The Family Court has required reports on separating couples with dependent children from Family Counsellors for at least 16 years to my knowledge.

Counsellors role was mediation seeking to reach agreement between the parties prior to Court adjudication.

The Courts put the interests of the child first ahead of parents interests and relied heavily on the Counsellors mediation report.

Unfortunately the original intent of the Family Court to function without Lawyers was not implemented and their presence invariably reinforced an adversarial atmosphere.

I agree, the Government's proposal is mainly symbolic and a waste of money.

I share a level of scepticism about the likelyhood of the centers making a real difference. Those who misuse the existing system are unlikely to change their values based on some sessions at a relationships centre while they are not held accountable for their own role in creating their situation.

Even worse is the prospect that these centers will be staffed by existing players with their biases and parents will be forced into their hands without legal representation and possibly with little understanding of their rights in that process. No on site legal advice, no independant record of what occurred and the possibility of staff with significant bias is a very scary prospect. I'm assuming that recordings of sessions will not be available or actionable.

Add to that the likelyhood that performance incentives will include a measure based on the number of cases resolved by the center or staff member involved and its easy to imagine a temptation to get outcomes which favour the person least willing to negotiate (manouver the more reasonable parent to get a result regardless of the sanity of the outcome).

R0bert

Four months ago, Ms. Sharma wrote an article supporting the proposed changes to Family Law (see CIS website and The Australian, 13 Dec 2005). This article lists the benefits expected from the proposals. The article says the existing legal situation is unnecessarily adversarial, and unfair to fathers and children. Ms. Sharma even argues that taxpayers shouldn't have to compensate women who will receive less money under the improved CSA proposals.

This new article seems a strange follow up.

Surely Ms. Sharma remembers that most of the existing divorce industry argued against these modest and reasonable changes. Many existing judges, lawyers, and community providers of advice and mediation, show entrenched unjustified anti-father beliefs.

Legislators also remember that their previous reform attempt, in 1995, was completely ignored by the divorce industry. This time around, the Government opted to develop new, better controlled, paths for handling the cases.

Ms. Sharma’s comments about the nanny state trying to control the lives of individuals are not appropriate here. Instead the aim is to control behaviour of industry players, thereby allowing individual couples to make free and informed decisions without duress – or the vested influence of lawyers and one-dimensional advocacy groups.

Yes, this is ambitious, and expensive, but necessary. Yes, biased anti-father zealots may still infiltrate the new Centres. Yes, it would have been cheaper, and easier, to legislate for a rebuttable presumption of shared residency in the first place.

Very eloquently said cabbage. And factually correct too.

Keeping lawyers out of divorce or dispute resolution will indeed be a great outcome if it can be achieved. My experience with marriage breakdown was that the lawyers polarised the parties and made communication impossible apart from that through them. This generates further anger and frustration destroying any possible reconciliation or negotiations between the couple. From a lawyers perspective it is more rewarding for them to have the parties totally opposed and as mad as hell.

SILLE, that may vary from lawyer to lawyer. In my own case my solicitor appeared to look for ways of avoiding the litigation process. That may have been driven to some extent by the feedback I gave as we went but I never saw anything which looked like a desire to keep us at each others throats.

My ex has blamed various solicitors for some of the unethical actions she undertook. The fact that a solicitor advised that a course of action was possible seemingly absolves her of the responsibility for instructing the solicitor to take that action or for her taking a certain action herself. I took the view that I was instructing my solicitor not the other way around and that ultimately I had to live with how we conducted our side of the case.

I think that some do behave as you suggest but they do have a responsibility to advise us of the options available to us, we choose what is acceptable. Something we should not forget.

R0bert