Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I rise to take a call on the Family and Whānau Violence Legislation Bill. Firstly I want to commend the Minister Amy Adams for the work that has been done on this bill. As she explained it is a process that was commenced by her calling for submissions on the discussion paper in 2015 and I for one am really looking forward to the robust discussion that will happen at select committee and the submissions made by the experts who will come to speak to that from the family violence and sexual violence community. So thank you Minister for bringing the bill to the House.I am really concerned—and I will be doing along with my colleagues my utmost to ensure that this is not a case of missed opportunities. We take every opportunity to update the legislation which is over 20 years old that will really go some way to supporting the safety of our families. Some of the changes in the legislation that the Minister has outlined I also want to put some responses to. Protection orders are part of this legislation and there are changes to protection orders in terms of their accessibility. The legislation makes it easier for victims to access protection orders but the counter to that is that it does not appear that the requisite support to enforce a breach of a protection order is put in place. While it is easier to obtain a protection order will it be easier for authorities like the police for example to enforce breaches of protection orders? This is a question that I hope we get some answers to at the select committee.As a person who used to work in the refuge movement and ran a refuge one of the things that used to concern us in our particular refuge was the six women holding a piece of paper to keep our women and kids safe. We would want at this time the examination of protection orders to be as thorough as it can be so that we can actually provide protection through this mechanism with the requisite backup of community services and the police.The Minister referred to police safety orders providing a mechanism for people who perpetrate violence to have access to anger management and change management processes. What I have to say about this is that this is actually returning us to a situation that used to occur prior to the changes in the prosecution guidelines. In family violence specialist courts it became a requirement that in order to arrest an offender for family violence there had to be sufficient evidence that that offender could be prosecuted in court. So they raised the level of evidence that was required and what happened was that people who went through the family violence court—who would normally access anger management programmes as of right because the court mandated those programmes—had their access to court reduced because they were not being arrested because the evidence required to arrest had gone up.Within this legislation under the police safety orders we are returning to a situation that already happened. I am really grateful for that. However in terms of legislation we should be moving forward. What kind of support do those community agencies that provide the anger management and change management courses require in order to be able to support perpetrators who come through the process under the police safety orders?I am really impressed that there is a focus on children. There is a very clear statement in this legislation that children who are in homes where violence is present are impacted by that violence. Regardless of whether they witness it or experience it themselves they are impacted by violence. But again I say where is the requisite support to support those children who experience the trauma of being in homes where violence is present? There is a focus on the new crimes under the Crimes Act around forced marriage non-fatal strangulation and the whānau violence aspect where members of the family can be charged under this legislation.But in reality what is family violence like for our families? Our families come presenting multiple issues. They come presenting issues that are created by the stressors on families whether that is around poverty jobs poor housing low incomes poor health or whether they have been the victims of family or sexual abuse in the past. Family violence is a bit like a black cloud that sits across the whānau the families in New Zealand. Like a black cloud it impacts every single person. So any solution that we have to family violence has got to deal with all of those affected—not only those who are harmed but those who do the harming and those who witness and experience the trauma by being part of a household where violence is present.So in reality legislation only goes so far. While this bill hopes to deliver real change there are some aspects that I believe are missing which I hope that through the select committee process we actually have an opportunity to address. The first is: what is our overarching strategy to deal with family violence in the long term? Legislation alone will not do it neither will just applying programmes. What we need to do is we need to have a strategy to deal with family violence and it has to be a long-term strategy.We used to have Te Rito strategy. Unfortunately this Government cut funding to Te Rito which was a network mechanism that was a support for those providers of family violence services across the country. There were 27 networks across the country and the evaluation of that strategy said that the most effective way to work in family violence was through networks where services were networked and connected up to each other.Education is needed. We need to have an ability to raise public awareness to have some support for young people for example at school. We need to be discussing the issue of consent and we need to be talking about respectful relationships. All of these things we have had in the past but funding cuts to those organisations that have delivered that have meant that those programmes no longer exist or exist at a very low level.We need to provide support for our police to do the work that they need to do and we need to support our community organisations. We need to have appropriate public awareness like we do with White Ribbon or It's Not OK. Those programmes need to be supported.I just want comment on one other aspect and that is around integrated responses to people who experience family and sexual violence. There is currently a pilot running in Christchurch called the Integrated Safety Response. Funding was taken out of full-time equivalents in the community sector and reinvested largely into the statutory agencies into their response to family and sexual violence. We know from reports from the pilot in Christchurch that that is not entirely working as it was designed. Those community agencies that lost funding to support this programme have now been asked to pick up that work.There is a lesson we must learn and it is about taking the opportunity to get this right. At the select committee we must ensure that we examine this bill thoroughly and that we speak to the experts. The experts tell us what they would like and we listen. We take the opportunity to craft a piece of legislation that actually will at the end of the day keep our family and whānau safe. We in Labour are supporting this bill. We hope that the select committee process will add some real meat to the legislation. We are commending the bill to the House. Thank you.