Turner Judy: General Debate 
Turner Judy: General Debate 
[Volume:649;Page:17781] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 Articles 8 and 9 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child include this wording: “State parties”—New Zealand is one of those State parties—“undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity including nationality name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.” They also state that State parties “shall upon request provide the parents the child or if appropriate other members of the family with the essential information concerning the whereabouts of the absent member(s) of the family”. 
Currently in New Zealand a court can recommend that a DNA test be carried out only when there is a question about the identity of a child’s father. If a male is named as a child’s father on a birth certificate and he is unconvinced of that fact there is no way that that male can take advantage of DNA technology to confirm whether his suspicion is well founded without the permission of the mother who named him. In 2005 the Law Commission published report 88 titled  
New Issues in Legal Parenthood 
. The recommendations in that report are wide ranging but one of the most straightforward is recommendation 4: “The government should ensure accessible efficient accurate and ethical DNA parentage testing services are available in New Zealand”. The report lists four things that are needed: developing standards and accreditation for laboratories developing a legislative framework informing the public about testing options and implementing the testing options. 
How urgently needed is that provision? Well this week a report was released from the United Kingdom where DNA testing for parentage has been available and monitored since 1998. Last year nearly one in five paternity claims handled by its Child Support Agency resulted in the revelation that the mother had either deliberately or inadvertently misidentified the father. The 2004-05 financial review of our Inland Revenue Department reported by our Finance and Expenditure Committee included in its report to Parliament this comment: “We … raised with the commissioner the possibility of using DNA testing to establish the paternity of the many thousands of New Zealand children whose birth certificates we understand have no father’s name recorded. The commissioner said that while it was not the role of the department to run a DNA testing regime to determine paternity Inland Revenue would take an interest in any law change that saw DNA testing used more frequently for this purpose.” 
In March 2006 Ruth Berry reported in the  
New Zealand Herald  
that the Government was considering making provision for enforceable court-ordered DNA tests and here we are in August 2008 no closer to a just outcome except for the fact that I have a bill in my name now on the Order Paper but that bill is unlikely to see the light of day before the election. I accept that the Attorney-General has signalled that my bill may need to have some strengthening in order to determine for instance whether a child could instigate at the court the call to determine who his or her father is if that is possible. United Future supports any attempt to strengthen what we have included in the member’s bill in my name. 
We know that our child support system in New Zealand has a large number of people who have for various reasons absconded from their responsibility to make payment—as the National Party has been pointing out regularly during question time. But I would suggest that included in that number is a large number of fathers who have remained unconvinced to this day that they are actually the father of a child despite their having been named on the child’s birth certificate. It currently seems a huge injustice that those fathers have no way to clarify that situation in court. 
The work on this issue has been done very conscientiously by the Law Commission. It has made a wide-ranging list of suggestions for the Government to consider. Those suggestions have been around for a very long time and if we shelve the more complicated matters around new birth technologies and the donor status of fathers this issue on its own seems to be a very straightforward one. We have the technology. I have been led to believe that there are accredited laboratories in New Zealand currently that would be well able to legally perform these tests and supply the court with robust information that would be able to be used for legal purposes. Therefore all that remains now is for the Government to take action. I have offered my bill to the Minister for Courts on two occasions. Once was during the consideration of the births deaths and marriages bill because there was an opportunity for this issue to be included in that legislation.