Williams Poto: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 01 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9249. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Kia orana. That is a really good note on which to start my contribution because I do want to respond to some of the comments that the Minister has made around family violence.Much of what the Minister has said I agree with. In fact most of what she has said I agree with. I agree that family violence is a huge huge problem in this country and I agree that many people in New Zealand will concur that dealing with the issue of gangs and gang families will go some way to dealing with the issue of family violence. However when you have the situation where you have over 100000 family violence call-outs by police in a year the gang portion of that statistic is minor—is minute—compared with the impacts that it has for every single community in this country. Whether they are low socio-economic communities or whether they are in the leafy suburbs every community is impacted by family violence.Although this measure goes some way to addressing a portion of it here we are yet again debating the use of targeting resources to a particular group versus taking some universal steps to address the issue across the country. A hundred thousand family violence call-outs by police: that would mean that there were at least 95000 families who are not gang affiliated who are still going to be impacted by family violence and whom the measures that the Minister has announced today will not touch—they will not touch. There are 62000 family violence investigations where at least one child is resident or present in a home where violence has occurred. The measures that have been announced today will not impact 60000 of those children.The Minister did touch on a very important point and that is about the trauma that is experienced by these children. It may not necessarily be that they are experiencing the violence themselves in the sense of being physically abused; the fact that they are in a home where violence is present even if they are not physically abused is traumatic enough for them to be damaged and to have huge impacts on their future life outcomes—negative impacts.The Minister I want to reiterate was also the Minister who reformed the Family Court and the impacts of that reform have had a negative impact on family violence. It is now harder to obtain a protection order to keep yourself safe. The reductions to the threshold for legal aid mean that fewer and fewer women in particular are able to obtain those protection orders. How are they able to keep themselves and their children safe when the key legal mechanism with which to do that is withdrawn from them because of changes that that Minister made to the Family Court? Also included in that reform was the reduction in access to Family Court counselling where many issues for families were resolved before they became major concerns for the country.So although I concur with much of what the Minister says yet again this country is headed down a very very dark passageway for when we are dealing with targeting small groups of people and when the problem is so epidemic. I was not going to speak specifically about family violence; I was going to address some other issues of trauma that exist in my community in Christchurch East. But I must respond to what the Minister has said in this regard.Family violence is a scourge on our society when 100000 incidents are reported and they are only a fifth of what occurs. We need to be looking away from targeting and to doing some specific work with those NGOs with the refuges with the police and with Child Youth and Family to contain this epidemic and not just look at specific and small targeted areas. I think that is not a good use of our taxpayer funding. Thank you.