Prasad Rajen: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumePrasad Rajen: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 19 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13565. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour):Namaste Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to take a call in the final reading of the legislation arising from the Family Court Proceedings Reform Bill. But I do it with some sadness because this is the kind of measure in this area that ought to be supported across the House. There ought to be agreement across the House when we are trying to improve a system. These series of bills do not actually do that and I want to go through the three major drivers to this legislation as we see it.The first driver here is the increasing costs in the Family Court system. Let me talk a little bit about that because it seems to have become a principle by which this Government operates. It says that if something we are doing is costing more then by definition there is something wrong with it and we must reduce it without actually having a look to see why that cost is increasing. So when we do that the only argument we get from this Minister and from this process is that this is out of hand because it costs too much. And because it costs too much we must now find a system that actually destroys the very value of the services provided in the Family Court.The Family Court is 30-odd years old and it has served us well. It is a well-developed system. That is not to say that it cannot be tweaked. It can always be tweaked. But intrying to keep a focus on only the financial driver for this particular area of change what the Government has forgotten to do is to calculate the advantages of that as well. The Government has not done that. We have had no discussion about what the value is of the kinds of services that are provided in the Family Court and through legal aid to those who end up in this particular place. So it is a Government that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. The Government has not demonstrated its understanding of the benefits to those vulnerable people who find themselves in this particular situation.The Government has been very ready to spend large sums of money elsewhere. If we look at that—I think the figure is $13 million. That is what the cost is of this service that is being is cut. If that is all it is then why in a country with a budget like ours and in a country with a soul like we purport to have has it become such a problem that we cannot actually provide the kinds of intensive services our most vulnerable children need—it is mainly children whose parents are separating; it is the adults who make the mess and it is the children who pay the price—and actually get the right services there so that change can occur? Yet we are prepared to spend inordinately much larger sums of money to address some other presumed advantage. The Government has not explained that. The Ministers have not explained that.I think that the financial driver behind this is hard to actually be convinced by. It is what the Government has done for a long time. It may just be that the real driver behind this is the Government trying to hide its own mistakes—the mistakes it made in 2009 with the unaffordable tax cuts etc. The long-term effect of that economic plan is that the Government now has to cobble together even small sums of money from very very good programmes just to balance the books. It is selling whatever it can sell. The Government is cutting programmes like this. In the scheme of things they are very cheap programmes—not expensive at all—and they are doing a lot of good; certainly doing no harm. Yet this legislation puts that aside.I cannot imagine Tim Macindoe actually being supportive of something like that when I know he understands the needs of the children who find themselves in this position. I have respect for the member who knows that providing the right amount of resources the right kind of assistance the right kind of dispute resolution procedures and making sure there are no financial pressures actually resolves the situation. But no this is not what the Government is doing.This is the awful consequence of the Government’s long-term policy. It has made so much expenditure that it need not have made and should not have made. It is not producing the benefits and now the Government is having to cut deep into many of the programmes that are for the vulnerable.The Government has become rather nonchalant about making cuts to programmes for the poor. It has done that all across the board. Whether under the guise of welfare dependency or inefficient programmes etc. it has made all those cuts. And yet the other day when the botulism scare was on the Government offered a couple of million dollars to the companies that were involved and that had to travel to China to sort that out. They did not even ask for that. They did not even ask for that but the Government was very quick to make public moneys available—a couple of million dollars. I heard the interviews with the owners of those companies and they said: “We didn’t ask for this. Nice to have.” How about that kind of thinking when it comes to providing for our vulnerable people?The second driver of this particular legislation is something that the member Scott Simpson talked about a few minutes ago and it is this: the argument has gone that we know that many many more people resolve their disputes themselves. That is true—they do. But from there the logic is so lost. Therefore the Government thinks thateverybody must do that. That belies logic because the very point is that the small number who cannot resolve their difficulties end up in this particular situation. Therefore they are at the sharper end and therefore they do require the kinds of services that the Family Court currently provides. Yet under the guise of that principle—that so many resolve their issues themselves—the Government says we now do not need to provide these services to these more vulnerable groups at the sharp end. It does not make any sense to do that but it is a justification. It is an intellectually dishonest justification when the Government says that for those reasons it will take away all of these services.Well one of the things that have happened is the change in family form over probably the last 20 or 30 years. The family form has changed. The nature of the family today is very different from the traditional families in which many of us were brought up. There are many many different types of families and they form and re-form all of the time. That is happening all over the world. Any cursory view of our family form statistics in New Zealand will show that family form is now different. One of the consequences of the change in family form is that there are more disputes. So it is not surprising that we are programmed to require our courts to actually provide assistance to those family forms. That is what explains the numbers. We have not become inefficient all of a sudden; there are simply more cases.What the Minister has done in this case—because of some perverse attitude towards the law profession and I do not understand this Minister’s attitude to that profession—is that she is actually not even listening to her own expert groups which she brought together to give advice. She is not following that advice. So the logic of this is just not there to follow. This is an ideological trip of this Government. It actually is hostile to the vulnerable.But maybe there is something a little more insincere. I think the Minister and some others have been captured by a number of powerful people who can say “Look what my partner did to me.” and that is because of the services that are available to them in the courts. That ought not to happen and this Minister and this Government have got captured by them. I have heard those arguments as well by some people who want to fight with their partners in court and when they lose they blame the system. Yet the system was designed simply to protect our children.This is an ideologically driven set of proposals. It is based on flawed logic. It is based on a rather miserly attitude to a small amount of money. And it will end up having to be fixed up again some place down the track. So for those reasons we have fought against this legislation and we will change it when we are in Government. Thank you.