Goff Phil: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 18 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13488. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): The amendments to the Domestic Violence Act 1995 in Part 2 of the Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill are generally appropriate in my view looking at the evidence but I want to talk about the general point of how the Government has gone about putting this part together because when I read the bill I see that there are no less than 20 pages of deletions in the—Tim Macindoe: No fewer.Hon PHIL GOFF: No fewer if you like—no fewer. There are probably more actually—more than 20 pages of deletions in the bill that the Minister of Justice brought to the House. Any bill that a Minister brings where one part is almost entirely deleted and has to be replaced is a suggestion Minister that it was ill-drafted ill-prepared and ill-researched.There is no better authority for those accusations than your own regulatory impact statement which you delivered late to the House—after in fact the first reading of the bill had taken place. It said that although there had been some research done the research was limited. You looked at other countries—the United Kingdom andAustralia—despite the differences in the systems. The regulatory impact statement then said: “There is insufficient historical fiscal and statistical data to accurately predict the average costs of performing some of the tasks associated with … processes. There was insufficient time for piloting proposed processes or for undertaking an historical file review … to obtain further data”. It also said: “because of the time frame there has been limited opportunity to discuss the final proposals with stakeholders.” All of those criticisms Minister are from your own Ministry of Justice. When you bring a bill to this House where Part 2 of the bill is almost entirely deleted and rewritten that suggests poor preparation on your part. It suggests a bill that is half-baked in this part and unfortunately even more so in some of the other parts of the bill that we most object to.The other worry I have is that the previous Minister of Justice set up an expert reference group to give advice on this. Its members were people who on average had done 20 to 30 years either as Family Court lawyers or as psychologists. These were people who were enormously experienced in this area and the report from the Minister’s ministry says that it followed the advice of the expert reference group. Well the expert reference group was highly offended at that statement in the report and said that in key areas of that report in fact you Minister entirely ignored their advice. This is what its submission says about domestic violence—the very part of the bill that we are looking at. It said: “The hidden dynamics of domestic violence and abuse will mean that many women will be at risk from a new family justice system”—that is the system the Minister is introducing in this bill—“which creates barriers of costs rights to representation and legal aid and early intervention in cases by Judges.”—barriers in terms of costs barriers in terms of rights to representation barriers in terms of more restricted legal aid and barriers in terms of the judges being able to intervene before the dispute becomes nastier and more difficult to resolve.It also says: “It is the two tier justice system created by this Bill which significantly increases the risk for victims of violence.” So according to the experts appointed by your predecessor the effect of this part of the bill which purports to actually improve the situation for victims of domestic violence and the overall effect of the bill are to worsen the impact of violence to increase the risk to victims whatever happens in terms of the technical changes in this part of the bill. It is almost without precedent that a Minister sets up an expert advisory group that group is ignored and then that group says that the bill will do exactly the opposite of what the Minister comes to the House and purports that it will do. We are very concerned about whether the overall effect of the bill on domestic violence will be helpful.I want to look at the specific provisions of this part. The current legislation in terms of domestic violence allows for the issue of protection orders and the respondent under those orders is generally required to attend a domestic violence programme. The difficulty with the status quo—and this is where I do agree with the detail of this part of the bill—is that the programmes are heavily prescribed in regulation and the attendance by the other party which is not the violent party but the respondent is also very low. That suggests that the nature of the programmes that are being run for both the perpetrators and the victims of domestic violence needs to change. Many respondents do not complete the programme and the answer to that including in this part of the bill is simply to increase the penalty that applies. It goes I think from 2 years of imprisonment up to 3 years if I recall that rightly. Well I do not think that imprisonment because you failed to attend a programme is actually the effective answer. A more effective answer in this part of the bill would be if the programmes were designed to actually meet the real needs both of the respondents and of the perpetrators of the violence.So I think it is a good thing that we will improve the format and delivery of the stopping violence programmes. You need to assess it and that is provided for in this part of the bill. The assessment is a good idea. You need to tailor the services to more effective responses. I think that is good. The risk Minister—and perhaps you would like to comment on that—is that with the greater variety of programmes you may well have some inconsistency in programme delivery. I would like to know from the Minister what she intends to do to ensure that while you have diversity of programmes you also have a consistency in terms of the outcomes of those programmes that are sought.The second thing that occurs in this section of the bill as I have mentioned is increasing the sentence for breach of the protection order. The difficulty with doing that is that in many cases increasing the penalty could make victims actually more hesitant to report breaches of the protection orders. That again would have the perverse effect of achieving precisely the opposite of what you want to do in this section of the bill.The final thing I just want to comment on briefly is clause 35 of the bill which changes the definition of domestic violence adding financial or economic abuse to psychological abuse. The sort of thing that I guess we are trying to get at in this part of the bill is where one partner denies or limits access to financial resources or prevents or restricts employment opportunities for the other party. I think it is important that those things are taken into account as reflective of the sort of psychological abuse that can happen in a relationship and that part of the bill is helpful.So in summary the detail of Part 2 is actually quite good. I think it is responsive to a particular need and we are not opposing that part of the bill. But if you look at the wider impact of the bill because of the denial of access of people to proper justice procedures to resolve family disputes it will be as the expert advisory committee said to probably increase the risk of violence not reduce it.