Family Court Judges' Conference

May I begin by greeting everyone in the languages of the realm of New Zealand, in English, Maori, Cook Island Maori, Niuean, Tokelauan and New Zealand Sign Language. Greetings, Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Fakalofa Lahi Atu, Taloha Ni and as it is the afternoon (Sign).

May I specifically greet you, Principal Family Court Judge Peter Boshier, and other Judges co-ordinating the conference activities; Rt Hon Lord Justice Thorpe, from Britain; Hon Diana Bryant, from Australia; and other distinguished guests from both Australia and Singapore; Judges of the Family Court; ladies and gentlemen.

It is with very great pleasure that my wife Susan and I join you here this afternoon for the New Zealand Family Court Judges Conference.

For the two of us to be in the company of New Zealand judges and lawyers, provides a comfortable feeling because there are very many of you I have known professionally and many of you that we (that is Susan and I) have known as colleagues and friends for many of the last 30 years. 

I would like to thank you, Peter Boshier, for the invitation to be part of your Court's gathering in this beautiful part of our country.  Gisborne is the place where you were raised and practised law so it is literally a place of Turangawaewae that you should bring your colleagues here as Principal Family Court Judge for your conference.

As I commenced preparing what I might say in opening the Conference in my "whaikorero" I was struck by a strident headline in this city's newspaper yesterday which sets out a challenge to all of us with responsibilities to render just solutions for our citizens.  "New Zealand Justice System" it said, "Sucks".  Inelegant (vulgar even) and certainly challenging.  It provided, I thought, an appropriate backdrop against which to talk.  We are a country with a population according to the Statistics New Zealand's recent website readout of 4,281,768.  We are a country of relatively well-educated, well-nourished and rights-conscious citizens and described by the UN Secretary General ago, Kofi Annan, as "a country that works".  Part of those workings is an active court system which, since 2005, with no more Privy Council, is totally our own.  It has processes - for one mere example - Family Group Conferences -that are looked to positively from elsewhere. 

All the bright possibilities of this country can be shaded grey by misjudgments of the heart and home, by domestic conflict, loss and turmoil.  

The human impulse to create connections with others of our kind, to build households and raise children, can of course be the source of the most profound satisfaction.  In a 1921 letter, New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield expressed what is surely a common desire to (as she put it) 'make family life so gorgeous - not hatred and cold linoleum - but warmth and hydrangeas.'[1]

I need not tell any of you, though, it too often happens that trouble overlays and obscures any opportunity for stable domestic happiness.  The impulse towards intimacy contains also the potential for the desperate, sometimes violent, distress often resulting in family disruption of one kind or another. 

There are many of our citizens who wake each morning with a heavy sense of things having gone very wrong. 

As a society we legitimately expect that people will take what steps they can to deal with this, and we have a vested interest that they do so.  The functional family or whanau is a key, not only to the happiness of individuals, but to the productivity and well-being of the nation. 

So our systems can offer different kinds of support to those whose lives have been disordered.  We seek to assist them to find the stable place where they can recover themselves, and where they can discharge their obligations to others.

As is so often the case the thought has been better put by someone else.  In 1971, the New Zealand poet James K Baxter wrote that:-'Some lightness will come later/ When the heart has lost its unjust hope/For special treatment'.  He died the next year, 1972, coincidentally on the anniversary of this very day: 22 October. 

Thirty-six years on I think that perhaps nobody really loses the hope that what is special in each of us can be recognised by the world.  In times of trouble, the promise of lightness might more reliably come from confidence in the mechanisms of the social context - say the Courts, say the Family Court.  It might come from a belief that, where necessary, those mechanisms can operate to affect a just resolution - one that honours the rights and aspirations of affected individuals.

And it might come from the sense of genuine connection with other people: the great diversity of people who now make up the nation of New Zealand.  Confidence in our society's essential justice - and in its impulse to sustain justice - is one of the pre-requisites for such connection.  It underlies therefore the strengthened society that results from our really knowing and valuing each other. 

The increasing diversity of our country has a clear potential to further enrich the lives of each one of us, to provide us all with new opportunities. 

But we need to be receptive, creative and flexible in taking up these opportunities. The communities of New Zealand - shaped as they are by demography, geography, ethnicity and clanship - have their various wisdoms to bring to bear on the kind of country we might best live in.  That knowledge must be able to be shared with confidence and trust, and must be able to be received with insight and compassion. 

As the apposite Maori proverb notes: Waiho i te toipoto, kaua i te toiroa.  Let us keep close together, not far apart. 

That proverb is no bad notion, may I suggest, to express to Judges, much of whose work has be done individually - and for whom being together like this for two days can be richly rewarding.

At this point, with you all so atypically close together here in the Gisborne Conference Centre, I would like to take the time to pay tribute to the work of all the Judges of the Family Court.  I want to acknowledge the specialist commitment required of a Family Court Judge, the complexity of your role, the unwarranted criticism to which from time to time you are inevitably subject - but primarily the fact that the quality of your work supports, and is seen to support, the integrity of our society. 

I know that the Family Court is, to use the phrase of the young "as busy as", and the demands on you are considerable.  Placing on record the viewpoint of a very great number of New Zealanders who would not agree with the sentiment expressed in the headline in yesterday's local newspaper, I commend you for the way that you have met the current obligations placed upon you and at the same time advocated to make the improvements you have thought necessary.  Recent and imminent changes - including greater openness and transparency, and the ability to more quickly deliver justice - will in my view increase the mana of the Court.

The agenda for your Conference - something which I have long thought is the best evidence that attendees are acquainted properly with contemporary issues is I reckon a good working example.

In my respectful view you continue to make a valuable contribution to New Zealand which deserves affirmation. 

It is now my great pleasure to open the 2008 Family Court Conference, and in our nation's first language, Maori, to wish everyone good health and fortitude in your endeavours. No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, kia ora, kia kaha, tena koutou katoa.