Ardern JacindaJACINDA ARDERN (Deputy Leader—Labour): I certainly share the view that the debate and discussion around the Family and Whānau Violence Legislation Bill by the select committee where it will eventually be referred will indeed be constructive. That is because this process to date has been constructive. We acknowledge that when Amy Adams as Minister of Justice first flagged her intention to do review work in this area she offered to members of this House to engage with her in that process. Labour was quick to take up that offer as were other parties. In fact we reached out to the Minister. We wrote the Minister a letter co-signed by myself Poto Williams Kelvin Davis and other caucus members who had an interest in the area. We all reached out to the Minister asking for an opportunity to meet with her. She accepted that offer and to her credit brought in other members of Parliament to sit down and have an initial briefing with her.At that point we put before the Minister some real areas of concern some of which I will touch on today and some of which my colleague Poto Williams has also expanded upon. In large part our view was that the preventative work that we need to do is still really under-resourced the ability of people to access services without having been referred through the formal justice system is still inadequate and ultimately that throughout our justice system there still needs to be competency built around identifying and working appropriately with those who are the victims of domestic violence. There are a range of elements that we will be seeking to really flesh out to build upon some of the initial suggestions that have been made in this legislation. Having said that we also as a party put in a submission into this process because we did want to use every opportunity we have to be constructive and will continue to do so.In my opening comments as well as acknowledging that openness by the Minister I also want to acknowledge that family violence affects everything. It affects absolutely everything. To be honest as a member of Parliament I did not grasp that in its entirety until I really had the opportunity to work in the children's portfolio to the degree that I have. I have seen the impact of family violence on children and then on children as they grow into adolescence and then on as adolescents go on to be parents themselves.I think probably one of the points when it really hit home—and I have spoken about this before—was the moment when I put in an Official Information Act request to the coroner's court to access all of the reports that the coroner had done on children who had died in Child Youth and Family's (CYF's) care. Actually at that time I was seeking further information on the way that we had failed our most vulnerable children. It was off the back of a horrific case of a child who had committed suicide while in CYF's care.I had an expectation of seeing cases of perhaps sudden unexpected death in infancy of abuse—of a range of things that you see in our media reports. I did not expect to see the number of cases of children who had been known to Child Youth and Family who had taken their own lives and who had witnessed on an ongoing basis domestic violence in their home. I did not expect to see that. When I saw that I remember asking down the track a police officer who worked intensively in the area of family violence—I raised with him that correlation. He said it was a correlation he had seen in his own district to the point that he had gone back through the files of the call outs that related to mental health or distress call outs and then linked them to domestic violence call outs. The correlation was undeniable—undeniable.This is not only pervasive but it affects a child's brain development. We have the research and evidence to tell us that now. I raise that so that we do not look at this issue in isolation and we understand that investment in this area is investment in a child's future—in particular a child's future—as well as their protective parent's future. That is why I feel so very very strongly about the work that we are doing here.I want to pick up on a couple of the specifics in the bill just to give an example of where we will be seeking extra work. We raised early on that it was our view that protection orders—at the moment hundreds of protection orders are denied when there has been an application for legal aid. That would surprise a lot of people—the idea that someone who is seeking financial support in order to seek assistance with a protection order might be denied that. It was our view that the process of accessing a protection order should be free. The mechanism we can discuss—be it a community law centre be it an automatic legal-aid process or be it whatever. The mechanism is up for debate but the principle was the same for us. The idea that a partner for instance who might be financially bound to the person who they are seeking to get a protection order against—how can you asset test that person against what might be the assets of their abuser from whom they are seeking a protection order? It made sense for us to make that as accessible as possible.The second point was that a protection order is only as good as the enforcement of that order. We have a long way to go for individuals to have faith in the system and faith that if they seek help when a protection order is breached that help will be swift and uniform in response—that is where I refer back to the idea of competency. I remember asking a legal-aid lawyer to give me some examples once of cases where they had seen breaches of protection orders that had not been followed through appropriately. Their example was that if in isolation a police officer has a protection order being breached alerted to them—and it might be in the form of some flowers being left on the doorstep. If a police officer sees that in isolation as an individual case they might just simply take sympathy or empathise that it is someone trying to make amends without seeing perhaps the markers of stalking behaviour and the abuse that has happened in the lead-up to that event. Actually really building an understanding of the different markers of domestic violence in abusive relationships is incredibly important when it comes to effectively enforcing protection orders.We also need to have a conversation about how we are talking about the ability of others to make applications on behalf of individuals for protection orders but we still ultimately rely on the victim to enforce them. That is hugely problematic as well. So these are all things that we would like to debate and discuss in a select committee.The other issue that I want to raise is that I think it is absolutely right that when making parenting arrangements in the Family Court that we require the court to consider whether a protection order has been made. We have cases—and I know this because I have seen them—where there have been medical files demonstrating the substantiated physical abuse in a relationship and there will still be a shared custody order which forces the protected parent to have an ongoing relationship with their abuser. The issue I take here is that that makes an assumption that as soon as you remove the intimate partner from that relationship that that individual poses no threat or risk to a child. That is the assumption that we are making there. We have got to have a debate around the way that parenting orders work when there are protection orders in place. There are a lot of contradictions when there is substantiated abuse in relationship where there is still ongoing contact with the abuser and a child.I want to add to that that if we are going to have that discussion we actually need to go back and review the way the Family Court reforms are working or not working. We were promised a review this year and I would say to the Minister that if we want the domestic violence legislation that we are reviewing now to be comprehensive and fulsome we absolutely—I would say first—need to review the family law court reforms because they are hugely problematic. They are hugely problematic and are contributing to this problem tenfold. It is very hard to separate them out in the way that we are being asked to do as a Parliament. So I would really endorse that need again for us to review those reforms.A second connection point is that this legislation with the way that we operate our care and protection system—I think that we have to acknowledge that there are cases where there is domestic violence and Child Youth and Family as it was known has gone to a protected partner and essentially said: Unless you leave we will remove your children." We know that is happening. We know that is happening and the trauma that that creates. We make an assumption that that removes a child from harm without acknowledging the trauma of removal for a child who in some cases will view themselves as the protector of the parent in that abusive relationship. It is a really simplistic view.I understand how many practitioners may have come to that place but it lacks a full understanding of what is happening in those relationships. We need to have a conversation about what is happening to children in those homes and take a systemic response to children who are living in homes where there is pervasive domestic violence."