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

Again, the body of evidence that Senator Hanson and I are presenting would seem to be mounting in favour of: there was not a recommendation from any of these reports to actually repeal the presumption in its entirety.

I'll now turn to the 2017 inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. I won't ask; I'll just tell—that seems to be lot easier, because we don't seem to have the answers with us. That report itself also didn't make a recommendation to repeal the presumption. In fact, what the committee recommended was as follows, at recommendation 19:

The Committee recommends that the Australian Law Reform Commission, as part of its current review of the family law system, develops proposed amendments to Part VII of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), and specifically, that it consider removing the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility.

So, to be clear, the recommendation of the committee was not to remove the presumption but to expressly ask the ALRC whether it should be removed—two fundamentally different concepts. Is that correct?