TIM BARNETT (NZ Labour—Christchurch Central) : I move, That the Prostitution Reform Bill be now read a third time. The one thing that all MPs might agree on is that the end of this debate is upon us, and that is a relief. It will all have been worthwhile if we agree, at about 9 p.m. tonight, to remove outdated, biased, and largely unenforced law, which leaves real problems untouched and which nurtures harm, and pass the Prostitution Reform Bill into law.

Having spoken to most members of this House about the issues at the heart of this bill, I believe that we have, through this debate, been asking two questions. The House has already answered question one, namely: what law best ensures the well-being of sex workers while responding to community sensitivities? That answer is the bill we have before us today. It may not be perfect, for laws rarely are, but it is the best this House has produced after 2¾ years of debate. The second core question is a conscience one. Given that there is prostitution in our society, should it be governed by law based on disapproval or on acceptance? After 32 months, 222 submissions, and 415 hours of debate in the Justice and Electoral Committee and the Chamber we are left today with that issue of conscience. Is disapproval of prostitution best expressed by sustaining bad law, or do we make the law as good as we can get it?

There are only three options for each member when he or she votes tonight: “for”, “against “, or “abstain”. Those who vote “for” accept that we can do better than the current messy law and that this bill is a workable improvement. Those who vote “against” are saying that the status quo, with all its faults, many of which have been accepted as such by all sides in this debate, is preferable. I say to my fellow members that the questions really are as simple as that. The choice really is as simple as that. The devil does not lie in the detail of this bill; the devil lies in the failure to understand that the choice is straightforward. An essential part of the opposition to this bill has been confusion and a complete misunderstanding of the limitations of a bill. A bill is not a group of social workers out on the streets of my electorate on a Friday night persuading teenage sex workers into a better life. A bill is not a drug addiction programme. Here in Parliament we do what we can by making the law as good and as workable as we can get it—making law that nurtures good social interventions.

The current law around prostitution was not designed to ensure the well-being of sex workers. It was planned around what I call a “kiwi prohibition”. The physical act itself is legal—possibly because it so hard to define legally—but such varied conduct as running a brothel and procuring anyone for reward to have intercourse with someone a person is not married to are crimes. The State licenses massage parlours, knowing that they are fronts for prostitution. The State makes hotel receptionists and care workers for people with disabilities who seek the services of a prostitute for those in their care into criminals. Yet the operator who coerces a sex worker or creates an illegal contract to control his or her workers is not a lawbreaker. There is no morality and no consistency in that.

So, through the heat haze of rhetoric, what does the Prostitution Reform Bill actually say? How does it make things better? It is a decriminalisation measure, similar to our whole family of public health - related laws. It does not seek to label prostitution as normal, but it does accept its inevitability. As Dr Basil Donovan, Clinical Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney, wrote to all MPs this week: “With the sole exceptions of the Cultural Revolution in China and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the law surrounding prostitution has no effect on its prevalence. Laws seeking to restrict prostitution merely promote corruption, brutality, and sexually transmitted infections.”

Having accepted that prostitution is here to stay, like it or not, the next thing is to identify what problems it generates. There seems to be broad agreement on that. The list includes operators, usually men, using emotional or physical force to control sex workers; under-18-year-old sex workers being sought by clients; prostitutes being trapped in the sex industry; the absence of any buy-in to common health and safety standards; offensive signage; and brothels being located in sensitive places. The next stage is to work out the best way of controlling those harms. That is harm minimisation. We know that under-age sex is best controlled by stronger law against the client—law that can actually be enforced—and that is what is in this bill; whereas exiting from prostitution is best controlled by a combination of good social policy, such as the provision in the bill to minimise benefit stand-down periods to people leaving the sex industry and some great on-the-ground social work projects. The law is then built. The rationale is not rocket science. It has been the basis of our public health law for the past 20 years.

So what will the world look like under this new law? It will look pretty similar to most of us who do not frequent the sex industry. There will be nothing much, in fact, except fewer risqué advertising signs, as the bill gives local bodies the power to control that signage. Members should remember that what we have here tonight is the best answer we can manage to the question of what law best ensures the well-being of sex workers. And for sex workers, the world will change dramatically if this bill passes into law. Key to this will be a transformation of their relationship with the State. At present their relationship is with the police, and that is occasional, at best, unless they are one of the 354 people arrested in the last 5 years for prostitution offences. Under this bill, they will be under a public health umbrella. They will have the opportunity for an employment contract, the certainty of an Occupational Safety and Health Service code, and a safer sex - focused environment to work in. They will have new protection from a stronger law against coercion. Workers aged under 18 will not be criminalised, but their clients will face longer sentences than under the current law, with less opportunity to successfully defend themselves.

My belief in this bill has been strengthened by the vitriol and inaccuracy of the opposition to it, and even more so by the sight of its enemies attacking it for completely contradictory reasons. When—and this is one of many examples—a member first calls for local bodies to have more controls over brothels in their areas and then, when amendments to the bill deliver exactly that, complains of it costing local bodies too much money, I sense that we are on to a good idea. Some accuse me of seeking to normalise prostitution. I have yet to hear a definition of normalisation that makes any sense in the context of a piece of law. A virtually unpoliced industry, where the core act of prostitution is not illegal, might be a definition of normal to some people. If the concern is that by taking practical measures to minimise harm we are de facto recognising the sex industry, I guess I would have to agree. But if we are tackling harm, surely there is no other way?

This is the most significant debate in this Parliament on a moral issue since homosexual law reform 17 years ago, and for most of us the most significant such debate of our parliamentary careers. Each member here has to live with his or her vote tonight for the rest of his or her life, and I know that some in this House have lived uncomfortably ever since with their “No” vote of 17 years ago. What we have before us tonight is a legacy of great parliamentarians and community campaigners who have gone before: Fran Wilde, who led the decriminalisation of gay sex; Helen Clark, who as Minister of Health, funded the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective; Maurice Williamson and Katherine O”Regan, who promoted the cause in the National Government in the 1990s; Georgina Beyer, who brings her unique personal experience to this House; and Catherine Healy, who has been the face of prostitution law reform for two decades. Will 61 members share in that legacy tonight? Will 61 of us vote to remove the last significant vestige of Victorian moral law from the New Zealand statute book? Yes, I believe we will.

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (NZ National—Nelson) : I have opposed this bill from day one, and I will continue to do so because it is based on the flawed premise of harm reduction. The best way that this Parliament can minimise the harm of prostitution is to minimise prostitution—full stop, end of story. A bill that has this Parliament making prostitution a legitimate career choice will mean more prostitutes and more harm. The member who promoted this bill said that we should support it on the basis that the current law has flaws. The member is mistaken. We should support this bill only if we are confident that it will make things better than they are now, and I do not have that confidence. The member also said that we should judge it on the basis of whether it will be good for sex workers. I say that no, we should judge it on whether it will be good for New Zealand society.

I know that passions in this sort of debate run strong, but I also have to say that I find the attack by the member of Parliament who promoted this bill on the churches of New Zealand to be inexcusable. His statement on the front page of the Christchurch Press that our churches have been ignorant and arrogant is not only false but totally unnecessary. It seems ironic to me that those who preach tolerance are so intolerant of those who do not share their liberal views. We then had the “feds under the bed” claim from Mr Barnett. His claims that there was a subversive campaign against this bill by some fundamentalist Christian churches from America were laughable. That was a sort of modern-day version of reverse McCarthyism.

I have news for Mr Barnett: this bill is opposed by ordinary New Zealanders, who reject the anti-family, politically correct liberal agenda of this current Government, and who want a Government that will stand up for basic decency and for standards. This bill is an affront to the values of ordinary New Zealanders. They are not judgemental puritans; they are common-sense people who know right from wrong. Prostitution is wrong because it cheapens the most intimate human relationship, by turning it into just another commercial transaction. I tell Mr Barnett that having sex is not the same as buying a beer or a latte. It is not the same as paying for a haircut or for some drycleaning. Sex is special, and it should not be for sale.

I represent a party that supports enterprise and markets, but I also know the limits of what should be commercially traded and what should not. This Parliament says that it is wrong to trade in babies or orphans—and nor should we; human life is too valuable for that. We also have laws that state it is wrong to have commercial trading in body parts and fluids, such as blood—we have a very unique blood service—and that is with good reason. Those who argue that prostitution is a victimless crime must resolve the moral dilemma of why selling blood, a kidney, or some other body part in life or in death is illegal. As a Parliament we say that those things are too sensitive to sell, and we should say that sex is, as well. Consenting adults may do as they wish, but sex should be an act of free will. That is why this Parliament puts such a high penalty on rape. We have high respect for human intimacy. Prostitution is nothing more than paid rape.

No amount of regulation and no amount of occupational health and safety inspection will make prostitution safe or healthy. I challenge this Parliament, after reducing the drinking age to 18, to ask how many people in New Zealand are drinking under the age of 18? Based on that experience, what confidence should this Parliament have that it will be any more effective than that in ensuring that prostitution is limited to those over the age of 18? Those who promote this bill have a naive view about the capacity of the State to enforce the detailed provisions of a law such as this. Those promoting this bill are taking us down the road towards normalising prostitution. We more or less had that assumption from the member who is promoting the bill today. He seems to live in a moral vacuum where marriage, de facto relationships, homosexual sex, and prostitution are just all the same. They are not, and long may this Parliament hold out and say that they are not.

The argument that prostitution will exist whether or not Parliament condones it is not the right way for this Parliament to write law. We outlaw theft, domestic violence, murder, and assault, knowing with every one of those that we will not be able to eliminate them. The real question that every member of this House must ask this evening is whether this new law would serve this nation better, or whether the nation would be better without these changes. The current law is not perfect. Personally, I would make it tougher. It is an anomaly that a prostitute offering sex for money commits an offence, whereas the client does not. That is why I voted in the Committee stage to make both of those offences, and I am disappointed that that was not adopted. I am strongly of the view that, despite all the support for this bill, it will do more harm than good. We need only to look at the experience across the Tasman in Australia to know that there has been a substantive growth in both illegal and legal prostitution since Australia has gone down a similar road.

The most significant part of this bill is the laws that it repeals. I want to bring those into focus in this debate this evening. Section 147 of the Crimes Act makes it a criminal offence to run a brothel. That goes, under this law. I say the law of the land should make it illegal to run a brothel. Section 148 of that Act, which is repealed by this legislation, makes it an offence to live on the earnings of prostitution. That also goes. If we vote for this bill tonight, it will be perfectly legitimate to live on the proceeds of prostitution. With this legislation, section 26 of the Summary Offences Act goes—that is, it allows soliciting. Any person will be able to legally offer his or her body for prostitution. Let us not fudge that. It will become quite lawful anywhere—at any time or at any place—for people to offer sex for money. It will be quite lawful to go door to door. That is wrong; that is not the sort of society that this Parliament wants in our country. The international research is compelling. The facts are plain, and the argument is simple. This bill will do more harm than good.

May I conclude by thanking many of the organisations and individuals who put in cogent arguments for the defeat of this bill. I commend Sandra Coney for more of her insightful writing, the Maxim Institute, the churches of New Zealand, and organisations like ECPAT and others. May good reason prevail, and may this Parliament reject the proposition that prostitution is just normal and should be legitimised. New Zealand deserves better than that. I urge this Parliament to reject this bill and to stand for a better New Zealand.

Mr SPEAKER: New Zealand First is to have two speeches, each for 5 minutes. The first speaker is Mr Brent Catchpole.

BRENT CATCHPOLE (NZ First) : This bill is a mishmash of band-aids, and it will not achieve the stated aims of its promoter, Labour’s Tim Barnett. Mr Barnett would have us believe that under this bill the health, safety, and employment laws will protect prostitutes and sex workers. Under the current law, prostitution is not illegal, and therefore they already have those rights.

This bill is not about the health and well-being of prostitutes. Instead, it is about the decriminalisation of the peripheral businesses surrounding prostitution—such things as pimping, brothel keeping, trafficking in young women, and drugs. This bill prohibits the hiring of children under the age of 18. Current laws already prohibit that, yet if we look at the prostitutes who are working on the streets of the cities of New Zealand, we will find girls as young as 10, 11, and 12 years of age selling their bodies in order to feed drug habits. There is no evidence to support Tim Barnett’s claim that this bill will improve the situation or make it any safer for sex workers. The exact opposite of that will occur, because the reforms will not be able to be policed, thus opening the door to organised crime. I include in that comment the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, which is an organisation championed by the Prime Minister and funded by the Government. It is the prime target—the one organisation that is out there promoting prostitution and recruiting young people into it, under the guise of providing them with a service.

From the day that this bill was introduced in September 2000, New Zealand First and, in particular, my colleague Peter Brown have campaigned against these reforms. Peter Brown has seen prostitution first hand. Firstly as a ship’s officer, and then while running his own stevedoring business, he has seen the degradation of prostitutes as they flocked to the docks and to the ports to wait for the arrival of ships. He saw the degradation of those women, particularly the young women, and especially the young Māori women, and it saddened him. All the New Zealand First members have voted against this bill in all its stages before the House—during the first reading, the second reading, and the Committee stage—because we firmly believe that the bill will not help sex workers. Instead, it sends the wrong message to the young and the vulnerable.

I urge all members of this House to vote against this bill, and to support a member’s bill that I have in the ballot. My bill would provide a real solution to the issues surrounding prostitution. My bill is based on the Swedish law, and prostitution has almost entirely disappeared from the streets of Sweden. Tim Barnett will suggest that prostitution has simply been driven underground, but there is no evidence of that. In fact, all the evidence shows that prostitution is no more underground in Sweden than it ever was. My bill, like the Swedish law, provides support programmes to help and encourage sex workers to leave the industry. It provides support, education, and real alternatives for them outside that industry. Other European countries are currently examining the same law, with a view to adopting it in the same way as the Swedish people have done, because those countries have seen that it has worked in Sweden. I will name the countries. Holland is one of them. Holland legalised prostitution, and it is now looking to change the law back. Holland has realised that it does not work when prostitution is legalised—and nor will it work when it is decriminalised.

I will vote against this bill, and I ask all members to vote against this mishmash of a band-aid bill called the Prostitution Reform Bill.

Mr SPEAKER: Before I call the next speaker, I want to advise the people who are listening to this debate that the only people who can participate in it are members of Parliament. I make that point very seriously. There is no contribution other than that from members of Parliament.

PITA PARAONE (NZ First) :Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker, ā, tēnā koutou i tau mai neii te pōnei.

[Greetings to you Mr Speaker, and greetings to you who have settled in tonight.]

Notwithstanding the amendments that have been made to the original bill, I wish to make the following points in support of my argument for continuing to vote against the bill. I want to focus on one or two issues.

First of all, I want to talk about youth. Youth face all sorts of problems, many of which we did not have to worry about when we were young. Those problems include the cost of education, which deters many young people from entering tertiary education, let alone from studying anything other than a vocational course that will provide them with a meal ticket. Whatever happened to the idea of youth being a time to explore and find out what one wants through trial and error, and of valuing education for its own sake? Many young people today cannot afford that luxury. The rising cost of housing makes even leaving home a mission impossible for many, stifling their need to be independent, and also putting pressure on their families, who did not count on having their children living at home until well into their adulthood. Then there are all the temptations and peer pressures that, for a lot of young people, involve risk taking, including taking drugs and drinking to excess.

Youth is all about taking risks. I am sure that even some of us remember a sense of being bulletproof. It is an exciting feeling, and the world can seem full of possibilities. But for some young people, it is all too easy to make a wrong move and to be lured into a lifestyle that seems easy, and even glamorous. Who cares what the job involves when the money and the hours are good, and many politicians in Parliament are saying it is OK? Well, I care. I have seen enough of our Māori young people destroyed by that lifestyle, and I cannot in all conscience give my vote to something that is so ruinous to our young people.

One may say that it is a matter of freedom of choice, and that sex workers enter the industry willingly. That may be so, but how much information do young people of 18 really have? What can they really know of the realities of this occupation? How can they have the maturity to really think about what they are doing, in terms of the rest of their lives? For many, the reality is so horrific that they take drugs to dull the pain. The money becomes a habit, and they begin to wonder how they could survive without it. The social ostracism and disapproval become a reality, so they start to identify more with their colleagues, and before long the industry becomes a lifestyle. But it has its price, and that price is in terms of self-respect and self-esteem, the lack of which can be manifested in many ways—members can just ask any police or prison officer, or counsellor. I put it to members that a young person entering the sex industry will regret it later on, and that the experience will scar that person for life. I do not want that for our young people. I want to deter them from making a bad choice that will stay with them for ever.

Another issue for me is normalisation. The thing that worries me the most about the possibility that this bill will become law is the outcome of the normalisation of prostitution. That sends out a signal that it is OK to work as a prostitute and that prostitutes will be protected by the law, just as though one was working in a factory or an office. I am not saying that sex workers should not be protected from the exploitation, violence, and abuse that is a daily reality for most of them. What I am saying is that by treating prostitution like any other occupation, the message is that it is like any other occupation, when, to me, it clearly is not. How many other industries do members know of where taking drugs to cope with one’s shift is the norm? How many employees do members know of who face the threat of rape and abuse on a daily basis? How can we condone our young people believing that selling sex for money is a reasonable career option? All too often, it is young women from disadvantaged and often abusive backgrounds who make that choice. Those women need help and guidance, rather than to be told that it is OK to be a prostitute. To me, prostitution is not OK. It is not normal, and I do not want to see any more young lives destroyed because of it.

SUE BRADFORD (Green) : I stand here in Parliament this evening to make one last plea to my fellow MPs—whatever political party they come from—to consider having the courage to cast a vote in favour of the decriminalisation of prostitution. The bill before us, which we have so hotly examined and debated for the last 3 years, is a good one, aimed simply at improving the health, safety, and welfare of one of the most vulnerable and exploited groups of workers in New Zealand. All the evils of the sex industry, which the opponents of this bill talk about with such anger—such as coercion, child prostitution, and the blatant exploitation of women—exist now. This bill aims to help end these evils, not promote them.

I have grown entirely sick of the misinformation that has been deliberately circulated in our communities. That misinformation about the Prostitution Reform Bill makes it sound as though the bill itself was causing all these iniquities, rather than aiming to end them. Representatives of organisations overseas—such as ECPAT Australia, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, and the International Save the Children Alliance—call for the decriminalisation of prostitution, because they know that restrictive laws merely encourage violence, trafficking, rape, and the spread of HIV/AIDS—not the opposite. The way to combat these things is through the harm minimisation approach promoted in the bill before us today—through good public health and education; through strong penalties against coercion and the use of under-age prostitutes; and through the creation of an environment in which sex workers, mainly women, are not obliged to become part of the criminal underworld in order to carry out their occupation.

To those of my colleagues in Parliament who profess to be feminists, I make a special plea that they consider voting in favour of the bill today. Many of our struggles in the 1970s and 1980s centred on women’s right to choose—our right to take, and keep, control of our lives and our bodies. I therefore cannot understand why puritanical, 19th century concepts of abolitionism still have such a strong hold on women like Sandra Coney and others—for whom I have a very high regard, but who continue to believe that somehow continuing to criminalise prostitutes will help end the exploitation of women. That simply does not compute. How can the arresting of women empower them? How can putting them through the degrading processes of police custody and a court appearance, followed by the appearance of a conviction on their criminal record—which will dog them for the rest of their lives—free them or empower them? In what way will the arresting of women make it easier for women to exit the sex industry when a prostitution-related conviction is one of the major barriers to future employment or career advancement?

I do not know how many of the feminists and women MPs who oppose this bill have been through multiple experiences of strip-searching, arrest, imprisonment, police violence, and conviction, as I have. I would like to assure them that these are not experiences, in any context, that are likely, in any way, to improve one’s self-esteem or ability to enter straight, upside employment. It is high time we moved into an era where the Victorian hypocrisy of convicting and condemning women who sell sexual services, while protecting the men who buy them, is discarded once and for all. Tonight is our chance to do that. This is not to say that we should move to the so-called Swedish model, in which it is the clients who are criminalised. An amendment to this bill, proposing the Swedish model, was thrown out by a hearty majority 2 weeks ago, showing, I believe, that many MPs have learnt from the experiences of places like the UK and Sweden, where all that happened was that much of the industry was driven further underground, with all the resulting negative impacts in terms of things like the spread of STDs, rape, violence, and other harms to sex workers themselves and those around them. As long as prostitution is a reality, is it not more important for those of us who identify as feminists to promote the rights and well-being of one of the most vulnerable and exploited groups of women, rather than to continue to allow the forces of the State to harass and criminalise them?

I would like to turn now from feminists to another group of my fellow MPs—the members of the ACT party, who, I gather, are quite divided among themselves about this bill. As avowedly the party in Parliament that is most dedicated to getting Government out of ordinary people’s lives, I fail to comprehend how ACT members cannot support this bill. Decriminalisation of prostitution is all about getting the police out of the bedroom, when it comes to sex between two consenting adults. Why on earth do some ACT MPs think we should get the State out of education, health, housing, prisons, and everywhere else but not out of the bedroom—one of the most private places we can enter? There is a certain lack of consistency here, which is simply incomprehensible to me, and I appeal to ACT members to put their principles above their fear of the purveyors of certain brands of moral outrage.

On the other side of the House, we have a number of people from trade union backgrounds, who have, it seems, chosen to turn their backs on this particular group of workers. I am not talking about people like Lynne Pillay, or Helen Duncan, or Rick Barker, or a large number of other Labour people who have staunchly supported their colleague Tim Barnett’s bill. Rather, I am talking about some others who seem to think that workers’ rights are something that are to be left outside the door, when it comes to a brothel or massage parlour. Of course, this has been the status quo for generations. Sex workers have been, and are, subject to bullying, rape by the boss, and other forms of sexual harassment, as well as arbitrary fines, forced sex with clients, withholding of wages, enforced overtime, and denial of any time off for holidays or illness. In the current setting, many workers are taken on as self-employed, independent contractors with no protection as employees and with zero employment rights.

The protections of the Employment Relations Act, the health and safety in employment legislation, and accident compensation legislation simply do not apply, yet some of these workers are suffering the most feudally oppressive treatment by management seen in New Zealand today. Employers can get away with this because prostitution currently takes place in the criminal world. If this bill is passed, the balance of power between employers and workers in this industry will gradually begin to shift. It will take time, but workers will have the law on their side for the first time. They will have the capacity to unionise if they want to, and they will be much more able to leave the boss behind and set up in a self or group employment situation should they so choose.

Anyone who understands and supports the basic principles of trade unionism should vote for this bill. In my role as the Green Party member of Parliament responsible for disability issues, I would like to address another matter altogether. In the 3 years I have spent working on this bill, it has become increasingly apparent that there is a whole subtext in this debate about which most of the bill’s opponents are either oblivious or deliberately obtuse—that is, the situation that faces people with a major physical, mental, or intellectual disability. For those people, sex with a prostitute is the only way they will ever find physical closeness or release, for the rest of their lives, or for a major part of their lives. It is all very well to moralise about the so-called evils of prostitution, but I believe that the real evil comes when, as a society, we ignore the real needs of those less fortunate than most of us, at the same time as we condemn those who provide what is, in essence, a much-needed social service.

I would like to commend, in particular, IHC New Zealand for having the courage, as an organisation, to come out in support of this bill in the last couple of days. IHC is all too aware of the real needs of the many people it does its best to serve. On a broader front, I would also like to acknowledge Tim Barnett, the Prostitutes Collective, and all the MPs and church and community group representatives who have worked so hard for decriminalisation over recent months and years. They are the people who have had the nerve to step forward, in the face of a classic wave of moral outrage, to fight for a much-needed reform, which I am sure will happen whatever the vote tonight. Finally, I would like to say how honoured I am to have been the Green Party’s representative throughout this debate. We are the only party in Parliament to have taken a clear position throughout in support of this bill, because we recognise that old union saying: “A harm to one is a harm to all.” Until that harm is removed, none of us can be truly free.

STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) : This is an odd debate—a conscience vote where the allocation of debating time is along party lines. I have considered whether I should be acknowledging, or trying to acknowledge, the arguments on both sides. In the end, one of the reasons for not doing that, other than the fact that I will be touching on the same issues, is that I do not believe that this debate has very often touched on the underlying law, or the bill, at all. This debate, in all the bill’s stages in this House, has tended to focus on whether people want to be seen to favour prostitution, or to favour what is seen as being progressive. There has been very little analysis of what Parliament is actually doing.

After the vote, prostitution will be legal, whatever the outcome. Prostitution has not been illegal in this country in living memory. Pimping has been, and brothel-keeping was, until 1978 when the Massage Parlours Act came in, and in effect we got a form of licensed brothel industry. But prostitution—consenting acts between adults for money—and the privacy of the bedroom have not been touched by New Zealand law for many, many years. Therefore, the debate that goes on, as if people who take a position on one side or the other are actually addressing anything other than a moral posture, is in fact idle.

I look at this as a lawyer and as a person committed to the rule of law in a liberal State. I do not ask, as Nick Smith did, whether this law change will make things better than they are now, because I believe that the law has far less capacity to change outcomes in the direction we think it will change them than most of us here care to admit. I look at this law and, instead, ask whether it will be better law than what we have now, and I hope that if we have better law, there might be better outcomes. As I said, we are not voting for or against prostitution, or for or against brothels; we have them, and they will remain, whatever the outcome.

There is no nirvana. I listened to the speech of my sincere Green colleague who talked about getting the State out of the bedroom, and about oppression, and about the balance of power shifting because the workers will have the law on their side, and I say “Where?”, as I did in the Justice and Electoral Committee, and as I did at the second reading. There is a set of slogans in this bill that have absolutely no contact with reality, and never did. There is nothing in this bill that changes the protection of the human rights of any prostitute. There is nothing that protects them from exploitation. There is nothing that will counter the natural market force. When restrictions to entry to a profession drop, when the risks of a profession drop—if that is what happens—supply increases, prices go down, and there is, usually, more power in the hands of the brand owner. The only thing that will enhance the position of workers in an industry like this is their comparative performance. There will be a very large tail of people who find that their lives are harder and their money is harder to get, and who wonder why people claiming to speak on their behalf were so confident of their moral position.

This is not a political, philosophical, or religious statement. This is a statement of law. It is a set of instructions to the police, the courts, and the local authorities, and what does it tell them? It tells the local authorities that they will now embark on the sort of debate that has been tearing Parliament apart over the last few months. They are not given criteria by which to decide the location of brothels; they are simply given confirmation of a power to do that. So they will be dragged into this morality debate masquerading as a debate about public health, safety, nuisances, and offences to morals. The net effect will probably be that there are locations and cities where it is very hard to establish a brothel. The unintended effect of that will be that street prostitution is less expensive and less legally hazardous. But if there is one thing I learnt from the submissions before the select committee, it is that street prostitution is more dangerous, more unhealthy, more undesirable from a drug abuse perspective, and more susceptible to crime than brothels—as we have them—are. So this measure is likely to be an own goal. Even if I thought that the Hon. Phil Goff had been sincere when he put it forward as an answer to those who were concerned about there being no protection for communities that did not want brothels, I do not believe that the Minister, with all the drafting resources he had, can have been unaware that this was a simple smokescreen set of regulations likely to play into the hands of those who want to make political statements at the local authority level.

The other significant change will be the abolition of the law against pimping. When people tell me that this change in the law somehow enhances the power and the ability of the prostitute to stand up to the boss, I am genuinely disgusted. If there is one factor of international experience, it is that prostitution is associated with brutal men who exploit women, who live off their earnings, and who keep them in a form of slavery—not all of them, of course; there are many who do not. But, in our current industry, the bad-employer elements that the Green member just mentioned are trifling compared with what they will be in an industry where the pimp is not afraid of any police action. Because that is what the change does. At the moment, the brothel-keeper and the pimp are well aware that they are breaking the law. They are breaking the law more readily than the prostitute, because the only liability that the prostitute faces is for hard-sell marketing. Anyone who looks at the back pages of their newspaper knows that advertising prostitution services is not illegal, and it has not been illegal for a long time.

So what do I think should have happened? We should have gone for a law that actually improved liberty, and that actually did get the State, or those who want to impose their views on others, out of this industry. We should have been looking at the evils that the law needs to combat. We have a law that says it protects young people. Clause 3, the purpose clause in the bill, talks about under-age prostitution. The Green and Labour members on my select committee rejected providing any practical means for enforcement of that. The police said they should be able to ask young prostitutes for proof of their age, and the majority on the committee said no. That was the turning point for me. That was when I realised that what I was dealing with was a bid for respectability, and not a genuine attempt to improve the position of the women or men in this industry. The bill says that it criminalises prostitution by those under 18. Well, that was already the law. That has been in the Crimes Act for some time. The real question about it was what resource and what capacity one was putting into the hands of those who must enforce it. The proponents of this bill decided that they not only would put no capacity in the police hands, but also would take away the existing powers that they have.

Finally, having become alive to the fact that this was a war of slogans, I became concerned about what would flow from it. There is a part of this bill that sets up a committee that is expressly charged with developing the law. We had submissions saying that prostitution should be a ground of non-discrimination; that, in other words, the Human Rights Commission should prevent people from speaking against prostitution, from refusing to rent their premises to prostitutes, and from refusing to maintain them in their employment if that was against their conscience. What we had was a series of thinly disguised submissions—some were not disguised at all—saying it is time for the law to move on from this decriminalisation, and to make prostitution a privileged position. I put forward an amendment that was designed to say that this measure was simply decriminalisation, and did not impinge on people’s rights of free expression, or freedom of association or non-association, or freedom of religion. That was rejected. At that stage it became plain to me that true believers in our classical liberties, and in the sanctions that any healthy community has, could not vote for this bill.

• Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

LARRY BALDOCK (United Future) : I rise to speak in the third and final reading of this bill, and I want to begin by thanking all of those across New Zealand who have taken the time to make their views known to us members of the House. To those who have lobbied and worked hard to try to convince us about the issues involved in this bill, I say that I trust they will not be disappointed tonight when the final vote is taken.

In standing to speak, I try to raise new points every time. I have had my share of speeches on this bill, as most members will know, but every time it is possible to come up with new reasons that we should oppose this bill, because there are hundreds of reasons that it should not be passed into law tonight. In the very beginning the bill was promoted to New Zealand as decriminalisation of prostitution, and all the supporters of it were very clear in their opposition to any legalising of prostitution. They wanted to decriminalise. Legalisation, as in Victoria, Australia, is clearly acknowledged to be a disaster, but this bill’s supporters decided and declared that the decriminalisation model, such as that in New South Wales, was a raving success, and that was why they wanted it brought here to New Zealand.

One of my concerns right throughout this debate has been our obligations under the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, which is our obligation as a signatory to the UN charter. It has always been my concern that if we liberalise our laws here in New Zealand, we will invite the possibility of the trafficking of women and children for prostitution, which is occurring on a wide scale around the world. When I raised these issues with the Minister of Justice he told me that, no, it was perfectly OK to pass this law, because the more that this issue was out in the open, the more it would be possible to control the evil of the trafficking of women, which is nothing less than slavery of women.

Well, if that is the case, I want to draw members’ attention to a recent article in the Australian newspaper: “Police lay their first sex traffic charges in Australia. The Australian Federal Police have charged a man and his mother with sexual servitude offences against three Indonesian women who claim they were held captive in a Western Sydney flat.” Sydney, of course, is where prostitution has been decriminalised. “The charges are the first to be made by the AFP under laws to combat sex trafficking, and the Government Minister for Immigration”—similar, perhaps, to our Minister of Immigration—“said this rarely happens in Australia. But a 4-month investigation by the Australian has uncovered widespread trafficking, abuse, and exploitation of sex slaves, revealing that women trafficked from South-east Asia were forced to have sex with hundreds of men to pay off so-called contracts. Although some sources said there could be a thousand or more women under contract at any one time, Mr Ruddock continued to play down the problem.”

I believe that is what we are about to unleash in our nation if we pass this decriminalisation of prostitution. There is no guarantee whatsoever that we will be able to better control the evils that occur in this industry if we bring everything out into the open. I have said on many, many occasions that in fact it is significantly in the open in New Zealand already, and I do not know how much more open it can become.

Another article from the Australian, talking about the famous King’s Cross strip, which, of course, has been operating for many years under a decriminalisation model, states: “The future of Australia’s most famous stretch of strip clubs, brothels, and adult shops is threatened after the Sydney City Council voted to prohibit new sex industry businesses from setting up in the heart of the red-light district. This sleazy, drugs-rife pocket of the inner city has been in the cross hairs of the council since it gained control of the suburb from the South Sydney local authority on May 8.” I say to members that that does not sound to me like a success story from the decriminalisation of prostitution. That area is still referred to as a “sleazy, drugs-rife pocket of the inner city”. There are enough problems with what we have already in this country without our opening the door to further proliferation of this problem.

I believe that if this bill is passed tonight, and even one extra woman is trafficked in prostitution—or even one more of our young women in New Zealand is enticed to go into prostitution—then this bill will have failed. No one has been able to give me a guarantee in this House yet that this bill will not do that. A lot has been said about it not leading to a massive increase, but has anyone been able to promise me that this bill will not lead to an increase of even one? If one person were trafficked into New Zealand as a result of this bill, we would be failing our obligations under the UN charter, and, surely, that must be of concern to this Labour Government, which is so committed to the United Nations and to its obligations under those treaties. Clause 9.5 of those obligations says that member States should do everything they can to reduce the demand that leads to the trafficking of women and children—estimated to be 700,000 to 4 million every year around the world. But, no, we have our heads in the sand in this country, and, as some members have said with very great clarity, we are about to unleash market forces if we pass this bill.

The truth is that this measure is, really, no longer decriminalisation of prostitution; it is legalisation, similar to that found in Victoria, Australia. If we do a comparison between that state’s legislation and what ours now looks like, we find some incredible similarities. There is licensing. There is zoning. There are health regulations, although we wonder where the army of occupational safety and health workers will come from here in New Zealand to do anything about trying to protect the health of our sex workers. We cannot find enough police now to inspect our massage parlours and to close down the ones that are operating without licences, let alone find the extra occupational safety and health workers who are to go around making life better for those in the sex industry.

The amendments to the bill that went through the House 2 weeks ago have, basically, passed the responsibility for taking care of the sex industry on to local government. If this bill passes tonight, this House will be delegating responsibility—we could say “passing the buck”—to our local city councils, and passing on to them the cost of regulating the sex industry, and I believe that is grossly unfair. I served for a time as a member of the Tauranga District Council. During that time, we had debates about some of the moral issues in our community. I believe that if every council throughout this country has to go through the process that is now required of it under the Local Government Act—to consult its communities over every by-law it passes—those councils will have enormous trouble enforcing what this Government hopes they will do under this law.

Interestingly enough, soon after those amendments were passed, the following appeared in the Bay of Plenty Times: “Sex workers fear red tape. Tauranga sex workers have rejected the idea of the local council regulating their industries, saying the move would only tie them up in red tape. Sex industry workers also fear that council workers will not have the right skills to successfully deal with them, and want the job to stay with the police.”

I believe that we in this House are meant to listen, and I think we have been getting mixed messages all the way through this debate. One of the very difficult things I found as I held public debates around the country was, on one occasion, to hear how terrible such a life is, and that therefore this law needs to be passed to make things better, and, on another occasion, to hear that the life actually is pretty good and “We don’t need you interfering in it, at all”. It has become very difficult to know how we should address this situation, but I am totally convinced that this law is not good law. Those who look to it to try to save them from the misery they are in will be sorely disappointed. This law offers no salvation for them. I hope the House will reject it tonight. I believe we should embark on an inquiry that will look seriously into the situation of the sex industry in New Zealand, and come up with some real solutions that will not open the door to market forces, which will damage everybody involved with the industry.

Hon MATT ROBSON (Deputy Leader—Progressive) : To change slightly the word order of Mark Antony’s most famous piece, the funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “I come to praise Tim Barnett, not to bury him, for he is an honourable man.” He seeks to remedy a set of social mischiefs that surround prostitution. In particular, he is concerned about the health and safety of the women and men engaged in prostitution. But I have come to bury the bill, not to praise it. It does not remedy the mischiefs around prostitution. On the contrary, it will worsen those mischiefs. On the surface, the bill is progressive, and that is the intention of the author and many who support it—I know that. But, on going deeper, I believe that it entrenches practices that do enormous harm.

There are some who say that prostitution will always be with us. I have heard those words said about the poor. I do not accept that. It is not some dictum handed down from on high. Many socialists and social democrats in this House, if they follow that philosophy, should realise that they should look for the material roots of prostitution and work out a strategy for its elimination. Mesopotamia was the source, in slavery, of prostitution. It flourished in Athens as a State system, also under a slave system, and it has come through to us under this present market system that we exist in today. Neither the present market system as we know it, which goes to extremes, which commodifies people, nor sexual slavery has to continue to exist.

Those who argue that prostitution is another form of work, and that, at least, it is paid for, do, I believe, a great injustice to the goal that they should, in my opinion, if they are on the left, be aiming for, and that is free relationships between people on an equal basis. I ask those who argue that prostitution is a career what sort of career it is if, when one reaches old age—possibly 35, 40, or 45—there is nowhere for one to go, and those who run the industry do not want a bar of one. What sort of career is that? What sort of career for our children is it, when it is put on the level of other productive work in society? None of that is an argument that people who are involved in prostitution are less worthy, in any way, than any other member of a community. But it is an argument that if we are serious about what we tell our children is productive work, we should not use the euphemism “sex worker” to describe this work. It is a euphemism. It covers up a practice that none of us, including those who are proponents of the bill, say we want our children to enter.

There is a need for an exit strategy in this industry, and that is what we should be concentrating on. We should certainly not be concentrating on having the police or other agencies chase people involved in prostitution—either prostitutes or their clients. Let us, as a House and a Parliament, work on an exit strategy.

I went to colleagues in the Dutch Parliament who voted for a similar law. Their party is called the Dutch Socialist Party, and anybody can contact it at www.sp.nl, which has an English section. It has written an article that states that now, given the experience in Holland, its members would not vote for that bill. Why? Because the very people they thought they were going to help—the most oppressed women, particularly immigrant women and young women—are the ones who have been driven into the burgeoning legal industry. They have also seen the drug industry continue to climb, and those people involved in prostitution continue to be exploited. And Holland has a reputation as a liberal society that looks after its people.

To those who say that it is Victorian morality that entrenches prostitution, I say “Nonsense!”. It is actually post-Victorian morality, because those who are making this industry something that goes on the Stock Exchange long ago rejected the hypocrisy that did surround Victorian morality, but they are the same sorts of people who, if one gave them half the chance, would bring back exploited child labour and longer hours for workers. They are the very people who opposed my member’s bill promoting 4-weeks’ annual leave that I know has massive support from my Labour colleagues as well as from the Green Party.

The way forward is to have an exit strategy that deals with the needs of the people who are involved in prostitution, and it should include anti-drug strategies, counselling, and vocational guidance for people. We need that. I do not believe that this matter should be dealt with in a member’s bill. These issues are ones on which the resources of the Government and Government policy should be brought to bear. The strategy should be to give people an exit; to allow resources and support to go to the agencies that keep our children out of prostitution, and that give social support to the women and men in the industry, to enable them to come out of it, not enter it—those are the resources that the Government needs to supply. A centre-left Government will need to address this issue when this bill fails—as I believe it will—and to put in place a proper strategy to deal with prostitution and its elimination.

JANET MACKEY (NZ Labour—East Coast) : I am not going to try to predict what will happen if this bill passes tonight, but the one thing I do know, having sat on the committee that considered the bill in the previous Parliament, is that it does not achieve the aims it sets out to achieve, and that is of concern to me. I believe that this Parliament has one chance in 20 years to address this issue, to address it well, and to bring in a bill that provides real benefits. This bill does not do that.

We have heard people tonight talk about those who are opposing the bill as not being liberal, as being conservative, and as not caring for women. I am a woman and I object very strongly to voting for a bill that legitimises those people who traffic in women. This bill makes it legal for people to live off the earnings of prostitutes. If we were looking for something that, effectively, dealt to the people who probably cause the greatest grief for prostitutes, then this bill certainly does that: it legitimises them. It gets rid of pimps and turns them into managers. I find that offensive, and I ask people to think strongly about that.

One of the issues that has not been spoken on, regarding the bill, is the social impact this bill could have in small rural communities. We are asking our district council—the Wairoa District Council—to nominate the place where it is willing to have a brothel. These are communities that are very small and are transparent. They do not have industrial areas. It is very difficult to hide things in a very small community. I think this is another example of Auckland, Wellington, or Christchurch legislation that will have a totally different, more dangerous, and more severe impact on small communities. There is huge opposition to this bill in small rural communities. I ask those members who are making up their mind to give some consideration to how councils in Wairoa, Opotiki, and Gisborne will manage the effects of this legislation.

I hope that the bill does not pass tonight. I hope that the issue does not go away. I hope that we as a Parliament pick it up. I hope that the Government picks up this issue, and that we have a chance to discuss this matter fully with our communities, and to come up with legislation that does address the health and safety issues that need addressing.

Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (NZ National—Port Waikato) : In choosing to vote against the bill, I am very mindful of the powerful argument put up by my colleague Katherine Rich in support of the bill at the beginning of this debate. In effect, she saidshe would be heartbroken if one of her children decided to enter the sex industry. But if he or she did, and I quote her: “I would want to know that my daughter had the same rights as my son. I would want to know that as far as possible the industry would be as safe as it could be, and above board.”

The major reason that I am not supporting this bill is that I do not believe that the legislative model proposed will enhance or protect the lives of the most vulnerable—the young men and women who prostitute themselves in the streets, and who are oftenthe ones unable to obtain jobs in massage parlours or escort agencies. Nothing in this bill reassures me that they will be protected, nor is there much visible evidence that this bill is underpinned by resourcing that will break the cycles of disadvantage that get them there in the first place, or help them find viable alternatives or rehabilitation. I am also mindful of the strong criticisms of this bill from the Police Association that recent changes to certify brothel operators are unworkable and naive. I note that the president, Greg O’Connor, has said that his association is not opposed to decriminalisation, but MPs need to draft a law that could be practically—and, I would hope, fairly—enforced.

I acknowledge the many people involved with the evolution of this bill, the sincerity with which they have been involved with it, and the huge work that Tim Barnett and other parliamentary colleagues have put into it. In particular, I thank the AIDS Foundation and the Prostitutes Collective, which, I believe, have already made a very significant contribution to enhancing public health issues.

But one of the pivotal concerns I have about this legislation is that there is very little underpinning to make sure that negative effects are minimised. Liberalising legislation that I have been involved with, and have observed more closely, is the development of abortion law in the Netherlands, as compared with New Zealand, which has an abortion rate four times that of the Netherlands. The greatest distinguishing feature of the Netherlands situation was a huge national effort in the 1970s by both sides of the question to resource relevant lifelong education, and ensure—before the legislation was enacted—that there would be resources and ready access to high-quality contraception, sterilisation, and safe abortion services. The same national effort has not occurred in New Zealand. What I do not see with this liberalising prostitution law is a determined national effort by people on either side of the equation to do everything possible before enactment to minimise the drivers towards prostitution and put extra resources in place to minimise the harm to public health—both physical and psychological.

This Parliament has seen a huge amount of passion and energy regarding this bill over the last few months. If only that passion and energy were put into ensuring that all New Zealand children had the opportunity of accessing first-class education and health from the time they were conceived, it would contribute hugely to breaking the cycles of disadvantage that so often lead towards prostitution. I agree that there is a strong need to remove the double standards relating to prostitution law in New Zealand, but the legislation model before us is quite inadequate.

JUDITH COLLINS (NZ National—Clevedon) : I have spoken against this bill since it first came back into the House, and I do so again tonight, because, in my opinion, this bill does not achieve the worthy goals that its promoter, Tim Barnett, has sought to achieve.

For many, many years, and for many decades and many centuries, there has been prostitution, and I believe that there will be prostitution for many decades and centuries to come. Whenever there are people who are impoverished, disadvantaged, the victims of sexual abuse as children, or victims of domestic violence, there is a culture that encourages prostitution. People who become prostitutes are very seldom people with many choices. They are very seldom people who can say: “Shall I take that job or that job? Which university shall I attend? Which particular degree shall I achieve?” With some exceptions—but only a few—most prostitutes are the most disadvantaged people in society.

This bill we are debating tonight has the worthy aim of helping those people, but it does not actually do that, and that is what is so disappointing. After 2¾ years in this Parliament, and after thousands and thousands of dollars have been spent on it, with trips here, there, and everywhere, this bill does not achieve that aim. Does it do anything to stop abuse by pimps? No, it does not; it now allows pimps to be legal. At least under the current law prostitution is legal, but pimping is not, nor is solicitation. Do we really want that to be legal?

When we visit Sydney and King’s Cross and see young girls, as I have, who could not be more than 13 or 14, prostituting themselves up and down the main street, do we want to see that here? We do not have to go very far, do we? We can see it almost any night of the week in places like Manurewa and Papatoetoe, because we have a law that, with exceptions, is currently not enforced. When the current law is not even enforced, what hope is there for these people in this bill that it will ever be enforced? What hope is there for prostitutes that safe-sex practices will be enforced? What possible hope will there be? None! This bill allows pimps and soliciting. It is an attempt to normalise what is not normal.

Prostitution is not something that has to be. It has been brought about by people being disadvantaged, and by other people being more powerful and using that power over them. Anyone who thinks differently need only look at history to see that one of the first things that conquering armies do is set up brothels. That is exactly what they do, because it is all about the powerful taking from the powerless.

GEORGINA BEYER (NZ Labour—Wairarapa) : I rise to make my contribution to the third reading of this bill, which I support. I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to the members of this Parliament for a considered and varied debate from both sides and both points of view. Along with that, I congratulate supporters of both sides of the argument for their contribution, which expresses a fair view from both sides of the nation. I particularly congratulate and pay great credit to Tim Barnett, who has had the courage and commitment to see this bill through to this most important point.

I support the bill, because, as everybody knows, I have had experience in the sex industry—and I am the only member of this Parliament to have had it. If I had had a law like this to protect me and give me some teeth for redress when I was 16 and 17 years old—even on entering into the sex industry—then I might have been spared the 5 or so years I spent in that industry. Barriers would have been created against people who would coerce those under 18 to enter the sex industry in the first place. I support this bill for all the prostitutes I have ever known who have died before the age of 20 because of the inhumanity and hypocrisy of a society that would not ever give them the chance to redeem whatever circumstances made them arrive in that industry.

This bill provides some of that protection. It provides people like me at that time with some form of redress for the brutalisation that might happen when a client pulls a knife. The horror of that situation is that it could be a life and death one—one does not know—but it would have been nice to know that instead of having to deal out justice afterwards to that person myself, I might have been able to approach the authorities—the police in this case—and say: “I was raped, and, yes, I’m a prostitute, and, no, it was not right that I should have been raped, because I said no, and it was not paid attention to.”

I think of all the people I have known in that area who have suffered because of the hypocrisy of our society, which, on the one hand, can accept prostitution, while, on the other hand, wants to push it under the carpet and keep it in the twilight world that it exists in. We are bringing prostitution reform into the light with some of what is proposed in this bill, and the criminal element does not necessarily like to be standing in the glare of greater public influence over how an industry like this might be conducted within our society. It is about accepting that that occurs, and it is about accepting the fact that the people who work in this industry deserve some human rights. I plead with those members in this House who are wavering right up to the wire, to think, for heaven’s sake, of the people of whom I have just spoken, including myself, who might be spared some of the hideous nature of the way society treats prostitutes—because that is here with us.

But if one does have fears, this legislation will be reviewed in 5 years to see how it is operating and whether it is effective. If this bill passes tonight, in 5 years we will be able to reassess its worth. That is something that those who are wavering should be comforted by. But to do nothing now would be irresponsible of this Parliament, because the status quo would remain, and that is unacceptable. This is our one chance in perhaps 20 years to do something. Whatever side of the argument we take, I know we all come from a humanitarian point of view, but I beg members to consider the side I am on, and the side many others in this House are on also. It is the side I consider to be right. It does not diminish, in my opinion, the opinions of those who are against this bill, because some valid points have been made, but not to address this issue now, with this possibility, is not right.

I will conclude by saying that right now we have a sex industry, and we have legislation based on an outmoded double standard. Let us change, please, the part we can.

Mr SPEAKER: There are two split speeches now from John Carter and Nanaia Mahuta.

JOHN CARTER (NZ National—Northland) : I understand the emotion that was expressed by Georgina Beyer. I have taken an interest in the issues and done what a number of MPs have done. I have spoken to a number of people who have worked, and are currently working, in the sex industry, to try to get an understanding of the issues. I respect those points that have been put to me by the likes of Katie Deckie,and a whole lot of other people with whom I have had the opportunity to debate these matters.

I have also had the opportunity to be on the streets with Mama Tere Strickland to see what the impact actually is on some of the people who live in a different zone to most of us here in Parliament. I say to members of Parliament—and, indeed, to the many people close to us tonight who are listening to this debate—that there are a group of people who do not even know where Parliament is. The people who are here in our presence tonight, and who are involved in the sex industry, are generally clever and capable people. Although they experience difficulties in the area they are involved in, they are able, in the main, to look after themselves, and they do so through the collective with which they associate. I refer to those who do not have any contact with the collective, or with other sex workers.

I want to draw the House’s attention to a group I saw, because this bill will do absolutely nothing for them. If I make no other point tonight, I want to make this point about a group of five people, of whom two were mothers, two were related and in their early 30s, and one had a 14 to 16-year-old daughter, but claimed the daughter was over 18. The other mother had two sons—one was 17 and one was 7. They were all out on the streets working. The two mothers and the daughter were in and out of cars. The elder son was there looking after the group, and was there to look after the 7-year-old, as well. When I asked Mama Tere about them, she said: “They don’t live in our society. They are not part of us. They don’t have dreams and aspirations. They don’t think about Christmas. They don’t have holidays. They don’t know about a future; they live now. We don’t live in their zone, and they don’t live in ours.”

Unfortunately, we have people like that in our society, and it is sad and horrible. If these people in this House have not had the chance to experience those sorts of people and see how they live, or even to try to understand what they are like, I urge them to do so. It was an absolute eye-opener for me. When I looked at this legislation to see how it was going to help those people, I saw that it did nothing for them at all. I was one of those members who were uncertain about whether they wanted to support this legislation. Like others, I want to pay my respects to those on both sides of the argument. I digress to say that this has been a good, sensible debate—unlike the debate on homosexual law reform, which got quite personal. At least we have kept this debate at a very good level.

But if this legislation were to be passed, what worries me is that that group of five is likely to grow. It will not just be that five, or however many of those people are out on the streets, it might well be a lot more. I am worried that if this bill were to be passed, there might be some advantages for those here tonight who can look after themselves, but there are a number who cannot. I say to this country, and particularly to this Parliament, that I do not want to be—and I urge this Parliament not to be—responsible for making life worse for other people we do not know about.

NANAIA MAHUTA (NZ Labour—Tainui) :Tēnā koe, tēnātātau katoa. Ā, ka tū au ki te mihi ki ngā hoa rangapū katoa i roto itēnei Whare Pāremata e pāana ki tēnei take, te mahi pūremu, te mahi kairau. Ā, tuatahi ka tū au ki te hoki ōku mahara ki ngā kupu kōrero o ngāmātua, tūpuna ko te wahine te whare tangata. Ko te wahine te whare kōrero, ko te wahine te whare wānanga. Koinātētehi o ngā tohu rangatira ki a mātaungāwahine, hei tiaki i ō tātaunei tamariki, kia kore, kia kore, kia kore e warewarengātohutohu a koro, a kuimānō te mea, kei a rātaungāwhakatupuranga, kei a rātaungākākano a tōnawā ka puāwai.

[Greetings to you and to us all. I stand to extend greetings to all colleagues in this House of Parliament in respect of this matter of prostitution. And firstly, my thoughts return to the words of the parents and ancestors who said that women are the childbearers; that women are the house of knowledge and the house of learning. This indeed is one of the sacred vestiges belonging to women, who watch over our children, and never ever forget the teachings of our grandfathers and grandmothers, because they are the forefathers of future generations, and in time those seeds blossom in fullness.]

Briefly, I give greetings to all members of this House on this particular bill. I turn my thoughts to some of the sayings of our old people, who say that women are the whare tangata, and that they are the vessels of knowledge and wānanga for our people. They say that because women have the gift of being life-bearers, the gift of being nurturers, and the gift of looking after that which is most important: our children within our families. I acknowledge that, and that this is a difficult issue. It is one on which every member of the House has been challenged personally, has been challenged politically, and, most certainly, has been challenged by every constituent in his or her electorate. But I stand quite simply to reiterate that I will not be supporting this bill.

This is the third reading of a bill that deals with a most difficult and challenging issue that faces us all. A number of issues have been raised in the context of whether this bill will achieve what it sets out to do, and whether it will provide improved health and safety standards. Time and time again the people we are most concerned about are those who are most vulnerable in this part of the sex industry. I do not purport to know everything about the sex industry, and I wish I did, but what I have endeavoured to do is to try to go out and talk to people, and to try to understand things. I have visited Australia and seen the models in Victoria and New South Wales, and what has come up time and time again is that no amount of legislation will protect those who are most vulnerable in this industry. Those people will be those who work on the street—it is purely and simply that. It will be youth. And what are we to do? Speakers in this House have said that to do nothing is irresponsible. However, I say that not to do more would be irreversible.

What are we saying here? All those people who do not support this bill are not saying that the issue will stop here. We are not saying that if this bill is defeated tonight, the story will end there. We are saying that we must make a commitment, as parliamentarians in this House, to show leadership to the current generation of young people, and to show that we are prepared to tackle the hard issues—and we will do so. We will not turn a blind eye, and I am disappointed in some of the statements that have been made in this House that imply that particular slant on the position that I represent. I have made no secret of my stance on this particular issue. Let me say something to people who are currently wavering, or who are not sure where they stand on it. In every Māori community that I have visited the social service organisations, alternative education organisations, and health services have all asked how, at a time when they find it really hard and struggle to provide good role models for youth, the decriminalisation of prostitution will improve the already difficult messages that really affect their young people.

We cannot let that situation continue. This is a serious issue. I ask any person in this House who has not yet made up his or her mind to think about the current and future generations of youth, and to make his or her decision accordingly. No reira, tēnā koutou katoa.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) : There is an old question: “What did the bishop say to the massage parlour owner?” Actually, he did not say very much, because they were both on Holmes the other night, and Paul Holmes kept interrupting the bishop. So the question becomes: “What did the massage parlour owner say to the bishop?” And she summarised this bill in one short sentence. She said something along the lines that this bill enables the sex industry and the selling of sex to be treated exactly the same as the selling of food. That is what she said.

I cannot really quite see how the selling of sex will be the same as selling food if this bill comes in, but I can see that this bill will make sex a legitimate commodity to sell. Anybody who sells a commodity legitimately has an agent, a marketeer, and a public relations guy—and that is what a pimp will become. This bill will legitimise pimping. It will give huge incentives for pimps to have more and more young women under their wing, under their control, in order to sell their bodies. They will make huge money from that, and that is what this bill will allow. Pimps work in devious ways. This bill will make them legitimate business people, but they will coerce, entice, induce, and persuade people. The bill states that it is illegal to coerce someone, but it does nothing about persuading, enticing, and what have you, in order to get young women, in particular—but also young men—to become prostitutes.

This has been a very good debate, because no muck has been slung to any great degree between MPs on one side or the other. We have stuck, very largely, to the issue. Equally, the people opposing this bill have not been moralising. We have spoken honestly about the concerns we have for the people who are enticed into the prostitution industry, and for young people in particular. The people opposing this bill recognise that this industry will not disappear. We cannot legislate it out of existence; we know that. We are grown people, despite the antics of some of us from time to time. We know that the industry will exist, and will exist for quite some time, but we want it to be contained and controlled, and we want to encourage people to get out of it. This bill does none of that. It opens the door wide for people to get into prostitution—to be enticed and coerced into it. I know that is to be against the law, but who will police that when somebody puts a bit of pressure on someone to become a prostitute?

I have spoken to the mother and father of a young woman who was enticed into this industry, and I tell members it is a heart-wrenching situation. One does not know what to say to them. The young girl—I do not know how old she is; I have never met her, and I do not know her name—does not know where to go, in terms of her future. She does not know what lies ahead of her, and the parents do not know how to help her. They have no idea of how to help their young daughter.

If we want to do something for the youth of this country we should set examples that are clean, honest, open, and legitimate. Passing this bill tonight will send the exact reverse message of that. This bill will normalise the sex industry to a very, very large degree. We will send a message to some people that it is OK to sell their bodies or someone else’s body. It will be OK to pick someone up, meet them, and sell their body to somebody else for sex. That is all legitimate under this bill. Young people in this country need better examples than that sort of thing.

I am an ex-seafarer, as I have told this House from time to time, and I have seen prostitution first hand all over the world. I have seen it in places where the regime has been liberalised for quite some time, and I have seen it where countries have gone down the sort of road that this bill provides for. If this bill goes through, I say the industry will expand. Members should make no bones about that. It has done so in New South Wales, and I believe it will expand quite significantly here. There will be more drug abuse; the industry will be a front for that and for child prostitution. Why is that? It is because people will be able to make money out of it.

If we take the police out of the equation, we open the door to all sorts of sinister operations. There will be more trafficking of women—not only people coming into this country, but also women being trafficked from one area of New Zealand to another. That is what happened to the young lady I was talking about earlier. There will also be more violence against prostitutes. In my sea career, I have seen prostitutes fighting for a client on board a ship, in a hotel, and in a bar room. We should not pass legislation that opens the door to those sorts of practices. Why do prostitutes fight? They fight because there is a market out there, and in some cases there are not enough clients to fulfil the economic requirements of the prostitutes. There will be more criminal activity, because anybody who can make any money from this industry will get into it. There will be more degrading acts performed, for lower fees. That is what a lady from Australia told the Justice and Electoral Committee. Prostitutes will have to perform more and more degrading acts, for fewer dollars.

Russell Fairbrother: That doesn’t say much about men, does it?

PETER BROWN: It does not say terribly much about men; the member is quite correct in saying that. But the member may also be keen to know that there are male prostitutes, and they will get involved. Young men will get involved in prostitution.

Russell Fairbrother: I expect they need protection.

PETER BROWN: They do need protection. If the member thinks this bill will provide it, he is not living in the real world. He has entirely missed the point of what I have been saying, and he has missed the point of some very good speeches in this House tonight if he believes this bill will provide that. I say to that member that we know that the status quo is not good. My New Zealand First colleagues would support a formal investigative inquiry into it—not a political inquiry, but a formal investigative inquiry. That member over there on the Government benches shakes her head.

This bill has been band-aided, as someone said earlier, with bits stuck in and bits taken out. Those things all came before the select committee, and they were all voted against. The proposer of this bill wanted to have decriminalisation and an open slather environment, to use blunt words. This bill is currently a mini-version of the Victorian model. It started out based on the Sydney model, and it has ended up like the Victorian model. The sponsor himself told the House, if I recall it correctly, that the Victorian model was not acceptable because it led to two tiers in prostitution: the legitimate and the underworld.

This bill is not good enough for the young people of New Zealand. I ask members to please vote against it.

DIANNE YATES (NZ Labour—Hamilton East) : I will be opposing this bill, as I have consistently throughout its earlier stages, because I think that at the moment, the bill is an absolute mess. I will also be opposing it, firstly, because I come from what I consider to be a feminist perspective that sees prostitution as exploitation, and, secondly, because I have gone out and spoken to many women’s groups—I am a member of many women’s groups—and spoken widely in my electorate. There are 58,000 voters in the Hamilton East electorate, and of that number of voters, only three people in the whole electorate have contacted me—I have solicited opinion—and asked me to vote for the bill. I have had hundreds of telephone calls and emails asking me to vote against it.

I believe that there are two ways of looking at prostitution through this bill and in this debate. One is that prostitution is a job, and if one does regard it as a job, then the arguments of people like Sue Bradford are valid. But I do not believe that prostitution is a job; I do not believe that it should be a legitimate job. I have been a schoolteacher for most of my life, teaching girls, and I have not taught them to seek that type of employment. I believe that those members who are voting for the bill are trying to have a bob both ways with the amendments that have been made to it, because it is not prostitution but soliciting that is illegal. Now the amendments are saying yes to prostitution, but people cannot have signs and advertising on the television or the radio, and brothels can be only in certain places in cities, which puts an awful burden on local government. Basically those are Nimby amendments from a bunch of members who say yes to prostitution, but not in their backyards or their suburbs, and nowhere near their kids, thank you very much. Let us hope that they realise that they are trying to have a bob both ways, and that it will not wear.

The other way of looking at prostitution is what New Zealand has signed up to through the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Article 9 on the trafficking of women—which we have signed up to—states that prostitution is the exploitation of women, and we have undertaken to eliminate and get rid of prostitution. I do not believe that this bill will do that. Someone at the back of the Chamber asked about the men. Let us look at what this bill is doing, because if we go with its provisions we are saying that prostitution is a job. We are also going against what I believe is Labour policy, which used to state that we should get rid of the anomalies around prostitution. The anomalies are still in this bill, in that the onus is on the prostitution industry and the women, and not on the clients.

When I said in this House that we should make sure that the clients of prostitutes have a health test and a licence, people sniggered. But that is what we are asking of the women, and that is what makes this bill not only a Nimby bill but also one that states that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. The bill still leaves the onus on the women rather than on the clients, which is why I promoted the Swedish law. What we find with the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the countries that have signed up to it, particularly the European countries, is that those countries are working through their commitments under that convention to eliminate prostitution, not to legitimise it.

To those who argue that that approach will only drive prostitution underground, I say that, by its very nature, prostitution is an underground activity. We have heard from prostitutes themselves that most of their clients—75 to 80 percent—are married men. Their clients are not people who would go around and make that public. We live in a welfare state in New Zealand where women should not have to earn their money in that way. If anybody does have to make money in that way, as a local MP, I invite that person to come and see me. There is such a thing as a benefit system. The states of poverty where people have to earn money through that particular way of life do not exist in this country.

I thank those women’s organisations—even those that are affiliated to the National Council of Women—that at the branch level have worked to support women, and I also thank very much Denise Ritchie of ECPAT, Sandra Coney, and those people who came from overseas to point out the anomalies in this bill.

LUAMANUVAO WINNIE LABAN (NZ Labour—Mana) : Kia ora, talofa lava, and warm Pacific greetings. I stand to speak on the final reading of this bill. I have not spoken during the previous readings of the bill, because I wanted to hear all sides and to come to a considered decision. I have been subject to vigorous lobbying from all sides. This has been particularly controversial legislation on an issue with social, ethical, moral, and religious dimensions. I have encouraged people throughout the Mana electorate to participate in the debate and to express their views, to assist me in determining how I should vote. One useful piece of advice I received was to remember that the conscience in the conscience vote was my conscience, and no one else’s. I have kept my peace, and I have kept my own counsel.

I have thought long and hard about how I might vote on this bill. It has not been easy. There are arguments by feminists for and against the bill, and there are arguments by Christians for and against the bill. As a person who has been raised in the Church, I have been concerned about the polarisation of the Christian view on prostitutes and prostitution. I have received many judgmental and unforgiving communications from people calling themselves Christians. Many have provided scriptural justification to support their arguments. The Bible has many texts relevant to this issue. Personally, I am drawn to Luke’s story of the prostitute who washed Christ’s feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, and anointed his feet with perfume. The woman’s actions were in contrast to those of the Pharisees, who rebuked Christ for forgiving a woman who lived a sinful life.

When I entered Parliament I said that I would pursue a permanent interest in advocating and promoting the interests of women, of Pacific people, of Māori, of the elderly, of ethnic minorities, and of all New Zealanders who are struggling to live a life of dignity. Over the last few weeks I have talked with, and listened to, many prostitutes and others working in the sex industry. I have been particularly touched by the stories of several Polynesian transsexuals and fa’afafines. Their stories tell me that the current laws serve to make their working life unsafe, and to increase the risk in a risky occupation. They are struggling to live a life of dignity. The current laws do not protect them. Whilst this bill has its imperfections, it does provide greater protection for prostitutes and affords them the same rights as other workers.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for prostitution. Good education, effective social development programmes, and high levels of employment can reduce the economic factors that push people into prostitution. But social and economic policies will not stop prostitution. We do not live in a perfect world. In spite of the moralising of the Pharisees and other well-meaning people, prostitution is still with us. Legislation and social and economic policies have not stopped prostitution; they have had a very limited influence on that very ancient trade. So we are faced with the dilemma of supporting an unsatisfactory status quo or supporting legislation that can make the world a little safer for those living and working at the margins of our society. In my maiden speech I said that our nation, New Zealand, needs a new politics of honesty, hope, and healing—a politics that brings our communities and nation together, so that all New Zealanders can fully participate and live a life of dignity. That includes all of our sisters and our brothers. We cannot deny a group of workers the protection that others have as a right.

I do not believe that passing this bill will lead to a significant increase in prostitution. I am committed to protecting the human rights of all citizens, whatever occupation they undertake. I will vote to support the third reading of the bill.