Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, may I agree with the member for Denison’s concluding remarks, which you so generously let him finish. This is not the end to family law disputes. Obviously, when the report Every picture tells a story came out, there was a lot of discussion about that. That report was well overdue. There had been significant changes in families in Australia since 1975, when the Family Law Act was first thought of and the court systems were set up, with ways of resolving these matters with less than full courts, on a no-fault basis, with the interests of the children or other matters to be considered.

I am reminded of a car ad—which is obviously not as successful as I think it is, because I cannot remember the name of the vehicle, but it is a four-wheel drive, possibly a Ford Territory. As it goes down the road, it changes from a car with a couple and the extra kids in it; then the dad is out of the car and there is a single mum; then the blended family jumps in; then we have empty-nesters—the kids have gone off. It really taps into what is happening in Australian society at the moment—that journey of families through the Australian culture. We have a vast array of types of families that we did not have in the seventies or eighties. We need to be focusing on parenting for better Australian citizens, citizens who are going to grow up to be contributors and net givers, not net takers.

I think everyone knows that I represent some singular pockets of hardship in Western Sydney that have a number of issues. In my area we are affected by a number of those social trends, in terms of the total absence of a father in children’s lives. I quite regularly see young males—say, 18 to 25 years old—who just cannot cope, and they walk completely away from their parenting responsibilities. The mother is on a very low income and generally may see $5 a week—although, if our changes occur, she may see $6 a week—but, at the end of the day, it is small compensation for not having someone doing the heavy lift with you.

I know, as a mother, that my husband’s parenting methods often leave me horrified because they are not something that I would do, but certainly my young son just loves a good rumble, a wrestle. I feel that a male’s way of parenting and interacting with his children is different from what I do as a mother but equally as important. It allows you respite between the demands of children and other things in your life, and it really is probably the easiest way of raising kids and giving them some options, some character traits from both parents, to choose from as to what they would like to emulate and the type of person they would like to be.

That is not so for a lot of children in my area. We are now at a point where 50 per cent of marriages break up and 30 per cent of children are born to unwed mothers. That does not mean to say that they are not financially capable of raising their children, but it is about the commitment to relationships and to everything that is involved. The member for Gilmore mentioned the Liberty Swing that was installed in her electorate through our school funding grants. A similar swing was installed at Kurrambee School, a school in my electorate for children with disabilities. I often marvel at the mothers who get a particular blessing from God and how they manage. Extraordinarily frequently it is a situation where the male in that relationship cannot deal with it and the mothers are left to go on alone. They do so most commendably and do the best they can.

So life chucks all sorts of curved balls at you, but at the end of the day you have to raise your children and as a nation we have to look at how our children are being raised. I see too frequently children figuratively grabbed by the ankles and used as baseball bats by parents to beat each other up over a failed relationship that they are feeling very bitter and torn about. They are so involved in their own emotions that they cannot see what they are doing to their children.

I make no bones about it: I certainly stood up in the party room and backed the tribunal option, where we would have a specialist tribunal that is inquisitorial, not adversarial, and one that can call its own evidence in the child’s best interest; where someone sits out the front with the skills to elicit from a mum and a dad, grandparents, cousins and extended families on both sides what support a young person needs to get their best go in life. It is not an order for one point in time; it is a rolling thing that goes with that person through until they are 18. Even if there is a dispute about the wedding, such as where mum is going to sit with her new partner and where dad is going to sit with his new partner, you could still keep coming back to this tribunal.

That tribunal did not eventuate. As with most things, life is generally a compromise, as the member for Denison put it, and I do not think anyone in the parliament quite got their vision of what needed to be done with family law. I think we all have a different point of view on what to do and most of us are sitting back and saying, ‘We’ll suck it and see.’ So we are going through with the family relationship centres. Certainly, they are a lot less costly than a tribunal. I have found that family law courts tend to become massive and expensive; that they start out as tiny tribunals that are supposed to fix things in a quick, efficient and cost-effective way but somehow end up as huge bureaucracies.

We have gone with 65 family relationship centres throughout Australia. The first 15 were announced, and the first one was in Penrith, in my area. That is no surprise, because my electorate and the electorates of Chifley and Greenway are largely areas with many very young children. These areas present particular challenges in terms of giving children the best start in life, as we often have to deal with young people who do not have verbal or other skills to cope with some very complex human emotions.

In one recent instance, a young fellow found out his partner was not faithful. He responded in a very Hollywood manner by kicking the wall, breaking doors, smashing furniture and carrying on. That situation ended up with apprehended violence orders that have gone on and on. It was over two years before he saw his child again. In my experience, he has a very supportive family with very involved grandparents. He is not a bad father and, with maturity and growth through life, this young man can make a really significant contribution to his children’s lives. So I think it was important to amend the existing definition of ‘family violence’ in terms of what is reasonable. What is reasonable given, for example, a person’s education and emotional maturity? Where do they get their learned responses to situations? Are they just acting out a sort of Hollywood drama or are they genuinely violent and a threat to their children and spouse?

I have experienced a lot of that sort of thing in my electorate. There are young men in my area who do not say, ‘Excuse me,’ but just biff their mate to get their attention. You can interpret that as violence, but it is where they are at in their lives, and I do not think it precludes them from being very caring and interested parents if they are given the chance, with a lot of input into what parenting means and what their responsibilities are as a parent. Hence I was thrilled when it was announced that the first family relationship centre was to be located in Penrith in my electorate of Lindsay.

The family relationship centres offer a tremendous change from the current situation. I hope that over the next three years of the operation of these centres we will see a cultural change so that parents do not make a first phone call to a lawyer, so that they will actively seek out parenting guidance on being mentors and role models for their children and that they will learn better ways of playing with their children and all sorts of other valuable skills, even if there is no chance of resuming their primary relationship. They can learn how to introduce subsequent partners or spouses into their children’s lives. I see a lot of very torn children who experience a revolving door of partners in their custodial parent’s life, which makes it very difficult for them to recognise a committed relationship, to have role models and to develop guidelines and the behaviours necessary to sustain those relationships long term, and they go on to have failed relationships themselves.

This is a landmark development. It is about enforcement, which is another complaint a huge number of people have made to my electorate office. The frustrating part of this matter is the amount of time my electorate office devotes to family law issues and child support issues. This should not be a political issue. It needs to be resolved out there in the community through the bureaucracies and structures we have in place. If this matter is coming into my electorate office, clearly there must be a political solution and we need to have the gumption to get up and do something about it. That is effectively what this bill does and what our announcement yesterday on the Child Support Agency does. We are taking some very big, bold, hard steps towards a different environment. I think there will be some mid-term angst and I expect that the phones in my electorate office today will be ringing off the hook over yesterday’s announcements. But in the long term I think we will see social changes so that there is an expectation that separating partners will take the view that: ‘I will be involved in my child’s life. Let me examine what that involvement will be and how I can best manage that and be the biggest contributor to it that I can. Let me examine how I can assist my ex-spouse or my ex-partner to successfully negotiate the raising of future Australians.’

There are some enormous issues out there. It is a tremendously changed world, for a crusty old conservative female. I shake my head sometimes and think, ‘Some of these kids don’t stand a chance.’ It almost started two generations ago with the breakdown in their own parents’ relationships. It is so difficult to mend. It is so emotional. People on low incomes do not have a huge amount of resources and quite frequently do not qualify for legal aid, and they walk away from situations and responsibilities. One fundamental thing that comes through in this bill is the child’s right to know its parent. If, when that child is a teenager, he finally decides that either one of his parents is an emotionally stunted, self-centred, immature, irresponsible git, that is fair enough. But he knows the parent well enough to make that assessment of their character instead of having a sense of abandonment that some imaginatively wonderful person just left them because he was not good enough. This is an incredibly important part of this bill. A child needs to know its parents. It needs to know both sides of its family.

I heard an incredibly sad story. It involved drugs. The mother had custody. Again, the father had just walked away—it was too hard; he was too young. He had got himself on the methadone program and eventually got a phone call out of the blue, when he was living in a friend’s caravan, to say, ‘Come and get the kids.’ He was dumped with kids of six and seven. Suddenly the children were abandoned with their father, who subsequently did a great job for a few years but died in incredibly unfortunate circumstances. The children are now with the paternal grandparents. You do not know what life is going to throw at you. Knowing both sets of grandparents and maintaining a relationship with both sets of grandparents is incredibly important. Grandparents need to be considered in the solution to what is in the child’s best interests.

I have seen the whole gamut of family relationships in my electorate—from the very wealthy and educated couples who impact terribly on their children to people who really were just too young and too ill-equipped to deal with the strong emotions that they felt and have taken incredibly bad parenting decisions. If nothing else, this bill reaffirms this parliament’s commitment to the children of Australia that we can do it better, that we can have a cultural shift where children know their parents—that is, where they know their parents at their worst and at their best—and know their grandparents. We see a huge change in this bill in access and enforcement of access. It goes to the point of quid pro quo—that is, make-up time—and even to community service for offending parents who spuriously decline access. I think that is a move in the right direction. Long term we will see some very significant changes in how adults deal with tough emotional times. They should not be impacting on the children the way that they do.

I suppose I am like the member for Denison—let’s suck it and see. Let us really see how we go with these massive changes. But, again, if they do not work, let us still have the courage as a parliament to come back and revisit this very difficult issue. It is not something that is going to go away. I am sure that 10 years from now the society in which we live will have even more complex problems, and we should never walk away from something that is just too hard and say we cannot do it. These issues create an enormous amount of work for me and my electorate staff. I want to take this opportunity to thank them very much for the caring attitude that they take towards the people who front up at my office. I do hope that their workload will be diminished by the measures in this bill, which will better equip us to help resolve these issues out in the community.

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