Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Family Law Act 1975 is one piece of legislation with which you do not want to interact. If the Family Law Act becomes relevant to your activities, you know something has gone wrong—terribly wrong. Family law disputes often expose the rawest of emotions, the deepest of personal hurts and the worst of human behaviours. Disputes lead to the loss of contact with your own flesh and blood and with your children, loss of business and employment, suicide and even murder. In fact, sadly, the history of the Family Court of Australia has shown that judges themselves are not immune to the latter.

Whilst practising as a lawyer, I saw the lot. As people grapple with their interpersonal grievances—sometimes egged on by unscrupulous lawyers, family members and friends—perjury with false, horrendous allegations seems to become the stock in trade. Make no mistake, it's not easy to legislate in this minefield of emotions, grievance, hurt, and betrayal. By its very nature, legislation is a one-size-fits-all approach. To seek to regulate and legislate in this fraught area, which exposes the frailty and fallen nature of human kind, requires the wisdom of Solomon on steroids. Legislation drafted—as it is—by people will never be perfect. Loopholes will be found and oversights will be uncovered, together with provisions that were well-meaning but have unintended consequences. Any parliamentarian worth their salt will have received representations on the perceived, if not actual, failings of the Family Law Act and its administration.

So, having said all that, it is appropriate that there be a full review of the Family Law Act and the family law system. The coalition government, in recognition of these factors and community representations indicating concern about the Family Law Act and its administration, has initiated the first comprehensive review. The task has been given to the Australian Law Reform Commission. I wish it well. I note that domestic violence and child abuse are going to be key areas of this review. Both are a blight on our society. As someone who helped establish, and was honorary legal adviser to, a women's shelter for a number of years, I saw many a victim of these vile activities. They are often life-wrecking and, indeed, life-threatening. The consequences cannot be overstated.

Sadly, in this area we also have opportunists who are willing to make serious allegations to intimidate, to get the upper hand and to avail themselves of a bargaining tool. These allegations are often thrown around like confetti in the family law system. Protection of women and children should rightly be a high priority of the system, and it's been designed to protect the vulnerable. Yet, the cynical abuse of such priority provisions undermines the very integrity of the system, gives it a bad name and demeans the issue. Specific provisions and penalties for false claims may be worthy of consideration. It would reduce perjury and help protect actual victims. Too often, initial allegations, which usually are against the father, are simply 'not pursued' or are allowed to be dropped—the tactical purpose having been achieved, or used as a bargaining chip for a later property settlement.

Having said all that, let's remember that most families are functional, that their dads and mums do a great job and won't need the family law system. But this discussion—a very worthy one, might I add, and I thank Senator Burston for bringing it forward—is a reminder that, as a government and a parliament, we should do everything to keep our families together. As that great Tasmanian, Dame Enid Lyons, so pithily opined:

The foundation of a nation's greatness is in the homes of its people.

To keep our families together, we need to relieve them of the scourge of unemployment and we need to keep household budget pressures down by providing them with reliable and cheap energy—just to mention two examples.

We need to salute the role of families as well, including fathers, so we need organisations like Free TV to desist from banning TV advertisements because they celebrate the role of fathers. To suggest that the recent advertisement by Dads4Kids required authorisation defied any logical explanation. Those wonderful advertisements, extolling the importance of fathers in the lives of their children, have been graciously run as a community service announcement for 15 years. Now we are told Free TV didn't ban them; they just required authorisation. With authorisation goes the free airing of the advertisement, thereby effectively banning them, given the charity clearly does not have that sort of money. So Free TV didn't ban them, they just used the system to ensure that they can't afford to run them.

Dads4Kids is known to be against changing the definition of marriage. Belatedly, Free TV, desperately trying to justify the unjustifiable, claimed this was the reason for requiring authorisation, because if someone went to their website they might stumble upon a submission supporting marriage as a man-woman bond, which was made to a parliamentary committee some years ago. By that standard, from now on can we expect Qantas advertisements to be required to carry authorisation as well? I dare say not. That is where Free TV has a lot of explaining to do. This unacceptable bias against Dads4Kids needs to be called out for what it is: political correctness gone mad, and another none-too-subtle attempt to punish those who are concerned about the consequences of changing marriage.

Suffice to say, it is overwhelmingly the fathers that claim systemic bias against them and their important role when it comes to the administration of the family law system. Often the claim is that fathers are not treated with any recognition whatsoever other than when it comes to maintenance, and then their importance is all of a sudden overestimated. Again, I stress, say and note that the vast majority settle these matters relatively amicably, but there have been—and there are—cases where livelihoods have been ruined and debts amassed, in circumstances where a better administration of the law may have led to a less charged situation.

Let's recognise that family law deals with the most intimate of relationships, the rawest of emotions. It is therefore wise for there to be a review of the Family Law Act and the system in which it operates. That is exactly what the government is undertaking with its commissioning of a root-and-branch review of the family law system. I trust the operation of the Child Support agency will be included in that. I'm sure that every senator in this place has had numerous representations in relation to the agency. I simply say that when I started in this joint 23 years ago the number of complaints was huge in comparison to now, so you can imagine how bad the system was then.

Soon this review will be underway, and I encourage everyone to submit their experiences, concerns and suggestions. To have a better functioning family law system would be a social good and an economic good. It would enhance our legal system's reputation. It would be fairer and more just to the individuals involved if we could reduce the conflict and the opportunity for inflaming this emotionally charged area. I congratulate the government on this initiative and I wish the Australian Law Reform Commission well in its endeavours.