Andrew Gee (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Attorney-General. Will the Attorney update the House on how the government's proposed reforms will make the court system easier, faster and cheaper for Australian families during the difficult period of family separation, and what are the dangers of taking a different approach?

Dr Aly interjecting—

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Cowan is warned. The Attorney-General has the call.

Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Calare for his question and acknowledge that he practised in this area and fully understands the difficulty that people face inside the courts. It was just last year that a committee of this House made a bipartisan finding with respect to the Family Court system that there was overwhelming evidence received highlighting the complexity of navigating multiple jurisdictions and multiple courts within the same jurisdiction. The same committee again considered, on a bipartisan basis, that 'the system of the two federal courts with concurrent jurisdiction should be simplified'. In fact, the overwhelming evidence for the need to reform the present system has been known for well over a decade. In 2008 a review commissioned by the then Labor government saw the Semple report say to the then Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, now Justice McClelland, that 'having two independent courts handling largely the same work has created confusion for litigants' and that having the concurrent jurisdictions has 'created a number of difficulties'. What I wanted to give the House was one example of those sorts of difficulties.

Last year there were 20,500 matters listed for final order applications in the two existing courts. Last year there were 1,200 matters, so that represents thousands of individual Australians who were moved from one court to the other. For example, if a matter was moved from the Federal Circuit Court to the Family Court, the family waited, on average, 11 months for that move to take place. After 11 months, they are literally required to start again in a different court with different rules, different forms, different procedures and different practice directions. In one case, a couple who started in the Federal Circuit Court in July 2015 were transferred to the Family Court nearly two years after filing and then two months later were sent back to the Federal Circuit Court. Now, can you imagine the difficulties, the unnecessary cost and the burden for that family, not to mention the turmoil and frustration caused that family in what is most likely one of the most miserable periods, as it was, of their life? Fixing that problem of transferals between courts will allow us to have hundreds more family law matters dealt with every year inside existing resources.

To address that very serious problem, the Turnbull government has announced today the establishment of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia. It is one single family law jurisdiction, one single point of entry and a single, more stringent set of initial assessment so that we can triage cases according to a sophisticated measure of their complexity. There is the allocation of $4 million to allow the new court to be enabled to lead a process of drafting all of the new court's rules, processes, practice directions and proceedings from scratch. That is so that we will have a single court with a single point of entry and vastly improved process for the tens of thousands of Australian families who at the moment are not being served well by existing arrangements.