Family law shake-up to cut years off divorce process in Australia
DIVORCING couples will have their cases heard in a new one-stop shop court from next year in a bid to cut years of delays, as part of the biggest shake up to family law in Australia since the 1970s.
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DIVORCING couples will have their cases heard in a new one-stop shop court from next year in a bid to cut years of delays, as part of the biggest shake up to family law in Australia since the 1970s.
The reforms, which will finalise an extra 8000 family law cases a year, will see the Family Court of Australia rolled into the Federal Circuit Court and then phased out.
The creation of the merged court, to be called the Federal Circuit and Family Law Court of Australia, will cut a backlog of unresolved cases in the two courts, which has gone from 17,000 to 21,000 in five years.
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The median time couples wait for their cases has jumped from 10.8 months to 15.2 in the Federal Circuit Court and from 11.5 to 17 in the Family Court.
Under the present court structure, people could file for divorce in either court.
“(It is) letting down both the people who work inside the court, because we have these incredibly inefficient overlapping duplicate procedures, and by extension the people who are using the court, because it means they spend too much time transferring from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” Attorney-General Christian Porter said.
“Many of them are waiting far too long to have a final resolution on matters that should be heard much earlier.”
Under the changes, which will need to be approved by Parliament, family law appeals will be heard by a single judge in a new Family Law Appeal Division of the Federal Court.
At present all appeals are dealt with by the Family Court’s appeal division, the majority heard by three judges.
Moving to single judge appeals will free Family Court appeal judges to start hearing trials again — which most have refused to do since 2010.
The reforms come after an internal review found the Circuit Court was getting through nearly 10 times as many cases as the Family Court.
Years were being added to the time it took to resolve cases because judges were shuffling couples between the two courts with no right of appeal.
“The court exists for the benefit of the people who during the hardest period in their lives have to find themselves inside the court,” Mr Porter said.
“We want to hear more cases more quickly and not leave people with unresolved family court matters, which only causes greater angst and difficulty for families during an already difficult time.”
The government wants the new court running by January 1.