Turner Judy: Relationships (Statutory References) Bill — In Committee 
Turner Judy: Relationships (Statutory References) Bill — In Committee 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I wanted to take a call in the Committee stage of the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill because I am one of those who at the second reading changed position. I voted in support of this bill at its first reading because as I read through and tried to make sense of the very many Acts of Parliament that it sought to change most of what I read seemed to be adjusting and providing opportunities for couples other than married couples on issues that I did not believe of themselves undermined the core purpose of marriage. 
Let me explain what I believe by that. I believe that in its crudest sense marriage is actually about breeding. When we look at the legal constraints around marriage it is very clear that I am right. The three constraints are that marriage is heterosexual that it is between two people and that it must not be incestuous. In the Civil Union Bill which I opposed we took one of those aspects of marriage and said that based on human rights it no longer applied. I believed that the rights that were being sought could be given in ways other than through a civil union. However I was happy to support the bill to let it go to a select committee and to allow public submissions to make sense of what was proposed. 
There are two reasons I have changed my mind. The first is that on closer examination many many of those amendments are a complete nonsense. They are giving rights to people for whom in recent years those rights have never been denied. There is almost a culture of victimisation that seems to play on the guilt of those in Parliament that suggests due to kinship status people have been banned barred or unable to have legal redress in some area. I find that on closer examination many of those claims are just not true. 
The second reason I am now opposing this bill is that it is now completely reliant on the civil union legislation—which I opposed; I disagreed with that—as a mechanism for supplying those few provisions in the bill that I think are possibly worthy of consideration. As I stated at the beginning of my speech my opposition to civil unions is that despite claims made by people to the contrary it very much undermines marriage as we know it. I am extremely concerned and interested in an amendment that we have just found proposed by Nandor Tanczos to put the civil union provisions into amending the Adoption Act. It shows exactly the concern I have that this bill is a little dishonest in that it was very selective about the legislation that it would amend at this time. The amendments that really do strike at the heart of what it means to be family and at what marriage was always originally about are very much addressed in Mr Tanczos’ proposal because it intends to provide for non-breeding units the rights to have the children whom by the choices they have made they would normally have walked away from. 
I do believe that there has been a huge amount of dishonesty and manipulation of people’s thinking. I believe that the middle New Zealand that everybody is scrambling to attract in this election year would have been a lot more resistant to this legislation if the adoption provisions had been included. They were very cunningly left out and I am sure that in the not too distant future the types of provisions Mr Tanczos wants will be addressed in an even more comprehensive way than he is now proposing. 
I am always interested when we start advocating for human rights. We have made a bit of an industry out of human rights and we are inventing them at a great rate of knots.