Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter
AMENDMENTS TO the Maintenance Bill are to be circulated to all the
relevant stakeholders for their comments.
Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, Senator A.J. Nicholson, made the disclosure during his closing statements on the debate in the Senate yesterday.
The relevant stakeholders, he said, included the Church, women's organisations and men's groups.
The bill, which will require spouses to maintain each other, parents to maintain their children and persons to maintain their parents and grandparents, entered its fourth week of debate in the Senate.
But Leader of Opposition Business, Senator Anthony Johnson, scoffed at the suggestion that members of the public will get the opportunity to make their comments on the bill by pointing out that the right thing to have been done was to have had it referred to a joint select committee of Parliament.
Meanwhile, the Government accepted the recommendations that the bill be amended to reflect that the court, before granting an order of maintenance, should take into consideration the quality of the relationship the children and their parents had before granting an order of maintenance.
"The fathers abandon the children from they are young, gone on to other fields and when the young man or woman grows up and earning a lot of money, appears the dad, demanding maintenance," Senator Johnson reasoned.
