Australia’s attorney general, Christian Porter, has announced a major structural overhaul of the family court. It will be merged with the federal circuit court. It’s the single largest change since the family court was established in 1975.
Why? Well, there have been ongoing calls for reform - there’s a conspicuous lack of funds for the family court, and a shortage of judges. Back in 2016, a Fairfax investigation discovered that the “average wait for trial has ballooned to two years”.
Delays within the justice process contribute to the vulnerability of – specifically – women and children. In 2017, the family court’s then chief justice announced that the court didn’t have adequate resources to “protect parents and children from violence”. Anti-violence advocate Rosie Batty campaigned with the Women’s Legal Service of Australia to make family courts “a safer place for those affected by family violence”.
But necessary resources have not been forthcoming. In March this year, journalist Jenna Price described the resulting situation as “turmoil”, which she says is the responsibility of “successive governments who have refused to fund the court according to its need or legislate to improve the process.”
Christian Porter is not delivering more money. In fact, given that there are many family law cases being heard by the less-specialist circuit court, he’s claiming that his merger of the two courts will reduce backlog merely by reaping efficiency dividends with a single point of entry, “driving faster, cheaper and more consistent dispute resolution”.
Sound an alarm. Porter’s statement that should chill the bones of any Australian with a political attention span longer than a biscuit’s. “Faster, cheaper” was the same promise Turnbull made about the NBN.
Legal scholars are expressing concerns. As Porter abolishes the family court, he’s also dispensing with the specific expertise now obliged of its judges to be “suitable person(s) to deal with matters of family law”. The importance of this suitability to those cases that get heard there cannot be understated. “Child custody cases can be wickedly complex, especially when one or both parents are alleging abuse,” wrote Jess Hill in an terrifying 2015 expose. “Making the wrong decision can be devastating; children may be ordered into the care of an abusive parent, or prohibited from seeing a safe and loving one ... (Decisions) require great skill and understanding to get right.”
Porter’s own decision has not even come at the end of a review. Curiously, his merger preempts a review currently taking place, run by the Australian Law Reform Commission, helmed by a University of Melbourne law professor.
The review is due for delivery in March 2019 - Porter’s reforms are scheduled for 1 January. His response to criticism of a threadbare consultation for his review-free restructure? “It’s the government’s decision”. He spoke to some judges, but not advocates, stakeholders or the community. Asked whether judges were supportive, he replied: “it’s not a matter of supporting or not supporting”.

"The whole Hanson story is never to let abject lack of capacity dissuade you from wading in"

The question arises about what informs Porter’s – and his Liberal-National government’s – own judgment. The spokesperson from the Women’s Legal Service Queensland is presently “demanding answers about whether Malcolm Turnbull has done a backroom deal with Pauline Hanson” on the court merger.
Sound more alarms. Maybe sound all of them.
Pauline Hanson’s double-decade, consistently bonkers political CV has been characterised by choices whose “highlights” include posing for photos with neo-Nazis, picking fights with drag queens, fear of Asian lesbian cyborgs, videos of herself claiming she’s been murdered, climate denial, halal food conspiracy theories and statements she admits get her called “racist”. Her most memorable contribution as a senator for Queensland was attending parliament both in a burqa and with slightly less dignity than a nude five-year-old disrupting a dinner party, arms striped with Nutella, parental underpants on their head.
Her judgment is so fragile she can’t even maintain a senate bloc of a mere four people with enough power to make or break government legislation; of the Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party’s four senators elected two years ago, two have been disqualified, a replacement has switched parties and she expelled another last week. Hers is not the leadership for the challenging and sensitive business of family law, with its extreme and personal emotions, its intersections of violence, sexual abuse, substance abuse and crises of parental capacity, its vulnerable children.
But the whole Hanson story is never to let abject lack of capacity dissuade you from wading in. Hanson has demanded the abolition of the family court since her political arrival in 1996. When returned to parliament in 2016, Hanson insisted on a meeting with the chief justice, claiming “What needs to be addressed is domestic violence orders. Women, most of them are women, are going out and throwing them around left, right and centre.” To Hanson child support payments are “punitive”, and – unless one parent is a convicted criminal – joint custody should be default.
In 2016, critics found her attacks on domestic violence protection and child maintenance “laughable, a rehash of the language and agenda of men’s rights groups” – “terrible”, according to the principal lawyer of Victoria’s Women’s Legal Service. And yet Hanson met with prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that year and was “very grateful for his attention” while declaring the family court’s abolition “huge on my agenda”.
Turnbull’s attorney general is unlikely to legislate Hanson’s demands for judges to be replaced with “mainstream Australians” in custody cases. But with a speciality court collapsed into a general one, judges relieved of expertise requirements in return for efficiency dividends and resources maintained at insufficient levels, he doesn’t need to. Family law academics Stephen Parker and John Dewar once mapped the trajectory of the Howard Liberal government tilting the family law system “more and more against women, either by accident or design”. Further compromises under a Turnbull government render the “men’s rights” agenda Hanson represents increasingly likely to win out.
There just might be votes in it, of course. Responding to the surge of votes for Hanson’s party in Queensland at the last election, the ABC reported “some Nationals MPs believe the One Nation leader’s push to abolish the Family Court struck a chord with angry dads battling custody issues” in 2016.
Queensland is the electoral battleground that the Liberals and Nationals need to secure to retain government – and rumours are certainly firming for an election this year. What fortuitous timing that Porter has abolished the family court at the very point that courting the “angry dads” that voted for Hanson may be in his government’s interests.
It’s a judgment perhaps more tactical than even ideological. And vulnerable parents and their children are just expendable to it.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia journalist