Goff Phil: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13219. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): In the bill that we are discussing tonight the Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill we are seeing evidence of a Government that is increasingly arrogant and increasingly dishonest in what it puts forward. I have got to say to the Minister of Justice I was incredibly disappointed with the comments that you as Minister made. First of all it was the arrogance that somehow you as Minister know best. Forget the people who work hard in their profession both as legal experts and as specialists who report to the Family Court. Forget the fact that your predecessor Simon Power appointed an expert advisory group a reference group and appointed them on the basis of their knowledge their skill and their experience. You Minister disparaged the people appointed by your predecessor because they say that this bill is a disaster. Let me Minister use their actual words “If this Bill proceeds as drafted the very fabric of the New Zealand family justice system will be destroyed.”Minister those comments were made about this part of the bill by the people whom your predecessor appointed because they are expert in this area. I want to know from you Minister whether people likeAntony Mahon a barrister with 30 years’ experience on the Family Court is a person who does not know what he is talking about. Professor Fred Seymour—I worked with Fred Seymour when I was Minister of Justice. He did brilliant things on behalf of the Ministry of Justice and to make our family justice system better. Dr Suzanne Blackwell is another person—a clinical psychologist with 30 years’ experience. Those are the sorts of people whom your predecessor appointed. You ignored their advice and then in the Cabinet paper that you presented to your colleaguesyou had the effrontery to say that what you were proposing aligned with what they recommended. They did not say it was lie; they said it wrong that it was incorrect. But I want to know from you Minister when you take the call why it was that the claim was made that what is being proposed in Part 1 and the other parts of this bill was aligned with what the expert advisory committee told the Government. Because they told the Government absolutely the opposite of what you have said. Then you said that this was motivated by your great desire to do what was best for the children of this country. That is not an honest interpretation of what motivates this bill and it is not what the submitters to the committee said was what motivated this bill.This bill pure and simple is about cutting costs regardless of the impact on the families and regardless of the impact on the children. That is what it is about. If you do not believe me Minister believe your own regulatory impact statement because what does it start by saying? It states: “Given the overall fiscal situation urgent steps must be taken to lower the cost of the current justice system …”. This bill is about cost cutting regardless of the social costs the family costs and the costs that you are imposing on the most vulnerable the children who will no longer get the sort of assistance that they need before the Family Court. It strikes me as strange that we have money to pay for Warner Bros we have money to pay to RioTinto we have money to pay toSkycity and we have got money to give in tax cuts to the wealthiest people of this country but we cannot afford to represent the interests of children in court by counsel for the child other than in exceptional cases. We cannot afford to get the specialist reports that are needed to make sure that the proper outcomes are reached on behalf of the vulnerable children. We cannot afford to do those things but we can give subsidies and welfare payments to the big corporates and to the most wealthy. I do not accept that Minister.Minister I want to refer you to the comments that were made by your expert advisory committee on the clauses that you are pushing through in this part of the bill. It says this is flawed. It says that the proposed reforms—maybe that should be in inverted commas—“are not based on empirical evidence; (b) are contrary to extensive existing evidence of best outcomes for families and children;”. I want to know Minister whether you agree with the comments made by the expert advisory group on what you are proposing in this part. Let me help you out because if you do not believe the expert advisory group perhaps you will believe your own ministry which says in the regulatory impact statement that the research that was done on this was limited and that some of the proposals have to be based on overseas examples. There was “insufficient historical fiscal and statistical data to accurately predict the average costs of performing some tasks associated with Family Court processes. There was insufficient time for piloting … [and there was] limited opportunity to discuss the final proposals with stakeholders.”If I was Minister of Justice in this Chamber and I had that report from my own ministry I would hang my head in shame Minister because you are making as you have acknowledged yourself comments that you know are not backed up by the facts. They are denied by her ministry. They are denied by the expert reference group. They say that this piece of legislation will create a two-tiered family justice system: “The more vulnerable members of society will have limited access to services to assist them in the resolution of family disputes.” OK if you earn less than the margin that entitles you to civil legal aid you will not have to pay the cost of the family dispute resolution service. What is that figure? I think Minister it is $22000. So if you earn less than $22000 you will not have to pay. If you are on a ministerial salary of a quarter of a million dollars paying will be easy but what about the strugglers the battlers the people going through a really difficult time in their lives? How are they going to pay $900 to get access to the family dispute resolution service? Nine hundred dollars isgoing to be a huge barrier to the strugglers and the battlers in life who cannot afford that and therefore will not be able to take advantage of that service. That is why the expert advisory group says that this will create a two-tiered justice system. Do you know what they mean by that? They mean justice for the wealthy who can pay for the legal advice and no justice for the people who cannot afford it.I thought that justice in this country was meant to be equal. I thought that children as the most vulnerable members of our society were entitled to the assistance that they needed entitled to the representation in court entitled to have somebody advocate for them and entitled to the specialist services that could say to the court in an independent way: “This is what needs to happen to protect those children.” So excuse me if I feel disgust when the Minister comes into this Chamber and says that this is about looking after the children and doing better by them. Actually Minister it is about doing absolutely the opposite. Then the expert advisory committee says: “for those who do have access to the services the services will be of a lesser quality than services available to better resourced members of society. (iii) it is entirely foreseeable”—Minister they say—“that inequalities arising from gender socio-economic status and ethnicity will become entrenched resulting in increased costs to the health education child protection and criminal justice budgets.”So here we have an example once again of a Government that will try to make savings by cutting services only to add the cost of what it is doing to the wider governmental service system. Will it help the court case not to have people represented in court not to have people understand the legal requirements and to have people who are engaged in a very emotional struggle between themselves and their partner not to have assistance to work through the system properly? No Minister. It will not help. The expert reference group your group says that the overriding fiscal imperative is evident throughout the bill. This is a bill about savings not quality.