English Bill: Relationships (Statutory References) Bill — Second Reading 
English Bill: Relationships (Statutory References) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:18991] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 This is indeed a curious piece of legislation now that it has been reported back. We are seeing here today a back-down by the Government from the extreme and ideological position it had taken about the nature of legal rights and obligations for relationships in New Zealand. I hope that today will be seen in the future as a turning point—as the day when the tide turned back towards respect for the customs and practices of the people and as the day when Parliament finally realised that it can no longer try to impose a theory of relationships on our community. 
There is no doubt that the Government has retreated significantly from the original purpose of the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill—no doubt whatsoever. The waves of theory have crashed against the rocks of reality. The reality is and always has been that New Zealanders will choose their level of commitment but in the past this Parliament has not respected that choice. For instance in the Property (Relationships) Act Parliament came up with a completely arbitrary definition of de facto relationships and imposed a whole lot of obligations on people who met that definition regardless of the choices they had made. 
 By contrast I welcome the efforts of the select committee which has now ditched the rather academic definition of de facto relationship that was in the original bill and replaced it with the definition that we have always had. That is that it is a relationship in the nature of a marriage and now a civil union and the court must have regard to the context and the circumstances of the relationship whenever it matters to a court to determine what the relationship is. 
So the project has fallen apart and we should be grateful. We will not be saddled as was threatened with a theoretical and ideological construct of relationships that corresponded to almost no one’s reality. But what has happened here has been done in such a haphazard way that I am sure that unintended consequences and sadness will arise from this legislation. What do I mean by haphazard? What should have happened was that the substantial policy analysis that has been done as part of the select committee’s work should have been done in the context of rewriting this legislation because as one of the members of the select committee has said the committee went through and decided that in some contexts it was appropriate to extend rights and obligations to de facto couples and in other contexts it was not appropriate. Well who are Tim Barnett and Lianne Dalziel to decide on that matter? Who are they? Who are the rest of the select committee—even my colleague Stephen Franks—to decide on writing the law and on selecting the appropriate circumstances where discrimination can occur and the circumstances where it cannot? 
It does not make sense. It would be much better for this Parliament to leave well alone let the common law draw the distinctions it needs to draw and stop trying to fiddle impose and theorise about how people will live their lives. 
Of course there is one aspect of this bill that does have a symmetrical and thorough approach and that is to ensure that all the rights of marriage are extended to civil unions. That points back to the hypocrisy of the Government’s original position which was that civil union is different from marriage. Well in law it is not different from marriage and this was the legislation—hundreds of pages; 230 pages in this latest version of the bill—that says it is the same. 
The committee knew that it would set off a firestorm if it were to abolish the language of marriage and I appreciate the efforts of those who were on the committee to ensure that the language of marriage was retained. That is important to so many people in New Zealand. It was a shame that it had to be pushed on the Government—it had to be pushed on the Government right through—that in the view of the community marriage has a status that is different from other relationships. Certainly the people involved in marriage believe that their relationship is different from others and that is why they have sought out that particular type of relationship. 
So the language of marriage has been retained but in the usual swap between substance and appearance the Government has accorded to civil union all the rights and responsibilities of marriage. Now that will probably not be sustained simply because the relationships are so different in reality. Civil unions for instance are much less likely to produce children or to have children in them when they break up and they will break up after shorter periods of time and more regularly than is the case with marriage and ultimately the law will have to reflect that. Parliament can pretend that it will push water uphill and can legislate for those couples to be the same but people are not slaves to our theories. They will live the messy unpredictable lives that we all live and the law ultimately will have to reflect that. 
So in that sense while this bill may represent some kind of conceptual victory for Margaret Wilson and Helen Clark it is a pyrrhic victory for Parliament because people will do what they were going to do anyway and that is how it is. 
I am also concerned about the confusion now in our law around laws of discrimination and my colleague Stephen Franks covered this issue to some extent. This bill was originally based on the idea that there should be no discrimination on marital status anywhere. The select committee figured out that that just cannot work which is why it dipped out on the definition of “de facto” and on extending all the law to de facto relationships. That is why the committee totally wimped out on the issue of social welfare entitlements. That was always the most difficult issue in this bill. 
What did the big brave select committee do with those advanced social theorists? It just said that it would not deal with it and that it would leave the definition of de facto relationships for social welfare purposes—where it actually really matters—to someone else. It would not deal with that in this bill. 
Well thank goodness for that! Thank goodness we will retain a modicum of common sense where relationships will have different definitions for different purposes. That is life! If people do shack up after a couple of weeks they should not be drawing two benefits. They should be described as a couple. But just because they are described as a couple for the purposes of benefits it does not mean they should be described as a couple for the purposes of custody of children or division of assets should that relationship break up. That is how it has always been and despite the best efforts of this Government it will always stay that way. I welcome that particular change. 
But what sense does this move now make of the Human Rights Act? If Parliament has decided to discriminate among different relationships as is written in this legislation why does the Human Rights Act say that we cannot do that? Are we breaching the Human Rights Act by attributing different rights and obligations to different sorts of relationships? Well the answer to that is yes—yes we are! This legislation makes a nonsense of the provisions of the Human Rights Act that outlaw discrimination on the basis of the type of relationship one is in. The sooner more people decide to ignore the Human Rights Act the sooner common sense will be restored to the law to make sure that we accept a pretty simple principle: different relationships are different. People choose different relationships and the rest of us have every right to treat them differently because of the relationships they have chosen.