Smith Murray: Care of Children Bill — Instruction to Committee Procedure In Committee 
Smith Murray: Care of Children Bill — Instruction to Committee Procedure In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:16639] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 I referred previously to the principles in clause 4A “Principles relevant to child’s welfare and best interests”. In United Future’s view those principles although they are fine in themselves do not go far enough. I have tabled an amendment to that clause stating: “(aa) the welfare and best interests of a child are best served when the child experiences the love and care of the child’s biological parents when they are living together in a life-long loving and committed relationship to each other.” The amendment is consistent with what United Future believes to be the principles that should underlie all policy that relates to family; namely that the family is the foundational unit that provides stability well-being and continuity to our society; secondly that marriage between a man and a woman is the most deliberate approach to the establishment of a family and that therefore society should promote and support it; thirdly that commitment stability and resilience are essential in marriages and all family relationships; fourthly that the family’s essential function is that of loving caring for and nurturing all its members recognising the need for an equality of well-being among them; fifthly that the interests of children are best served by growing up in a happy understanding safe home created by a loving mother and father supported by the extended intergenerational family or whanau; and finally that family membership requires a balancing of the rights duties and responsibilities of each member. 
The first of two particular aspects of my amendment is that in United Future’s view it is in the welfare and best interests of a child in all cases that the child is brought up by its biological parents. One of United Future’s real concerns in regard to the Care of Children Bill is the Government’s move to replace biological parenthood with social parenthood so that we get to a situation in which a child may have a multitude of parents because they arise through social connections rather than through biological connections. 
The second aspect is the lifelong loving and committed relationship. When children are not brought up in the lifelong loving and committed relationship of their parents they suffer and it is not in their best interests. Clearly that is best fulfilled through marriage. The Government and Parliament should be promoting marriage rather than doing things that will undermine marriage or simply lower it to a common denominator with other relationships such as the proposed civil unions and such as de facto relationships. 
Clearly the importance of permanency in a child’s life—ongoing permanency not the sort of permanency where parents decide to stay together on a day-by-day basis depending on what they feel—is absolutely imperative and should be encouraged by our society. The importance in the child’s life of the parents’ commitment to their relationship cannot be underestimated. Therefore in the Care of Children Bill—which fundamentally deals with the way we approach the care of children in our society and what is in their best interests and welfare—we should be taking the opportunity of promoting the stable lifelong loving and committed relationships that constitute marriage and not at the same time as we are expressing the importance of a child’s well-being undermining it by allowing facilitating and encouraging the sorts of families that clearly do not statistically provide the same outcomes. 
That is certainly true of the provisions in the bill that encourage single women to have children and that encourage same-sex relationships. In neither of those instances can it be shown statistically that the situations provide anything like the same sort of support that loving parents—and biological parents in particular—can provide for their children. It is particularly important that children have both a mother figure and father figure. Certainly there is a dearth of information because of the lack of relationships in terms of same-sex parenting but we know at least that even same-sex parenting research that homosexual researchers have done shows that children in those relationships tend to be far more sexually active and sexually promiscuous. As a nation and as a Parliament we should be putting principles in the bill that will encourage and foster the sorts of relationships that are best for children.