Franks Stephen: Civil Union Bill — Procedure Third Reading 
Franks Stephen: Civil Union Bill — Procedure Third Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:17646] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 Mr Speaker despite your request and despite your satisfaction with the debate in this House over the last few days we have been trading insults some thinly disguised and some undisguised. Behind them have been a whole stream of messages to the country and from the country that reflect the fact that this has not been a debate about law or the meaning of words in law. This has been a debate about which tribe the Government wants to identify with. This debate was deliberately intended to divide. It has been a deliberate piece of wedge politics as Mr Cunliffe so carefully defined for us during the Committee stage. 
Why? Because the legislation itself is almost empty. The legislation talks about a concept that is never defined. It was swathed in fine language that we could all aspire to uphold: “commitment” “exclusivity” “caring” “stable” and “long-term relationships”. But there is nothing in this bill about those things and there is nothing in the companion bill about them either. 
We—probably 70 or 80 percent of members of this House—could have been celebrating instead the removal of disabilities from a minority that has been oppressed and that has good reason to feel that the law has not been on its side. We could have been extending to couples who have offered their communities a great deal and continue to do so the same legal treatment as has been extended to married couples for many years. Instead we have what I believe is a consciously nasty piece of political strategy. It has ended up as a political triumph because—as I think was calculated—commentators in the media did not choose to look behind the slogans. I believe that the Government did this deliberately. It has kept citing international precedent has kept citing its intentions in a very misleading way. 
I want to get to what is behind it. For example the notion that this legislation was first hatched up only 4 years ago belies the fact that the Law Commission in 1999—5 years ago—did a reasonably accessible summary of the laws in this area overseas and of what we could do here. We have heard a lot about Swedish Dutch Danish Norwegian and French laws. Well they are quite different from what this House is now voting on. The Law Commission stated in 1999: “… gays and lesbians should be prepared to acknowledge that they are not harmed by a legal code designed to avoid giving what may be seen as gratuitous offence to those for whom matrimony is a holy estate.” The Law Commission recommended that we do what Danish law does: provide for registration of a same-sex partnership. Well the effects of registration of a same-sex partnership would as far as the law goes make it virtually identical to marriage. As the Law Commission stated: “The necessary legislation can be elegantly succinct.” If the Government had cared to look at the recommendations of the Law Commission it would have seen that most of the changes were implemented on one page. It is very simple. 
The reason it is so simple is that the Law Commission did not set out to ape the ceremonial; it set out to give the substance. The New Zealand Government has instead deliberately set out a pantomime copy of the ceremonial around marriage and has left out all the substance. I believe that was deliberate. In fact so different is the law this House is voting on that I think the Dutch relationships will not even qualify to be treated as civil unions in this country even though Government speakers have been citing Dutch law as an example. Why? Because in the Scandinavian and European examples they dropped the paraphernalia that had to do with tradition only. Holland for example does not require a court to rubber-stamp a dissolution. The way we have drafted clause 34 means I think that those relationships will not qualify in New Zealand. In those examples they also dropped the solemnisation procedures. 
So we have the emptiness of this law. In the time we have spent on this law we could have been genuinely trying to restore respect for commitment stability exclusiveness and the other things that are cited; what we have instead is deliberate careful offence. I say “careful” because the offence goes only so far as not to cause enough people to vote against the bill for it to fail. 
I believe that the Government chose the ceremony and not the substance because this legislation is a political act to reward supporters and to designate tribal boundaries by offending those who are considered to be irrelevant or to be too stupid to remember this issue when the time for the ballot box comes around. I heard the dismissive language—the talk of “the fundies” and the sneering comments that the sky would not fall. I heard the Hon Chris Carter telling objectors in Hamilton that they must come from the Roman Catholic Church—that “archaic bigotry” as he described it. 
 These are people who are worried about morality. They are right to be worried about morality because the whole debate has been couched in moral terms. People have not bothered to look at the words in this legislation. There has been an attempt to make this a debate about what kind of virtue the people voting on each side reveal. When it is cast in those terms it is perfectly proper for a vast number of New Zealanders desperately concerned about the state of our family law and our children to come up here without reading the law and to say “Enough is enough!”. 
They might have chosen the wrong target—and I think they have; I do not think there is a logical connection between gay marriage or same-sex relationships and the 30000 or more children who are at risk in this country today. But I do think there is a logical connection—much more distant— between those children and the view of many in this House that we can play with our cultural institutions scoff at traditional morality and scorn those who express concern without there being a consequence. I think there are far more logical reasons for those people to be concerned such as a welfare system that funds breeding by sad women with vicious men who have absolutely no intention of caring for the women or the children or a marriage law—which should be the most important contract we have—that the State has now decreed cannot be enforced in any form. 
One of the interesting things is that the partnership agreements that can be registered in France for example are enforceable. We cannot do that. The only way that we can get an enforceable contract which might mean that the person who is grossly at fault in breaching his or her promise of a long-term stable commitment receives some sanction is by getting a lawyer for each side to write it and even then the court can overturn it so that all bets are off if it thinks things have changed. 
So the time that we should have been spending on strengthening family law and that we could have been spending on producing something that made all of us feel we were supporting gay couples same-sex couples to become what people said they were aspiring to become has instead been spent—deliberately in my view—on whipping up contention. 
I asked for some simple assurances. One of them is in the New South Wales equivalent—an old one. So that the courts cannot use their creative desires to get into law writing the legislation should simply state as the New South Wales law does that there is no intention to demean the status of marriage. I asked for an assurance that would keep the Jacquie Grants out of the Human Rights Review Tribunal and keep out the advertising standards authorities members and the film censors who have decided that this country’s interests are best served by suppressing people who want to argue that homosexuality is wrong. I may disagree with them but I will fight in this House as long as I can for the kind of freedom that New Zealanders once thought was axiomatic—that they could shun vice if they wished and they could argue against it without being labelled as bigots or hostile and without being victims of a cunning political plot to exploit this issue.