Borrows Chester: Family Courts Matters Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Borrows Chester: Family Courts Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18567. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I appreciate the opportunity to make a contribution to the debate on Part 7 of the Family Courts Matters Bill. I guess it is the experience of so many of us working out of electorate offices that people who contact us from time to time about judicial matters are frequently people who find themselves in a state quite broken by the Family Court process. Not having had any personal experience in relation to matters before a Family Court my only experience is through the mouths of those who have. It is a real shame that people find this process so bruising and damaging. In actual fact I think that if there is one thing we could do at some stage in the future it would be to remove as much as we could the adversarial process of the Family Court. Children are frequently at the centre of that process. They become not a toy or a plaything but certainly the most bruised chattels—almost—of those who are scrapping over things that invariably originate away from children and are to do with the relationship of the adults in the situation to start with. I think that that is a real shame.  
Given the clauses in Part 7 National is pleased to be able to support this bill and this particular part of the bill especially because it puts at the heart of matters the opportunity for mediation and it requires that there is a consideration of reconciliation or that these matters are explored. It is a shame that things progress so quickly before the Family Court. I guess no one gets to the Family Court without quite a bit of baggage from previous years or incidents leading up to it but it is a shame that in the middle of what can often be an acrimonious and hostile period people are required to explore reconciliation at a time when it is probably least likely to occur. It is often quite amazing though that after the process is complete—it may be a matter of months it may be a year or so down the track—if one explores the state of the relationship at that time one sees that it is often in a much healthier state than it was at the time of progressing through the Family Court process. Unfortunately that is the time when the orders are made and it is almost as if the relationship is set up for failure at that point. However it is very difficult to see how a judicial process imposed on a personal relationship can do anything else. So not only do we have sympathy for people involved in this process as the parties we also have enormous sympathy for children who are placed into the process by dint of their parents needing to bring matters before the court. The mediators and the counsellors then have to work through that court process.  
It is a real shame too that various parties always seem to find the whole process something that they feel completely dissatisfied with. Frequently many of us as members of Parliament are contacted by men who have been through the process of the Family Court and found—from their point of view in any event—that they have not been treated well. But then on the other side of that we have women who feel that as soon as they entered the process they ran up against family trusts who had paid for big gun legal counsel to fire against them and they found themselves—from their perspective—disenfranchised by the Family Court situation as well. So we end up back where I started from which is that it is a shame that the adversarial nature of the Family Court system or the judicial system is such a big part of the Family Court system no matter how much we would like to try to move it away from that. National is pleased to note that there is a move to maybe deaden that adversarial process to look to counselling and mediation as things that could become keystones of the Family Court process and to lessen the impact on those who are involved in it.  
There is one very disappointing factor though and that is that the Government did not produce a bill capable of dealing with the anomaly that the Family Court cannot order DNA tests to establish paternity. A man accused of being a father is required to pay child support without paternity having been proven and a DNA sample cannot be required by the court. It is very much a matter of consent on behalf of the custodial parent of the child; the court cannot force a DNA test to be made so that paternity can be proven. But at the same time the court can move against the nominated father and require that paternity payments be made. It seems a huge anomaly. It is one of the prime areas of complaint that we see through our electorate offices all the time and it has not been addressed by this bill.  
Anyway National looks forward to the upcoming election—whenever the Prime Minister decides to give us a date—we look forward to the prospect of having the privilege of Government and we look forward to the ability in the future to rectify the law to make it fairer to those coming before the Family Court.