Brown SimeonSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to take a short call on the Family Court (Supporting Children in Court) Legislation Bill. Firstly may I congratulate you on your election to the role of Assistant Speaker. I think it's the first opportunity I've had to be able to do that and I wish you well in the role. I do just want to take a short call on this bill and most of the arguments from the National Party's perspective have already been outlined as to why we will not be supporting this bill in this first reading debate. Mostly this bill essentially puts the onus or the role of the Family Court which is a very important—it puts more lawyers in there rather than actually supporting the rights of children and trying to achieve quick resolutions. Fundamentally what we are seeing here is a bill which will undermine the changes which were put in place by the last National Government which did seek to encourage individuals families and children to come to resolutions and that the responsibility should be shifted towards them from in-court resolutions which do take a significant period of time. One of the comments from the member for Upper Harbour—she mentioned that this bill is about affirming the status of lawyers and affirming the role they play and the skills they have. I just want to say yes I acknowledge lawyers in our country have an important role to play. They have very important skills. But this is not the reason why we should be supporting legislation. It should be about how we can get resolutions for children in these circumstances.We've heard from Nick Smith about some of the cases very difficult cases and how the need for quick resolution is critical for the lives of these children. We've heard the statistics where we know that if a resolution can be achieved through mediation it only takes an average of 37 days. If we should be doing anything we should be trying to see how we can be ensuring more cases are dealt with through mediation and those forms of dispute resolution rather than lawyering up and having more cases heard before the courts. There's a number of questions that I have not had answers from in listening to the Government's members speak on this. What measures of effectiveness will be used to measure the success of these changes? I haven't heard from the Minister whether there's actually a measurement. Is there a measurement in terms of how many fewer days on average will be taken before a court hearing is had? Is there going to be a target that the Government is going to set? The Government—Tim van de Molen: This Government doesn't do targets.SIMEON BROWN: Yeah no. Tim van de Molen our excellent MP for Waikato he says This Government doesn't give targets." No they scrap targets. They love scrapping targets. But if we're going to make these changes how are we going to measure their effectiveness? How are we going to measure their success? Or are we simply just changing the law and with a hope and a dream thinking this is going to make things better? I challenge the Government on that question. What's the additional cost—what's the additional cost—and has there been a cost-benefit trade-off between adding additional support into mediation and adjudication services which will allow faster resolutions in these instances? These are number of key and important questions which I don't see talked about in the bill. I haven't heard any of those answers from the Government members. We will be scrutinising this bill at the select committee to ensure that it is robustly scrutinised because at the end of the day we need to see better outcomes for our children and for our families in New Zealand."