Chauvel Charles: Reports — Inquiry into the Identification Rehabilitation and Care and Protection of Child Offenders 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Reports — Inquiry into the Identification Rehabilitation and Care and Protection of Child Offenders 
[Sitting date: 29 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:4946. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I want to commend the work of the Social Services Committee in respect of the inquiry into the identification rehabilitation and care and protection of child offenders that it has conducted and the report that it has produced 
. 
 There have been some excellent contributions in this debate and I particularly in this regard want to mention those of my colleagues Jacinda Ardern and Rajen Prasad but also the contribution of Metiria Turei. I think the point that she made around the need in this area to stop working from a model where as she put it we have to identify them to one where they have a place to come is absolutely apposite. I share her despair when I read that protective parents in a violent relationship need and would welcome parenting programmes. Parenting programmes are not designed to work within the dynamics of domestic violence and they will not keep a victim of domestic violence and her—because it is usually her—children safe. In fact there is a higher chance that they could be put at risk. 
The inquiry clearly got great benefit from having heard from the Family Court. It is obvious from the report at pages 37 to 38 that the evidence given by the court to the committee was very useful in its deliberations. What I want to do is just place on record my gratitude to the outgoing Principal Family Court Judge Peter Boshier because I have certainly been a member of committees in this House where the judge has as he clearly did here come along to a committee and given very frank and helpful evidence about what it is really like at the cliff-face the coalface—however you want to put it—in respect of dealing with the sorts of issues that confronted the committee. The judge in his time has done his level best to make that court work and to make it an efficient and effective place from which interventions can occur. I think he will be missed in his tenure as a judge but I certainly wish him well in his term at the Law Commission where I know he will provide excellent advice and support in respect of his areas of expertise. 
Having mentioned the Family Court I do need I think to touch on the recent changes that the Government has announced to that court. Some of them are positive: the focus on mediation the attempts to streamline the system and end the requirement to have representation where maybe that is not necessary but to allow the parties to get quickly to the nub of a dispute. All those things are positive and I have said that publicly. What is not positive is the attempt to introduce new charges for accessing the court and the ending of free counselling services. Those counselling services at the moment are a hugely important safety valve and the ability to access six funded counselling sessions I know has been an extraordinarily helpful thing for families who are in trouble including families who face issues around violence care and protection orders and the other sorts of matters that are touched on by this report. It is of real concern that we are changing the rules of access to the Family Court and in the rush to save costs we are going to really have to take great care that we do not simply perpetuate many of the problems that are referred to in the report. 
In this regard I am particularly concerned that although there was evidence given to the committee around the utility of increasing youth advocates we are actually seeing that service being cut. We are seeing as I have said cuts to the free access to the Family Court the elimination of free counselling the new fees that have been brought in and then of course there is the likelihood of a coming announcement about court closures around the country. These are the sorts of services dealt with in the report that are not amenable to videoconferencing so if we do not get all that right we are simply going to be spending more money in the corrections and health budgets. That is certainly not something I want to see. We have to get this area of service right including in the Family Court and the courts budget.