Family Law 2025

AUSTRALIA Law and Practice Contributed by: Paul Doolan, Melinda Winning, Carly Middleton and Jeff Marhinin, Barkus Doolan Winning

are (limited) rights of appeal from arbitral awards where an error of law can be established. The timeline for Australian court proceedings is as follows. • Where interlocutory relief is sought, the court will generally allocate an interim hearing of those matters approximately four to eight weeks after the application is filed. The pre - cise timing can be shorter or longer, depend - ing upon the urgency, complexity and the court’s diary. Interlocutory hearings are often conducted by Microsoft Teams videolink rather than in person – although there is a move back towards in-person court hearings for interim matters. • At the first return date, the court will look at matters of disclosure and valuation, and make procedural directions designed to ensure that parties have given full and frank disclosure and that the relevant property and financial resources have been identified, as well as to facilitate the appointment of single experts to resolve valuation disputes. • Parties will usually be “required” to partici - pate in mediation and directions are made to facilitate the conduct of a mediation. • If matters cannot be resolved through nego - tiation or mediation, then – depending upon the complexity of the issues – they can be allocated to different levels of the Australian court system. The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (Division 2) deals with the vast majority of financial cases of the “run of the mill” variety. Those cases with multi - ple parties, complex issues, difficult valua - tion issues, large asset pools or requiring an extended hearing will be heard by the supe - rior court (ie, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (Division 1)).

• Within that superior court, there is also a major complex financial proceedings list operating on the eastern seaboard of Aus - tralia, where cases of greater complexity or substantial asset pools are allocated for hear - ing before assigned judges. • As a general observation, the timeline for a reasonably complex financial proceeding case – from the date of filing to the date of hearing on a final basis – is presently approxi - mately 14–24 months. 2.3 Division of Assets The Australian system of property settlement fol - lowing a breakdown of the marriage is governed by the Family Law Act. Australia does not have a community of property regime. There are no presumptions or starting points of equality of division of assets. The High Court of Australia has made clear that courts exercising jurisdiction to alter property interests under the Family Law Act shall not make an order for property settlement, unless it is just and equitable to do so. That is, there must be a principled reason for altering the property holdings of one or both parties to the marriage. That being said, in the vast majority of cases – particularly those where the marriage has been of reasonable duration and/or there are children born of the marriage – the court will quickly accept that an order for property settle - ment should be made. General Approach to Property Settlement in Australia It is often said that there are essentially four steps to determining what order, if any, should be made for property settlement, as follows.

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