Newman Muriel: Care of Children Bill Status of Children Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
Newman Muriel: Care of Children Bill Status of Children Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:621;Page:16723] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (Deputy Leader—ACT) 
: 
I rise on behalf of the ACT party to oppose the legislation. This is another law progressing Labour’s anti-family politically correct social engineering agenda. It is a sad day for New Zealand because this legislation has been long-awaited but the bills lying on the Table do not make the changes that are needed to improve family law in this country. The reality is that family law in New Zealand is not working as it should. At the moment far too many of our families are totally distraught. They have been split apart. They have been denied contact with children. Children can no longer see mum or dad can no longer see grandparents. It is an absolute disaster. The Government by means of this legislation had the opportunity to sort out some of those problems particularly in respect of our access and custody laws. 
All members of Parliament will have come into contact with this issue when we meet grandparents or family members who tell us heartbreaking stories because of custody and access laws whereby they are no longer able to send Christmas presents or birthday cards or even telephone children who should normally have contact with those people. In this legislation the Government could have sorted out many of those problems but it failed to do so 
The law fails to protect the rights of mothers and fathers to see their children after a family has broken down and I say that it is interesting the hypocrisy if one likes of a Government that has advocated that the United Nations conventions should be upheld by New Zealand yet one of the stipulations in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the right of every child to have a mother and a father. We go to extraordinary lengths over these provisions on human reproductive technology to make sure that those children will be able to have contact with whoever is their father yet under this legislation where we could have put in place provisions to make sure a child whose parents have separated can have contact with that other parent the Government has failed to do it. So I believe this is a sad day for New Zealand because this time we could have been putting the law right. 
The reality is that in New Zealand today a child whose family has separated is the victim often of losing contact with the non-custodial parent. In fact today more New Zealand children lose a father because of our family laws in a 6-week period than lost a father during the entire course of the Second World War. I say this Government could have fixed it but failed to do so. 
In particular there were two changes to family law that needed to occur. One change is to open up the Family Court properly. Some provisions have been put in this legislation. I guess that time will tell; we have to give the system the benefit of the doubt but when we have provisions in there that include censorship of material that the media are going to report on when we also have a system whereby anybody can object to the media being in the court or any other person being in the court then one cannot say that we actually have an open court. 
So I believe that the open court provisions in this legislation will fail. They will fail to bring into the open the matters that have needed the scrutiny of the public for many many years. They will still remain secret. So the bad things happening in family law will be maintained because the Government has failed to open it up to the scrutiny of the public. 
The second issue is shared parenting. This legislation was instigated because of the Government’s response to a member’s bill to introduce shared parenting back in 2000-01. The Government said no to that. The bill said that when families break apart both parents should remain connected with their children in the way that they are when they are an intact family. Just as a mum and a dad in an intact family have total and equal responsibilities for the care of their children so too after a relationship breaks down they should still remain equal in their responsibility to their children. It should be up to the parents to decide what sort of living arrangements would best suit their children depending on their age where their schools are located and a whole lot of matters. That is called shared parenting. 
I introduced an amendment to introduce shared parenting into the Care of Children Bill and I have to say that it is with great sadness that I found that only the National Party supported it. When push comes to shove I realise now that the only other party in Parliament that genuinely wants to change family law in the way that we have debated over the years is actually the National Party. Those families out there who are concerned about this issue will have to realise that the only way they are going to get change in New Zealand is if they have a National-ACT Government. Those people out there will need to know whom to vote for at the next election and just for the record it should be the party vote to ACT. 
Today is a very sad day for fathers in New Zealand. Since the time Labour came into power the fathers’ groups around the country have become more organised. They have realised that they should take a lead from what women did way back in history where the feminist movement created greater law changes that would benefit women. But I have to say as a woman standing here today that the pendulum has swung too far away from the rights of males in this society of dads in particular. For the last 5 years or so many fathers have gone around talking to individual members of Parliament trying to explain to them how the law needs to change to make it fairer—not only fairer on them but on their children as well. And they have been encouraged. Individual members of Parliament have said: “Yes we agree we need to change the law. We need to make it fairer.” but again the proof is today. Today we will find that there is no desire on behalf of the Labour Party and on behalf of the Green Party in particular to do anything to make it a fairer society for those fathers. 
In particular I guess it is the ones who are marginalised who are not able to see their children on a regular basis who have to pay large amounts of child support and in return they might get to see their child once every 2 weeks for an hour or so in a Barnardos home or some other facility. It is a very very unsatisfactory way of trying to maintain a relationship with one’s child so all too often we see those relationships quietly drifting away quietly dying and the child no longer has a dad whom he or she knows and is alongside. 
It is a stark reality that in this legislation same-sex couples have been accommodated far more than fathers. The rights of dads have largely been ignored. Not only has shared parenting not been a part of this law change but it is the same with paternity rights which they have asked for. Those rights were simply to allow a father to have a DNA test through a mouth swab to see whether he indeed was the father or whether the child was his child. That has been denied. 
The legislation increases the number of people who can be counted as guardians. At one time the dad the biological father used to be one of two guardians in the child’s life. Now there can be many many guardians and that dilutes the father’s rights as a biological parent. Everyone thought the open court would be one of the provisions in this legislation and would allow the public to see what was going on in the fraught area of family law; we believe they are Clayton’s provisions and will not do what they wanted. It is with great sadness that I say the ACT party will be voting against this legislation.