Mackey Moana: Sullivan Birth Certificate Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Sullivan Birth Certificate Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 19 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:16115. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): Kia ora. I am very happy to take a call on the second reading of the Sullivan Birth Certificate Bill. I congratulate my colleague and friend Louisa Wall on once again being a champion for some very important issues in this House and around the country. I also of course congratulate the Sullivanwhānau for having the courage to go out there—and I do not underestimate how difficult it must be to have a bill with your family’s name on it going through Parliament and being spoken about.Like Mr Hague I was on the Government Administration Committee for the marriage equality process but not for this bill’s process. But what really struck me about the marriage equality process was when you sat down and looked into the faces of the people who were submitting you realised that they were sitting in front of a bunch of strangers being forced to talk about the most personal aspects of their lives in order to see progress in human rights legislation. Not many of us who are just afforded these rights at birth have ever had to do that. We do not earn these rights. There is nothing particularly special about us when we are heterosexual. We just get all of these rights handed to us by the fact that we were born straight. We have never had to do that—we do not have to sit in front of a bunch of strangers and argue why we should be treated exactly the same as everyone else and why our family is just as valuable as everyone else’s families. When you go through the process of looking into the faces of the very real people who are affected by this legislation you really appreciate their courage and their commitment. So I imagine that to do that when it is only your family involved must be even more difficult. But it is just as important—just as important—so I really want to acknowledge the family that we are assisting tonight to address a great injustice.I was also on the select committee that considered the civil union legislation. The change in the tenor of the debate between civil unions and marriage equality was huge—in a very positive way. The civil union debate was very very bruising very very brutal and very very negative. The marriage equality legislation was not a walk in the park either but by comparison things had changed significantly and there was a lot more respect at the select committee for the marriage equality process than we saw for the civil union process.When we went through the civil union legislation a lot of it was about giving same-sex and de facto couples the rights of married couples without going the full way to marriage. But the stories that we heard were just truly horrific—in particular the case of the death or incapacitation of one family member where that family member was the biological parent of the child involved and where there had been a falling out with the extended family. There was a complete lack of power for the partner in that relationship to have any rights at all. So we had situations where couples who had been together for decades and decades in loving and supportive relationships and then one of them ended up in hospital. The family did not approve of that relationship so the family swooped in took over and went against the wishes of the individual who was sick in hospital. In these cases the partner had no rights—absolutely no rights at all. They had no rights in the funeral arrangements. They were not even able to see the person with whom they had been in a loving committed relationship for decades purely because theState refused to recognise in even the slightest way that their relationship had any kind of legal standing.A lot of this was addressed during the civil union debate but the one crucial part that did not get addressed by civil unions and remains an issue today is adoption. We acknowledged during that debate that the status of children of heterosexual civil union couples as well as of same-sex civil union couples remains a very grey area under law. It is one that does need to be resolved because at any time we can wind up with a situation like this where you suddenly realise that you do not have the rights that you expected you would have. I expect that a lot of heterosexual civilly united couples believe that they have those rights but in fact it is an area of law that remains very grey. My colleague Jacinda Ardern has a bill the Care of Children Law Reform Bill to try to address that. It is an area that we do need to address because when you are talking about the relationship between parents and children you are talking about something that is extremely personal. It is something that this Parliament should prioritise.One of the things that I think this bill really highlights is that the relationship you have with your parents does not end when you turn 18. Guardianship which was offered by the Care of Children Act is a very different thing from being a parent. You can say that somebody has a legal responsibility for somebody until they turn 18 but if anything I think that our relationship with our parents gets better beyond the age of 18. It stops being a kind of “You do this you do that.” mother-child or father-child kind of relationship. It becomes a friendship and it becomes a very very fulfilling relationship. So I entirely understand why it is incredibly important to have that relationship with your parents—a relationship that only gets better the older you get—legally recognised under the law. I understand why it is not enough to say “Well they are all adults and they should just get on with it.” No. I would be just gutted if the legal relationship that I have with my parents was in any way compromised by an action of the State.I want to make just two final points. I hope that this bill will have the support of everyone in the House. Given the amount of time that we spend in here and as MPs in the communities dealing with the horrific fall out from parents who do not want to be involved in their kids’ lives and the amount of time that we spend talking about parents who do not fulfil their legal responsibilities and who do not behave in a way that is conducive to a healthy relationship and a healthy child it would seem to me to be utterly hypocritical and repugnant not to support a parent who says that they want to legally be there for their child and for this Parliament to actually stand in the way and not allow that.I think that where we have parents who want to be involved in their children’s lives who want to take that legal responsibility and want the State to recognise it we should be doing everything to get the State out of the way and say: “Absolutely. We wish there were more of you.” We wish that every family had the strength and the love and the commitment that this family obviously has for each other to go through this process. Our country would be a much better place a less violent place a much healthier place if the kinds of commitment morals and family values that we are seeing in this particular family were reflected right across our society.Finally I want to end by making the point that this bill highlights a very real fact: until we get full equality under the law for same-sex couples there will always be loopholes there will always be families that fall through the cracks and there will always be sad cases like this where through no intended malice the law does something very very cruel and does something very very destructive in a family’s life. That is why full equality for same-sex couples must be the goal of this Parliament. If we truly want to see every family supported and every family recognised and to supportloving and good families then that will happen only when we get full equality for same-sex couples. Thank you.