House debates

Tuesday, 16 March 2021

Committees

Australia's Family Law System Joint Select Committee; Report

5:13 pm

Photo of Peta MurphyPeta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's my pleasure to note this interim report of the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Family Law System today. I'm not a member of the committee; I wasn't part of the inquiry, but I wanted to take this opportunity to speak on behalf of all the people in Dunkley who have been and are going through the family law system and on behalf of the Peninsula Community Legal Centre. The recommendations in this interim report are considered, and I want to congratulate those members of the committee who took to this task in good faith and with a real intension to improve the lives of people, particularly to improve the lives of people who often are going through the worst experience they will go through in their lives, which is the breakdown of a relationship. By definition, if you're at the Family Court, your relationship has broken down. But it does not have to be a retraumatising experience, the way that the member for Cowan has so eloquently described it as. And it certainly should not be a retraumatising experience for children. If anyone is innocent in the breakdown of a relationship, it is the children. We cannot continue to have a family law system where children's experiences and voices are too often not heard or not heard properly, and where the system allows them to be used at times as weapons in an ongoing fight between their parents.

The Peninsula Community Legal Centre in my area of Dunkley is staffed by the most dedicated lawyers and service professionals that one could hope to meet. They are people who are working in the justice system, to be honest, not to make money for themselves. Most of them could go out and make a huge amount more money in the private system but they want to serve their community. They do so, essentially, on the smell of an oily rag. When I have spoken to the Peninsula Community Legal Centre and Jackie Galloway, their general manager—who is an amazing woman—about what do you want to see change in the family law system and are you putting in recommendations? I see the weariness in their eyes and the weariness in their demeanour because they have put in these submissions to various inquiries over and over again. As the member for Cowan also just said, the time for submissions is over.

They want a number of things to change in the family law system. A number of them are addressed in the recommendations of this report. Funding for community legal centres is money so exceptionally well spent because it is, in some ways, a preventative measure of people getting caught up in a legal system over and over again and not being able to get out because they can't represent themselves, or because they are forking out all of their savings and all of their retirement savings, often, to pay for private lawyers, which leads to further problems down track, which often gets them back into the justice system. Funding a community legal centre and an entire legal system properly is for the good of the entire community, including those of us who aren't using it. But in particular, it is for the good of some of the most vulnerable people in our community who just need help in their time of great crisis,. and that's what the Peninsula Community Legal Centre and community legal centres across Australia do.

Building on the Australian Law Reform Commission report of 2019, the Productivity Commission report, pleas of people across the justice sector, Justice Connect—for years—and the recommendation in this report we need to fund those community legal centres properly. I agree, we also need to look at the fees that are charged privately. This won't surprise people, given that I come to this place with a legal background and having been a practising lawyer and barrister, I agree with the proposition that lawyers need to be paid and paid well for the job that they do. This isn't often said but a lot of lawyers, particularly those who work in community legal areas, family law and criminal law, often work over and above what they get paid for. But not all lawyers and not in all cases. When we have a family law system that is supposed to be helping people divvy up their savings and their property for the good of them and the good of their children, we shouldn't be leaving them to divvy up the dregs that remain at the end of a protracted adversarial system, where the lawyers have had to have been paid so much money because it's gone on for so long.

Just today I have had two emails from constituents. One telling me about her daughter who exhausted all of her superannuation to pay for the family law legal fees. We know what happens when women retire without decent superannuation. There was another who wanted to tell me about a situation where her daughter is having to go to her father for a loan in order to go through the family law system. That's just two stories from today. So I wholeheartedly endorse the proposition that we have to have a family law system where access to justice means something. It shouldn't be a system that's available for those who can pay. It shouldn't be a system that only works well for those that have resources. It should be a system for everyone.

Like my Labor colleagues and the crossbench, who voted against the government's legislation, I want to restate my profound disappointment at the changes to the family law system, which have effectively led to the abolition of a specialist family law court. In this week, when we've heard thousands and thousands of women and the men who support them around the country calling for a better system to deal with domestic and family violence, to lose the specialised system to deal with people who have gone through that is a tragedy. We didn't need to lose the family law court; we needed better funding and better resources for the family law court to be able to deal with people who are dealing with family and domestic violence, particularly children.

Comments

No comments