Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The reforms contained in the Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Bill 2005 represent the most significant changes to the Family Law Act 1975 since its inception 30 years ago. They will create a new future for Australian families and for our society as a whole. The amendments in the bill address myriad problems faced by families going through the traumas of family breakdown—everything from custody negotiation and enforcement of court orders through to the establishment of improved counselling and dispute resolution services.

It is an enormous task to try to smooth out the peaks and troughs in our landscape of family law, but I think almost everyone who has experienced the trauma of a family breakdown would agree that these reforms are long overdue. I have met hundreds of men and women whose access to their children has been restricted, who have lived with domestic violence, who struggle with difficult financial commitments and who live with angst, hurt and personal vindictiveness that all too often come from relationship breakdown. I have seen many non-custodial parents becoming extraordinarily distressed from being deprived of contact with their children. In addition, I have seen the victims of domestic violence placed in unbelievably difficult situations because of the limitations of existing laws.

There has to be a circuit breaker which will see these non-custodial parents being able to enjoy their children and will ensure that the custodian of children feels free from intimidation and violence. The manipulation of either of these two positions—and we see a lot of that in our electorate offices, such as not sending the kids to court ordered or agreed contact times or falsely contriving domestic violence orders—should receive the full force of the law. Our family law system needs to approach individual cases on an impartial basis, with the presumption of shared responsibility and shared rights of parents and with the welfare of children at the forefront of every consideration.

I commend the work of the House of Representatives Family and Community Affairs Committee in compiling its report Every picture tells a story, which has provided a strong platform for the new raft of legislation. The committee’s inquiry into child custody arrangements in the event of family separation took 1,716 submissions from hundreds of different groups ranging from lone fathers associations to academic and legal centres, private citizens, politicians and domestic violence agencies. Members of the committee were exposed to and considered many points of view before the final report was compiled and I commend the committee and in particular its chair, Kay Hull, the member for Riverina, for the excellent work done. Just deviating for a moment from the general tone of this speech, I would also compliment Barry Wakelin, the member for Grey, Minister Brough and the former member for Richmond, Larry Anthony, who headed up internal coalition committees that, in turn, set the preliminary foundation for the Hull committee. Without the hard work of all four of these committees we would not be debating the merits of the amendments here today.

I consider many of the report’s recommendations to be straight-out commonsense and I am sure that they will make the quality of life of many families affected by breakdown appreciably better. Nurturing better relationships between separated parents is the crux of achieving better outcomes for all concerned, particularly for children, when it comes to family breakdown. The bill will help create a non-confrontational environment for parents. It will encourage them to come to access and financial arrangements without having to resort to the court system.

Under these reforms people will first have to attend family dispute resolution and make a genuine effort to resolve their problems before starting the parental order process. That is why the government is rolling out 65 family relationship centres around the nation as part of these reforms. One of these centres will be based in Bundaberg, in my electorate, much to the satisfaction of local families and community support groups. The centre will be the front door to the new family law system and will support families at all stages of their relationships by strengthening their family relationships, preventing separation wherever possible and enabling parents to resolve conflict in separation. All these things are in the interests of their children.

It is a sad fact that more than one million Australian children have a parent living elsewhere and almost 300,000 of these children have no contact with their fathers. At the last census 12 per cent of all families in my electorate were single parent families. If you like, in hard figures the figure for Hinkler was 9,395 single parents. That is an awful lot of people having to cope with tricky custody arrangements, child support payments, other financial arrangements and the flow-on effect on other relationships. It is also an awful lot of children to have limited contact with the non-custodial parent.

An Australian Bureau of Statistics report of 2003 showed that 26 per cent of children in broken households saw their non-custodial parent less than once a year or not at all—26 per cent. The same report showed that 49 per cent of children from broken homes never had an overnight stay with a non-custodial parent. That is a shame. That is nearly half—very bad.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies report Parent-child contact and post-separation parenting arrangements of 2004 backed up those figures with its own startling results. The indicators for custodial mothers whose children have little or no contact with their fathers were quite alarming: 53 per cent of these mothers were unemployed, 50 per cent had no educational qualifications, almost 61 per cent did not own their own homes, 54 per cent had personal incomes of less than $15,000 and more than 70 per cent received no child support. What sort of environment is that for a child to grow up in?

The same study showed a very different result for mothers who had shared care arrangements with the father of their children—and that is not to say that they got on well but that they had got the relationship down to a sensible basis. When you look at the figures there, almost 47 per cent of those women had full-time employment, 67 per cent owned their own home, 35 per cent had a personal income upwards of $35,000 and more than 50 per cent received child support payments.

Perhaps an argument could be made that people who have had few advantages in life, those who are both figuratively and literally holding the baby, are more at risk. But, alternatively, these figures could support the case that separated parents who share custody of their children ultimately enjoy a more stable and fulfilling lifestyle. I think that is what we should use as a starting point. Undoubtedly, the best possible outcome for children in many instances is shared parenting custody arrangements. I am a strong believer that magistrates hearing such cases should enter the hearings with the presupposition that parents have equal shared responsibility and have equal time with the child or children to the extent that that is physically possible.

Of course, the facts of modern-day life mean that shared parenting can only work in a limited number of cases where parents live in reasonably close proximity. It is simply unrealistic to expect children to travel from one parent to the other over long distances time and time again. That creates its own level of dysfunction. In that instance, courts must consider an arrangement for children to spend substantially more time with both parents that will translate into not just weekends and holidays but also doing day-to-day things with them that other kids expect and enjoy.

I also applaud the direction that courts must also consider whether parents fail to fulfil their major responsibilities, like failing to pay child support or not turning up for prearranged pick-ups. When these reforms were first announced, I was quite surprised to receive feedback from one women’s domestic violence group concerning these reforms, saying that these reforms could lead to greater violence being inflicted on women and children. I do not accept that. One point they made particularly angered me. It was this group’s assertion that women, in the main—they did not say exclusively—claiming to have experienced domestic violence should not have to produce evidence of these claims. This is quite an outrageous expectation and one that is punitive with regard to fathers. It is only right and proper that, if an individual wants to make a serious allegation about a former partner, they should front up with the evidence and not just expect that a magistrate will take their word on something which will have lifelong ramifications for the members of that family.

I see a lot of this. In fact, there is one particular lawyer—I had better not name the town; let us say that it is in my general vicinity—whose modus operandi is this: ‘Take off and get into a house somewhere; it will take him three months to find you and, when he gets there, no matter how calm or good he is, slap a domestic violence order on him.’ One of the ex-wives said, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ This lawyer said, ‘It will be better when we get it into the Family Court later.’ That sort of thing is going on. I am not saying that every person does it, but there are even lawyers producing it. I think the new arrangements that are part of this bill which take some of the adversarial nature out of the issues will lead to a much better lifestyle for people.

I further believe that it is only right that individuals who present false evidence to courts should be suitably punished as they would be punished in any other court for a similar misdemeanour. Of course, where there is real violence and threatening behaviour, the court should be equally tough. Magistrates should take it into account in their final decision on custody and access arrangements. So I support both sides of that agenda.

In finishing, I would like to make one other point. I made this point to the committee in my evidence to them. I am sorry that it is not part of the bill. I suppose it is not quite within the strict portfolio area. I think that, where all of these arrangements for counselling are made and where pre-parenting arrangement meetings are being held and so on and where these break down—in other words, for these intractable cases that end up in courts—we should have a very strict rule. Where the parents are of equal or near equal means, both parents should receive legal aid or neither parent should. Where they are not of equal means—where you have a very rich ex-husband and a very poor ex-wife or vice versa—of course legal aid should be given to the one who needs assistance.

I have seen some outrageously unfair decisions in the way of legal aid. The opposition was talking earlier about the Family Court in Parramatta. I remember one gentleman from my electorate used to hitchhike from Gin Gin, west of Bundaberg, to the Parramatta Family Court. He used to live in a dosshouse, because he could not afford any decent accommodation, and then front up to the court, where the wife had a barrister and, because of the contentious nature of the action, the children had a barrister. Both had solicitors. So he goes in there to represent himself and face the Family Court after hitchhiking several thousand kilometres. That is not equality before the law.

My proposition is that we should put legal aid into two buckets. Family Court legal aid should be on that basis. Where people are of like or similar means, both should receive legal aid or neither should so that they both appear before the court on equal terms.

The family law system will always be a difficult system. Amendments contained in this bill will go a fair way to improving the situation. I hope it creates a climate which focuses on conciliation and negotiation, rather than on conflict, and that the welfare of children is paramount in all its considerations. For that reason, in again complimenting Kay Hull and her committee, I give strong support to this bill and commend it to the chamber.

See this speech in context