Thursday 2 October 2008

Submitted!

I've just sent the final version of our submission on the Sexual Violence Legislation review off. Many thanks to everyone who put their names to it.

Some comments:

"Thorough as always, good work."

"great piece of writing"

"I strongly support your submission, in particular the section on consent. ... Thank you for the opportunity to support your efforts."

"Nice work."

"& thank you to you & the other Hand Mirror bloggers for the site – I read it regularly and find the intelligent local commentary inspiring, and sometimes comforting. I don’t tend to comment on the site, but posts often spark discussions with my friends."

"I thought it was very thoughtful and well expressed, and I agree with everything you have said."


Thank you everyone. If you are one of the people who put your name to it, and you would like a copy, send me an e-mail.

If you missed out on sending your name in, but you would like to add your support to the submission, you can send an e-mail direct to the Ministry of Justice, saying something as simple as: "I support the submission made by the Readers and Writers of The Hand Mirror." The address to send it to is: SVSUBMISSION@justice.govt.nz Put "Submission on review of sexual violence legislation", and they will know what to do with it.

3 comments:

Julie said...

Thanks so much for doing this Deborah, it really is very appreciated. What is the process from here, in terms of any response we might get?

stargazer said...

my thanx also deborah. it was a great submission.

Deborah said...

We won't get a response to the submission, other than, I hope, an acknowledgment of receipt.

The policy people in the MoJ will be reading through all the submissions now, and writing a paper / brief for their minister. The brief will report what is in the submissions. Then either in that brief, or in a separate one, they will assess all the arguments, and make recommendations to the minister about how the law should be changed.

Once the minister and the policy people have sorted out what changes they think should be made to the law, they will prepare a paper for Cabinet. If Cabinet approves the changes, the go ahead will be given for a bill to be drafted. The bill will be introduced to the House, and we get a standard legislative process from there, including select committee review. That's when we get another chance to make submissions, this time to the select committee.

Given that there's an election coming up, I would expect that it will be next year some time before we see any legislation being introduced to the house, and it might be towards the middle of the year, or even later. These things all take time. Also, for the next however many weeks, although we still have a government, ministers won't be making any big decisions. So this will go on the back burner for a while. However the policy work will be going ahead.

If we want to see how our submission has been taken into account, then sometime next year, we could make an OIA request for the brief on submissions that MoJ will be preparing now. We must make a diary note to do that...