Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

Politics can be pretty frustrating. Politicians don't often go for the obvious commonsense solution. Instead they go round and round in circles like a dog looking for a ball that's right under their nose. That's exactly the case with the Federal Circuit and Family Law Court in Burnie. The court was first squeezed out of the Burnie Magistrates Court in 2021. They found a temporary home in the Burnie Arts and Function Centre but it was only ever temporary. When the arts and function centre became unavailable earlier this year there was a flurry of panic. We've solved this problem for now; the family court is back in the Burnie Magistrates Court, exactly where it started.

But this short-term issue has raised a much larger one: there is no long-term plan for the future of the Federal Circuit and Family Law Court in Burnie, and it baffles me why, in the past two years, more hasn't been done to fix this. The Tasmanian Liberals are building a shiny new court complex in Burnie. Everyone assumed the family law court would go in there; they only need space once every four to six weeks. Except there has never been any agreement between the state and federal governments and the federal circuit court that the new court complex would be a shared space. It doesn't take a genius to figure out a shared space just makes sense. Everyone I've spoken to—lawyers, judges, council members and people in the community—agrees that this should be the way forward. The state and federal governments, along with the federal circuit, need to pull up their socks and work together to make this happen. The federal government will likely need to chip in a bit of cash for an extra court but I think it's a small price to pay for access to the justice system on the north-west coast.