Coronavirus Australia: Courts flat-out as lockdown triggers spike in family brawls

Courts are swamped with urgent family law cases as people grapple with issues thrown up by pandemic.

Urgent family law cases have spiked amid lockdown tensions.

There has been a massive jump in urgent family law cases as parents and separated couples grapple with issues thrown up by the corona­virus pandemic.

The number of urgent applications jumped by 39 per cent in the Family Court and 23 per cent in the Federal Circuit Court from March 15 to April 15, compared with the same period last year.

Chief Justice Will Alstergren, who heads both courts, told The Weekend Australian issues such as state border closures, health concerns, financial distress and — in some cases — parents opportunistically withholding their children, had caused the jump.

The court had created a new “COVID list” to give priority to those families, and hear their disputes within 72 hours, he said. A national registrar would triage the cases and transfer them to a judge.

The pandemic is helping drive a permanent transformation of the work of the family courts.

From April 14, all court applic­ations will now be filed electronically and almost all hearings are being conducted by phone or video­conference.

Chief Justice Alstergren said the technology was a “game changer”.

Judges were now able to hear disputes between litigants from all over Australia.

He said while virtual hearings would never replace face-to-face trials, now that the technology was in place the court would continue to use it where appropriate. This included in procedural matters, urgent cases, for regional litigants who would otherwise have to wait a long time for a judge to visit or for vulnerable parties or witnesses who did not wish to leave their safe location.

He said the technology was working particularly well for appeal­s; this week a judge presided over an appeal from his home in far north Queensland with two appeal judges based in Sydney. While lawyers say many non-­urgent hearings have been delayed because of the pandemic, Chief Justice Alstergren said he was proud the courts were staying on top of their workload, and the disruption would not set them back “too much”.

“Judges take their duty to provid­e an essential service to Australian families very seriously,” he said. “They are determined to ensure they have access to justice and that wherever possible they will continue on with hearings unless it’s unfair to do so.”

The two courts were still achieving an “extremely high” clearance rate of 86 per cent, he said. A clearance rate of 100 per cent means a court is clearing as many cases as it receives.

Before the pandemic hit, the courts were for the first time in many years achieving a clearance rate of more than 100 per cent.

Chief Justice Alstergren said it was too early to say whether the lockdown would cause a jump in divorce rates. “People have been put in a very difficult situation at the moment, they’re certainly spending a lot more time with each other than they’re used to,” he said. “If there are tensions between them it might be exacerbated … I’m not convinced we’ll get any more divorces necessarily.”