Clendon David: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Clendon David: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 04 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7044. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 This Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill is an important piece of legislation. The Family Court plays an important part in our judicial system. It plays an important social role in New Zealand. It is a more than 30-year-old institution and so it is entirely appropriate that we should have a review of its functioning to acknowledge its shortcomings and to seek better outcomes for those who are obliged to seek out its services. 
We can modernise—yes that is a good word—and a key focus a word that keeps popping up in this bill is “accessibility”. It is important that we have access to the court processes but it is more important that people have access to justice that people who are vulnerable have access to the protection of the State to which they are entitled and that people’s well-being is protected. Access in that larger sense is something that perhaps is lacking in this bill and that is one of the reasons we are unable to support it in its current form. 
It is proposed that the court and its processes are not sufficiently focused. That is a fair criticism. The fact that some of the processes are poor—equally these are reasonable criticisms and those we can take on board and seek good solutions for. But sadly—and Mr Goff in his far from hysterical contribution made this key point—the primary driver of this bill seems to be the focus on cost-saving. We have this bald number thrown up: $84 million to $142 million without an equivalent increase in applications. That is not a trivial sum of money but there is not a lot of detail given us around that. I think if we drill into that we will find that perhaps the implication of this massive cost explosion is actually not particularly well warranted. 
But critically it is almost an inevitable phenomenon of these sorts of cost-saving exercises that you end up not saving money but simply exporting costs. You find that the money that is saved in one place will be imposed elsewhere. If we create behavioural dysfunction and social dysfunction as a result of inadequate court provision of services we will relocate those costs to elsewhere in the justice system to the education system to the welfare system. There will be no net saving in dollars and there is likely to be considerable net increase in cost imposed on individuals on women on children and indeed on fathers who are involved in these processes as well. So let us not imagine for a minute that cost-saving in itself is a sufficient reason for the level of intervention and change that is being proposed here. 
We are told that this obligation to go to a dispute resolution process will mean something like 1200 cases coming to the court and 2000 children will not of necessity be exposed to a court process which is unlikely to be a happy process for them. But again those comments are very superficial. The point has already been well made by Mr Little that there is rather an odd logic at work here. It is revealed in the regulatory impact statement the proposition that there is this flood of cases inappropriately coming to the court. We do not have the information. One of the key data sets that is missing is that we do not know what percentage of cases of separation actually come to the court but we can assume it is around that 10 percent based on evidence from the UK. So it is actually 12 percent of 10 percent. It is a very very small proportion. And to suggest that there is in fact an overwhelming default to the court that too few people are sorting out their own lives and their own business and the welfare of their kids is simply not sustained by the information. 
We have had already submissions directly from some key organisations: Relationships Aotearoa the Association of Counsellors and the Law Commission. It is unfortunate that some of those submitters have been accused of self-interest the lawyers particularly. We know that lawyers typically rate around there with politicians and used-car salesmen in public perception but I would argue that people who go into family law—lawyers who specialise in family law—are very unlikely to be motivated by personal wealth. If you want to make a lot of money in the legal profession I suggest you would not be very bright if you chose family law as your area of expertise. We have highly capable very committed people in the legal fraternity working on this stuff and I think it is a fairly cheap shot to suggest that the lawyers are simply feathering their own nests.