Dalziel Lianne: Child and Family Protection Bill — First Reading 
Dalziel Lianne: Child and Family Protection Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:8803] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 Labour will be supporting the Child and Family Protection Bill. In 2008 the Hon Annette King introduced the Domestic Violence Reform Bill and it is now at the bottom of the Order Paper. It was of course abandoned by this Government so that it could do two things. The first was to introduce the Domestic Violence (Enhancing Safety) Bill which picked up the police protection order provisions of Annette King’s bill and was passed after being divided into two separate bills. That then left a number of other provisions that needed to be passed; hence the bill that we have before us tonight. 
But there have been some major omissions from this bill. When we add up the bills—the divided bills with the police protection orders in them that have already been passed and this one—there are still some glaring gaps and I want to— 
Hon Simon Power 
: That’s why it’s still on the Order Paper. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Oh the Minister is actually saying he will address the other issues with the Domestic Violence Reform Bill. 
Hon Simon Power 
: I wouldn’t have it on the Order Paper if I wasn’t going to. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Oh I do not know about that but anyway I will wait and see. The Minister has said he is leaving Annette King’s bill on the Order Paper so that it can be addressed at a later stage. I will be very interested to talk to him about what that timetable might look like. 
I will talk about the omissions from this bill because I think it would be very good to know maybe from the next Government speaker why there is the delay with the additional provisions—if it is indeed a delay and they are not being put off into the never-never. I welcome the changes included in this bill that originally came out of the Domestic Violence Reform Bill. The Minister has gone through those provisions. There is really only one provision in the legislation that was not included in the bill that Annette King introduced and that was the last provision that the Minister mentioned. 
I will quickly run through the provisions of the bill just to indicate the support that the Opposition has for them. First of all clarifying the law around the application of protection orders for young people when the applicant dies is clearly something that needs to be tidied up. There are of course provisions to enable the Family Court to make interim orders relating to a child’s care or to vary existing orders even though no application has been filed. This is important. It came up during the consideration of the discussion document that we put out during the domestic violence review that the previous Government was responsible for. We identified that quite often the courts were not attuned to the provisions of the Care of Children Act when they were looking at a domestic violence application. It was therefore important to write in this provision. I think it is really just to draw the judges’ attention to the fact that this is something that they should resolve at the time that they are dealing with a domestic violence application. 
Issues of contact are to be addressed by ensuring that the Family Court reviews those arrangements within a few weeks after a temporary protection order is made. Again the need for this provision came through very clearly in the discussion document that we put out. It was really important that the law codified the practice that has now been developed in the Family Court in that regard. 
The bill removes the administrative barriers to engagement in stopping violence programmes. We know that there are issues around effectiveness levels in stopping violence programmes but where they are willingly participated in we know that the success rate is much higher so therefore removing those administrative barriers will obviously be of advantage. 
In relation to the extension of the Care of Children Act to address all abuse including psychological abuse in terms of the care and contact arrangements I want to put it on the record that I was on the Social Services Committee which considered the bill. After hearing a lot of evidence on this we decided to exclude the psychological abuse provisions that related to the domestic violence legislation from the care and contact provisions in the Care of Children Act. I think we got it wrong. I am not ashamed to say that; sometimes we do. Sometimes it is a question of a judgment call and it is based on the evidence and the submissions received at the time. I think this is a good tidy-up of the legislation. Too many gaps have been left in the difference that exists between the two bills so I really do think this provision does strengthen the protection for children as the Minister has said. I strongly support this change coming in. 
There is then the provision that I have been waiting for for a long time. Actually I do not think the Minister mentioned this particular provision in his commentary. It is the question of the ability to discharge a section 105 order which is essentially a Hague convention provision ordering a child to be sent back to the other signatory party’s jurisdiction where the guardianship arrangements should have been dealt with in the first place. The case referred to in the explanatory note of the bill  
Butler 
v 
Craig 
 involved a constituent of mine and that is why I have always felt that this is an important case to address. It highlights a gap in our law and it is one that is commonly addressed in other jurisdictions. I do not think people should be nervous about giving the court the power to cancel one of these orders. Other Hague convention countries do exactly the same as what the bill proposes and I think it is important that our law allows for that as well. 
Finally the bill makes changes to the Adoption Act by introducing a 7-year sentence for inducing another person to consent to an adoption. I think the point that the Minister did not make is that the whole point about bringing in the 7-year sentence is to create an extraditable offence which gives us the international reach that unfortunately we do not have under our existing law. It enables the ratification of the optional protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as the Minister said. I totally support this change. This issue is a serious matter internationally and I just reflect on the scene in Haiti involving a group of people going in and grabbing children in order to take them out of the country for adoption. I do not know what the motives of those people were and I am not making a judgment call on them. I am just saying that in those sorts of situations we have to be really really careful that the law is strong enough to protect against the unlawful trafficking of children. That could have been the case in Haiti; who knows whether they were a genuine outfit. So this provision is very important. 
I remember attending the World Conference on Women back in 1995 and being at a table with a group of women politicians from Romania from whom I heard about the impact of international adoptions on children from that country. People were taking personal responsibility for wanting those children to be cared for; we saw terrible scenes in the orphanages back then. But the message those women were giving to politicians from other countries was that we should stop stealing Romanian children. They agreed that Romania had a problem that needed to be addressed but they said we should think about the long-term impact on children of totally ripping them out of engagement with their families. As we saw in Haiti family members will sell their children not for personal benefit but so that their children will have more advantages whether educationally or with regard to positions or whatever else. They will allow their children to go but long-term emotional damage can be done to children in that situation when they are dragged away from their family culture language and all of those things. There has to be the capacity for children to return to their families as well. So the Minister is bringing in a good change and it certainly has support on this side of the House. 
Compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is obviously important but it has been made kind of ironic by the exclusion from the other bill of the definition of a minor. I think it was really important that we lifted the age from 17 to 18 not only for the sake of compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It also made me wonder whether there was a connection between this and the bill we are just dealing with which drops the age of criminal responsibility for a range of offences in addition to manslaughter and murder in terms of the Youth Court’s jurisdiction and whether that has something to do with the failure of the Government to address the problem where 17-year-olds can simply fall through the cracks. I was thinking of what the Minister said about the circumstances that these young people can find themselves in in terms of being exposed to family violence. Then I heard the debate we have just had on the previous bill and I was thinking about the long-term consequences of the damage that domestic violence does to children even when they are just hearing the violence or experiencing the violence around them rather than being directly involved. That long-term damage can lead to the sort of outcomes that we were just talking about with regard to the previous bill. So I would like to think that we could address that at some stage in the very near future. 
A couple of other provisions have been left out of this bill such as the question about without notice applications for protection orders being declined and the need for written reasons. Those provisions were based on very very important reports that were done for both the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the ministerial task force on family violence. I think it is really important that the Government seriously thinks about including those additional provisions in the bill sometime soon.