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

One. Is that counting the minister or not?

An opposition member interjecting—

Two, counting the minister. The minister has to do it, so we will discount that one. One member has voluntarily got up and spoken on this bill, the bill that is going to abolish the Family Court, against the advice of the entire legal profession, on the advice of two accountants who know nothing about family law, and there's one member of the government who actually thinks it is worth getting up and speaking in favour of it—one. I don't blame them, by the way, because there is not much that they could say about it. Once they said two accountants thought it was a good idea, there'd be nothing else, because everything else that has been written about this says it puts children at risk. It increases the risk to children. Children's safety is being put at risk by this bill. So it's not surprising they're not getting up and talking about it. It is really not surprising. It is absolutely disgraceful, really, that they can sit on the government bench and not be interested in something as important as this is to children and families at the worst time of their life.

Nobody says there aren't problems with the Family Court at present, because there are. There are real problems with the Family Court. The main cause of the problem isn't a mystery at all. It's really clear. The Australian Law Reform Commission found:

… the family law system has been deprived of resources to such an extent that it cannot deliver the quality of justice expected of a country like Australia, and to whose family law system other countries once looked and tried to emulate.

Over the last seven years, in particular, the story of the Australian family law system has been a story of neglect, with the Abbott government, the Turnbull government—I get their order wrong; is it Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison?—and the Morrison government. It's been a story of neglect. In the Parramatta court, for example, we have fewer judges now than we had in 2008. I got up and made a speech in this House in 2016, way back then, when the queues and delays in the Parramatta Family Court were getting so long that judges were saying cases introduced in 2016 would not get a result until 2018 or 2019. When judges on stress leave—not surprisingly—had not been replaced, I got up and spoke.

We have fewer judges now than we did in 2008. After Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, we are next: the Family Court of Parramatta has the most cases. We are the fourth in terms of workload. We have eight judges—six in the Federal Court and two in the Family Court. We have delays of six to eight months for a family assessment. Even for a family assessment it can now take six months—or eight months for a family report by a family consultant, which forms the basis of many cases. It's an eight-month wait there, and that's before it even gets before a judge.

This is extraordinary. We have men and women and their children, trying to rebuild their lives, waiting years for an outcome. A one-year-old can be three or four before the decision is final. A 10-year-old goes through puberty before the decision is final. Can you imagine the additional strain this places on a family, the permanent damage it does to that relationship? What I know about this is that when two people have a child, they're connected for the rest of their lives. That connection is permanent. We as a nation want those connections to be healthy. We want children to be raised with both parents. We want them to have access if there isn't violence involved. We want it to work. We want parents to have a relationship, because they need that if they're going to raise their children well in a safe and secure environment.

It means parents can't make decisions about the school their child goes to or where they live—all the practical operational matters that families have to go through when they separate and try to figure out how to have two households with one child or two households with two children who move. They're incredibly complex matters. There's so much stress, so much anger, so much rage, so much hurt.

This incredible under-resourcing of the Family Court—for years—has made that worse. What do we get now? Now we get an Attorney-General who makes the extraordinary statement that, because the Family Court's struggling, he's not going to give the extra money in the budget to the Family Court until after it's abolished, until after it's merged. He says, 'Why would you give money to a system that's failing?' It's failing because you didn't give it money. It's failing because the government didn't properly resource it. There aren't enough judges. There aren't enough specialists. They've cut funding to legal aid. They've cut funding to community legal centres. They've cut the very structures that support families outside of the courts. The number of people going to the courts is growing year by year by year.

I'm going to come back to Parramatta, because it's really quite interesting. It is the fourth largest, but it also serves right out to New South Wales, right across the Blue Mountains out to the Central Tablelands. It has all of Western Sydney, across the Blue Mountains, into regional New South Wales. That's the area that it serves. And it has fewer judges now than it did in 2008.

If you look at population growth, you'll see that Western Sydney is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. Western Sydney will take an enormous number of people. There is development going on everywhere and there are new families moving in everywhere. Ask anybody in Western Sydney who has to commute what's happening in Western Sydney and they'll tell you about the number of people moving in, and the Parramatta court has fewer judges now than it did in 2008.

This legislation is going to make things worse. According to the experts in this area, this legislation is going to put children at greater risk. Just think about that. All the people on the government benches who aren't bothering to speak about this legislation should think about that. They should come in here and explain themselves. They should come in here and explain how, on the advice of two accountants with no experience, they're going to put children at greater risk.

See this speech in context