Turner Judy: Amended Answers to Oral Questions — Question No. 4 to Minister; Family Courts (Openness of Proceedings) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Amended Answers to Oral Questions — Question No. 4 to Minister; Family Courts (Openness of Proceedings) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:13890] 
JUDY TURNER (United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the first reading of the Family Courts (Openness of Proceedings) Amendment Bill. I want to state upfront that United Future is offering cautious support for this first reading but I want to signal that we have a range of concerns we want to see addressed during a select committee process in order to be able to support the bill beyond this point. 
The Care of Children Bill promised that it would deliver greater openness and transparency in the Family Court. We have a report from the Law Commission which has made a series of recommendations that appear to be more moderate than that proposal. I guess if we had the luxury of time United Future would have preferred to see how some of those policies were implemented over a year or two as to whether they sufficed or whether we did need to look at pushing the boundaries as this bill suggests. But that is not the case. 
We have the bill before us now and I think that like most members of Parliament United Future members over the last couple of years have been inundated with emails and letters and have had meetings in constituency offices with people who are angry and frustrated. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
JUDY TURNER 
: When we concluded for dinner I was referring to the fact that lots of members will have experienced what I have experienced which is that they will have been inundated with emails letters and people coming to their electorate offices with real concerns anger and frustration directed towards Family Court outcomes. The call for a greater degree of transparency in the Family Court has been around for a long long time. The questions we are asked when we talk to those people are about why there is a need for such secrecy. People say they do not want their personal details kept private and unable to be scrutinised so I think that Mrs Newman has provided a great opportunity here for the people who do not feel that the Care of Children Bill gave them the opportunity they were looking for to present their concerns about the openness of the Family Court. 
We note some of the differences between the member’s bill and the Law Commission’s recommendations and I think that there is the kind of tension that will need to be discussed if we can get this bill passed through to the select committee. There are questions of how far we go and how we balance the issues of privacy so that the Family Court does not return to some sort of grimy  
Sunday Times  
exposé of everybody’s personal details but instead provides the sense of dignity that families desperately need when their lives have turned to mud—as has happened when most families are needing to access the services of the Family Court. 
What the public seems to be crying for is an exposure of the trends of rulings that are happening down at the Family Court. The complaint is that if we look at the trends and overall pattern of what is coming out of the Family Court there is real reason for concern. The truth is that we do not know whether those people are right or wrong—whether they are just reacting to their own disappointment at a Family Court outcome or whether they really have touched a raw nerve in relation to a real dysfunction that is going on in our Family Court system. 
Union of Fathers and groups like that have formed a cohesiveness around their very great distress at Family Court procedures and rulings. I think that that is long overdue even if there is just a half-truth in what those groups are talking about. We are talking about children’s access to parents to custody and to parental orders. They are serious matters that need to be well scrutinised. The public deserves to know that the Family Court system is above board that the rulings are fair and just and that we can have faith in the system.