Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

This legislation is designed to combine the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court into a single entity. Its effect is to abolish the Family Court as a standalone institution.

Of all marriages in Australia, a relatively small proportion end in divorce. For most of those marriages that end in divorce, the couple works out between themselves their financial settlement and arrangements regarding the children. I think in most cases, despite the sadness of the marriage ending, people understand their responsibilities to one another and their responsibilities to their children and try and come to an arrangement, which, of course, may not make everybody happy but is at least civil.

A small proportion of marriages that end in divorce end up in the Family Court, and the reason they end up in the Family Court is that there's something more complex about the divorce. In some cases, one member of the couple may be unable to compromise or the financial settlement is complex for some reason. In other cases—and these are the ones I am particularly worried about and, I believe, many others are particularly worried about—there is a history of domestic violence in the relationship, which means that any arrangements are fraught with danger, most often for the mother and often for the children. So it is absolutely vital that, in these circumstances, we have people hearing the case and assisting in the court who understand the dynamics of domestic violence in relationships.

That's the reason that we oppose this bill. We are opposing the bill because specialised family courts, run by people who understand the cycle and the dynamics of domestic violence, are absolutely critical to keeping women and children safe. They create an environment that is focused on the best interests of children and on keeping victims of violence safe—on the human needs of all those who enter into them. That's what the evidence tells us.

Mr Deputy Speaker O'Brien, I commend to you and others in this place an excellent opinion piece written by the journalist Jenna Price in today's Sydney Morning Herald about just how dangerous this proposed merger of the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court is. Jenna Price points out that this move is opposed by everyone who knows what they are talking about when it comes to family law and when it comes to domestic violence: the Law Council, women's legal services, community legal centres, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services and family violence legal services. Jenna Price goes on to quote a former Chief Justice of the Family Court, Elizabeth Evatt, a very distinguished jurist, who said:

We were a team with a single mission to help families in trouble … Merging would be a disaster. Australia should be proud of the Family Court and it should receive adequate resources.

Jenna Price also quotes former Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson, another jurist who has served this country with distinction. Former Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson said:

You will end up with circuit judges who don't have any family law expertise and are quite likely to misunderstand the system.

We know too that, in contrast to what the federal government is proposing, states are moving to more specialist domestic violence services in their court systems. If you look at state systems, particularly as they deal with apprehended violence orders, they are moving to more specialist knowledge. In Queensland, I went to the Southport Specialist Domestic and Family Violence Court a few years ago. When it was evaluated in 2017, the evaluation found that this approach of a specialist domestic violence court provided:

… strong collaborative relationships between the court, domestic violence services, police prosecutors and duty lawyers …

This 'resulted in improved coordination of matters and services'. It found higher 'ratings of satisfaction and perceived procedural justness of the process reported by victims compared to the comparison court' and higher 'levels of self-reported understanding of court outcomes for both victims and perpetrators compared to the comparison court'. There is absolutely no reason for us at a federal level to be moving away from specialised court processes and specialised courts when all of the evidence, both federally and at a state level, is that more specialist services are preferable.

It troubles me so deeply that we hear horrific stories, again and again, of victims of domestic violence, like Hannah Clarke and her three beautiful children, like Luke Batty and like Olga and her two beautiful children. We hear these stories again and again, and we have a vigil in front of the parliament. I've been to more than one of these candlelight vigils. We all ask each other, 'What can we possibly do to reduce this terrible toll that domestic violence is taking on our women and children?' yet what we should be doing is not a mystery. It's not a mystery that walking away from specialist services like this makes the situation worse, not better.

We saw also just last year the government cut funding to the National Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum, the peak body representing Indigenous survivors of domestic violence. This year the money that was set aside for respectful relationships education in our schools was cut from $2.8 million to $1.36 million—more than halved.

Again and again, we hear of stories at our universities and even in this place of sexual harassment and sexual violence. The cut to respectful relationships funding comes at the same time as we have a survey that has found that one in three men think that punching or hitting your wife doesn't count as domestic violence, and 42 per cent of young men were found to think this in the recent survey. How can it be that we're actually cutting funding for respectful relationship programs at a time when two out of five young men don't think it's a problem to use physical violence in interpersonal relationships?

I can't reconcile this outpouring of grief when something monstrous happens in our community with this baffling unwillingness to follow the evidence on what keeps people safe. We need more support for education on respectful relationships, not less. We need more specialist services, not fewer.

The government is correct to point out that the backlog in Family Court cases is a problem. It is a problem because the longer these cases drag on the more likely it is that conflict will escalate and that violence will ensue. It is a problem. You don't fix the problem by abolishing the court. One of the big mistakes made during the Howard government years was to abolish the funding for specialist counselling in the Family Court. If that specialist counselling can defuse the situation and help the parties come to an arrangement between themselves, of course that is a good step forward.

Recently a group of colleagues and I spoke to the terrific author Jess Hill, who wrote a wonderful book called See What You Made Me Do, which has been a bestseller and has won multiple awards. We ask ourselves the question: How can this happen? How can these acts of violence occur in our midst? Jess Hill, in her book, endeavours to explain how this can occur. In a terrific article that was written by Madonna King in Good Weekend about Hannah Clarke and her children, Jess Hill says, 'There is no other form of torture that is permissible under law in Australia.' She says that in relation to coercive control.

In her book, Jess Hill writes about coercive control:

A victim's most frightening experiences may never be recorded by police or understood by a judge. That's because domestic abuse is a terrifying language that develops slowly and is spoken only by the people involved. Victims may feel breathless from a sideways look, a sarcastic tone or a stony silence, because these are the signals to which they have become hyper-attuned …

Hannah Clarke said more than once that her husband was not usually physically violent towards her, but he controlled every element of her life. He was listening to her phone calls, he was reading her messages, he was stalking her on social media and he was turning up unannounced after the relationship broke up. He was controlling what she wore, what she ate and who she was friends with.

Coercive control is subtle, but it is devastating. The idea that a court that doesn't have specialist understanding of domestic violence could ever understand elements such as coercive control is just fanciful. So, instead of moving to better protect victims of violence like Hannah Clarke and her children, by destroying a specialist Family Court and by losing the expertise of the people who are highly trained to recognise and deal with domestic violence we are actually making life more dangerous for people in this situation—people like Hannah Clarke and Olga Edwards and their children. It really is not enough to hold vigils, to give speeches and to say how horrified we are by these acts of extreme violence, of domestic terrorism, when, when we are given the chance to make life safer for the victims of this sort of domestic terrorism, we in fact do the opposite. We need to make sure that our court systems are more responsive to victims of domestic violence, not less responsive, as this proposal would do. Labor opposes this bill for good reason.

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