committee of the whole House stage and through the third reading. With that I will commend it to the House."