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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Wednesday, 4 August 2004) . . Page.. 3434 ..

which means living together as parents and children. The problem is that for a definition of parent you need to go to the Legislation Act, which refers to a parent meaning the child’s mother or the child’s father or someone else who is presumed under the Parentage Act 2004 to be a parent of that child.

The Assembly will remember the debate of the Parentage Act 2004 which talked about surrogate parents and the like and did not really take into account the diversity of parent-like situations that families can find themselves in. And it is quite clear under the law that a child cannot have any more than two parents at any one time. In that sense, the definition of family is actually quite limiting and looks solely at the relationships between parents and children and not necessarily more broadly at all the other people who make up that family unit and impact on the lives of the parents and the children.

We need to have a greater focus on the multitude of family types, not just this definition that actually works to exclude, I think, families. Single parents, families with same-sex parents, extended family arrangements, single mothers who continue to try to throw off the stigma of being a single parent and not being deemed a proper family could see themselves being marginalised as they try to work with this commissioner for the family.

This bill does not necessarily rule them out from accessing the services of the family commissioner, but I think there is a perception there, under our current law, about whom we talk about when we talk about families. That rules all of these different types of families out.

Instead of setting up another bureaucracy like this, we need to be putting resources into youth and children’s services, into women’s services, into providing avenues for marginalised people to get help and advice, into providing more support for the families of prisoners, into providing more support for single men and their children and actually setting up situations so that, if they need help and advice on family matters, there is a place that will provide this support. I think that’s better done by a government agency, service delivery agency or a non-community organisation working possibly with the resources of government to provide that support, rather than an independent oversight body set up to review decisions.

A support system which considers the rights and best interests of children as paramount will do more to help families than a proposal that will not be able to support our most vulnerable at their time of greatest need. The best interests of the child need to be considered within and outside the family context, especially when a child may be suffering abuse. As we saw with the tabling of some of those reports yesterday, the place where some children suffer most harm is in their family unit.

So I think there is more work that needs to be done as opposed to saying that a commissioner for the family will be able to fix some of the problems that we have at the moment. We need to look at some more practical solutions to help families, to help them deal with the issues that they are going through, to provide greater parenting skills, to provide greater support whenever it is needed, not an independent oversight body in this sense, because I think that misses the point of what families need at this time.

We could have more practical solutions such as measures to encourage men to actually seek out and participate in counselling. We know that women attend counselling at

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