Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity, once again, to rise in this place and talk about the administration of our federal courts. In the electorate of Parramatta, it is a particularly important issue. We have an incredibly beautiful legal precinct, built since I became the member for Parramatta—so it is in the last decade at least. It is an incredible facility that holds up to 12 courts. On a Monday a couple of weeks ago, four of those courts were sitting, not because there was not enough work but because there were not enough judges to staff those courts.

We have backlogs, particularly in Family Court matters, that are seeing families on custody disputes being told they will have to wait three years to have their matter heard. Interim hearings are taking 18 months, at the least. So we have families, barristers and judges under incredible stress, because families are suffering in the way that only families can when one parent is denied access to a child for that length of time. You can imagine what it is like to be the parent of a six-month-old child, knowing that your custody matter will not be able to be determined for at least three years, when your child is 3½ years old. It is just not good enough. It really is not okay.

I am very pleased to be able to get up today and once again speak on this matter. The Courts Administration Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 is actually an important bill. It merges the corporate functions of the three federal courts—the Federal Court, the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court—to make efficiencies behind the scenes. It does not merge the functions of the three courts. The three courts remain separate and their current management systems remain in place, but the administrative functions, including finance, human resources, information technology and property administration—things that are absolutely back-end administrative support for these three courts—are merged, with an estimated saving of $9.4 million over the six financial years up to 2020-21.

In federal budgets, $9.4 million is not a large amount, but $9.4 million is a large amount of money, and it is worth making these administrative changes to save that amount of money. It is well and truly worth doing that, but I would question what the cost to families and the community is, over a six-year period, of delays of up to three years in having a property or custody matter heard. I would question whether this government even knows what the economic costs are, let alone the social costs to families that are unable to make decisions about their work life, that are constantly under stress and that are unable to settle with their child into the new family arrangements, or to barristers who are feeling the pressure and judges who are taking sick leave. We have one judge in Parramatta who is on sick leave for six months, leading up to his retirement. We hear stories from barristers that the judges are under incredible strain.

I wonder whether this government has considered what the economic cost is to our community of these kinds of delays, let alone the social costs. I really would urge the government to think very clearly and very hard about whether or not this is actually good enough. I know that the Parramatta court is not the only one with these circumstances. Colleagues of mine from Newcastle and Wollongong have made similar speeches to this House about their delays. My concern today is about the completely unreasonable strain that families are carrying because our courts simply do not have the resources they need to deal with the matters before them.

Our courts are chronically under-resourced. Since the election of the coalition government in 2013, the number of judges sitting at the Parramatta registry of the Family Court and Federal Circuit Court has decreased from eight to five. Families are now waiting one to three years to have final orders, leaving lawyers encouraging mediation to solve most disputes. That is a good thing, but, where mediation cannot solve an issue, 18 months to three years is far too long for a matter involving property, let alone a matter involving a child.

The delay is due to judges leaving the court, essentially, and not being replaced. In 2014, we saw a judge move from Parramatta to Melbourne, so we lost one. We had another judge who took 560 days to be replaced, and we have another one now on sick leave who is due to retire in six months time and is not expected to be back before the courts before his retirement. That leaves us in a situation where, on a Monday a few weeks ago, we had four judges hearing matters in 12 courts, and one of those judges in the Family Court was handling 600 matters. He had 600 matters on his list. Judges usually handle around 300, which still sounds like a lot to me, as a layperson, but he is handling 600. We are hearing from barristers of judges effectively showing their stress levels in the courts themselves, which does not provide the kind of settling relationship with the families that we need in our family courts.

In November 2014, the Chief Judge of the Federal Circuit Court, John Pascoe, said:

The Attorney-General is aware of the pending retirements and of the court's heavy workload. I have indicated to the Attorney the pressure that is currently faced in particular registries such as Parramatta.

Then, in December last year, Chief Judge Pascoe said he was considering moving the judges who sit in Parramatta and the Wollongong courts to Sydney due to insufficient resources, despite Parramatta being one of the busiest courts in the country. So we have now the idea of closing the Parramatta registry being floated. The very idea that you would close a major part of your court infrastructure in the geographic heart of Sydney because the government has not appointed enough judges is quite extraordinary. The idea that the pressure in the court system would be so great that that idea would be even floated astonishes me. It astonishes me.

We have, as I said, a phenomenal legal precinct built within the last decade. It has a capacity to grow. It has a capacity to serve our community. We are going to see the population of Western Sydney double in the next 20 years. I would argue that we are going to see the population of Parramatta double in the next 10 to 15, given the amount of work that urban growth is doing with high-rise residential at the moment. We are not a declining community; we are a community that is growing, and we are a community where the need is only going to grow. And here we have the idea of the registry being closed because of insufficient resources seriously being floated.

Again I would ask the government, particularly the Attorney-General, to reflect on this. This is something that impacts on a large number of families in a way that nothing else does. At a time when the things that you thought were secure are falling apart or you are trying to re-establish your life, when you are struggling and arguing over custody of your child—and there is nothing more important than that—to be told that the wait could be three years is just not okay. I have seen parents who are not in that situation moved to tears by the idea that they might have been—that they might have actually been denied access to their six-month-old until that six-month-old was three or might lose contact with their 10-year-old and not meet them again until they are in puberty. This is not okay.

The level of strain and tension that is caused in these families that cannot find a resolution is beyond belief. The spirals of mental health that we see parents go into when they cannot find a way out, when there is no solution to something that is so profoundly important in their lives—the most important thing—are something that the government should reflect on. I have heard lawyers tell me how worried they are about the mental health of their clients over this, and I know that members opposite would understand this because we all have people who come to our offices who are in situations that they cannot resolve. We all see those spirals. We see the beginning of it. We see them becoming increasingly litigious. We see them give up their jobs to be full-time litigants. We see them bit by bit lose their connections with community as they become angrier and angrier and more obsessed with one element of their life. It is not okay. That is what I say to the Attorney-General: it is not okay.

In Senate estimates in early February, the Attorney-General said he was aware of the delays in the Family Court and said:

I wish I had more judges.

Well, so do we. So do we in Parramatta. He has appointed six new ones since then. He has done that. He has appointed six more, and I congratulate him for that because these delays are all over the country. But he placed them in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide registries. We did not get an extra one in Parramatta. Even with a judge retiring in six months on sick leave, we can see no improvement in our current circumstances and only increasing delays as that backlog continues to grow.

At the very least, I would urge the Attorney-General to make sure that he is ready to appoint when that judge does retire. He knows when he is going to retire. He knows the date. We cannot wait 560 days this time like we did last time. You do not leave families waiting that long. You do not leave them in those kinds of circumstances. And you do not leave judges in those kinds of circumstances either. You do not leave people who are handling incredibly complex and sensitive matters and who need their full capacity to do so in circumstances where they are handling double workloads under this level of stress. You do not do that to employees. You do not do that to judges. You do not do it to people who need their full capacity in place. And that is what is happening in the courts of Parramatta.

The judges will not be speaking out about this. They are doing what they do, although I have heard of occasions where they have lost it in the court and literally said: 'What do you expect me to do? I've got 600 cases.' That is not what you expect of a judge, particularly if you are standing there waiting for the judge to help you resolve one of the most important issues of your life.

Unfortunately, after those six judges were appointed, a spokesperson for the Attorney-General's office commented that the Parramatta and Sydney courts are now at 'their full complement of judges'. I beg to differ. If this current level is the full complement of judges then it is not enough. It is not enough. It is not okay.

The Attorney-General received a KPMG report before the 2014 budget, which he has refused to make public. It reportedly warned of severe under-resourcing of the Family Court, the Federal Circuit Court and the Federal Court—a $75 million funding black hole. I urge the Attorney-General to release that report and have a real conversation with our judges, the people who represent families in distress and advocacy bodies who represent those families about how we can ensure that our Family Court system is able to deal with the matters it has before it in a timely way. If there is change needed then make a change. If there are new ways of doing things and new ways of keeping people out of courts then do that.

Alongside the lack of appointment of judges we have also seen cuts to the legal aid services in the community that actually help people keep out of court. In my community we have the Macquarie Legal Centre. It is a fantastic centre. We have seen funding on again and off again. It is likely that there will be a 30 per cent cut coming next year. These are services that over time have built expertise, relationships and networks in the community. They assist people to make decisions early on, when their problems emerge, so they do not go down a protracted legal pathway. They are incredibly important resources, which the government have cut. In fact, they have cut those legal services three times since they have come to government. Again there is a lack of logic here: on the one hand they do not appoint enough judges but on the other hand they cut the services that help keep people out of court. It beggars belief.

Parramatta has lots of courts but no judges. Rockhampton is blessed in that it has one more judge than it has courts. A full-time Federal Court judge was appointed to Rockhampton but they have no court to sit in. We have a spare one in Parramatta—in fact, we have eight spare in Parramatta at the moment; they are fantastic courts—not that I want to take a judge from Rockhampton; I do not. I seriously urge the Attorney-General to have a look at what he is doing and perhaps plan a little further ahead than he is now. If he is going to appoint a judge, he should make sure that they have a court to sit in. If there is a great need somewhere else, he should make sure that those matters can be heard in a timely way.

I will finish by thanking the government for this bill, as far as it goes. It does make some machinery changes that will improve the efficiency in the back end of our courts, and that is always a good thing. It is always good to make sure that money is not wasted if there is a more effective way to do it. I urge the government seriously to look at the economic and social costs to families and ultimately our community of substantial delays of up to three years on things like property and custody matters. As I have said probably 20 times in this speech so far, it really is not okay that families are waiting that long for a resolution to disputes about the most important thing in their life, which is their child.

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