Page 3340 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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There is no such benefit to de facto relationships or other relationships flowing from the Family Law Act. The Commonwealth head of power under which the Family Law Act is made is a power to deal with marriage, and therefore other relationships need to be dealt with by State or Territory jurisdictions and by parliaments in those places.
It is not just de factos in the conventional sense who miss out in this situation. There are many other personal relationships which evoke the personal interdependence of a marriage and which also, arguably, should be protected by the law; for example, an adult child who resides in a house or a flat with their parent, a companion to an aged person, a parent living in a granny flat. The question, I think, is a worthy one. Should, for example, a child who has made financial commitments on behalf of a parent have fewer rights than a wife who has made such commitments for her husband? Should a strict commercially framed law of contracts define the entitlements of people who are adopting an increasingly diverse range of lifestyles in our community?
It is one thing to be judgmental about some of the relationships and the lifestyles we are talking about here; it is quite another to say that people who adopt those lifestyles deserve no protection from the law. Disapproval of married couples, indeed, of homosexual relationships, is not a pretext for saying that such people have no rights under our law, or should have no rights under our law. That is not to say that all relationships should generate the same rights. At least we should aim, I think, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the goal of certainty. We should be able to find a medium which gives people in those particular relationships some chance of knowing where they stand under the law of this Territory, and that is a very important goal which I believe this discussion paper makes some attempt to address.
The biggest problem at present is that people who are in such relationships and who find themselves in need of resolving some conflict or dealing with some difficulty simply do not know where they stand. The Australian Law Reform Commission made some comments about other sorts of relationships than those which are governed by the Family Law Act. It recommended that the law should recognise as valid the relationships which people choose for themselves, and must support and protect those relationships. Whether or not one recognises them as valid, I suppose, is a question for individuals to answer; but it seems to me that they deserve protection under the law, and in the process whereby we examine this discussion paper we should assess how far we believe we should be protecting those relationships.
The paper is premised on the assumption that this uncertainty should be cleared up as much as possible. I am disappointed, as I said earlier, that there has been little public debate, for example in the media, other than a day or two after the paper was launched, about the implications of this paper. I think it puts the onus on us, as members of the Assembly, to examine community sentiment and to work out just how far we, as an Assembly, can afford to go. My party certainly does not wish to commit itself to the details of the Bill - I assume that the Bill will not be introduced into the Assembly for some time - until the process of full discussion with the community has been undertaken and the result obtained.
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