The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Family Law Act, the single most intrusive and destructive piece of legislation to ever pass the Australian parliament. In that time the Family Court has been the subject of dozens of government inquiries and attempts at reform on its road to becoming a cash cow for lawyers and the single most hated jurisdiction in the country. Far from the caring, helpful court promoting joint custody and cooperation after separation, as its founders envisaged, the Family Court rapidly became a law unto itself, imposing sole custody on separating families despite all the documented harm of this style of custody order, while denying non-custodial parents contact with their children on the flimsiest of excuses. Overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive, and unaccountable, defying public norms of decency and probity, the ideologically driven Family Court and its so-called evil sister the Child Support Agency have remained remarkably resistant to reform and indifferent to the public odium they attract. Successive governments from both left and right have failed to listen to their constituents and respond to their concerns. They have resorted to vested inquiries in the hands of the mandarins and publicly funded elites whose feigned attempts to listen to the views of ordinary people are a stain on the Australian Public Service. In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to fix outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown. The country's failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself.
