Turner Judy: Civil Union Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Turner Judy: Civil Union Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17474] 
JUDY TURNER (United Future) 
: 
 I rise to speak in the Committee stage of the Civil Union Bill. I find this opportunity quite a sobering one because like most people in this Parliament I have very close friends on both sides of this argument. I know that when we make a decision as to how we will vote on something like this we do it at the risk of being misunderstood and at the risk—worse still than that of being misunderstood—of hurting people whom we would rather not hurt. 
I will not be supporting this bill and the reason is that I have a very clear understanding in my mind of what marriage is about. My understanding is not religious because it pre-dates any Christian response to the institution of marriage. I guess in the crudest way of putting it marriage is about breeding. It is actually about society’s way of making sure that the children who are born are born in a safe and nurturing environment. Even people who are unable to have children or choose not to have children are constrained by current marriage law by those issues of breeding. 
The legal constraints are these. Firstly marriage is heterosexual. Secondly it is between two people. Thirdly it cannot be incestuous. As soon as we start to play around with that and claim based on human rights that one of those three legs of the stool is no longer essential—that is the requirement that it be heterosexual—we start to pull apart the fabric of that institution. In my reading of the Civil Union Bill I found it distinctly dishonest in that it is promoting—although we call it by a different name—gay marriage. 
I think that what has gone wrong here is that we have become confused in our thinking about what human rights are. I have heard the term “human rights” bandied about a lot in this debate. We have started to design human rights and hand them out like Christmas presents. But my understanding of human rights is that they apply very much to the individual and here we are applying human rights to a relational context. I for instance do not believe that marriage is a human right. I believe that human rights are about those things that add to one’s survival and to what it means to be human—anything that contributes to one’s humanness. As soon as we start adding to that definition we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble. I guess the best way if we are going to see it as a right at all is to talk about it as being a civil right. 
I plan to support the amendment from Richard Worth because I certainly would have no problem with the legal possibility of registering a relationship for the sake of that relationship. I think this issue does not have to be for instance a bedroom issue. I think there are lots of relationships that would benefit from establishing clearly the next-of-kin status that the relationship deserves providing for protection of jointly owned properties and reflecting the investment over a period of years that has been given to the relationship by providing some legal framework and legal protection around that. I think that is a good idea and it disappoints me in many ways that that was not the path we chose to tread with this particular bill. So I will be supporting that amendment. 
I think this bill does undermine marriage as we know it because we are now applying to non-breeding units provisions that were originally designed for breeding units. That is exactly what we are doing. I know that that is putting it in extremely crude terms but that is exactly what we are doing. Not only that but we are making an institution out of this new arrangement. We have always understood that social parenting arrangements would kick in whenever biological parenting arrangements fell over in some way and we have had some fine examples of that but we have never sought to make an institution out of it.