Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The Family Law Amendment Bill 2023 is of central importance to Australians. It seeks to address problems in an area of everyday life that touches all of us—family and personal life. Families are not safe for many. Just this year the Australian Bureau of Statistics told us that more than one in four women in Australia have experienced violence at the hands of a current or former intimate partner since the age of 15 years. One in four. This is utterly shameful. And it's not just women; one in 14 men told the ABS that they had experienced violence from an intimate partner too.

The problem is far worse for our First Peoples. The past 65,000 years have seen a flourishing intergenerational First Nations family life. We have also seen the terrible impact that colonisation has brought upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families across our nation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 31 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence related assaults than non-Indigenous women and 7.6 times more likely to be killed than non-Indigenous women.

Long gone are the days when victims needed to prove mistreatment by showing evidence of physical violence. We now understand that abuse can take the form of subtle coercive control and may involve emotional or financial manipulation, and that these are just as harmful. Separation is often the riskiest time for domestic and family violence. For many, separation does not mean an end to the violence but more harm and more control, especially at contact changeover times for children.

Domestic and family violence is the norm, not the exception, in family law. Recent data from the Lighthouse Project provides undeniable evidence that most parenting disputes before the court involve allegations of family violence. Sixty-four per cent involve allegations of family violence against one parent, and 57 per cent involve allegations of family violence against children. Victims-survivors face a common belief from family law professionals that children need a relationship with their father, no matter the abuse they have suffered or the domestic violence they have witnessed.

Victims-survivors also report that their allegations of family violence are not believed and that their experiences are minimised or trivialised in the family law system. Several women in my electorate of Goldstein have shared with me their distressing stories and concerns about the family law process. One of them said:

The father of my daughter was described by author on gendered violence Jess Hill as 'one of the most terrifying coercive controllers and users of physical and sexual violence that I have practically ever heard of'. Though he's been found guilty of multiple breaches of the Family Violence Intervention Order, and indictable criminal offences following a violent attack on my daughter, keeping her safe from him has been, at times, a seemingly impossible task, despite spending more money than the value of our home in Goldstein on legal advice in order to protect her.

As a victim/survivor of severe family violence, I understand the dire need for family law reform to prioritise the safety of children. I see it as the most poorly understood danger facing Australian children currently.

Our kids are threatened. We now know that exposure to violence at home is as harmful for children as being abused themselves. In short, to describe children as being 'exposed' to family violence is incorrect. They're experiencing it. I have heard mothers tearfully acknowledge that they could not protect their children from witnessing violence after separation.

Across Australia an estimated 2.6 million to 2.7 million people have witnessed violence towards a parent by a partner or experienced abuse before the age of 15. These are distressing numbers. As a nation, we cannot accept this. We must make laws that are carefully designed to support these families, to identify and address the problem of domestic and family violence as early as effectively as possible. This bill is overdue. It responds to longstanding calls for change.

In recent years we've learned a great deal from inquiries such as the Australian Law Reform Commission's 2019 report Family law for the future and the Joint Select Committee on Family Law System 2021-22. The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children calls for improvements to the family law system, including the need for justice systems to be equipped to provide trauma-informed, culturally safe responses that prioritise the safety of individuals and families. We must listen. Last year, the Wiyi Yani U Thangani First Nations Women's Safety Policy Forum called on the Australian government to 'ensure that First Nations women and children are front and centre of the design and delivery of the proposed separate First Nations national plan to end family violence and violence against women'.

I commend the government on the strengths in this bill. It directly responds to many pressing problems in our family law system and does a great deal for adult and child victims-survivors of domestic and family violence. It removes the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility, and this is key. The current law has created a well-entrenched misunderstanding in the community that both parents are entitled to equal time with their children, regardless of domestic and family violence or abuse. However, in families with a history of abuse this may not be appropriate or safe.

One in five Australians believe that violence is a normal reaction to day-to-day stress, and almost one in three Australians think that women are partly responsible for perpetuating abusive relationships—wow! The removal of this presumption is strongly supported by Women's Legal Services Australia, who have long advocated for its removal. As they explain:

While we recognise that it is often in the best interests of children to spend time with both parents, this must be considered on a case-by-case basis, and the safety of children and adult victims-survivors of domestic, family and sexual violence and abuse must be prioritised.

The removal of this presumption is therefore an enormous step forward in terms of our ability to identify and respond to domestic and family violence.

In response to the evidence received during the public consultation stage, the emphasis on family violence has been strengthened even further. The bill now emphasises the importance of ensuring children's safety when judges or parents are deciding which parenting arrangements would be in the best interests of children and expands the scope of whose safety should be considered to anyone caring for children, rather than just children themselves or those with parental responsibilities. I welcome these efforts to identify the safety of adult and child victims-survivors of family violence as a priority.

However, this bill is not perfect, and I say that in the spirit of collaboration with the Attorney-General's office to support improving it. Drawing on evidence produced by Dr Jessica Mant and Associate Professor Becky Batagol from Monash University, I believe there are currently some gaps in the bill that need to be addressed for it to be truly effective. There is still not a strong enough focus on the problem of domestic and family violence.

Under this bill, there will be six principles to assist judges, lawyers and parents to come to decisions about what arrangements would be in children's best interests. While simplification is to be commended, this should not come at the expense of the safety of those arrangements. Safety is just one of those six principles. If the bill is enacted, there will be nothing in it to suggest that protection from domestic and family violence is any more important than any of the other five principles. The bill must prioritise safety if we're going to address the problem of domestic and family violence in our family law system. In 2011 this parliament passed laws that prioritised the safety of children in parenting matters. These laws were enacted after multiple reports showed that the Family Law Act failed to adequately protect children and other family members from family violence and child abuse. Removing these laws is a step backwards. It is a terrible price we cannot ask more women and children to pay.

The bill relies heavily on the term 'safety' when it talks about domestic and family violence. As Zoe Rathus from Griffith University explains, the word 'safety' conjures images of physical abuse rather than emotional and psychological harm. It does not invite thinking about a range of non-physical abuses common in family law cases. This is a critical gap. The overly simplistic focus on 'safety' here is a subtle shift in language which rolls back on the rich understanding of domestic and family violence we have gained recently. This framing fails to recognise the important realities of past domestic and family violence in the context of future parenting arrangements.

The bill also does not go far enough to address the problem of legal systems abuse. It is only recently that legal systems abuse has come to our attention as a form of domestic and family violence. Research studies undertaken across Australia, New Zealand and the UK all demonstrate how family law proceedings are deliberately used by perpetrators to assert continued control and intimidation over their children, their children's other parent and anyone else who cares for those children. The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children requires us to address systems abuse.

A major achievement of this bill is that it will introduce a new power for judges to make orders that stop people from bringing court proceedings where it would cause harm to the other family members involved. However, there is nothing in this bill that directly encourages judges to use this new power in cases where they see family violence. These orders can and should be used to secure the safety of children in those situations, and the bill can do even more to address legal systems abuse. Systems abuse should be explicitly listed as a form of family violence in the Family Law Act. A Monash study of legal systems abuse in family law recommended inserting legal systems abuse in the legislative definition of family violence as an example of behaviour that may coerce or control a family member

It's also important that we continue to evaluate the effectiveness of our laws for responding to systems abuse and domestic and family violence more broadly. The bill must allow for research into these issues to make sure that our laws are the best they can possibly be at protecting those affected by family violence. These changes must be addressed if the bill is to be truly effective. I want to commend this government on finally bringing this bill to this place. The government has responded to insistent calls for change on matters that profoundly affect too many Australians each year. It is our job to care about getting our laws right on domestic and family violence, including our family laws, but there is more we can do here today. It is not good enough that, across Australia, about 50 per cent of women who have children in their care, when they experience violence by a current partner, report that their children have seen, heard and experienced that violence. We can do more and we must.

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