In the last sitting week of Parliament before the long winter break, the Attorney-General tabled a regulation that will see the Government pocketing buckets of extra money from vulnerable families that use the Family Court.  The regulation will see fees for families that use the Family Court increased annually instead of every two years.

This is a sneaky deception by the Attorney-General.  This year’s Budget papers indicated that there would be no increase to family law fees.  Attorney-General Porter has shown himself to be just as heartless as his predecessor, George Brandis.

In 2015 Labor fought George Brandis in the Federal Court to stop him increasing family law fees by sneakily introducing regulations after they had already been disallowed by the Senate.  Those regulations were also introduced as Parliament went into the long winter break. We stopped the fees being increased then, but a change of Attorney-General has not changed the playbook.

This Government has no problem giving the banks $17 billion dollars but it will scrape and claw every last cent from vulnerable families who are desperately trying to resolve their parenting disputes in the Family Court.

It’s not enough for this government to penny-pinch its inept administration of these important courts by not replacing judges in a timely manner and proposing to abolish the Family Court to save money, now they hit families at their lowest ebb, including women and children fleeing family violence, with an extra tax on access to justice.