Christian Porter outlines plan to end families’ agony

Christian Porter’s legislation would merge the Family Court with the lower-level Federal Circuit Court.

Christian Porter: ‘Families come first’. Picture: Kym Smith

Attorney-General Christian Porter has outlined his fallback ­position to secure uniformity and improve efficiency across the family law system, while abandoning a key plank of his court reforms.

Mr Porter is negotiating with crossbenchers to secure the passage of a bill through the Senate to restructure the family courts.

The legislation would merge the Family Court with the lower-level Federal Circuit Court (which handles about 90 per cent of family law disputes) to create a new court with two divisions.

Mr Porter is willing to abandon a plan to send family law appeals to the Federal Court, as recommended by a Senate inquiry. He said the committee’s recommendations were not “fatal” to what the ­Coalition government was trying to achieve.

“The goal is to have one court, one point of entry, one singularised system of rules, forms, procedures, one singularised system of management, efficiency in the ­appeals, and efficiency in the throughput across the courts,” he said.

He said the government was willing to “die in a ditch” to ensure the reforms included an ability for the chief justice to decide uniform rules for both divisions of a new federal circuit and family court.

This would end “the agony” for families of moving between different courts with different rules and procedures, he said. About 1200 cases a year bounce between the two courts.

Some have argued a single entry point to the system and uniformity could be achieved without legislative changes, but Mr Porter said this had proved impossible.

Instead, the chief justice needed to be responsible, at least for a period, for creating a new set of uniform rules in consultation with other judges.

“That is the only way you would get a single set of rules,” he said. “If there is going to be an outcome that has to be accepted or the process becomes pointless.”

Mr Porter defended appointing three new judges to the Family Court last month after earlier saying he wanted to “rebalance” resources by shrinking it because it was the “less efficient” of the two courts handling family law.

He said once the Family Court was merged with the Federal Circuit Court, the chief justice would be able to ensure an optimum flow of work between the two divisions.

“Inside a singularised structure with centralised control and very heavy triage you can direct work to where the resources are,” he said. “Allied to that, it has been a matter of goodwill to demonstrate that the reforms are about improving the system and ensuring that families come first.”

The reforms to the family law system are aimed at improving ­efficiency amid a backlog of about 20,000 family law cases.

Crossbench senator Rex Patrick said he was not opposed to the chief justice setting the rules for both divisions for a period of time. He was also in favour of all judges in Division 1 sitting on appeals (rather than having a separate ­appeals division) to improve ­efficiency, as occurred in the Federal Court.

He said his major sticking point, now that he had been able to ensure the legislation was “sensible”, was ensuring there were adequate court resources for South Australia.

Mr Porter said his conversations with crossbench senators had “not been limited merely to legislation”. He said: “We’ve also spoken about resourcing.”

If re-elected, Mr Porter said he would focus in the next term of parliament on any further reforms recommended by the Australian Law Reform Commission when its family law inquiry was concluded.

He said the system needed to be “significantly more innovative” in catering to the needs of families.

“Even simple things like having court facilities available to families after business hours,” he said. “You’ve got hardworking families, often with mum and dad working … going through a terribly difficult period in their lives and expected to spend hours in a waiting room outside court … on a work day.

“And yet we have court infrastructure … operative only eight hours in every 24-hour cycle.”

Mr Porter’s other priorities to achieve within the first 12 to 18 months of a new government would be to implement recommendations from former High Court judge Ian Callinan to reshape the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and ensure the overhaul of defamation laws, currently being reviewed under a process led by the Council of Attorneys-­General.

He would also “make good” on the government’s promise to implement a commonwealth integrity commission and reform the class action law system in response to recommendations from the ALRC.

Labor and the Greens have said they will vote against the family courts restructure.

Justice Party senator Derryn Hinch told The Australian he wanted a royal commission into the family law system and would wait on the outcome of the ALRC review before deciding whether to support the restructure. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has also demanded a family law royal commission.