Issues Please indicate which issues from the committee's Terms of Reference are relevant to your submission a. ongoing issues and further improvements relating to the interaction and information sharing between the family law system and state and territory child protection systems, and family and domestic violence jurisdictions, including: ☐ Yes i. the process, and evidential and legal standards and onuses of proof, in relation to the ☐ No granting of domestic violence orders and apprehended violence orders, and ii. the visibility of, and consideration given to, domestic violence orders and apprehended violence orders in family law proceedings; b. the appropriateness of family court powers to ensure parties in family law proceedings provide ☐ Yes truthful and complete evidence, and the ability of the court to make orders for non-compliance ☐ No and the efficacy of the enforcement of such orders; c. beyond the proposed merger of the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court any other reform ☒ Yes that may be needed to the family law and the current structure of the Family Court and the Federal ☐ No Circuit Court; d. the financial costs to families of family law proceedings, and options to reduce the financial impact, ☒ Yes with particular focus on those instances where legal fees incurred by parties are disproportionate ☐ No to the total property pool in dispute or are disproportionate to the objective level of complexity of parenting issues, and with consideration being given amongst other things to banning ‘disappointment fees’, and: i. capping total fees by reference to the total pool of assets in dispute, or any other regulatory option to prevent disproportionate legal fees being charged in family law matters, and ii. any mechanisms to improve the timely, efficient and effective resolution of property disputes in family law proceedings; e. the effectiveness of the delivery of family law support services and family dispute resolution ☐ Yes processes; ☐ No f. the impacts of family law proceedings on the health, safety and wellbeing of children and families ☐ Yes involved in those proceedings; ☐ No ☐ Yes g. any issues arising for grandparent carers in family law matters and family law court proceedings; ☐ No h. any further avenues to improve the performance and monitoring of professionals involved in ☒ Yes family law proceedings and the resolution of disputes, including agencies, family law practitioners, ☐ No family law experts and report writers, the staff and judicial officers of the courts, and family dispute resolution practitioners; ☐ Yes i. any improvements to the interaction between the family law system and the child support system; ☐ No j. the potential usage of pre-nuptial agreements and their enforceability to minimise future property ☐ Yes disputes; and ☐ No ☒ Yes k. any related matters ☐ No Your submission Please provide a brief summary of your experience and any relevant issues. Your submission should respond to one or more of the committee's Terms of Reference. Please Note that this Submission will be sent electronically as well as in paper form. 2 I’ve Met with the Chief Justice of the Family Court and he told me his court “did everything right”. Harry Cozens on the Murders of his Daughters, Jessica 10 and Jane 12 by their mother Heather Glendinning in West Australia 2011. Despite desperate pleas by Harry with the family court for over a decade regarding his fears for the safety of his children. No apology from the court for this. ( The Australian, December 2, 2019. P 1 ). In Memory of George Romeyko and Robin Inslay. With Complements to : Barry Williams. Sylvia Smith, Dr Robert Kelso, Bettina Arndt, Mark Whittaker, Mark Latham, Ian Monk and Coral Slattery. Any examination of the operations of the Australian Family Court cannot be held in a vacuum. The history and political philosophy of the court and its designers must come into play in any serious attempt to understand the court and the intentions of those who implemented it some 40+ years ago, as well as its abject failing. For some of those practitioners, sad to say, the family court is functioning perfectly running true to its intended charter. The elements of “no fault” and the privileged position of females and mothers ( reflected in the gender breakdown of who pays child support and who receives it ) under the application of this Australian Court has precedence in the Marxist experience of the then and now defunct USSSR and in post 1949 Maoist China. The Marxist family courts as introduced at that time, were not merely institutions with the sole purpose of dissolving a marriage and providing for the maintenance of children, those courts had a zealous political agenda. Parallels with those hateful authoritarian Soviet/Sino courts can be easily identified in today’s Australian divorce courts. This court is Australia’s Shame. Prime Minister Paul Keating once referred to the Senate as “Unrepresentative Scum”. If the Senate is Unrepresentative Scum, then what is the Labor Party’s Family Court. Much less then Keating’s Ideal of the Senate? MEN FACING THE INVIDIOUS FAMILY COURT ARE NOT FACING A PERSONAL OR LEGAL PROBLEM. THEY ARE FACING A POLITICAL ONE : MANIFESTED BY DECADES OF LITTLE OR NO REPRESENTATION FOR THEIR GENDER IN PARLIAMENT AND ONGOING VILLIFICATION. The March 2019 report of the Australian Law Reform Commission ( ALRC) inquiry Family Law for the Future—An Inquiry into the Family Law System (ALRC Report 135, 2019) was one that criticised the operation of the family court after an 18-month inquiry. This report recommended that the family court be phased out ( Recommendation 1 The Australian Government should consider options to establish state and territory family courts in all states and territories, to exercise jurisdiction concurrently under the Family Law Act 1975, as well as state and territory child protection and family violence jurisdiction, whilst also considering the most efficient manner to eventually abolish first instance federal family courts ). Further to the report of the ALRC, media, the Brisbane Courier Mail published details of an interview with the Chair of the ALRC Committee Chair, Federal Court Judge Sarah Derrington. In the Courier Mail article ( Courier Mail 17 June 2019 ) she was quoted in a damning inditement that the family court was creating a generation of psychologically damaged children, a “mistake” and needing to be abolished. It is significant that one of the highest advisory law bodies in Australia ( well at least the Chair of the ALRC Committee in this case ) has so harshly criticised the court, within, by way of the Committee’s report and thereafter in sections of the media. Many individuals involved in family law reform over the last 4 decades had arrived at the ALRC’s position independently many years prior and without the investment of supposedly “expert” involvement and the expenses of a Committee of Inquiry. 3 Indeed, the family court was a massive, deadly and costly mistake some 44 years ago, its decisions and operations damage children as well as the community and it should must be disbanded. The 581 page report of the ALRC provides in its body a “brief” history of the court ( p 56 ). This is couched in the detail of prior Matrimonial Causes Acts ( 1945, 1961 ) and the stated desire of “progressives” like Gough Whitlam and Lionel Murphy to eliminate “fault” in divorce proceedings and to reduce costs to parties before the court. The report gives the impression of the court as being established for purely altruistic reasons in some kind of 1960’s vacuum but suffering in effectiveness from an unexpected swamping by expanding and emerging unmanageable domestic violence incidents by divorcing couples and ongoing short falls in funding. The report details the court operations and philosophy which have ostensibly failed. There seems little value in combing through such details, it would seem as beneficial as using the Titanic disaster as positive resource material for guidelines for modern maritime safety. More a Warning for the future than a system to pin future hopes on. HISTORY OF THE FAMILY COURT: THE MARXIST MODEL: THE COMMUNIST REALITY. The real history of the family court is not as the ALRC report skips over in its contemporary Australian 1940’s 50’s and 60’s narrative, but as our learned friends in the ALRC, on the Bench and the Professions would no doubt understand from their tertiary studies in history, contained within the social and political upheavals beginning in Europe in the early 19th Century. Family court consummators, Whitlam and Murphy were both failed politicians. One as a Prime Minister well and truly booted by the Australian electorate in a general election another as a Federal Attorney General and thereafter and a Failed High Court Judge ( the “Age Tapes” were illegally obtained, no question, not dishonest in their content, but truthful, reflective and objective. Admittedly inadmissible as evidence because of the nature of their procurement, but otherwise no doubt an honest account of conversations between Murphy et al ). Both Whitlam and Murphy were Marxist ideologists. Whitlam constantly referred to himself and “Fabius Maximus” and Murphy was a least a “pragmatic” Marxist, having aligned himself with the left in political office during his career in the senate and during his student days. The origins of Australia’s Family Court and Family Law Act are a modern manifestation of the toxic Marxist forces that originated with Karl Marx and his turgid 1848 Manifesto and the lamentable successes of Violent and deadly Marxist revolution in the 20th Century, principally in the Russian USSR 1917 slaughter and Maoist the Communist China 1949 killing fields. Family law in these one- party state dictatorships was rapidly implemented and underpinned by Marxist philosophy. Early in the Chinese Communist revolution Mao stated that “The marriage law is only next to importance to the great fundamental law” ( the Constitution).