Bridges Simon: Child and Family Protection Bill — In Committee 
Bridges Simon: Child and Family Protection Bill — In Committee 
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SIMON BRIDGES (National—Tauranga) 
: 
 The Child and Family Protection Bill is a highly worthy bill because ultimately it is about better providing for the welfare of children and families. It does that by amending the Domestic Violence Act 1995 the Care of Children Act 2004 and the Adoption Act 1955. Perhaps unlike other speakers throughout the first and second readings and in this Committee stage I will focus on the last Act the Adoption Act 1955 and the amendments that we are making there. I suggest that they are very important ones and I will focus on them shortly. 
The Bills Digest in really quite banal terms talks about the fact that the Adoption Act amendments deal with “an increase in the international movement of children for adoption purposes. … Current powers are inadequate to deal with the modern day international movement of children for adoption purposes. New provisions are required to fulfil New Zealand’s commitment to protecting the welfare and best interests of children and to make it easier to prosecute offences relating to intercountry adoptions.” I agree with that. What we are doing is excellent. We are making sure we are complying with the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. That gets closer to what this is about. 
This is not something that is banal. It is banal perhaps in the frequency of it and how common it is sadly in the world we live in. But I suggest that what we are dealing with here in living up to our international obligations is the era we are living in which is the era with the most pervasive human rights violations. We are talking about the oppression of children and women worldwide about sex trafficking forced prostitution gender-based violence such as genital mutilation the killing of children and women simply on the basis of their sex and stonings. We are not talking about small numbers of people; we are talking about many millions of women and children every year. We are talking about billions and billions of dollars every year when we talk about sex trafficking. So this is a very important issue in my view. 
We can look back at the history of slavery worldwide and at what William Wilberforce did two or three centuries back and of course we say that was great. He ran a crusade effectively and towards the end of his life ultimately won and saw the end to slavery of black people in Britain at least. But today in the world we live in the slavery of children and women continues and persists at a very pervasive level and involves millions and millions of children and women. 
One of the things that is influencing my thinking a lot is a book I am reading at the moment called  
Half the Sky  
by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. They are Pulitzer Prize winners on the issues of sex trafficking forced prostitution gender-based violence and so on. They make the case that this is terrible but they—and I have not read to the end of their book but I can tell where it is going—push the theme that action and condemnation at an international level can work and that we can make a difference. We have to be very careful how we do it. A senator pushed through a bill in the United States of America to ensure that child labour laws were toughened up around the world and that American law did toughen things up. But in doing so he saw child labour go down and child sexual slavery increase as the children went out of the clothes shops and into the sex shops. We would not want to see that happen.