Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

For the record, I would have thought that there were advisers here from the Attorney-General's Department who could assist you in answering that question. Actually, it was a landmark report. It was landmark because it was unanimous and bipartisan and both parties of government came together to produce fundamental changes to the family law system. Those particular recommendations were the result of the outcomes of many, many years of Family Court cases decided without any kind of legislative guidance on the value of shared parenting.

In March of this year, the Attorney-General published a piece in the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Advertiser and the Courier Mail, in which he said:

… the Howard government inserted the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility in the Family Law Act. This ill-advised step has created ongoing confusion and delivered prolonged litigation and conflict.

It is time to repair the damage.

I want to compare Mr Dreyfus's comments with the research published in 2014 by Professor Patrick Parkinson on the impact of the reforms made by the Howard government in 2006, which, as I said, inserted a presumption of equal shared parental responsibility based on a landmark report that was both unanimous and bipartisan.

At the time, Professor Parkinson was a Professor of Law at the University of Sydney. He'd been president of the International Society of Family Law, the chair of the Family Law Council and the chair of the Ministerial Taskforce on Child Support. His detailed analysis of the impacts of the reforms, published in the Dalhousie Law Journal in 2014, looked at the careful balance to those reforms, including the protections against violence and the increased use of mediation. This was one of the analyses:

The total number of applications for final orders in children's matters (including cases where there were also property issues) fell from 18,752 in 2005-2006 to about 12,815 in 2010-2011, a fall of thirty-two per cent over the five years following 2006—

When the landmark reforms and the landmark amendments were made to the Family Law Act. So, the Attorney-General's claim, which he uses to justify the changes, don't accord with the evidence. Do they?