Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Family Law Amendment Bill 2023 and the Family Law Amendment (Information Sharing) Bill 2023. I begin by thanking my colleague Senator Larissa Waters for her leadership and tireless advocacy over many years for better support for women and children.

The Family Law Amendment Bill will primarily amend the Family Law Act with the aim of making the family law system safer and simpler for separating families to navigate and ensuring that the best interests of children are placed at its centre. The Greens welcome the introduction of family law amendments aimed at putting children's welfare first in family law matters. For far too long our family law system has been fraught with challenges, leaving children caught in the crossfire of disputes and decisions that they should never have to bear.

Since the Howard government rewrote Australia's family laws in 2006 we've seen the presumption of shared care weaponised, instead of the best interests of kids coming first. The women's safety sector and legal advocates have long called for a child safety focused court. We look forward to these reforms moving closer to that goal—and I really thank all the advocates who have worked so hard for the changes that are being made today—but these outcomes can only be achieved with adequate resources, and the Federal Court and the Family Court and the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children remain woefully underfunded.

Gendered violence is at the core of many cases in the family law system, and we know that children frequently bear the brunt of violent relationships and protracted legal matters. The reforms proposed in this legislation are grounded in the fundamental principle that the best interests of the child must always be paramount. This means that the mental, emotional and physical wellbeing of our children must guide every decision, every judgement and every action taken by our family law system.

One of the most significant changes is the establishment of a single entry point for family law matters, which will not only streamline the process for families in crisis but also ensure that the focus remains squarely on the needs of the child. Another key reform is the focus on family violence victims. This report stresses the need for greater support for victims of family violence, recognising that this is a critical component of the proposed reforms.

The Australian Greens believe that women have the right to equal respect, responsibilities, opportunities and outcomes in society. Women have the right to enjoy equality to men in all spheres of society, and their human rights, experience, knowledge, work and other contributions to society should be recognised and valued equally to men's. That is why the Greens platform calls to eliminate violence against women at home, at work and in public and to massively increase investment in the measures that would help us achieve this.

In addition, one key way that the government can provide women with more economic security and support when fleeing violent relationships is by raising the rate of income support. Last year Anne Summers published her report on violence and poverty and revealed that government payments offered little support for those leaving violent relationships. There is still so much more to do. Our social security system should support people when they lose their income, when they fall sick and when they are seeking safety from a violent partner. Income support payments like JobSeeker are far below the poverty line and they don't offer the financial security needed for people to pay the rent, let alone find new accommodation.

I want to use the rest of my time here this morning to share a story with you which was told to our Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into poverty. This was the heartbreaking testimony of witness A. It shows why we need not just the family law system to be reformed but our whole social security system to be upgraded to truly put the rights of women and children at the forefront. We need holistic reform. Witness A told us:

Seven years ago, I unexpectedly became homeless as a result of domestic violence. It was in just one weekend that the coercive control that I'd lived with for my whole marriage suddenly escalated to the point where my life was threatened. When I tried to protect myself and my children, they were threatened as well. I went to a refuge with my children. My then husband withdrew all the money from our joint bank accounts, which was all we had, and he hid it. He also started legal proceedings against me in the Federal Circuit Court so that I would be the respondent and I would have no choice but to leave the refuge to appear in court and also to find and somehow pay for legal representation for the next 5½ years. That's how long the Family Court proceedings took. I had no option to opt out because I was the respondent.

So it's been seven years of alternating between precarious employment and unemployment, of homelessness and ongoing housing insecurity and food insecurity …

I'm trying to explain to my kids that we can't afford things but I'm not able to explain how we got into this situation, because of being legally barred from disclosing the domestic violence to them. I've had seven years of pretending to my kids that I'm not hungry or I've already eaten.

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There's the anxiety of ongoing abuse from the ex, with threats of retaliation at times, and also the ongoing financial stress from the financial abuse.

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I was not allowed to work during the marriage. I had a long time out of the workforce, and since then I've had to … take very low paid and physically—and psychologically—unsafe jobs. I didn't have an option. I had to remain housed; otherwise, I would lose care of my children. In two of those jobs, I was left with severe trauma from workplace psychological injuries, and each time the compounded traumas made it harder to find suitable employment afterwards.

With housing, I was put on a priority housing list seven years ago, but nothing's ever come of that. Over the last seven years in private rentals, I've never, at any time, paid less than 80 per cent of my income in housing. Sometimes it has been more than 100 per cent. But I knew that if I ever became homeless again, that would be the end of my shared care of my children. I've managed to stay housed only by, once, going begging to church authorities for emergency rental assistance and, another time, by receiving a one-off victim recognition payment from DCJ just at the point where I had no means of paying my next month's rent. Next time that happens, I won't have anywhere left to turn.

There have been a lot of health effects. The first few years I lost a lot of weight both from the stress and from not eating much. Then I had a lot of gut problems and developed an auto-immune disorder which I didn't recognise for a long time … Last year I had emergency gallbladder surgery. I knew I had some gallbladder issues, and I had a few bouts of excruciating pain, but I couldn't afford to see a specialist, so by the time I ended up in emergency my gallbladder was rupturing. I also have chronic migraines, but I can't afford to see a specialist or get good medication for that.

I've tried a couple of times to study part time to try to get some qualification that would help me get better jobs that would pay more than $25 an hour. Twice, I've had to quit the courses I was doing partway through because the supports just weren't there that would help someone in my circumstances to succeed in study. My kids' education has been affected as well, despite my best efforts to shield them. I can't afford the extracurricular activities and expenses. They wear donated uniforms. The teachers get them in trouble for not having the right shoes. It's really unfair. As my kids have got older, I've seen them trying to pretend to me that they didn't really want to do the things that they couldn't do. That makes me really sad.

In terms of my social life, it's really hard, because I can't just go and meet up with a friend for coffee—I can't afford to do that.

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Lastly, I want to talk about income support payments. A couple of times during this time, I've been unemployed for a while, and I've needed to access income support payments—first Newstart and then Jobseeker—but after my most recent experience with Jobseeker I decided I was never going to apply for it again. What I found was that the interactions with the Centrelink people and the job agency replicated the coercive control and the psychological abuse dynamics of the marriage that I had escaped. The loss of agency, the verbal abuse, the gaslighting tactics and the dehumanisation from those agencies made me suicidal. My risk of suicide was higher as a result of dealing with Centrelink than it was from the direct incitements to suicide from my ex-husband. I've decided that I would rather literally starve to death slowly if I am out of work again . I've come close to that a few times, but I'd rather go that way than deal with Centrelink again.

I want to thank Witness A for sharing that with us. It just shows the interaction of all of the government policies and systems that are needed if we are truly going to be putting the needs and the rights of women and children first.

This bill makes some welcome changes, but so much more needs to be done to support women like Witness A and their children across family law, housing and income support. So I urge the government to treat this bill as another small step forward and to commit themselves to make the holistic changes that are still required, particularly with income support and in investment in public, social and affordable housing. These are all required. They're actions that this government can take, needs to take and must take if we are going to put the rights of women and the rights of children at the centre of everything that we're doing.