Bugger

Kevin Hague is leaving Parliament for a CEO spot at Forest & Bird. Bugger - he was an effective MP, and would have made a great Minister of Health. But like other Green MP's before him, he'd done his time, and it is better to move on when you can still do something else useful than cling on grimly in the desperate hope of power like some do.

National doesn't care about justice

This week is the 30th anniversary of homosexual law reform in New Zealand. Up until 1986, consensual sex between men was illegal, and punishable by up to seven years imprisonment. Hundreds of people were prosecuted under this law, and jailed unjustly for something which should never have been a crime. But while the law was changed, its victims still carry those convictions. This week, Green MP Kevin Hague presented a petition to Parliament calling for those convictions to be reversed:

Thirty years on from homosexual law reform Green MP Kevin Hague has presented a petition to Parliament calling for an official apology to the men who were convicted before 1986 for having sex with other men.

He wants the convictions overturned and said it's time the government put things right.

"For those people who are still alive, this will have cast a massive blight on their entire lives most likely, the same might apply to families [of men who aren't alive], because one of the consequences of a conviction quite often is that it tore families apart."

Hague is right. Our government committed gross injustices. It needs to make that right. Forgiving convictions is the least it can do (arguably, its victims are also deserving of compensation). Unfortunately, Amy Adams has dismissed it out of hand as "too hard". Faced with an ongoing injustice, National just shrugs its shoulders and says "meh".

While there are obvious challenges caused by the conflation in the law of consensual and non-consensual sex, I don't think it is beyond the wit of the government to fix this. The courts are legally required to retain records, so its not as if the core data is missing; all it will take is some time spent trawling through them to find relevant cases. National's upfront refusal to do this tells us clearly that they simply do not care about justice. And if that's the case, the Minister should resign so we can get someone who does.

A worthy bill

Back in 2009, Acting Principal Family Court Judge Paul von Dadelszen called for a complete overhaul of the Adoption Act, arguing that it was outdated and discriminatory. Predictably, the government did nothing. But now Green MP Kevin Hague will be fronting a bill to totally rewrite the law:

The Member’s Bill places adoption in the Care of Children Act, as originally intended by the Law Commission, and makes the best interests of the child the fundamental principle underpinning the law. The Bill also:

• Ensures that all adoptions will be “open” unless exceptional circumstances mean there is a need to extinguish links with the child’s biological parents. While this has become common practice, the current law does not provide for it at all.
  
  
• Removes unnecessary restrictions on the kinds of people who may be considered to adopt, ensuring that adoptive parents can be selected from all the options, in the best interests of the child.
  
  
• Acknowledges, but does not regulate whāngai arrangements, which are instead controlled by traditional Iwi practice.
  
  
• Provides for the adoption of children conceived and born through altruistic surrogacy arrangements.

Its worth noting that this isn't just a Green effort; there's been a cross-party working group on it for some time, and National's Nikki Kaye has also contributed strongly to it.

This is a bill whose time has come. And it speaks volumes about the government's priorities that they are leaving it as a member's bill rather than progressing it themselves. But I guess ensuring fundamental rights for kids and adoptive parents just doesn't benefit National's rich backers enough.

Spamming the ballot for marriage equality

Two weeks ago, Labour MP Louisa Wall released her Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill [PDF]. Today, the Greens' Kevin Hague has got in on the act, with his Marriage (Equality) Amendment Bill [PDF]. While the two bills have the same goal, they achieve it by slightly different means, and Hague's bill additionally does some consequential legislative tidy-up. Which should be enough to avoid SO 277(2), meaning double the chances for a marriage equality bill being drawn.

If anyone else wants to spam the ballot, and make it three bills out of sixty, there's another version here which ought to slip through (on the basis that it changes the law in a different way from either Hague or Wall's version).

Progress on same-sex adoption

Nikki Kaye and Kevin Hague have finally gone public on their member's bill to legalise gay adoption. It's a good move - and a necessary one. Our adoption laws were written in 1955, and are geared mainly towards stranger adoption. Stranger-adoptions are now a tiny minority, and most adoptions are about getting the paperwork for blended families. What this archaic law means is gay couples not being legal parents of their own kids. And now, thanks to the High Court, we're in the absurd situation where that discriminatory restriction probably doesn't apply to same-sex de facto couples, but does to those who are civil unioned. The law desperately needs to be changed to update it for the modern world.

Ideally, the government would rise to the challenge, and do a thorough review of adoption law (that will also fix all the other problems with the Act). But National isn't interested in progressive social legislation, so its left to Kaye and Hague to do it via a member's bill - which will increase the chance of technical mistakes being made. Its not idea, but when the government abdicates its responsibility, its what we're left with.

It will apparently be a few months before the bill is ready for the ballot. If drawn, I think it will pass - the flaws in the Act are obvious, and I don't think the bigotry of a few is going to stop Parliament from fixing them. And hopefully, it'll convince them that these issues are not toxic, and that they can move ahead on removing marriage discrimination from the books as well.

In the ballot XXXIII

Another batch of Member's Bills currently in the ballot. Previous batches are indexed here:

Crown Minerals (Protection of Conservation Land Listed in the Fourth Schedule) Amendment Bill (Metiria Turei): would amend the Crown Minerals Act 1993 to require an Act of Parliament to remove land from the protection of Schedule 4. Land would still be able to be added by a simple Order in Council. This would prevent selective excisions to allow mining, and reflects the current regime for national parks.

Fisheries (Precautionary Approach) Amendment Bill (Kevin Hague): Originally a government bill put forward by Jim Anderton in 2008 and then discharged, this would amend the Fisheries Act 1996 to require decision-makers to take a precautionary approach in decision-making where information is absent, uncertain, unreliable, or inadequate. The most significant effect of this would be to shift decisions on the total allowable catch under the Quota Management System in a more sustainable direction, reflecting the international consensus towards precautionary environmental management contained in a number of international agreements to which New Zealand is a party. It's a sensible measure, but the fishing industry - which thinks that fishing is sustainable until the last fish is caught - hates it.

Resource Management (Requiring Authorities) Amendment Bill (Ruth Dyson): Amends the RMA to tighten the criteria for the granting of requiring authority status (allowing a company to compulsorily acquire land under the Public Works Act) by re-inserting a "public interest" clause. This was originally in the law, but was removed by the Resource Management Amendment Act 1993. Since then there have been several dubious grants of requiring authority status for private profit - most notably in the case of Central Plains Water Ltd for its unsustainable Central Plains Irrigation Scheme.

As usual, I'll have more bills as I acquire them.

Time for a new Adoption Act

The Herald highlights a speech [PDF] yesterday by Acting Principal Family Court Judge Paul von Dadelszen in which he calls for a complete review of the Adoption Act 1955. The Judge points out that the Act was drafted in a different era, where "stranger" adoptions were the norm, adoption was seen as a "clean break" with no contact with birth parents, and only straight married couples were seen as suitable parents. But society has changed significantly since then, and none of these assumptions are true any more. Today, most adoptions are legal confirmations of existing family relationships (e.g. step-parent adoptions), open adoptions are common, and other forms of relationship are generally on an equal footing. The old Act hasn't just failed to keep pace with the times - it violates fundamental legal norms against discrimination, breaching the BORA, Human Rights Act and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in eleven different ways.

Von Dadelszen calls for the Families Commission to conduct a complete review of the Act to bring it into the new millennium, remove discrimination, and allow same-sex, de facto and wider whanau adoption. Somewhat predictably, the Herald focuses on the same-sex angle, ignoring the real issues raised in the rest of the speech (though they do also talk about Kevin Hague's Adoption (Equity) Amendment Bill which is currently in the ballot). But its a bigger issue than that, and Hague's bill, while necessary, would solve only part of the problem. Von Dadelszen is right that the law needs a complete review. But I'm not sure that the Families Commission, with its recent high-profile bigot appointments, is the best body to do it. Over on Red Alert, Lianne Dalziel argues that the job should go to the Law Commission, who have previously looked at law in this area (giving us the Care of Children Act 2004).In the long-term, I think that is the best way to go. In the short-term, however, the need to end discrimination is pressing. If Hague's bill is drawn from the ballot today, then it should be passed. The attitudes behind the Adoption Act are those of the 50's, and its time we moved into the modern era.