English Bill: Care of Children Bill Status of Children Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
English Bill: Care of Children Bill Status of Children Amendment Bill — Third Readings 
[Volume:621;Page:16729] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 This is one of those pieces of legislation that contain some useful steps forward but the principles behind it are so misjudged that it is too difficult for the National Party to support. Any MP who has dealt with the regular run of child custody battles knows it is dangerous ground for outsiders to tread on. For the reasons other speakers have raised children often become the pawns of competing parents and the feelings involved are almost always intense. Of course we never get to see the families whose issues are resolved; we get to see the families whose issues remain unresolved often for years and at huge financial and emotional cost. Some of the procedural changes in this legislation will help to reduce those costs but I do not think they will reduce the feelings. The nature of the parental relationship is such that in a significant proportion of cases when that relationship is disrupted there will be trouble. 
I want to reflect on one or two aspects of the legislation that were debated by Parliament at some length. The first is clause 35 of the Care of Children Bill. My colleague Judith Collins put forward a Supplementary Order Paper on that clause proposing an amendment to change the current law. I know for a fact that the debate on the clause was conducted largely in ignorance of the law by the MPs who were voting on it. The debate demonstrated that many MPs thought the current law prevented a medical or other health professional from advising parents when a girl under the age of 16 had an abortion. Of course the current law does not do that. Clause 35 states that there is an exception to the general rule that a child under 16 cannot consent to a medical procedure and that a parent must give consent. The exception is when a girl is having an abortion. That is the one exception to the rule as outlined in clause 35. The clause does not proscribe notification at all but professional ethical codes and practice over the years have evolved to the extent that doctors and nurses feel they cannot notify parents because they feel that would breach their professional code of confidentiality. In that respect Parliament had an opportunity to assist parents and in my view many health professionals—judging from those who contacted me—by writing the law to make it clear that despite the professional ethical code of confidentiality parents should be notified when a girl under 16 is having an abortion. 
The general law is weighted in favour of parents being involved. For instance if a girl has an abortion and a complication arises so that she needs further surgical procedures then those procedures can be done only with the consent of the parents. Parliament missed an opportunity but the fact that it did so is not an accident. What lay behind the majority vote against changing the law in favour of notifying parents is the same kind of view that lies behind much of this legislation—that is the idea that parenthood is some kind of social construction and that somehow the genetic relationship between a parent and a child is less important than the construct the wider community wants to put on parenthood. 
 This legislation and previous legislation particularly that relating to marriage and to property when relationships break up all head in one direction—a direction whereby the Government says it is completely neutral about the nature of these relationships and about marriage and family. One need only look at the definition of “family” in the Families Commission legislation to see that it means almost nothing. This particular Government has decided it wants to be completely neutral. In fact I would go further; I would say that that stream of legislation demonstrates hostility to traditional successful arrangements that have worked in our community for a long long time and that will I believe despite the Government’s assault on them continue to work for a long long time. 
The overwhelming evidence is that children raised by their biological parents in a stable parental relationship—even two or three in a row as can be the case these days—do much better on average than children raised in other circumstances. If the Government was genuinely committed to the kinds of principles it occasionally espouses under political pressure—like being family friendly and wanting to involve parents and take them seriously—then it would not have written this legislation the way it has and it would not be trying to pass these bills which are yet another part of a continuous stream of legislation that under the pretence of neutrality undermines a set of institutions that has worked extremely well. 
I want to give one little example here: the trouble the Government got into over defining what a father is which is not something the Government would necessarily have a lot of expertise in. In the initial drafts of the legislation the Government decided to define the lesbian partner of a mother as a father and it seemed to think that we should all just agree with that—that somehow we were all such rational and reasonable people totally familiar with human rights legislation that we would all think it fine for Parliament to vote through legislation defining the person in that situation as a father. Common sense prevailed at least in the wording of the legislation. It has not made any legal difference but the Government realised how far out of touch it is with the way normal people go about their daily lives. I think the Government has persuaded itself that people who criticise this kind of legislation are backward reactionary and conservative and that most people know how the real world is. Well in the real world most children are brought up in situations with a biological parent. Most children are brought up in households with two parents—that they are always the biological parents is less and less the case but most of them are—because that is what tends to work. That is what people generally seek as an ideal even if they do not always realise it. 
I just wish that this legislation reinforced that social reality more. I do not like the idea that I have been reduced to being the person who provides day-to-day care. I am not a childcare worker; I am a parent as are many thousands of others and that is different. I think the terminology is inappropriate. It is worse than inappropriate; it is just wrong. It is wrong to define in law the relationship of a parent as that of a guardian who conducts the day-to-day care of a child. As we have found it is pretty easy for people like de facto partners to become guardians and therefore responsible for day-to-day care. I must say that casual de facto partners who might just make the threshold of 1 year have a lot less commitment to the children in the household than those of us who have changed nappies for years and years and looked after children with the mixture of delight and suffering that that sometimes entails. 
That is why we cannot support this legislation in the end—because it is trying to pretend that children live their lives in a kind of human rights textbook. They do not. Children have not read those textbooks; in fact most parents have not either. If the legislation had reflected not just procedural improvements but also more sound common sense about how the world actually works then we would have been able to support it. But that is not the case.