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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 272 ..

When we go out for public consultation on inquiries, the people who make submissions to us do so in the hope that something will be realised at the end of that, not just a report to the Assembly, which will change a couple of months later. Furthermore, it would be quite inappropriate for a government approaching a caretaker period to commit to a number of responses immediately prior to an election. If, for example, the government changed, things would be entirely different. It has no hope of happening this time. However, the principle still applies.

One of my big concerns is that we would get to the stage of having a report to the Assembly and the government of the day would not have enough time to respond to it before we go into caretaker mode. I do not think we would have the time to do that.

Some of the issues mentioned in this motion have been addressed by this Assembly in the earlier inquiry we had into homeless fathers with dependant children. Some of what we put in that report goes to some of the issues here. That signals that this Assembly does regard these as serious issues, so I do not want anybody to suggest that this side of the chamber considers that these are not serious issues. The terms of reference are plainly just too wide.

Regretfully, this side of the house will not be supporting the motion. However, if Mrs Burke should be fortunate enough to be returned after the election, I am sure that the new committee would entertain a motion from her then.

MR STEFANIAK (11.02): I listened with interest to what Mr Hargreaves said. Mrs Burke tells me, Mr Hargreaves that, yes, the terms of reference are the same as the those of the South Australian committee. That committee reported in three to four months, so she informs me.

It is a very important motion. A lot has been done for women over the last 30 years, and rightly so. However, there are some real and growing problems in relation to men, and Mrs Burke’s motion is an eminently sensible one and would allow the Assembly to look into those. I think it is important that the work is done now. It is something that can also be taken up in the sixth Assembly, but I think there are so many issues around men and men as fathers that this should be looked at now.

Mr Speaker, I will quote now from a little book, Men and Separation: Choices in Tough Times by Relationships Australia. There are some stark figures here that are probably much worse than they were 10 or 15 years ago, indicating a situation that is probably far worse than it was at the time that I was practising in family law in the late 1970s and then again in the early 1990s.

In the year 2001, the median age for men to marry was 31; the median age for divorce was 42; 42 per cent of marriages ended in divorce; 12 per cent of separated children lived with their fathers; nearly one-third of all children, 30 per cent, lived with only one natural parent and had no, or next to no, contact with the other natural parent, who was often the mother; 18 per cent of children lived in a one-parent family; and 8 per cent of children lived in a step or blended family.

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