Australia

Parents should think twice before taking their child overseas without first getting permission from the child’s other parent. A number of legal restrictions are in place to prevent a child leaving Australia without the consent of both parents. Even if you are only planning a short holiday, it is important to get permission from the…

Relationship breakdowns can be a source of emotional distress and grief.  These feelings can be inflated by the complex, and often unavoidable, exercise of dividing property. You may have an interest in the property you shared with your former partner, however, your name may not be on the property title. There are a number of…

The Registrar uses administrative formulas to calculate child support assessments. He or she considers income and care when calculating the child support a parent must pay. In special circumstances, the Registrar of Child Support can change an assessment. The provisions that empower the registrar to do this are found in Part 6A of the Child Support…

Presumptions of parentage are the framework courts and other agencies use to make an assumption about who the parents of a child are in the absence of direct evidence. In the past, a presumption of parentage was dictated by common law (court-made law). The common law presumption reflected traditional social norms: marriage only occurred between…

Contact services are agencies which provide trained staff to supervise the handover of children from one parent to another and to oversee a party’s time with the children. There are many privately run and government-run organisations which provide contact services. Reports by contact services Contact services can provide a report to the parties and to…

In recent months, the Department of Home Affairs (DOHA) has been increasing the range and scope of migration options for prospective skilled visa applicants who are willing to live and work in regional Australia. On 26 October 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the government would be stepping up its commitment to regional Australia…

In November 2019, the Sydney and Brisbane registries of the Federal Circuit Court implemented a new system. This system is the Discrete Property List and it is intended to fast-track simple property matters, with little delay and expense for parties. Why the Discrete Property List? It is well known that matters in the Federal Circuit…

A trial, also commonly referred to as a hearing, is a contested proceeding that determines an outcome for the parties. In respect of Family Law matters, this will usually involve parties that have separated and require judicial determination for parenting and/or property matters. A final hearing leads to orders made on a final basis, where…

If a Child Support Assessment is issued in Australia, there are several methods the Child Support Agency can use to recover debt. These include making arrangements with the payer’s employer to deduct the amount owing from wages, garnishing the amount owed from bank accounts and intercepting tax refunds. However, if the paying parent moves overseas…

Section 121 of the Family Law Act imposes a widespread prohibition on the publication of any part of family law proceedings. The provision makes it unlawful (subject to exceptions) to publish information that identifies any person who is a party to such proceedings or who is otherwise connected to proceedings. The rationale behind this provision…

Justice reinvestment is an approach to addressing crime that involves redirecting funding that would normally be used on prisons back into the communities most affected by crime. These funds are then used to pay for programs and infrastructure to deal with its root causes. Justice reinvestment originated in the United States in response to the…

A report released on 11 October 2019 by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has warned of the dangers of the digital welfare state. Digital welfare states are states, like Australia, that allow their social security system to be administered and automated by computer technologies without the involvement of caseworkers…

On 7 August 2019, the High Court decided the matter of Comcare v Banerji, which dealt with an employee’s claim that her dismissal from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship breached her constitutional right to freedom of political communication. Ms Banerji had used social media to criticise the department and individual employees within the department,…

In the 2019 Family Court decision of Ellwood v Ravenhill, the court decided an application by the mother in a parenting matter where orders had been made in respect of two children aged 15 and 17 on the application of the father. The father had made the application without fulfilling the requirements of Section 601,…

In recent years, Australia’s laws restricting what journalists can report and what information Commonwealth employees can disclose have got tighter and tighter. Human rights lawyers and activists have often raised the alarm that we are creeping closer to becoming a police state, with liberties such as freedom of the press under threat. But exactly what…

It is a principle of administrative law that government decision-makers should be required to fulfill the legitimate expectations that they have created. Where a decision-maker has failed to satisfy a legitimate expectation in the process of arriving at the decison, the decision may be challenged. The doctrine of legitimate expectation came to prominence in 1994.…