Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish I could be as convinced as the member for Chisholm was in her speech just now about the committee's work and the report. There is something that the government can do immediately about the inconsistencies and the incongruences occurring in the Family Court, which includes up to four years delay for somebody seeking justice through that system. They could appoint the judges that have left that system through retirement or assist those judges who have over 300 cases on their dockets.

The Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs throughout last year had the opportunity to inquire into a better family law system to support and protect those affected by family law. Unfortunately, this is a subject I have an expert lived experience in. Recommendations have been made for an accessible, equitable and responsive family law system which better prioritises the safety for those involved. Many families across Australia access the federal family law for assistance and support to resolve the legal issues which arise following family breakdown, including those impacted by family violence. Family break-up happens all the time. Not all of them land in Family Court. The ones who do are there because they cannot resolve it outside using the usual mechanisms. These are special families who are incredibly vulnerable and need this parliament's and the legislation's full support.

I am well aware and all too familiar with the shortcomings of the family law system. The shortcomings for families who are impacted by this system are far greater than for those who are not. I would go further and say they are not shortcomings; they are absolute, abject failures, and the people they are failing most, and the most grievously, are children. The struggles families face following breakdown are difficult, and the legal system is complex to navigate, but it is even harder when you are marginalised by having family violence as a feature of that breakdown.

The inquiry was about the specific way in which family violence and family law interact with each other. The 6,000 or so pieces of evidence we took throughout this inquiry told the story of how desperately inadequate the system is at serving families affected by family violence. When the chair of this committee, the member for Corangamite, denied the judges of the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court the opportunity to attend a hearing, I was most grievously offended. The people who have the oversight, whose life's work it is, and who spend every single day presiding over this, were not invited. They were invited; then they were uninvited. That is an insult. When family violence is a component of family break-up, separation and divorce, the complexities and difficulties are compounded exponentially. For the committee to be unable to hear from those judges and the two voices who were the most expert on this, you must ask yourself how serious this chair was about actually getting on with looking into the job we were tasked with on behalf of the Attorney-General.

Our current system absolutely needs to change, and addressing the shortcomings with real solutions instead of tinkering and teetering with the versions would be an absolutely great start. The addendum made in this report by Labor members provides a good insight into our feelings on those, and our reservations in supporting this without a caveat.

Families that experience family violence need adequate support and management to be provided to ensure their ongoing safety and their wellbeing is a priority. This doesn't end when they hit the family law courts. And it is not just that they deserve it; we absolutely owe it to them. In this place, we talk about and we say we are aware of the impacts of domestic and family violence, but are we really? At least one woman a week is killed by a current or former partner. It is week seven of 2018, and we've already had to count nine women. When a woman leaves an abusive relationship, the very, very least we can do is to provide a legal system through the family law courts that does not exacerbate the abuse. This is exactly what we are seeing now. The committee have made 33 recommendations; seven of them are needed absolutely right now.

Recommendation 12 focuses on the imbalance created when an unrepresented perpetrator of family violence is legally allowed to stand up in a courtroom and query their victim. I'm aware the government has made an announcement to support ceasing this. The member for Griffith talked ad nauseam about this and we have spoken at length about it on this side. But it's only an announcement and you cannot hang your hat on it or feel warm and fuzzy on the inside over an announcement. An announcement must be followed with action. Victims need help now and I call on this government to move past the announcing and get onto the delivery.

Recommendation 19 talks about the assumption of shared parental responsibility. This is a hangover from the reforms made by former Prime Minister Howard. It's not surprising he didn't seek a woman's opinion on this, because I'm sure, if he had and he'd done some investigation, he would have understood this is absolutely the wrong way of moving forward. These reforms were hastily delivered and create a situation where the perpetrator of domestic violence can use the courts to continue to perpetrate the violence, continue the imbalance of power and use the courts to try and obtain custody from the person they committed domestic violence against.

Who are these people? When you commit domestic violence against the other parent in your relationship, you do harm to the child. In New South Wales, our jurisdiction says that a secondary victim of domestic violence is the child that is in that household. So what right, I ask, does a perpetrator of domestic violence have to rock up to a court and use the legal processes to try and seek a shared equal parental responsibility? They have a right, absolutely, to a relationship with that child, but they also had a responsibility and a duty of care when they were living under that roof and were a perpetrator of domestic violence. We have a law that currently says, 'That's fine; you're entitled to ask for it and to go through that system'—a system which takes up to four years from beginning to end, at exorbitant cost of up to about $30,000 or, in some instances, even more than that.

We also heard about the extraordinary circumstance where, when the child ages another two years, the perpetrator can then ask for the file to be reopened and go back to court, dragging the victim and that child back through the process all over again. I cannot begin to imagine the impact on those children or that victim in being re-traumatised over and over again. So, when we call for shared care not to be presumptive, it needs to be understood what that actually means. It's not some law where we just want to marginalise all these poor perpetrators of domestic violence; it's actually taking into consideration the long-lasting impacts that trauma has on developing brains and young children.

The penalties need to be greater. If you were to commit DV, would you continue to do it if you knew when you were doing it that it actually meant access to your children would be dissolved as well? I don't see it as a penalty; I actually see it as a responsibility and something that we could do to help move to end the cycle of domestic violence. We know violence creates long-term harm and the consequences do not cease once people have exited the family law system or once that perpetrator is removed from the home.

Of the women who fall victim to violence, more than half have children in their care. I say 'women' because we do know that there are more women than men affected by this. It's imperative that these women who land in the family courts are supported. With this in mind, I note recommendation 31, which talks about the disgraceful delays in the Family Court system—delays that, out of all of this, notwithstanding our judicial officers working incredibly hard, are the most important thing to be addressed right now. It is something where, with a very easy pen stroke to put more judges into those positions, we could start addressing some of the backlogs. It is unacceptable that a woman and a four-year-old child could enter a family law system and not exit until that child is in middle primary school. When you are facing these things, you face the prospect of not being able to make decisions about where your child is going to attend school or about who's caring for them medically. That is four years out of a developing child's life. You learn everything that you're going to learn between the ages of nought and seven. If we are subjecting children to this life of instability because Family Court's going to drag on for four years, we are not doing our jobs as parliamentarians and legislators, or good jobs.

Recommendations 27 and 28 talk about better training for judicial officers. Recommendation 8 talks about the abuse of power, which I touched on briefly, and how perpetrators continue to use the system to gain access to their victims and continue the abuse long after the victim has left the family home.

We will await the commission's review and recommendations to allow any reform proposals to be thoroughly considered before they're implemented. I would caution against the use of parent management hearings. During our inquiry, we heard it was on, and then it was off—it was on and it was off. The people who are supposed to be charged with the responsibility of delivering these parent management hearings cannot be sure about who's going to be served by the parent management hearings or who will preside over those parent management hearings.

Before I finish, I'd like to acknowledge the tremendous effort of the committee secretariat, who did an extraordinary amount of work and took on incredibly heavy evidence on behalf of the committee.

See this speech in context