Turei Metiria: Wills Bill — In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Wills Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10006] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party has some amendments on the Table—on Supplementary Order Paper 118 in my name. We are proposing to amend clause 10 of this bill. The two amendments we seek to make are to add as an exception if you like to the current age-limit requirement for making a will in this legislation a person under 18 who has a dependent child or dependent children. We think that young people who have taken on responsibilities as an adult should be entitled to the full legal protection rights and responsibilities of adults. 
In the circumstances of the legislation there are some exceptions to the 18-year-old rule. I have talked to the officials about that and they accept and understand that using the age of 18 as an indication of adulthood is a very blunt instrument for doing so. There is significant legislation in overseas jurisdictions most classically from England—the Gillick case; those kinds of things—that shows that the age of maturity is a developmental stage and differs for each young person. But for the purposes of legislation age is often the only really useful tool so that is why the age-limit is set at 18 in this bill. But there are exceptions to that in the legislation and those exceptions include situations where a young person has entered into a civil union a marriage or a de facto relationship. The key issue here is that all three of those states require third-party agreement to those young people being able to enter into them. A person under 18 cannot marry without parental consent or the consent of the Family Court and it is the same for de facto relationships and for civil unions. 
So the principle in the bill is that those under 18 still have to have some form of third-party consent to the state that gives them the exception that enables them to be able to make a will. I can understand the point of that—I really do. But there are some situations where young people find themselves members of the adult community and they have not needed consent. The most obvious example is when they have a child. They do not have to have consent to have sex frankly and sex often leads to the consequence—as many of us know—of having children. That state of affairs does not require third-party consent it does not require a Family Court to agree and it does not require the parents to agree—in fact it is often completely without the parents’ agreement but none the less it does happen. 
Surely when young people find themselves in the situation entirely within the bounds of the law—totally lawfully—of having a dependent child or dependent children they are then expected by the rest of the community to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. They are expected to raise their children properly to find ways of supporting those children and to make sure those children are properly fed and cared for are educated and have good healthy lives. Sometimes they need support in order to do that—many of them do it successfully without support—but they are members of the adult community from that point on. Surely as far as we can within the law and knowing that we have to use many blunt instruments in order to put in place these kinds of principles we should accept and understand that young people who have children in those circumstances are members of the adult community and are therefore entitled to the full responsibilities and rights of adults. 
It is certainly true that the child of a young person who dies intestate inherits that young person’s property. So this provision is not necessarily about just protecting the baby’s entitlement to inherit from his or her parent; that does happen as part of the process of law. But the young person may want to make other dispositions about his or her property—other dispositions to other members of the family—or may have other concerns about his or her property. A young person may have significant amounts of property. It is certainly true that many young people are working a lot at the moment in order to protect themselves against the difficulty of student loans—that is something we have discovered recently. So young people sometimes have quite reasonable amounts of property and certainly as parents they will have property interests and concerns that they want to take care of in a will. Surely making a will is such a state of responsibility and such an indication of a person taking responsibility for his or her life that those young people who are in a situation where they have children should be entitled to take that step. 
I urge members to support this amendment.