Meager JamesJAMES MEAGER (National—Rangitata): Thank you Madam Speaker. There's been a number of very strong and impressive contributions tonight. As the chair of the Justice Committee it seems somewhat odd to pop into the middle and come forth with what's traditionally more of a summary or review of what happened at the select committee process of the bill but that role does fall to me. And I think as is custom it would be appropriate to offer a number of acknowledgments and thankyous at the top.The first acknowledgment is to the Hon Dr Deborah Russell for stewarding this bill through. She's already mentioned many of the people who have contributed to the bill to get it to where it is tonight and actually enlightened me on some of the history of the bill that I was unaware of. So I'll also acknowledge Charlotte Abrial who had a petition that I was unaware of and the petition that I was aware of of Ashley Jones who's with us today. And I'll just acknowledge Ashley being here with us and for being able to make a contribution to this bill as well. And of course I'll also acknowledge Chris Bishop who received the initial petition. If you recall in the first reading speech from Mr Bishop he retold the story of receiving the petition drafting the member's bill only to find out that Angie Warren-Clark had pipped him at the post and got in there first. So it just goes to show that when a good idea comes before the Parliament and comes before members it's one that can be supported across the House. So I want to also acknowledge Angie for getting the member's bill into the ballot and drawn too.I think it's important to acknowledge that because it shows that this House receives a number of petitions and it's a good part of the democratic process that individuals and constituents can petition Parliament to make change. A lot of those petitions flow through the Petitions Committee and come to our committees and unfortunately the House can't particularly act on what's required or requested in those petitions. But this is an example of a constituent who has—or a number of constituents who have had concerns who have bought petitions to Parliament and those petitions have turned into real change. So I think that's a way to acknowledge that you can affect the democratic process and you can affect change by doing something as simple as presenting a petition to the House. So congratulations to those who engage in that process.Now also I wanted to make a comment on the fact that the contributions tonight have been so constructive and collegial and that's how the Justice Committee operated throughout consideration of this bill. You only have to look at bills that touch on family violence and sexual violence to realise that seems to be the pattern across the Justice Committee. We've got a couple of other pieces of legislation coming through—strengthening protections for family violence and strengthening legal protections for sexual violence—and in both of those cases I think you've found a very constructive way that the committee's approached that. So I wanted to acknowledge members of the Justice Committee and also to Dr Russell for her contribution when she sat in on those committee sessions as well. And also can I just thank the advisers and the Clerk's team for their assistance in moving the bill through to where it is at the moment.I guess as part of this process I will read into the record essentially what the bill does the summary of the bill. So of course the key purpose of the bill is to insert a new ground for the dissolution of marriages or civil unions. I wanted to note the civil union part because there is a change to the title in the bill that's been recommended to reflect the fact that we're not just talking about marriages we're talking about civil unions as well now. And that's important because as our family and relationship property law has developed over the years we are recognising more and more types of relationships and so it's only proper that we recognise that with more types of relationships come more legal obligations. So we needed to recognise that we're not just talking about dissolution of marriages in this bill but civil unions as well.It essentially allows for the dissolution to be granted more quickly in instances of family violence. I'll touch on some of the issues that the member Tamatha Paul raised as well in terms of protection orders. It is fair to say that this does represent a slight departure from the no-fault system that we do operate under at the moment. Although I think that is a bit of a misnomer because it's not quite a no-fault system. Under the current law in order to obtain a dissolution you have to of course demonstrate irreconcilable difference in the relationship. Under the statute the only way to demonstrate that is to essentially prove or assert that you have been separated and living apart for more than two years. So while it may be seen as a no-fault system it's certainly not a no-barrier system.Many submitters throughout the process actually—and it will probably be acknowledged by the committee—made the case that further changes could be made to the bill that there are other instances where individuals or families may want to or may need to call for a dissolution earlier than that two-year stand down process. I think that was beyond the purpose of this bill but it's something that I'm certainly sympathetic to and something that perhaps could be addressed at a later stage in a further member's bill if the House has the appetite.So I think it's important to probably touch on that point around protection orders right now. There were a number of submitters who said Yes we support the bill. Yes we support protection orders being an appropriate level of evidence to demonstrate breakdown and to initiate this sort of fast-track dissolution process. But there could be other examples of evidence that we could use. Can't we use a conviction for an offence of family violence? Can't we use some other levels of evidence in order to initiate this process as well?" I think they were fairly well-made arguments and the committee considered them pretty closely. Some of the issues that came with that were that as soon as you introduce more and more levels of evidence and more subjectivity into the evidence that evidence would then need to be tested particularly in a judicial sense.The risk for the committee was that the broader you expand the scope of evidence the harder it might actually be to get a dissolution. If you are entering into a judicial process where you have to test the evidence get a family violence conviction and then have that subject to appeal you may end up waiting longer to get your dissolution than the original two years or something that a protection order may have helped with anyway. So on balance the committee at this stage has recommended that the evidence be restricted to permanent protection orders. There's another aside there that the bill as introduced I understand actually allowed for temporary protection orders to be the evidence as well but there were some issues around that too. Temporary protection orders can be issued essentially without notice of the respondent and there was a risk seen by some that it would disadvantage or it could be used to abuse the process.And of course we acknowledge that by limiting the evidence that you can use to get the dissolution you are going to limit the number of people that this can benefit. But there was also always that balancing exercise that needed to be taken into account. So again I think that there is some scope to perhaps expand the criteria of people who could qualify for this process but it may be beyond the scope of this particular bill right now.I wanted to touch on just some of the figures around the submission process. So the committee received 30 written submissions and member Deborah Russell highlighted a number of those organisations. For the Justice Committee that is probably on the lower end of the number of submissions received. But I can tell you that the quality of those submissions were all incredibly high and the seven-odd oral submissions that we heard were also of incredibly high value and high quality as well. So it's not always a case that more submissions makes a stronger case. It can be the fact that the better the quality of the submission the stronger the argument can be for the bill's changes.Now I'm very rapidly running out of time so I thought I would just run through the remaining changes that the committee actually recommended. We have recommended that change to the title just to recognise the different types of relationships that this will cover. We have recommended an extension to the commencement date as introduced. It was coming into for six months but that's been extended to 12 months to give the courts longer times to adapt to the changes.We actually grappled with an interesting issue that was only really brought up—the bill as introduced would actually have allowed a perpetrator or potentially could have allowed a perpetrator of domestic violence to seek a protection order so that they could then gain a dissolution of marriage in order to disrupt essentially harass the victim once again; or maybe speed up the property dissolution process or put them under pressure when it comes to spousal maintenance. So the committee's actually recommended a change so that it's very very clear that the intent of the bill—and it's important this is read into the record—the intent of the bill is that only the protected person can apply for a dissolution of marriage not a potential perpetrator of harm. The only exception to that being that if there are protection orders on both sides then a joint application can be made. So that would be the one instance where perhaps if there was family violence incidents on both sides of the relationship someone who may have been a victim of family harm but had also perpetrated it can apply for that dissolution of marriage. So I think it's important to get that on the record just in case some future court goes back and peruses the Hansard for any guidance as to what we actually meant.And then the final one I just wanted to put in there was that it was initially unclear as to whether or not you could make an application for an order dissolving a relationship before the appeal period for a protection order had expired. So we've made that clear that you have to wait for that appeal period to expire. That is going to cause a small amount of delay but in the long run we think it will actually speed up the process so that you aren't subject to those potentially long-drawn-out judicial processes.Look that is my contribution. I think it is an incredibly important and decent bill and as you've seen from the contributions across the House very well supported. I want to congratulate the member for stewarding the bill through and acknowledge Ashley and Charlotte for their role that they've played in this as well. Thank you."