Care of Children Bill

This bill is about lost opportunities. That is a comment that has been made throughout the long hours of the debates on this bill. This bill, if the Government had had the courage to talk to people who work in the area of family law, and listened to families and children, would have gone a lot further when it needed to. Unfortunately, when the heat came on, the Government just whimpered on it. This was an opportunity for parental rights and responsibilities to come to the fore—and note, I say parental rights “and responsibilities”. Children in this country do not have enough by way of parental oversight in what they do. Instead, the Government’s big issue here is turning custody into day care. One of the big concerns it has is that custody of a child for a parent denotes some sort of ownership. Well, parents do own their children, and children do own their parents. That requires responsibility. Unfortunately, one of the great plugs from the Government is turning custody into day-to-day care, which is nothing more than childcare—unpaid childcare work. That is what the Government says of parents now.

One of the other opportunities lost was that in relation to guardianship. Guardianship is a very, very important concept in our law and for children. It is for the benefit of children. Yet this Government has decided that a partner of a mother can, after only 1 year, and with no court intervention, just fill out a form, trot along to the Family Court, give that form to the registrar, and become a guardian. In the select committee process those of us who actually care about parents, care about families, and care about children, had to fight to get some changes to actually show that at least these people who were going to be given this guardianship would have to front up with a criminal conviction record.

Having said that, that would not have helped those little girls in Masterton, because their mothers would have just gone willy-nilly along with this sort of process and thought it was fantastic. This was a lost opportunity to take guardianship and be even more serious about it. It was a lost opportunity to open up the Family Court. We have this morning talked extensively about why the Family Court must be more open. It was an opportunity to let the sunlight into the Family Court and to free people who are currently feeling that they are subjected to two very, very strange practices from some people who work in that area.

It was an opportunity to open up so that parents know what is going on with their young children. It was an opportunity for consent to medical procedures to actually extend through a little bit. It was an opportunity for notification for parents when children were having an abortion. Because the stupid thing about this law is, of course, that any parent needs to consent to his or her 15-year-old undergoing a dental procedure. Yet the Government whipped its people; it would not let them really go to their hearts and go to it.

💬 Hon David Benson-Pope: That is not true. The member is telling lies.

The Government did that. This was an opportunity to take paternity seriously. It was an opportunity for this Government to say: “Children need to know who their fathers are, and they need to have their father.”, but it did not. What did the Government do? It wimped. It wimped out on it because all it wanted to do—the whole purpose of this bill—was to say that men are women, women are men, and we are all the same. Well, we are not all the same, and I celebrate the fact that we are not the same. I have no problem—and I want to put this on record—with lesbian couples having children, or gay men having children. I do not have a problem with that at all. What I do have a problem with is when we have to say that a lesbian is a father. Well, she is not. She might well be the partner of the mother. She might well take over a lot of the parenting role, but she is not a man.

I speak to Clauses 1 and 2, and on behalf of New Zealand First I wish to make it clear that there is no way that we can support this gender-bending legislation. Legislation that states that a father is a mother, and a mother is a father, is gender-bending, and absolute claptrap. It is supported by the Labour Party, which has no regard for natural, biological family relationships. It is absolute common sense. A man can only be a father. A man cannot be a mother. A woman can only be a mother. She cannot be a father. Yet we have deemed in legislation that a woman can be the father of a child. I tried to move an amendment to clause 167 a little while ago to amend the Status of Children Act, which is part of this legislation, to make it clear that a woman could not be the father of a child in those circumstances.

That amendment was put forward to the select committee by the Auckland District Law Society subcommittee on those matters. That is not a trendy lefty or a trendy righty organisation. It is a good bunch of lawyers trying to make a good contribution to our society, free of charge. One must remember that the work done by the Law Society, and all those lawyers who contribute to it, is done for the benefit of the public. That subcommittee proposed an amendment to the Status of Children Act, which states currently that a woman, by operation of the Act, deemed to be a parent of the child, must be treated as far as practicable in the same manner as the father of a child. The Auckland District Law Society subcommittee said that that clause was worded clumsily and could be more appropriately and sensitively phrased.

The Law Society is being extremely polite in using the word “sensitively”. It means that it is gender-bending, absolute claptrap that shows that the Labour Party has no regard for the normal family relationship, which is the backbone of our society in New Zealand.

It is interesting in the United States that President Bush seems to have won the election, to a large degree, on the support of normal family relationships. New Zealand First would like to put a challenge forward. Let us have an election where we will see who stands for normal family relationships. We in this House are behind normal family relationships.

💬 Moana Mackey: Define “normal”.

Moana Mackey asks what is normal. A female Labour Party member does not know what “normal” is, so I will tell her what normal is. Normal is a man; normal is a woman. Transsexual and transgender is abnormal. That is common sense. Homosexuality is not normal; it is abnormal. A man is normal. A female is normal. The Labour Party, with its female takeover of it, has men who should not be called men. Labour Party men are not men. We know by this bill that Labour Party men are women. We know by this bill that Labour Party women are men. Members of the Labour Party do not know what is normal. They are horribly mixed up, and that is what will happen to this country if the Labour Party anti-family claptrap continues by young members who have absolutely no idea, no experience, and who want to take over this country. That is unlike Craig McNair in New Zealand First who is solidly behind normal family relationships, and exhibits that in his own life as well.

This legislation does little to change current practice. It is an utter waste of the taxpayer’s money and time. There is more important legislation that we should be confronting in this House, rather than this absolute nonsense that the Labour Party has spent tens of millions of dollars on to try to enforce the view that men are women, and women are men.

I have no objection to lesbians having custody of children. They can do a very, very good job in the circumstances in which they find themselves. But, there will be situations where lesbians will have the custody of children of natural parents, and we saw that in the select committee. A lesbian mother came along, she was doing a very good job, but she had the custody of the children of a normal father in the earlier relationship of her lesbian partner. The world is getting terribly complicated these days.

💬 Darren Hughes: Catch up with it.

The member wants to deride me. Darren Hughes does not support normal fathers and normal mothers. That is his choice. I support normal fathers and normal mothers. The people in Levin should know that Darren Hughes does not support the natural father or the natural mother. He can interject as much as he likes. I remind the people of Levin that that is what he stands for.

I rise to make a contribution to this part of the bill that talks about the title, the “Care of Children Bill”, which Opposition parties have realised is a complete and utter misnomer. This bill is replacing the Guardianship Act, an Act that has withstood the test of time, and does need a little bit of tweaking, but not in the way in which the Care of Children Bill has done. I guess that one of the most concerning aspects of the legislation is that it is another step in the relentless drive of the Labour Party to thrust political correctness down the throats of unsuspecting New Zealanders.

This bill redefines the family. I looked through it to see where it celebrates marriage, because this is all about children. Of course, as we all know, and common sense tells us, kids in a good married relationship family do better than children who have gone through family breakdown and all of the other trauma that that brings. Yet this bill does not celebrate marriage. In fact, when members look where marriage is defined they will find that it has been redefined. What is now in its place is that, according to Labour Government law, a married woman is no longer a married woman, but a partnered woman. A partnered woman means a woman, one, who is married; or, two, is married, but living with a man, or with another woman as a de facto partner; or, three, is not married, but is living with a man, or with another woman as a de facto partner.

This bill dilutes what has been an institution in New Zealand that has long been regarded as something that should be protected. In fact, Governments in other countries go so far as to encourage marriage. They do not do it for any moral or religious reasons, but simply because marriage is an institution, and kids do better when they are brought up in a family where mum and dad are committed, both emotionally and through law, to the ongoing family relationship.

This bill is a lost opportunity. It was an opportunity to put right family law in New Zealand—a law that has seen the marginalisation of children, and certainly the marginalisation of fathers. I was very hopeful that the Government would see fit to introduce concepts like shared parenting, like a proper open Family Court, and I have been disappointed to see that the Government has voted those amendments down.

One of the real concerns about the bill is that although it sounds good and has a “feel good” feeling about it, if it were renamed the “Marginalisation of Children Bill”, then maybe people would realise: “Hang on a minute! This bill might not do the things the Government is telling us.”

One of the real concerns is the concept of guardianship in the bill. The old way we looked at guardianship was that there was a mum and a dad and they were the guardians of the child, and other people could become guardians, in exceptional circumstances. But this bill totally erodes that concept. The Government will claim that it extends the status of guardianship, but effectively it erodes guardianship, because under this bill one can have any number of guardians. As we heard in the debate, another person could come into a child’s life, for no longer than a year, and then be made a permanent legal guardian. I say that that may be not very wise, and we may, in the future, regret the passing of this bill with such a provision in it.

But, more worryingly, we have already heard a lot about fatherlessness in New Zealand. It is a huge cause of concern, I believe, when one in three New Zealand children is growing up in families without a dad; and one in two Māori children is in that situation. Under this bill, because of the erosion of guardianship, the poor old dad, the biological father, who is no longer living with his child and in that family, is marginalised even further. So I say it is a sad day for New Zealand that this bill, which really gave so many people such a great deal of hope that family law was going to be fixed once and for all, is failing those people.

This bill, to my mind, reflects the Labour Party’s term of Government. It started off with some promise, but as it has gone on through the last 2 years it has deteriorated. We have had legislation such as the Prostitution Reform Bill and the Civil Union Bill, where the Government has started to introduce the social engineering that is so damaging to our society. We also have examples like the Supreme Court Bill, and now the Foreshore and Seabed Bill, where the Government rushes things through Parliament, contrary to widespread public opinion. We have just seen that occur with regard to clause 37 of the Care of Children Bill.

The bill starts off with very nice-sounding principles. They are ones that United Future welcomes, although I suggested in Supplementary Order Paper 294 in my name on Part 2 that they do not go far enough. Nevertheless, those principles reflect the important role that parents have in their children’s lives. New clause 4A states that the child’s parents and guardians should have the primary responsibility for the child’s care. Further on, the bill states that there should be continuity in the arrangements for the child’s care, and that the child’s relationships with his or her family group, whānau, hapū, or iwi should be stable and ongoing. That is excellent. It refers to both of the parents. It states that the child’s care and upbringing should be facilitated by his or her parents and guardians, and by all persons exercising that role. It also states that relationships between the child and members of his or her family should be preserved and strengthened. Those are really noble principles, so the bill starts off fine.

But by the time we get to the end of the bill, we find that it has degenerated into situations that are nothing like those concerning the care of children, and they are totally contrary to what is in the best interests of children. So the Care of Children Bill should be renamed “The Care of Children (but only if consistent with our PC social engineering ideology) Bill”. That is effectively what happens, because as soon as anything that is in the best interests of the child gets in the way of the ideology of this Government, then the Government moves away from that and follows its ideology, even though that will be damaging to families, to parents’ relationships with their children, and to the children themselves. United Future is strongly opposed to this bill for that reason. In this bill the Government has moved away from fine principles, and has started into those other things.

The obvious example of that is the debate we had last night on clause 37 and the Government’s refusal to interfere with the secret abortions that go on, whereby nobody knows that an abortion has happened except the doctor and the girl concerned. Parents do not know about abortions, and that has serious consequences for their children. I quoted an example of a rape situation that fortunately did not result in a pregnancy, but did result in sexually transmitted diseases and serious psychological harm to the daughter. The parents did not know about the rape and were not told about it, because the misguided codes of ethics of the medical practitioners’ bodies state that privacy rights extend to not telling parents what is going on in the lives of their young children. That is reprehensible, but there is nothing that this Government is prepared to do about that. It thinks it is just fine that parents do not know about the serious consequences that happen to their children.

I was just rereading my Hansard notes about the case I mentioned that happened earlier this year. A girl was raped, and the parents did not know about that. Let us think about the distress of those parents, who were left in a situation where they had a girl who had changed in her behaviour and who was clearly affected by certain situations. There were bizarre situations when the girl was in a restaurant and she would suddenly flip out, and the parents had absolutely no idea what was causing that. They were at their wits’ end. They came to the conclusion that it could only be the result of the school environment. They got to the point of thinking that they had to do something, and about what they could do, so they thought they would withdraw the girl from her school and put her in another school—that maybe there was a problem at school. Only then, when they approached the school about that, after having been distressed for 2 months about the girl’s attitude, were they told that in fact their daughter had been raped.

I think that is absolutely reprehensible. When this Government allows that sort of thing to happen without the parents having any right to know what is happening, then it is moving right away from the care of children, and from a situation where the best interests and welfare of the child are paramount, to a situation where it is prepared to protect doctors and allow that sort of thing to go on. It is prepared to protect criminals. That was a criminal offence—the rape of a girl. Yet the medical profession did not even report it to the police. Nor did the school report it to the police. That is a reprehensible situation.

United Future will not support this bill.

I move, That the question be now put.

I am not surprised that the Labour Party, under urgency, is trying to shut down debate on one of the most critical areas of New Zealand life, which is the area of family law. This bill is a radical experiment in social engineering. It is about undermining the critical role that parents play in children’s lives. What this bill does—and we can talk about the detail of it, as we have over this morning and last evening—is to increase the legal rights of the child, of new partners, of social workers, of lawyers, of judges, and of the police, and to improve the legal rights of iwi, family groups, and hapū. Every time we do that, we take away the legal rights of parents.

I was just astonished that when the Government introduced this bill, the Minister had the audacity to say in this Chamber that Labour was interested only in parental responsibilities, not in parental rights. It is interested only in parental responsibilities, not in parental rights. Is that not interesting? How many speeches have we heard from Labour Party members talking about gay rights, workers’ rights, and indigenous people’s rights? They are interested in all those rights, but when it comes to parents’ rights they do not give a toss, and that is a disgrace. It was interesting for me that again the Minister in charge of the bill, David Benson-Pope, said that we have a simplistic view in the Chamber that it is a parent who raises a child, and that that is wrong—that it is the community that raises a child. Do members know what my wife said about that? She asked whether the community would come around and change my son’s nappies at midnight. Will the community ensure that my child receives his food, and receives the love and care that is needed to bring him up? Of course not! That is political garbage, and this Minister and this Labour Government are imposing that on our country.

The Labour Party somehow believes that the family—a mother and a father who are bringing up children—is dead. I say to Labour members that the institution of the family predates the Labour Party, predates this Parliament, and predates the very philosophies that may drive them. The family is a lifelong institution that will survive. The people of New Zealand know that the only way they will stop this sort of PC nonsense is to sack the Labour Party at the next election.

💬 Hon Mark Burton: Oh!

I wonder whether Mark Burton told his constituents in Taupo that he wanted a law that stated women could be fathers. Did Mark Burton tell his constituents in Taupo that he believed that in this country women can be fathers? Did that member tell his constituents that the momentary de facto partners of this country will have all the legal rights of guardians? Well, we will be telling the people of Taupo that, which is one of the reasons that the member for Taupo will be out on his tail at the next general election. The people of New Zealand know that we cannot separate children’s best interests from the best interests of families. The most important thing for children is the family. What we should have is a families bill that states how this Parliament will support the work of families, in order to ensure that children get the very best deal.

I say that the National Party looks forward to being in Government, when its members can put in place some laws that will work for children. We on the Opposition side of the Chamber understand that parental rights are important, and sit right alongside parental responsibility. In contrast with the Labour Government, which wants to water down both rights and responsibilities, we on the Opposition side of the Chamber say that parental rights and responsibilities go hand in hand, and that children’s interests are best served when this Parliament recognises that it is parents who are the most important people in children’s lives. But sadly, that will not occur without a change of Government.

I move, That the Committee divide the bill into the Care of Children Bill and the Status of Children Amendment Bill, pursuant to Supplementary Order Paper 290.