Login
Family Court restructure must have ‘benefit of public input’
Changes to the family courts systems of the magnitude proposed by the federal government must be the subject of careful consideration by parliament, together with broader community consultation, argues the president of the Australian Bar Association.
Jerome Doraisamy
ABA president Noel Hutley SC said the association remains of the view that any legislation to restructure the nation’s family law jurisdictions requires “close and careful examination by parliament”.
To continue reading the rest of this article, please log in.
Create free account to get unlimited news articles and more!
“The structure and implementation of any reform of the area can only be determined if all interested parties have access to and appropriate time to consider the most up-to-date information available and particularly the PwC report which the Commonwealth Attorney-General has referred to be as being the basis of the current proposals,” he said.
This material has not been released, however, and there has been no public consultation about any proposed measures, Mr Hutley noted.
The ABA believes that measures of this importance should be the subject of “careful consideration” by parliament, he said, with the “benefit of public input” from the broader Australian community including the legal profession and representative bodies.
“The Family Court of Australia and its specialist judges perform important work in difficult and complex family law cases, but the court has been under-resourced for many years,” the ABA said in a statement.
“The ABA remains of the view that the court should not be dismantled after 40 years of operation without careful consideration of the value that maintaining a properly-resourced specialist family court would bring.”
NSW Bar Association president Arthur Moses SC agreed with the national body’s take, tweeting this morning that the nation's “family law system is too important to be the subject of experiments”.
The comments follow NSW Bar’s submission to create a “Family Court 2.0” and mixed reactions from lawyers and boutiques across the country to the proposal to merge the existing Family Court and Federal Court of Australia.
The Family Law Amendment (Family Violence and Other Measures) Bill 2017 is being brought before the Senate today for a second reading debate.
