Page 1321 - Week 04 - Thursday, 30 March 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
registrar will make an immediate child protection report to Child and Youth Protection Services.”
Think about this for a minute. In fact, Madam Assistant Speaker, I ask the members of this Assembly to put themselves in the place of the magistrate or registrar in this case. An application to amend a protection order comes before you. Both parties to the order have consented to its amendment. At the same time, you have every reason to believe that amending the order will put a child at risk. What must you do? Amend the order anyway. But do not worry too much about that, because you can then immediately file a child protection report with care and protection, let an already overworked government department handle the problem and hope, of course, that they are actually able to do so before anything serious happens to the child in question.
Put yourself in the shoes of the child. Could you reach any conclusion other than that the court has failed you? Why are we requiring magistrates and other officers of the courts, good men and women who we employ specifically to exercise their judgement, to surrender their judgement on these matters? If tying such officers’ hands is not enough, we then burden them by telling them that it is okay—as long as they then wash those tired hands of the problem by taking the extra step of filing a report explaining that they have just compromised a child’s safety.
Even if these two processes somehow worked flawlessly—I have serious reservations that they ever could—it seems far better both to me and to the stakeholders that have shared their concerns with me that these processes be reflected and supported in the law itself. That way, the law could at least advocate and protect the processes, as well as provide for child protection when needed, by enabling the Magistrates Court to amend as requested by the parties, to amend in some other way or not to amend a protection order at all in the event that these processes have been compromised.
My proposed amendments address these issues in two ways: first, by changing the language so that the Magistrates Court may, rather than “must”, amend an order regardless of whether the three conditions have been proven and considered. This change restores to the court its mandated role of exercising responsible judicial oversight in these matters. In addition, a new subsection has been added which states that the Magistrates Court must not amend the order if it can be reasonably foreseen that the amendment will place a protected child of a protected person at risk of harm by the respondent.
These small but very important changes will permit the Magistrates Court to amend protection orders effectively and less onerously when there is genuinely no safety risk, and the amendment is to the benefit of all parties and in the best interest of the child, without requiring any additional investigation or consideration.
On the other hand, the new subsection places a protection for cases where the safety of children and multiple parties may be at risk, stipulating that the Magistrates Court must not amend the order in these cases, even if all parties have consented.
As is often the case in legislation, the tension here is between the desire to simplify the process of amending a protection order in straightforward cases and the desire to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video