Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

Back in 2001, Western Australia was the first place in the country—because the rest of the nation was covered by the federal Family Law Act—to do law reform so that couples in de facto relationships, be they same-sex or opposite sex, could split their assets. In 2008, federal Labor also did superannuation splitting as part of its de facto law reform. But it has taken until 2020—because Western Australia is not part of the federal Family Law Act—for de facto couples now to be able to split their superannuation. I cannot begin to tell you of the injustices that have been done in that time because of the lack of capacity for people to split their assets.

A constituent wrote to me, pleading with the parliament to make sure that this gets passed. She had been paying most of the household bills, and her partner at the time had said to her: 'Look, this is great. Because you're paying the bills out of your salary, I can afford to pay more into my super so that we can have a happy, full and rich retirement.' So that is what they, as a couple, did. But what happens when they're before the Family Court? Even if they had wanted to split their assets amicably, when a lot of the assets were in superannuation the failure to act on law reform in this area meant that they could not. This has left hundreds, if not thousands, of people worse off than they otherwise would have been if they had been able to split their assets fairly, including superannuation.

Minister Porter said that this was urgent 12 months ago. I don't think the fact that it is now in this place some 12 months later reflects that urgency, but I will make these remarks short because I believe it is urgent that the bill passes today.