Turner Judy: Family Courts Matters Bill — In Committee 
Turner Judy: Family Courts Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:646;Page:15695] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 Part 6 of the Family Courts Matters Bill is largely about the openness of the court. It covers hearings the reporting of proceedings and the sort of identifying information that can be used. One of our submitters who I think would describe himself as a victim of the Family Court—he had not had a happy experience—made the very good point that nobody actually wants openness for itself; they just want people to know what is going on. This issue is not about returning to the days when one’s private matters were splashed across a special page of the  
Truth 
 newspaper in the weekend. It is about ensuring that the judgments and processes that go on in the Family Court are transparent enough. Certainly to date this court has a history of men in particular feeling aggrieved by the processes and feeling that there is bias in the court. That of course is strongly denied by those who work in the court and act in the interests of the court. Is the issue that where there is smoke there is fire? We have to accept that there has been a high level of dissatisfaction in this area. The belief is that if we could make the courts more open that would bring them into line with the concerns that a certain sector has. 
Another submitter made the point that she believes that judges should be required to give an explanation if they choose for instance to exclude somebody from a court hearing so that again it is clear what they were thinking at the time and what brought them to the point of excluding somebody. 
There has been a new openness for the media in the Family Court. I think a previous speaker has spoken about the fact that although some fears arose during the debate on previous bills before Parliament that this situation would become like that in the old days that has not actually happened. The media has not shown a high interest in the ongoing concerns of the Family Court. Because of that there is also a belief that these new provisions possibly may not offer children in particular any additional protection. 
One of the interesting issues is that currently if the proceedings of a case in the Family Court are published identifying information must not be used. That is clearly articulated in the bill. One of the things we learnt from submitters—Professor Bill Atkin was one submitter who I remember talked about this—was that that created a problem for law journals and for documentation that is particular to the legal fraternity and court staff. When identifying information is written in a coded or concealed way that makes reading court cases extremely complicated because alphabetic letters are used to refer to people—“A” said something to “B” and that affected “C” who was then related to “D” and so on. It becomes extremely difficult to try to make sense of a court case minus the identifying information. 
The Family Court covers cases that arise under the provisions of several Acts of Parliament each of which has its own differing publication rules. The Children Young Persons and Their Families Act and Care of Children Act were two Acts that were pointed out to us. Professor Atkin suggested that the Family Court would possibly be the better if there was a more generic set of rules covering all cases regardless of which Act was being enforced or which Act the case was being heard under. 
Part 6 also talks about avoiding unnecessary formality. Yet we must balance that against the fact that judges have requested the ability to reintroduce gowns. My understanding when I made some inquiries as to why this was being considered was that it was because there was some concern on the judges’ part that although the court had become more informal in order to reflect the types of cases it deals with and particularly because family matters are always sensitive and do not necessarily require the same level of formality as other matters what had happened in some cases was that a sort of complacency had developed and a bit of a disregard had set in for the authority of the court. There was a feeling that it may at times be helpful as a visual reminder of the authority of the court for a judge to wear a gown in order to remind the people involved in cases of the status of the court and of the judge’s role. I can understand that but I think we have to be careful that proceedings do not become too formal. Certainly the trend in the Family Court has been to move towards greater informality. 
When we spoke to Judge Boshier he welcomed the provision of the bill that improves the openness of the court. He also suggested some generic publication provisions instead of one provision in each statute. He felt that the easiest way to fix the problems that professional documents have with the publication restrictions would be for that matter to be addressed by regulation. He did not feel that we necessarily needed to change the legislation but that we could look at some simple regulations that would mean that for certain publications that were not available to the general public but were used by the legal fraternity the restrictions could be waived and the problem could be fixed in that way. 
A concern was raised—and it is probably one of the most interesting concerns about the area of openness—that the bill would allow children themselves to publish court details and judgments. The concern was that we had not defined the word “child” sufficiently which meant—although this sounds like an extremely unlikely scenario—that a 5-year-old could act on his or her volition and choose to have the details of a case published. Of course particularly when one is talking about young children the fear is that children could be manipulated by the adults in their life to publish details of a court case in order to meet the interests of the adults often for vexatious reasons. The fear is that children could be used as puppets. There was some discussion at the Social Services Committee—and certainly a number of submitters talked about this issue—as to whether a child himself or herself could initiate the publishing of the details of a case and the judgment on it. 
The Family Court website apparently already puts up judgments for viewing but they are difficult and complex to get the hang of because the lack of identifying information makes the reading of judgments quite difficult. So this is actually quite an important part of the bill. 
One of the other issues concerned the definition of a vulnerable person. A vulnerable person is not necessarily only a child. A person is vulnerable if he or she is able to be identified. A vulnerable person may also not necessarily be a child now but for instance if a court case is published at a much later date may have been a child at the time when he or she and the family were embroiled in that case. Ten 15 or 20 years later someone can still be quite vulnerable to the publication of those details. We had to shift our thinking away from just the immediate impact on young children to a much wider consideration of what it means to be vulnerable as a result of the publication of identifying information and of what openness could mean if it were provided in a way that would put people at risk.