Goodwill at risk over delays, says MP

The political goodwill extended to a cross-party effort to reduce domestic violence may disappear if two long-awaited reports on the issue are not released soon, says National welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins.

Last month, in the wake of the killing of baby twins Chris and Cru Kahui, MPs called a truce on the issue of family violence and held cross-party talks to try to find a way to prevent similar tragedies.

Politicians planned to meet again after two reports, on child homicide and on domestic violence, had been released.

Ms Collins said at least one of those reports had been promised "in a couple of weeks", and she wanted reassurance over its progress.

"One of the problems with reports like this ... is that sometimes they have unpalatable information in them and things we don't actually want to know because it's fairly embarrassing for us as a country," she said.

"I fear that might be part of the reason why there's been delays on this particular one. I'd love to see this report come out because we're never going to get an improvement until we acknowledge there's a problem.

"There has to be some follow up, otherwise I think it risks losing the goodwill that I think that all the people who were at that meeting felt they were bringing to the table."

A spokeswoman for Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope said progress towards the next multi-party meeting was going to schedule.

The Cabinet was to be briefed today and then a second meeting for all parties would be called. That meeting would be a briefing rather than a report release, the spokeswoman said.

The Weekend Herald revealed that the legal system was struggling to issue and enforce protection orders.

Figures in a new report commissioned by Auckland's Inner City Women's Group said that every month since last June there had been more breaches of orders than orders issued.

Last year the Family Court granted 2645 orders, down from 4066 in 1999. In that time, reported male assaults on females rose from 6949 to 7526.

Ms Collins said protection orders were well-meaning but not necessarily achieving the goals they aimed for.

"I would very much support us [in the cross-party context] having a look at how they are operating and how they could be improved.

"[But] you shouldn't actually have to have an extra piece of paper that says 'thou shalt not hit'."