Bradford Sue: Children's Commissioner Bill — Third Reading 
Bradford Sue: Children's Commissioner Bill — Third Reading 
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SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 Like other parties in the House tonight I stand to welcome the third reading of this bill. The Green Party is pleased that this rather delayed piece of legislation has finally made it through to its final stage. I am glad that our new commissioner will now have a better legislative framework around her office. It is of course very timely that we are working on this bill just now both in terms of strengthening and clarifying the role of the commissioner and in terms of incorporating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into New Zealand law. 
 All of us in this House are highly conscious at the moment of some of the events of the last few months including the death of yet another child Coral Burrows the outcomes of the baseline review of the Department of Child Youth and Family Services and the most recent reports into the deaths of Olympia Jetson and Saliel Aplin. We have already had a debate in the House last week about the two Aplin-Howse reports and I do not want to relitigate the content of all those discussions here tonight. However I want to say that the one of the critical things that was revealed in those reports was the way in which the adult world appeared to be simply unwilling and unable to hear the voices of those desperate children. Ultimately the only person to blame for those children’s deaths is their murderer—as a number of commentators have been at pains to point out over the last few days. But that does not mean that all of us should not make a better effort as the Minister has been saying to take the time and be really willing to listen to what children are trying to tell us. 
Whether it is our own children at home and those in our immediate personal lives or whether it is children with whom we work in a professional capacity we all need to do more to understand and act on the clauses of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It demands among other things that we should make the best interests of the child a primary consideration in all public and private actions; that we should assure the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely on all matters affecting that child; and that we should take all appropriate legislative administrative social and educational measures to protect children from all forms of physical and mental violence and abuse. 
Recent events have once again exposed the gaps in our adult systems to brutal scrutiny and shown them to have failed. Once again it is children who have paid the ultimate price for that failure. Indeed it is timely that we are now passing the commitments of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into law. I just hope that we as legislators take this responsibility very seriously in the years to come no matter what political party we come from. 
Like every other country in the world New Zealand badly needs a place within the bureaucracy where children come first and where the rights of children in all sorts of respects can be advocated for without fear or favour. Our new Commissioner for Children Cindy Kiro and her staff are to be congratulated on the work they have done so far including the Aplin report. I am sure that that augurs well for the future of the office in this new era. It is important that having passed this law we do not try to haul the Commissioner for Children and her colleagues back because we disagree with them over any particular issue politically or tactically. 
It is important that all of us in this House respect the newly strengthened mana of the office and the even greater mana of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child that lies behind it. There will be times when we will disagree with what the commissioner says whether we are in or out of Government. However I hope that MPs public servants and others will make it their responsibility to pay more attention to what comes from that office than perhaps some of us have in the past. Of course that does not mean that we should not critique or debate what comes out of the Office of the Commissioner for Children. In fact quite the opposite; rather we should take the responsibility of engaging in these debates seriously and pay attention to what is happening whether or not we agree with any particular statement or analysis. 
It will be really interesting to see what steps are taken to carry out the new legislation in practice. In particular I am keen to see how the new clause requiring the commissioner to develop appropriate means of consulting with children so that their views can be taken into account is implemented. The Green Party was very keen to support the addition of that clause during the select committee process. We saw it as critical if we were to meld the intentions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child itself with the purposes of the bill in whose schedule it lies. 
Like other colleagues who sat on the Social Services Committee when we considered this bill in the last Parliament I thank all the individuals and groups who took the time and effort to make submissions on the bill the officials who helped us and our chair at the time Taito Phillip Field. I hope our work all that time ago has sown good seeds that will now be nurtured and grown so that in all sorts of small ways the future of the children of this country will be brighter. I wish the new commissioner and her staff all the best in their mahi and I look forward to the flowering into reality of all those fine intentions.