ALERT: New Family Court Rules from 1 March 2018.
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February 2018
The Family Court of Australia has recently announced that the Family Court Judges have approved significant amendments to the Family Law Rules which will take effect on 1 March 2018.
The biggest changes to the Rules to be made aware of are:
- You are no longer allowed to have annexures to an affidavit. Rather, any document that a party seeks to rely on should be only referred to in the affidavit, with the party to tendered to the court at the hearing a bundle of referred to documents. However, a copy of any document referred to in the affidavit must be served on the other party contemporaneously with service of the affidavit. In practice this may mean that a tender bundle is prepared with the affidavit; which would not filed with the affidavit but served with the sealed affidavit.
- A completed superannuation information form is no longer required to be filed with an Application for Consent if a superannuation splitting order is sought. The court will accept another document, as long as it allows the court to determine the value of a superannuation interest. In practice, this means that a current member statement of a party’s interest in the superannuation fund will be sufficient.
- If a party is served with an Initiating Application, Response, Reply or Notice of Appeal and they do not oppose the orders sought in that document, a new form has been created called a Submitting Notice which will allows the court to make final orders in their absence of a party and without the necessity of them filing any court documents.
- The Family Court has now abolished the form ‘Annexure to Proposed Consent Parenting Order’ which was required to be completed by parties that were seeking parenting orders through an Application for Consent Order. The court has now issued two new ‘Notice of Risk’ forms, which have yet to be released from the court but it is expected they will have similarities to the Notice of Risk forms currently required to be completed for all parenting matters in the Federal Circuit Court.
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