Collins Judith: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCollins Judith: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13210. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): I would like first off to acknowledge the work of the Justice and Electoral Committee on this matter. It has been a very good select committee and it worked very hard on this Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill. We have had tremendous work as well from the Ministry of Justice. It has worked right across all the stakeholders in this area.I make no apologies for believing that it is time to reform the Family Court. I speak as somebody with experience—around 22 years’ experience as a practising lawyer and quite a lot of it in the Family Court area and the family law area. What I know is that couples break up all the time. They split up all the time and they make sensible arrangements for their children all the time except if they get into a situation where they are encouraged to not make sensible arrangements or where they are encouraged to take legal action. In court we are talking about what happens to a child from day to day where they go for Christmas where they go to school. In fact it is quite normal it is quite average it is quite usual for couples to split up even when they have children.What is not normal or usual is for a child to be asked to have a lawyer to be able to say what they want. Most children can speak to their parents. Most parents can speak to their children. This is not to say that a lawyer is not someone who should be available when needed but the fact is that over the last few years what used to be an unusual occurrence—a lawyer being appointed for a child—has become the norm. That is not usual and it should not be.The member who has just resumed his seat Andrew Little has talked about the UN. Well actually I am really quite a fan of the UN but I would also say this: it does notbring up children. Those of us who do bring up children know that a parent’s first responsibility is to their child. It is absolutely the No. 1 responsibility before anything else. A lot of parents I have seen—Sue Moroney: The ones that go wrong so often. Why does it go wrong so often?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: That member may want to take a call herself. I can certainly say from experience that I have seen plenty of people who have gone through the Family Court system come out the end of it and say: “Well we were told we had to go through this otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get what we needed.” Actually if only they had sat down and had a chat they would have sorted it out.I make no apology to this Committee or to anybody else for supporting a family dispute resolution service to try to keep families out of court and to keep mums and dads away from court unless they simply cannot reach an agreement in which case the court should be involved. But let us give people as many opportunities as we can to resolve their differences around their children because ultimately they are their children and they have a responsibility to them.Part 1 deals with amendments to the Care of Children Act 2004. Yes people may be personally upset that their partner has decided to leave them or to go with someone else but there is no need to use their children to get back at each other. Many of us who have any experience in the legal profession know that time and time again we come across people whose entire lives have been destroyed by being pulled through the Family Court year after year after year. There are matters that have come to my attention as Minister of Justice where people spent hundreds of thousands of dollars around access to their own children. These are not people who are paedophiles. These are not people who abuse their children. These are people who simply wanted to have access to their own children and who were being denied it through a system of abuse of the legal aid system and of the Family Court. That is simply not good enough.If we can keep people out of court if we can get them to take responsibility for their actions rather than blaming their lawyers and if we can get them to take responsibility for their children I think that is a very sensible thing.Andrew Little: Who’s blaming the lawyers?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: The member asks: “Who blames the lawyers?”. Well having been a lawyer for 22 years I have listened to a lot of people blame everything on their previous lawyers but who after $200000 worth of legal fees now wanted to settle it. I think it is incredibly important for people to understand that yes people split up but there is no need for these matters to go to court unless every other avenue has been addressed. People need to be helped to be responsible for their actions.What we also know is that if we want to see the abuse in the Family Court system all we need to do is look at the way that the costs in the last 5 years have gone right through the roof—a 65 percent increase in legal aid costs out of Family Courts. Do we think for a moment that there is a 65 percent increase in benefits for the people who were going into the Family Court? No unfortunately there was not. Were there any better outcomes for children? No. Were there any better outcomes generally for families? No. There were in fact more people encouraged down a route that was going to actually tear them apart as families and also come between children and parents.We all know as parents that it is a very tough job being a parent. It is actually even tougher being a 6-year-old child being asked to have your own lawyer and having to tell your lawyer where you want to live. I cannot understand how anyone can think that it is anything other than frankly abuse of a child to require a child aged 6 years old to choose which parent they get to live with. That is like saying to a child: “Who do you love more Mummy or Daddy?”. That is not fair to a child. That is the role of the parents and if not the parents of the court. The court has the opportunity under this billto appoint a counsel for a child if needed but it should not be the norm. It should be in exceptional circumstances when it is needed not because the parents are not being encouraged to come up with reasonable decisions about their own children. It is for the court to be able to make a decision if they cannot reach that.I make no apology for thinking that parents need to be in charge of their children. They need to put their children first and they need to put their own personal views about the other parent second. It is not the child’s fault that the parents have split up and too often children feel that it is their fault because of the way in which the court system works. So family dispute resolution is something I am absolutely supportive of as I am of counselling when needed—when required by a judge or suggested by a judge. But it is actually time that Governments worked out—and this Government has—that families parents adults and children need to be able to get on with their lives. They do not need to have some nanny professional organisation whatever it is interfering in every single thing that they do. Parents will not be encouraged to take responsibility unless they are in fact asked to do so.Hon Phil Goff: This is all about saving money regardless of what the Minister’s saying.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Mr Phil Goff may well say that but he of course oversaw the biggest blowout in legal aid ever—the biggest blowout in legal aid ever. And yet I would think he should also be thinking: “Who benefited from it?”. Did the children benefit from it Mr Goff? No they did not. Who benefited from it? Certainly not the children. Were the people who benefited from it the adults the parents? No not them. There was not one better outcome for all of the money spent on legal fees on psychologists or on anything else. What it did was it strung out costs for years. It also strung out massive amounts of litigation that tied up these children’s lives for years.I think anybody who has heard some of the stories that the select committee will have heard and that I have heard—and that I know of as a practising lawyer before I came to Parliament—will know that whenever parents went to the wrong lawyer they ended up in litigation. They might have been there for years. This is not something that should be in the courts unless it is an exceptional circumstance and then the court needs to act quickly it needs to act fairly and it needs to act decisively.Courts should not be asked to relitigate where a child spends Christmas every year—the sort of nonsense that we have seen going through the courts. It is an absolute outrage that the taxpayer and everyone else and the children are being pulled through that sort of nonsense. The courts should be left for big decisions. The decisions around where a child lives and the big decisions about whether a child is safe are the decisions for the courts not whether a child spends Christmas this year with Daddy or Mummy. Those are the decisions that parents must be encouraged to make for themselves and only if they cannot should they then go to a court.This bill is about changing the way we think about family law. Family law should be about the children and it should be about the parents. It should not be about the lawyers the psychologists and all the other professionals who are very highly paid to do this job. This bill is an excellent bill. I would like to particularly thank those members of the select committee who undertook to review this law on the basis of what is in the best interests of children.