Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

A particularly shameful aspect of the passage of this bill through the Senate last night is that the government has not acted as the government of Australia. It has not acted nationally. It's done some kind of deal for one state to get an additional number of judges and registrars. The delays in the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court are national. The massive work overload being experienced, in particular by judges of the Federal Circuit Court and in particular by those judges of the Federal Circuit Court who sit in single-judge registries, has got to the stage where some judges are dealing with a case load of 600 current cases. It's hard to even imagine how a judge would be able to cope with that kind of workload or do justice to the families coming before that judge.

None of that is going to be fixed by this bill. What would fix it, or go some distance to fixing it, is not just the measures that I've already described of the single point of entry, which is already happening, and the common rules, which are already happening, but actual increases of resources for both the Federal Circuit Court and the Family Court. That's what the government ought to have been doing. That's what the government has been told now for years.

For nearly eight years this government has been in power and it has stopped its ears to the cries of those who are experiencing these delays in the Family Court. It has turned its back on all of the sound advice that it's received from former judges, from practitioners and from the Australian Law Reform Commission, and instead it is pretending that there's some kind of fix in the effective abolition of the Family Court of Australia. It's a shameful day and it's a great disappointment to me and everyone in the Australian Labor Party that the government has proceeded down this course.

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