Logie JanJAN LOGIE (Green): It has been widely acknowledged tonight that we have a real problem in this country with sexual and domestic violence and child abuse. I think it is uncomfortable to say it but we do have an epidemic of this violence. You know I have got no doubt that if 2.5 percent of this country at any one time or 15 to 20 percent of people over a lifetime in this country got a virus that was completely debilitating for years and might even kill them then we would have had a different response. But that is actually the exact situation that we are in in this country with the levels of intimate partner violence alone. Domestic violence is that serious a problem and the good news about looking at it in that way is that it focuses our attention on the fact that if we intervene properly it is something that we can change. It is an epidemic that we can turn around.The Green Party will be supporting the Family and Whānau Violence Legislation Bill—of course we will. Just in the last term of Parliament I gave over 30 speeches in this House advocating for reform of our laws and policies relating to domestic and sexual violence so in many ways for me at least it is a real relief to be able to get the opportunity to start debating this legislation. It is well overdue. While I was giving those speeches last term and again in this term I have to acknowledge there have been some small discrete pieces of legislation that have passed that might be helpful. But also we have seen very significant erosions to our Family Court protections housing and social security which all provide vital protections for victims and when done right provide measures of accountability for perpetrators and those things together over time have fundamentally undermined protections which we need to be addressing. I do want to just briefly go through some of those areas of concern so that people who are listening can consider whether the legislation that is in front of us today is going to address the clawbacks that we have seen over recent times.Under the National Government we have seen changes to the police prosecution guidelines making it harder for victims to get cases to court and for perpetrators to get access to programmes to change their behaviour. We have seen reforms to the Family Court that removed protections for victims of domestic violence and that were roundly criticised as focusing on money saving rather than on safety. I am now hearing in the community—which has absolutely horrified me if I am honest—refuge advocates saying that they are now at times advising victims not to go to the Family Court because the decisions that are coming out of some of our Family Courts are putting those victims and their children in more danger than if they were not going to the court. We have been promised a review on this as has already been pointed out but we do need to be considering those things at the same time. It does not make sense to be looking at making changes to domestic violence legislation and not considering those reforms and the impact of them on the Family Court.Because of part of those reforms we have seen a loss of 25 percent of family law lawyers which has made the systems of support much more difficult to access and the restrictions that were put on legal aid resulted in some women paying thousands of dollars for protection orders which they cannot even guarantee will keep them or their children safe because the courts are not consistently responding to them and acting on breaches. In some cases the police are being told off for bringing minor breaches to the court and wasting the court's time because they are under so much pressure. Then the perpetrators are seeing that as a kind of free card and their violence is escalating and we are seeing much more harm. So we really have to be looking at those things in a package.We have seen an increase in the number of domestic violence cases going to restorative justice even though virtually no restorative justice practitioners in this country have been trained to safely work with victims and perpetrators of domestic violence and there is nothing in this legislation that is actually acknowledging that or providing any guidance on the appropriateness or indeed a level of skill that should be required for doing that work. There has been a reduction in baseline funding for specialist agencies which means that they have had to reduce paid hours cut services and spend money on a national fund-raising campaign to try to raise money to have a child advocate in refuges. This is why we are talking about this more. Demand is going up and we are seeing the police deal with this more and the very services that are able to provide the support are having to cut back. It does not make sense and the legislation—in the context we have been given for it—is not addressing that.We have seen a further loss of specialist kaupapa Māori services which we know are essential for effective processes for Māori and we have seen the introduction of a presumption of shared parenting in the Family Court and a provision in the Vulnerable Children Act that makes it easier for children to be separated from their protective parent as a result of the behaviour of an abusive parent. That has already been touched on by Jacinda Ardern but it is really critical to understand that while the outcomes of that are deeply profound—and that is part of the reason for the cycle of violence because one of the things that results from that reality is that a child is left not understanding who was wrong. Often they will think that they are wrong and that the person who had the power and who used the abuse is no worse than the parent who was trying to protect them. It sends children no message about the direction and where we stand in our values as a country. It is critical that we change that and there is very little in this legislation that does that.On top of all this we have seen changes to Housing New Zealand and Work and Income that make it much much harder for victims to re-establish themselves after leaving a violent relationship. Of course these have just been more barriers in the way of victims being able to get and become safe. This system has been described by various reports as broken fragmented and inconsistent with gaps and overlaps and no infrastructure to hold together all these services and outcomes. I am certainly going to be interested in the conversation that we have in select committee to test whether this is going to provide that structure. Is this legislation the answer to that broken system? Because on my first reading of it I have a concern that maybe it is not. We have an epidemic; we need a response worthy of that to actually let New Zealand know that we can turn this around. We can build safety in our communities and we need this response to seriously start doing that.However considering all of those terrible changes that we have been seeing over the last few years I do particularly want to acknowledge the Minister Amy Adams and offer her my wholehearted congratulations on getting this work on the Table. It is a turn-round from what we have been seeing and I do not at all underestimate the amount of work and the political skill that must have gone into her being able to get this across the line. As inadequate as I might think it is it is a very significant change in this Government's approach.There are just a few other points I want to touch on. In the regulatory impact statement it is pointed out that there is other allied work going on and that this is not everything. It talks about the Child Youth and Family reforms as allied to this. But that for me is quite problematic because that legislation adds domestic violence in a completely token sense. It is not at all integrated and does not address the problems that victims of domestic violence have been reporting to us for years.I also want to say that people I have spoken to about the bill are quite disappointed that there is nothing in here that is significant around the reforms of the Care of Children Act or the Vulnerable Children Act. It also talks about the work that is happening around sexual violence and the court processes there and I would like to point out to this House that we have been waiting almost a decade for that work and we still have not got it yet so it is pretty difficult to have confidence in that.