Barnett Tim: Relationships (Statutory References) Bill — Second Reading 
Barnett Tim: Relationships (Statutory References) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:18975] 
TIM BARNETT (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 As chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee which dealt with this complex legislation over a period of about 6 months I would like to commend the report of the committee to the House. I begin by thanking the submitters—we had many submitters on this legislation—the committee staff and the departmental staff who spent many hours dealing with the issues arising from the legislation. I also thank the select committee members particularly those who had a strong objection to civil union but were able to cooperate very positively in addressing some of the real issues in this legislation. 
I would like very quickly to go through a number of aspects of the bill. Firstly looking at the environment it addresses there are 186 New Zealand laws that provide rights or responsibilities to people who live in relationships. The committee discovered that almost exactly half of these laws—95—already cover people in married or de facto relationships and the remaining 91 cover only married people. We assumed that there was some dramatic difference between the 95 and the 91 in terms of the nature of the legislation; in fact there is very little difference. The only rationale that explains why half our laws cover married and de facto people and half do not is that the first category of laws—the 95—are either new to this Parliament in the last few years or have undergone reform of their original drafts. That means that over time this Parliament under various colours of political control has been adding “de facto” to existing legislation. 
The committee then went further and found out that before 1984 de facto couples were added to five laws; between 1984 and 1990 five other laws were amended to add “de facto”; between 1990 and 1999—when I believe Mr Worth’s National Party was in power—20 laws were amended to add de factos to married couples; and 61 further laws have been amended since 1999. I do not remember back in the 1990s allegations of social engineering or calls for referenda over the sombre reality of adding de facto couples to legislation already covering married people. So what we are doing with this legislation is effectively a tidy-up of a trend that has been going on in Parliament for many years. 
The second key point about the environment of the bill is obviously that we now have a Civil Union Act. The first civil unions take place on 30 April 2005 and no New Zealand law currently gives a right or a responsibility to people who have entered into a civil union; so the second purpose of this bill is clearly to give life to the concept of civil unions. 
The third social reality behind all of this is that according to the last census which was carried out 4 years ago a quarter of all New Zealand couples living together are not in a marriage. Among younger people—those aged under 45 years—that applies to a third of couples. So an increasing number of New Zealanders are living in de facto relationships yet half the relevant laws do not cover them. This bill amends the vast majority of those 91 laws that currently exclude de facto couples and it amends all but one of the relevant laws to include people living in civil unions. The committee really examined the bill on that basis. 
I would like to address directly a comment made by Richard Worth. He said that de factos opt not to marry or to civil unionise and that some do this actively and some do this passively. That is absolutely accurate. But when one actually looks at the legislation that is being addressed one has to apply the reality of a de facto relationship to the Acts being amended by this bill. For example there is a whole category of legislation that calls on the spouse of somebody who is on a board to have his or her interests revealed also but this legislation does not currently apply to a civil union partner or a de facto. It is in the interests of the wider society that there be transparency in the operation of boards. That is why we already have laws dealing with board members who are married. And quite properly for the benefit of the wider society those laws should be expanded to include de facto couples and civil unions. 
On the issue of access to a body in a mortuary currently the mortuary regulations that define who can access a mortuary to see a body apply only to married couples. Most people in a de facto relationship I suspect would not foresee themselves coming across such regulations were one of them to die and the other to want to get into the mortuary to view the body. 
To take another example income tax law currently has a mixture of treating all relationships equally and actually separating marriage from de facto relationships. This completes the process which has been going on for years bit by bit of treating all couples equally for income tax purposes. 
I will give a last example: there is a package of legislation around committal orders for drug or alcohol addiction that gives the partner of the person who has an addiction the ability to sign a committal order for that person and again legislation has to be amended so that de facto and civil union partners are treated in the same way. So these are all about realities. These are all situations that people can get into. We will now as a result of this bill have much clearer law. 
What we then did—noting by the way that giving civil unions and de facto relationships broadly equal legal status is not the same as giving them equal social status in whatever way—was to look in detail at the legislation. We have made three crucial changes. Firstly as touched on by the Minister and by Richard Worth we changed the definition of “de facto” to continue the current practice which is to define “de facto” as a relationship in the nature of a marriage. Into that we added “or civil union”. That was on the basis that flexibility would be maintained; that although the checklist approach—the definition of de facto relationships—may be appropriate for property relationships it was not appropriate for the vast range of scenarios envisaged by this law. Also we felt that a simpler more straightforward definition would encourage courts to handle disputes that might arise in the context of the law to which they relate. That was the first change made by the Justice and Electoral Committee. 
Secondly we removed some of the proposed new rights for de facto couples relating particularly to under-18-year-old de factos and also for inheritance rights when one of a de facto couple dies without a will. We felt that there should not be an automatic assumption that the surviving de facto partner should be the inheritor. A very particular amendment we made was that the Wills Act of 1837 which is currently being reviewed as part of a Law Commission review on succession should not have civil union added but that the Law Commission should be able to report first. 
A third point is on the language of the legislation. We found that not only was the bill as drafted a bit of a mixture so that on occasion the word “spouse” was read to mean “de facto and civil union partner” but also we found that a number of laws passed by this Parliament over the last 20 years also mixed up the language of “marriage” and “de facto”. We also recommended as touched on by the two previous speakers terms of reference for the Law Commission by the relevant Minister and those will proceed on a range of issues including people living in a non - de facto relationship with another person.. 
This is a moderate and common-sense approach to tidying up discrepancies that can lead to discrimination in our law. I commend the bill to the House.