Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

These bills, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia Bill 2019 and the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2019, attempt to implement a really, really bad idea: the effective merging of the Federal Circuit Court and the Family Court into one court, effectively abolishing the specialist court that works with families through one of the worst times of their lives, the court that works with couples that are desperately trying to work out how they are both going to live with their children and each other, are separating property and are already emotionally invested in one of the worst times of their lives. These bills make that situation worse by abolishing the very place that specialises in dealing with those cases.

You'd expect, given that this government is always talking about following the evidence—evidence based this and evidence based that—that there would actually be an evidential basis for this. You'd expect that there'd be inquiries and reports that actually backed up this really odd idea, which is no less than to abolish the Australian Family Court. Yet, when you look, that's not what you find. The Morrison government claimed that the proposed merger had been 'informed by independent reviews and inquiries over a decade'. The Attorney General's Department website lists five reports under the heading 'The evidence base for the reforms'. But, when you look at the reports, none of them recommend this. None of these reports even considered these reforms. These reforms just seem to have come out of the blue. With all of the inquiries into the Family Court system, all of the experts around the country and all of the people who work in it, this one came out of the blue. The idea that you'd abolish the court—not work to improve it, not give it more resources and not help it overcome its extraordinary backlog due to those lack of resources but abolish it altogether—came out of the blue. Only one of the five reports recommended restructuring the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court, and it recommended something completely different, which would have maintained that specialist Family Court as a standalone entity.

So there is no evidence, no consultation and no report that actually recommends this, except a short report by two accountants from PwC who did a desktop review of the two courts and decided that merging them was a good idea. For a start, those two accountants made a series of heroic assumptions, including that there was an equivalent level of complexity between the matters in the Federal Circuit Court and those in the Family Court, and clearly that's not true. Nobody who has anything to do with the Family Court or who has walked past a Family Court location or spoken to a person who's been involved in the Family Court would actually believe that. These two accountants did not have any special skills in Family Court matters, yet it is their recommendations which this government has taken up.

After that, the proposal not only has no friends but has enemies. Virtually every single expert in this field has come out against this proposal. No fewer than 110 stakeholders—ranging from the Law Council of Australia to women's legal services, community legal services, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services, child protection advocates and disability advocates from across Australia—have written to the Attorney-General asking him to abandon this foolish plan, which has not been thought through and comes not from experts but from two people who did a six-week desktop review and have no experience in the field, even though, for many, many families in Australia who end up in divorce, this is a crucial part of the solution-making for families in extreme crisis.

This proposal is opposed by 110 individuals because they believe it will harm vulnerable children and families in need of specialist family law assistance, increase rather than decrease the cost, time and stress for families and children in the family law system, place further stresses on Federal Circuit Court judges who are struggling under unsafe, unsustainable and unconscionable workloads and fail to address any of the fundamental problems plaguing the family law system, including the risk of family violence survivors falling through the cracks. No less than the very first Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia, Elizabeth Evatt, has said:

The proposed merger of the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court … will lead to undesirable outcomes for children …

These are absolutely clear statements from virtually every specialist. The President of the Law Council of Australia has said of the proposed merger:

It would result in the effective abolition of the Family Court … The … merger bills, if passed, would also mean that Australian families and children will have to compete for the resourcing and hearing time with all federal matters … There must be an increase not a decrease in specialisation in family law and violence issues. This is critical for the safety of children and victims of family violence.

You can't get clearer statements than these that this abolition of the Family Court will lead to greater risk for children. You can't get a clearer statement than that. On the advice of two accountants with no experience in family law, in a desktop review over six weeks, suddenly this government thinks those two accountants know more than all the people who have spent their lives working with family violence, with family break-up, in the best interests of children. It is astonishing that this conservative government that is supposed to have this admiration for institutions, that is supposed to understand the value of them, is breaking one apart because two accountants said it was a good idea. It is absolutely astonishing. Community Legal Centres Australia said:

… moving away from a specialist family court model would be a retrograde step and expose survivors of family violence to unnecessary risk.

The Law Council of Australia said the proposed merger is 'a terrible gamble with the lives of children and families'.

That's what we're debating here in this House today. That's what we're debating, except we're not debating it. I want you to think about what would have happened when Gough Whitlam introduced into the parliament the bill to establish the Family Court in 1974 if no government members had got up and spoken for it. Can you imagine if 25 members of the opposition had got up and spoken against it and not one government speaker thought it was a good enough idea to support it? That's what we've got here. When Whitlam introduced that bill there were 28 hours spent debating the bill. Fifty-nine members on both sides spoke on it. I looked at the speakers list this morning. I look at the speakers list every day. I know you won't be able to see it, and I can't hold it up, because it's a prop, but quite often we see a lot of speakers on our side and not many speakers on their side. That's quite common. The government doesn't seem to have a lot of members of parliament who actually want to get up and support the government in its bills. But for this one, there are virtually none. I understand maybe there was one. I have heard a rumour there might have been two. Two?

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