Smith NickHon Dr NICK SMITH (National): Family law is one of the most difficult but actually important areas of work for our Parliament. It's hugely important for the wellbeing of our children and I don't think there'd be a member of this House that wouldn't recognise that the most important relationships that we have are with our parents and with our children. Equally I'm one of those who say that actually family is one of the most important institutions in our society.The real core of the question with this bill for Parliament is whether by having more lawyers and more court involvement we're going to get better outcomes for children and I am a sceptic of that perspective that the Government has with this bill. In my 30 years of experience as a constituency MP I have seen appalling cases through the Family Court in which there have been gross injustices. I highlight two particular cases in which parents who were together who had done absolutely nothing wrong had lost the right to see their own children for many years while the Family Court processes delayed and drudged on. Now nothing would be worse for me. The worst thing you could do would be to deny me access and the right to see my four children. Those sorts of examples are a real warning that when we have family issues locked up into our traditional adversarial court system that can take years and tens of thousands of dollars—that we in Parliament shouldn't have the maturity to be able to question: actually is that really working in the best interests of those children and those families?I note for instance in the statistics that the average time to get a resolution of a dispute between separated parents through the process of mediation is 37 days. The average period if it goes to court is over 300 days. Now if you're a bloke or lady in your fifties 300 days might not seem that long a time. For a child 300 days is eternity. It's a really long time and that is very damaging for the child. And so in designing our Family Court system which we have responsibility to do in this House we need to be very careful of the incentives that we create because actually members on this side of the House say that that system needs to be designed in such a way that we encourage parents as much as is possible to resolve their issues themselves over their children and the way in which we create family law has to be one in which we have parents incentivised to cooperate and to work together in the best interests of those children. Every time that we open another avenue for long drawn-out court processes we may think we're doing the right thing for the child; in many cases we are not. Justice delayed is justice denied and no more importantly than in the case of dealing with Family Court issues.So my view of this bill is that it drags us down a further route of encouraging and furthermore resourcing huge sums of public money into drawn-out legal arguments rather than actually trying to find resolution. I honestly believe that if we spent more money on facilitation and social work - type skills to support parents to raise children in separated environments we would actually get better outcomes than the huge emphasis that there is here on actually adding more lawyers and more legalistic process around trying to get a better outcome for children. We will scrutinise this bill further at select committee. We'll never get perfect family law because every family is so different and it is a challenging area but it is National's view that we need to be focused on getting shorter resolution getting away from an adversarial system and truly being focused on how we can get parents to cooperate and work together to get good outcomes for children.