Jacinda Ardern Labour's Jacinda Ardern will put forward an amendment to her adoption bill at its upcoming first reading to immediately fix the basic discrimination in the current law, because the full overhaul her proposed legislation will lead to will take a long time. The MP's private member's bill, which would task the Law Commission with reworking our antiquated adoption law, will come up for its first reading in the next few months. The law currently only allows married straight couples and single people to adopt, plus more recently de-facto straight couples thanks to a test case precedent. While fixing that basic discrimination will not fix all the law's problems, Ardern says her bill is a chance to fast-track that aspect. "So it's my intention to flag that I will use my adoption bill to set up the process for wider reform, but immediately clarify the question of who can adopt, just so we get that straightened out." It would mean as soon as it passed and set off the Law Commission process, the discrimination question would be immediately fixed. "There's no point having one without the other. It's just that one will take a little bit longer," she says, describing it as a "significant piece of work." Ardern points out the Law Commission over ten years ago wrote a report called Adoptions and its Alternatives, and in almost 350 pages told Parliament what needed to be fixed. "What my bill does is basically have the Law Commission finish that piece of work - turn its recommendations into a bill which would then come back to Parliament." She says otherwise, even with the very basic discrimination about who can adopt fixed, a lot of gay couples would still not find the law fit for purpose. "One good example of that is that because our laws are based on the 1950s, it means that only the parents on the adoption order maintain any legal relationship with a child. Everyone else is severed from that relationship. And that I don't think fits the modern situation of a lot of our families now. So removing the discrimination doesn't fix the whole problem," she says. Support for Ardern's bill is not clear cut because of unease about the lengthy Law Commission route being taken, and it's far from a sure bet to pass the first reading. She acknowledges it's a different process to use to resolve this issue: "But because of the complexity of the drafting, because we wanted to get it absolutely right, that's why we've chosen to use this process. Because in opposition we don't have Parliamentary Counsel Office to help us with drafting and we don't have a Ministry of Justice. And we wanted to make sure we got this right for kids." Even if Ardern is not successful, other irons are believed to in the fire on the adoption issue, which GayNZ.com Daily News will have full details of soon.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Saturday, 13th October 2012 - 5:09pm