Mr Speaker,

The debate we're having tonight, about whether or not we take the next stage in voting to decriminalise prostitution in Aotearoa New Zealand, is one of the most significant I've participated in since coming to Parliament three years ago. This is an issue which arouses huge emotions in most of us, and before going any further, I would just like to say that I respect the right of every other MP — and member of the public for that matter - to their particular beliefs and personal feelings on this difficult and sensitive issue.

At the same time, however, I would like to make a plea to all MPs who have not made up their minds either way yet, to consider casting a vote in favour of decriminalisation at the end of the debate tonight. I am one of a fairly small number of MPs still in Parliament who have sat through the entire Select Committee process on this Bill from beginning to end.

We heard submissions from a huge variety of perspectives, from sex workers, nuns and feminists to brothel owners, church leaders, women's groups, local government representatives and a myriad of others. We spent months discussing and researching, with the help of officials, the myriad of tricky issues the Bill raises. I have to say that I don't think any stone, no matter how murky, was left unturned.

The Select Committee did NOT in the end make major changes to Tim Barnett's original Prostitution Reform Bill, as some would have the House believe. We did pass some clarifying amendments and did things like widening the responsibility for the provision of safe sex materials and setting up a Review Committee to monitor how the Bill works out in practice — but none of this in any way significantly changed its original intent or scope. To those MPs who supported this Bill at the end of its First Reading, I'd like to say there is no reason to change your vote now.

There has been intense lobbying of all of us over the last few weeks and months. Many many issues have been raised and while I'd like to talk about them all, time constraints mean I'll stick with just a few key points.

First of all, I believe that in the end this issue is at heart a moral one. All sorts of other arguments are used to cloak this reality but I think that underneath all the words and emotions what we are doing when we vote today is making a moral judgement.

New Zealand laws around prostitution find their ancestry in Victorian England, and further back than that, in the Christian Bible. While I accept totally peoples' right to their belief that for example prostitution is a sin, I cannot accept their right to maintain that Christian sin as law in 2003 in a country that is not a theocracy and has no state religion.

I do not think that people of one faith or part of one faith have the right to impose their moral precepts through law, unless there is acceptance by wider society that there is actually a crime being committed. So for example, our society accepts that the Biblical sin of murder is a crime, but we don't accept that people who commit the Biblical sin of adultery should likewise be sent to jail.

I fundamentally question the right of the state in this day and age to interfere in the rights of people 18 and over to have consensual sex with each other. There is no way that sex workers, mainly women, should continue to be open to harassment and prosecution for a victimless crime.

Nor should we turn to the Swedish model which prosecutes the men who pay for sex. The Swedish experience shows that all this does is drive prostitution underground. In the UK, laws criminalising the client have been tried for 17 years, and there is no sign whatsoever that prostitution is dying out, even though this is the main rationale for this type of law.

While on the Select Committee we heard evidence from a sex worker in Sweden who talked about the much greater physical dangers she and others now face as a result of the law change there. She reported that some of the worst consequences of the Swedish law have been that there is a lot more underage teenage prostitution, that the mafia bosses have more control, and that workers are too scared to get police help even when friends are murdered because if it gets out that they've called the cops, they lose all their customers.

I would like to ask those feminists and Christians in the House who are so fond of the Swedish model, whether they really think it preferable that we should impose greater criminalisation on the industry with all that that entails, rather than remove sanctions and create the protections which come when prostitutes feel able to call police and other services for help when they need it, without fear of persecution or of loss of trade.

There is a feminist strand of thought which opposes this Bill. This seems to come from a perspective which says that because prostitution is fundamentally an unpleasant yucky kind of thing for most people to even think about, and because some sex workers have had abuse in their earlier lives, somehow this means all prostitutes should continue to be criminalised for their profession.

As a lifelong feminist myself I acknowledge the desire behind this line of thought to bring an end to something which its proponents see as degrading and exploitative — but I come from another strand of thinking which believes that in fact it's our job to do everything we can to make life better for all women, even those in this most vulnerable of occupations.

Unless we truly believe that prostitution is going to disappear altogether, and soon, I believe the best we can do as feminists is to maximise the conditions which will help to end the worst excesses of violence, coercion and exploitation, rather than allow prostitution to continue as a subset of the criminal world.

Rape, physical assault, theft of wages, the threat of murder and other extreme forms of violence and exploitation are what many New Zealand prostitutes live with right now. In dealing with this Bill we are not talking about some abstract theory, but about the reality of peoples' lives. It is no use waiting for some utopian future to come true — I would much rather do everything I can right now to help protect and empower those who - for whatever reason - have chosen to make prostitution their profession.

This Bill is a workers' issue too, and I hope people with union consciousness will see the sense in making this particular work environment one in which employees will have much more power to organise, if the Bill goes through.

I think it's instructive to consider for a minute some of the groups which have come out strongly in support of the Bill. These include organisations like the Prostitutes Collective, the AIDS Foundation, the Salvation Army, a number of Sexual Health Services, several Community Law Centres, Family Planning, CABx, Women's Refuge, and Wellington Independent Rape Crisis. The people from these groups are those who work with and for prostitutes at grass roots level.

As lawmakers, we often justifiably try to give precedence to the views of those groups who are most intimately connected with any particular piece of legislation, whatever the topic. I think we should apply that principle here too, and give priority to the voices of sex workers themselves and of those who work most closely with them.

Finally, I am pleased to advise the House that in line with our Green Party women's policy, all nine of our MPs will be voting in support of decriminalisation. I hope others here tonight will have the moral courage to face down the outrageous and totally unnecessary moral panic which has been created around this Bill and join us in that vote.