Anxiety of separation C

AN you pinpoint the best times of your life?

For most people, it’s probably in no particular order, getting married, getting a house, and having kids.

Putting these milestones at risk means deciding to separate or divorce isn’t easy.

It’s heartbreaking, frustrating, time-consuming, stressful, and if lawyers are involved, expensive.

Separating is awful, more so if kids are involved; it’s so awful that back in 2017, a report into family law was ordered by the AttorneyGeneral, George Brandis; the first since the 1970s no-fault divorce was established.

The report was released in

2019 and made 60 recommendations. The most radical was to take responsibility for Family Law from the Federal Government and give it to the states and territories, who already manage domestic violence orders and child protection, allowing a more streamlined response.

With little time for recommendations from the report to be adopted, Senator Pauline Hansen chimed in, accusing women of fabricating stories of domestic abuse to prevent fathers from seeing their children, and vowing to set up an inquiry into the family law system.

Senator Hansen said her personal experience of her son being denied custody of his young son would not cloud her judgment, despite using parliamentary privilege to detail what she says were false accusations by her ex-daughterin-law.

So with Scott Morrison unwilling to alienate One Nation support, domestic violence victims and anti-violence campaigners weren’t surprised when Hanson was named deputy chair under Senator Malcolm Roberts on the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law System that convened in Townsville this week.

I stopped by, but a shocking phone hook-up meant the answers from Family Law Practitioners Association of Queensland president James

Steel were largely unintelligible.

Nevertheless, the panel persevered, with Kevin Andrews suggesting women commit perjury and should have to ‘prove’ they have been abused, and Senator Hanson espousing a jawdropping assertion that there were, some instances that were at the ‘lower end’ of domestic violence.’ Tell that to victims, but anyway.

What we could decipher from the family law expert phone-in was that mediation was the optimal outcome, but backlogs and a lack of legal aid funding prevented this from happening as effectively as it could or should.

We weren’t permitted to stay for the afternoon sessions of private submissions. This was a pity, but with only 3 per cent of cases actually getting to court, this means there’s an awful lot of mediation required to sort out the other 97 per cent.

Ideally, unless substance abuse or violence is a factor, kids should spend equal time with each parent and have access to both sets of grandparents.

Perhaps if counselling, anger management and mediation were a priority, outcomes might be less adversarial – frustration and desperation can lead to an escalation of already volatile situations.

Financial stress is an added burden, non-custodial parents (usually fathers) must provide a suitable place for their kids to stay when visiting, often while still paying the mortgage on the family home.

It’s clear both sides have issues, outcomes need to accommodate both parties, and provide coping mechanisms, with a mandate for keeping things civil.

Perhaps the Federal Government’s role should be providing the tools to achieve it.