Borrows Chester: Family Courts Matters Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Borrows Chester: Family Courts Matters Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18574. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 I will pick up on a couple of points that were made by my good friend Paula Bennett. She was talking about triples and I wanted to draw attention— 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Name-dropper! 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: Well I align myself to as many famous people as I can. But I need to draw attention to those metropolitan members because they may not know that in the provinces some of these multiparty accords are actually celebrated. If any members have the privilege as I will have tomorrow to visit any of the bowling clubs they will find that on the boards around the clubrooms they will see that the clubs list the status of various people. They have triples boards and championships in the triples and all the names are listed. But they also have fours. Then the doubles are listed—well you know there are always quite a few in the doubles—and the poor people who are just in the singles. They are all on their own but there are heaps of them as well. So this is not something new that the honourable Minister’s speech-writer has come up with; this is something that apparently has lain latently within the provinces for a long time.  
However let me get back to Part 1 of the Family Courts Matters Bill. [ 
Interruption 
] I said “lain” not “laid”. Anyway the National Party is pleased to be able to support it in a major way because it does not refer to triples doubles singles or fours. The Family Court system must be a system that is open and fair and this bill increases the openness and the transparency of Family Court proceedings. We believe that that is a good thing. Those who have to go through the court process frequently feel bruised and broken by it more so probably than in other court systems. It is and has been shrouded in secrecy for a long time and we can understand the reasons for that especially at the time that secrecy was introduced. Really whose business is it other than those intimately involved with the break-up of a marriage-type relationship? Parts of the proceedings are not things that should necessarily be open to the public to scrutinise and comment on.  
However those who are at the core of matters proceeding before the Family Court and especially those who feel they have not had openness and due process shown to them are those who most want to have the dealings of this particular court open to some public scrutiny. We believe that that is a fair thing to happen. We mentioned in earlier speeches the incongruity of there not being a provision within this bill—and it would have been most suitable to have had one there—for DNA tests to be compulsory where for instance a parent particularly a father is accused of being the father. A father can deny that but has no means of being able to require a DNA sample to be taken so that paternity can be proven. Yet the Family Court as the law stands at the moment—and will continue to stand even after the passage of this bill—has the ability to require paternity payments child support payments from the accused father whether or not it is proven he is the father and he has no ability to prove he is not. That is a real anomaly within our system. Right across society there is a lot more openness and transparency put on a number of what have previously been private areas yet we have the ability to hold people to account merely on an accusation without any proof. I think that that is a bad thing.  
Another point I make is that we frequently hear in any discussions around the court system that the only people making any money out of this are lawyers: “It is a real heyday for lawyers—rah rah rah!”. You know I speak as a lawyer with a “long” history of practising in the courts for 2½ years and never appearing before the Family Court. But I would like to point out that that really means we have an adversarial— 
Hon Member 
: Did you win any cases? 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: I have never won a case in the Family Court— 
Hon Member 
: Have you lost any? 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: —and I can say that I have never lost one either. So there you go.  
Hon Member 
: Did you meet Denny Crane? 
CHESTER BORROWS 
: I sit on the fence—I should be in one of the minority parties and I have never met Denny Crane. But having said that the fact is that it is our adversarial system that forces lawyers to act in the best interests of their clients. It is the system that forces one side against another and it is frequently in an atmosphere of hostility and animosity that actually means that the lawyer has to thump the other side as hard as he or she can. That is the nature of the system. The fact that going to those depths costs frequently a significant amount of money is the nature of the work. If we are looking for something that is open and something that will be fair then maybe in time this country will have to look at the way it does the Family Court system.  
Finally I would like to make the point that we must never forget that the most critical people at the centre of all these issues that appear before the Family Court are frequently children. An acrimonious series of court hearings with children at the heart of it and scraps over custody and access can only leave them—the most vulnerable people within the system and those most at risk although counsel for the child are appointed—having long-term harm not of their own choosing. It is those people who will need to be most protected by the way this bill is implemented and by the way the Family Courts carry out their business in the future. Thank you.