Rurawhe AdrianIMPROVING ARRANGEMENTS FOR SURROGACY BILLFirst ReadingTĀMATI COFFEY (Labour) (remote): I move That the Improving Arrangements for Surrogacy Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill.This has been a long time coming. There are many people around Aotearoa who have been waiting for change in this little space. I want to acknowledge them as we move forward into what I believe and many believe is a very innovative and very refreshing step into the future when it comes to the laws around surrogacy here in New Zealand. I want to dedicate this to all of our surrogates. In te reo Māori we call them kōpū whāngai because they carry the children of the future and often on behalf of others that cannot carry babies for themselves. This is not just a gay issue; it's not just a straight issue either. This is an issue for many New Zealanders who for one reason or another find it very hard sometimes impossible to be able to carry children themselves. Ever since I started on this journey I've made sure that I've been telling people this journey is all about making modern laws for modern families. We've come a long way from the old nuclear family the way that things used to be or at least the way that television and the movies like to think families were portrayed with mum dad and the two kids. These days we have all kinds of families and often when we have surrogates stepping into that role as well the family gets extended just a little bit more. So the goal is to create modern laws for our modern families and to make sure that this is a mana-enhancing process for our surrogates for our intending parents and for everybody that's involved in this. I'd say having had some lived experience in this area that the law is currently not a mana-enhancing system. At the moment we've got a couple of laws that have been cobbled together to try and solve the issues that we face in the world of surrogacy. They're not fit for purpose they are outdated and today we start the journey of change.When I've talked previously in public settings and to anybody that wants to listen about what surrogacy looks like and where my bill fits into this I'm very quick to say that surrogacy issues are far and wide. In fact I say there are this many issues [Holds hands in wide circular motion] that need to be dealt with in the area of surrogacy and my bill deals with about this many of them [Holds hands in narrow circular motion]. But still it's a start on a very long journey. I want to talk very quickly about some of the parts of the bill that is before the House and some of the innovative changes that we've landed on. The first part of the bill talks about amending the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2004. The way that the law is currently structured any surrogate that decides that they want to altruistically carry for another couple are only allowed what they call valuable consideration. It's a very legal term and for people that aren't legal beagles they sometimes get confused by that. But let me put it this way: it's a way that we are able to maintain the sanctity of the previously held notion that commercial surrogacies aren't exactly what we want here in Aotearoa but a way that we might be able to provide something for the surrogate. Because it's been so murky in the past it's been up for interpretation quite a bit but there are hefty penalties for couples for arrangements that enter into any kind of commercial surrogacy arrangement. So with that in mind the offer on the table the proposal on the table is to ensure that the surrogate isn't out of pocket ensure that if they choose to go into this arrangement that actually they're not left with expenses unpaid because of the law being in the way. Therefore I propose the change through this legislation the term valuable consideration" into "actual and reasonable expenses" so that the expenses that the surrogate has to incur as a result of her choosing to do this doesn't leave her out of pocket. I think that's fair and I think that's reasonable. Also in Part 1 of the amendment bill is the idea of a surrogacy register. At the moment if you want to find a surrogate you're forced to either go cap in hand to those people around you sometimes your family; sometimes if they say no your friends; and sometimes if they say no as well online Facebook groups which purport to match people up with surrogates who would like to carry for other couples. But I'd say that this is not the best way that we could do this. The creation of a surrogacy register that's administered through the Ministry of Health would help to be able to sort that and bring looking for a surrogate into the light and help match up intending parents with those people who choose surrogacy as a pathway to be able to start their family.Part 2 talks about court order—the ability for all parties that are stakeholders in the arrangement for the surrogacy to be able to go to a court well in advance of baby being born and to be able to agree to the terms and conditions of a court order: a surrogacy order if you will. What would happen in a surrogacy order is that provided all parties agree then on the time of birth the legal parentage of the child moves to that of the intending parents. The way that it is at the moment is fraught with difficulty. Sometimes intending parents can wait 10 days sometimes longer to be able to take parentage of their child. Often as I've found in my engagement with so many people that have been through the surrogacy arrangement it's not an easy step for a surrogate to make to go through this so the better you can clear up those terms and conditions up front and in the eyes of our courts the better off it is for everybody—again a mana-enhancing process. I'd also hazard to say that if we had surrogacy orders in place at the moment we wouldn't as a House have had to have gone through the Paige Harris Birth Registration Bill which is now an Act. But unfortunately in that situation baby Paige's mother had died in the process and baby Paige's mum was unable to be recorded on the birth certificate. Because of a surrogacy order if that had have been agreed to earlier on there would have been no problems with that. What I do also know is that there have been other cases that have come forward because of the gaps in our current laws.Part 3 talks about amending the Status of Children Act 1969 to make sure that if the court order is approved from birth the intending parents become the legal parents. Part 4 talks also about that too. Part 6 is a very interesting area because actually at the moment and anybody that's involved in adoption knows that when it comes to the birth of children the old way of thinking—when the Adoption Act was drawn up in 1955—was that a clear cut needed to be made between a child that was being put up for adoption and their birth family. This is absolutely at odds with how we see the world these days here in the future in 2022. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child says that we need to honour the whakapapa honour the DNA of the children that are born of every child that's born. The idea of a clean cut is no longer part of the accepted thinking in this space. So it would therefore be acceptable for us to be able to record on the birth certificate in a surrogacy arrangement all of those parties that make up that surrogacy arrangement. I believe that it's for the good of our tamariki and our mokopuna to know exactly where they come from and this is a really Te Ao Māori perspective on this as well. The ability to know your whakapapa to be able to connect into your blood and your history is everything and every child that is born deserves the right to know that. This bill will also amend it so that birth certificates can be recorded appropriately for those people in surrogacy arrangements—again creating a mana-enhancing process. The thing that makes this bill slightly different is that the Law Commission have been undertaking a review. It was a Government intention to be able to do a review into the area of surrogacy to be able to do a deep dive into all of the issues that we face in this area. I'd like to congratulate the New Zealand Law Commission for undertaking that work. They haven't yet reported their work back though so as this goes to select committee it goes knowing that the New Zealand Law Commission will very soon report their findings back and there may be a will of the Government to be able to turn that into legislation. As I said before there are a lot of issues in the world of surrogacy and this bill fixes just a few of them. I'm very open to the findings of the Law Commission report and look forward to seeing where they land and listening to some of their recommendations and whether or not we might be able to turn that into legislation—in which case I'm open to the idea of my member's bill being absolutely superseded by a strong piece of legislation informed by the work of the New Zealand Law Commission. That of course can be discussed in the Health Committee as we progress through this. I want to finish with some acknowledgments—some acknowledgments to the people that helped this bill—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired. The question is that the motion be agreed to."