I am Elizabeth Chin, a legal studies student, taking the South Australian Matriculation (SAM) program, would request for your time in helping me answer the following.

However, in my opinion, I think divorce is easy to obtain because of the following reasons:

1. The inception of the Do-it yourself divorce kits in 1996 by the Australian Government.
2. The principle of no fault Divorce introduced in 1975.
3. Online divorce by the Federal Magistrate Courts in 2004.
4. Divorce without the consent of the other spouse.

In your opinion, do you think divorce has been made easier?

Hope you will spend some time in answering these.Your cooperation is much appreciated by me in helping me.

Thank You.

Your sincerely,
Elizabeth Chin

Golly Elizabeth...ur not helping my marriage.. I just had a HUGE fight with the missus :)

Kidding.. it was just a 'normal' fight..... u know..doghouse for a few hours... yelp yelp....

Have fun picking peoples brains.

P.S. you obviously answered your own question. Now just write the essay.

Perhaps you could explore the longer term social implications of the ease of divorce ? I can give you an anthropological article which shows how 'small changes can have a LARGE impact on a community, and often they don't realize just how seriously the change they made will effect them. You could use it as supporting evidence for re-thinking some of our quaint laws.
http://www.anthroprof.org/documents/Docs102/102articles/steelAxes.pdf

Thank You for your reply. In your opinion, why has the Australian Government made divorce easier? Is it used as means to allow Australians to get out of their marriages easily?

Regards,
Elizabeth Chin

The fact is you must be seperated now for two years.
Thats two years before you can get on with your life.
You also must show you have attended some counciling together to see if the marriage can not be saved.
Often this is thrown at people who have been separted over a year etc.
Many of those people are in new relashonships and just wanting to get on with their lives.
This makes it even harder when property is involved.
No its not too easy its the opposite.
Adults can make up their own minds and one years is all most require.
The Government ought to stay out of peoples private affairs and not make it even harder to get on with their lives.
Fact is most people are well over the marraige by the time they walk out the door.
They dont require a two year delay in being able to move on.

PALE, well said. By the time you can actually get a divorce it seems that most people are well and truly over the relationship. The longer and more difficult that process is the greater the potential for unnecessary conflict. The issues around child residency, property etc make divorce a minefield.

If we were to tighten things up I'd rather see it at the other end, make the process of entering into a legalally binding commitment more clear (especially defacto relationships) and allow for a greater variety of relationship contracts. Let people sign up for what they intend to fullfill - some go into a marriage with an intent to do the "for better or worse, till death do us part" committment and find out later that their spouse has taken a "while I continue to feel fullfilled and happy with the relationship" approach.

I'd like to see less support for the users and manipulators in the post seperation wash up. Those most willing to use the kids as pawns, least willing to support themselves etc seem to be the ones the government thinks should be protected.

As for the impact of no fault divorce and the like - I'd not like to go back to the point where it was necessary for schemers to set a partner up to try and get them to be "at fault". To a point where unsuspecting people are followed by PI's so their partner can get the evidence to move on.

I don't like it that people break committments to others all to easily, I don't like it that people enter into relationships with the risk of being cleaned out finacially and emotionally if things go wrong.

I do think that when things have gone seriously wrong putting roadblocks in peoples way which hinder them moving on causes more harm than good.

R0bert

Elizabeth, I am a “CONSTITUTIONALIST” and Attorney, not a lawyer, and have been involved for decades in matrimonial cases before the Courts. Generally a divorce is far too easy to be obtained.
At times, people claim they were separated for “X” amount of time even so they never were and achieve a quick divorce.
There was this case where a woman had posted a divorce application but never was advised of a hearing. She continued to live on with her husband. After he died she discovered that she had been divorced without she having been notified of a hearing date and neither her (late) husband was ever notified about it.
A marriage must be viewed as a “contract” between two parties. After all, often one of the parties gain a lot by getting married. Hence, I do not accept the concept of no fault divorce, as this would be akin to every other contract to be no fault breach. Indeed, where partners in business are getting married it allows a business otherwise being very secure by the divorce of them the business contract is reduced to a matrimonial contract and often leaves one severely out of pocket.
I am lucky in a sense that my wife doesn’t use computers and neither so use the Internet as she is quickly in flames that whenever anything goes wrong she announces she is going for a divorce. Someone wrongly phoned in, and leaves a message, and my wife has it about getting a divorce because she didn’t like what the person was saying. I just haven’t a clue what the caller was on about. In 2005 she had it in her head that she had cancer and when I dared to ask her to wait until the test results were known she announced she was going to get a divorce as I clearly showed not to care less about her suffering of cancer, etc. Well, the test came back and showed negative and so she claimed that the test were done wrong as she knew she had cancer, etc.

continued....