Dalziel Lianne: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDalziel Lianne: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11540. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East):I believe that this legislation the Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill represents a very serious retrograde step in the history of the Family Court. I remember when the Family Court legislation was passed. I think it was back in 1980. I do not have the information in front of me but I was completing my law degree at the time. There was a lot of interestin the Family Court—[Interruption ] Yes I know. I was just a child. The point was that the Family Court course was changing because the law was changing and that was the point I wanted to make. It certainly was designed as we said in our minority report “… with its jurisdiction covering care of children domestic violence and property matters with a high degree of state assistance provided to the parties [signalling] an important policy principle: the state has an interest in effective and just resolution of family disputes.” That is what the law was based on.Apart from the money-saving driver that really is behind this bill the ideology that lies underneath it is that family disputes are private matters. Two adults whose marriage civil union or relationship is unravelling cannot expect to call on the State for any support in resolving the disputes that necessarily arise in such a case and potentially the conflict that arises. Of course we all know that conflict can be healthy. How one manages conflict is really the primary consideration. The Minister of Justice made it very clear in her comments that it was really up to private individuals to deal with their private disputes and that that was not an issue for the State.The chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee I will say has chaired the process extremely well but we do disagree on this matter. It is not a matter purely for private consideration and I do not think that the divide is as he stated it to be. He said that the Government has a view that a family dispute is private and the Government should stay out of it and therefore the opposite is that Labour believes that we have an interest in the private context. No we do not. It is the peaceful resolution of the dispute—it is the conflict resolution—that is very much in the public interest. That is the public good and that was what the counselling services that were made available—six sessions per couple for free funded entirely by the State—were for.I think that that public good could actually be framed by reference to the legislation from the Family Proceedings Act at the time which had the focus of everyone on reconciliation and conciliation. That really does put a line underneath what is the most fundamental aspect of the Family Court legislation as it was established more than 30 years ago. It was also very much focused on ensuring that the best interests of the parties were able to be served in dealing with what was a difficult situation. When we go to the regulatory impact statement we find why the Government wants to get rid of the six free counselling sessions. As my colleague Andrew Little has already said that was reduced to three sessions and it is down to one session I think in October. We discover in the regulatory impact statement why we are getting rid of the counselling sessions. It is not because we do not like people sorting out their own disputes; it is because it is costing $9.7 million—$9.7 million. That is the reason for getting rid of the counselling provisions. Nowhere in the regulatory impact statement can I find what the absence of free counselling sessions will cost in the medium term or the long term.Reduced relationship breakdowns—we have been told that there were a number of couples who reconciled as a result of the free counselling and that of course there are flow-on effects to children as a result of relationship breakdown and how that is managed. Agreed day-to-day care arrangements more understanding about the relationship more ability to cope less disputes between separating parents—the list goes on and on. I could go on to the intergenerational impact because we know that relationship breakdown has an ongoing effect with children. We know that domestic violence is intergenerational. All of these issues are matters that should be the subject of the regulatory impact statement but the regulatory impact statement is very short-sighted. It is interested only in how much cost is going into counselling at the moment. It does not seem that the Government is really interested in the long-term costs. It is really about individual Ministers who are interested in reducing their budgets in the hereand now and it does not really matter that a future Government will have to pay the price in another Minister’s budget down the track.The process for changing this law was excellent. It was the best process that you could possibly imagine. Members might have heard me commenting on a previous bill about how important it is to get people around the table to look at the evidence and to actually bring the experts to the table—Hon Ruth Dyson: Oh not that evidence again!Hon LIANNE DALZIEL: I know that an evidence-based approach is not popular with the Government but I do think that it has got something to offer us as a nation. What happened was that the Government released a discussion document and the Minister got together with the profession the academics the officials and the NGOs. Everyone who was anyone in the whole area came to the table or actually came to Parliament—to the Legislative Council Chamber—where they held an in-depth conference where they workshopped the issues where they traversed the issues where there was good healthy debate and understanding. Out of that there was an expert reference group established.So what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong when such a good process was established? Well I think the requirement to cut money out of the justice budget is what went wrong. An online survey was given more weight than the expert advice and that is unfortunate to say the least. What we ended up with was legislation that pretended that early legal advice does not make a difference to people’s behaviour. We had lawyers but not just lawyers; we also had some of their clients—previous litigants—who came to us and said that they understood that their rights were quite different until they had received advice from their lawyer. There were a lot of men who felt that the Family Court was biased against men against male litigants. There were a lot of women who assumed that they were automatically entitled to have day-to-day care of their child. There were a number of misconceptions that were remedied in that first consultation with the lawyer.Then second we heard what happened. These clients had the initial conversation with the lawyer and then the lawyer would refer them off for counselling—as I say reconciliation and conciliation. There were a number of lawyers who told us that they saw people for that initial advice they sent them off for counselling and they never saw 95 percent of them ever again. That is because the counselling service works. It might cost $9.7 million but it is incredibly effective. So why would we remove the one thing that is known to be effective and replace it with something—the family dispute resolution process—that we do not know the detail of? And actually we will make people pay for that and we will actually indicate that that could be as much as $900 for X number of sessions because we do not even know the number of sessions that we will pay for either. That is nuts. Why would you throw out what works and replace it with the unknown unless all you cared about was saving the money up front instead of thinking of the long-term consequences.The cases that came back had a range of problems that were highly complex. So basically the Government wants to see only those cases going to the court and everything else being dealt with in family dispute resolution before they can come near the court. I think the trouble with that is that it ignores the dynamics of a relationship in meltdown—completely ignores it—especially where one has already made the decision to move on and has maybe entered into another relationship. We heard that from submitter after submitter after submitter. It depends where you are at. Whether your husband comes home and says: “I’m leaving you for the person I’ve been having an affair with for the last 15 years.” or the other way round the woman comes home and says: “By the way I’m leaving you for the person I’ve been having an affair with.” thebottom line is that these are enormously emotional difficult issues for people to face up to. These people actually need support and power imbalances can be extremely well hidden when they do not know who is on their side. At least when they have a lawyer sitting with them they know that they have got somebody who is on their side whom they can tell everything to and we can get good results.I think this bill has a lot of problems within it and that is why the Labour Party will not be supporting it.