FAMILY LAW – Parenting – child has a good and close relationship with both parents – long history of difficult co-parenting relationship which is not assisted by the Father’s protests against the Family Law Act and his obsessive complaints about “the family law system” in Australia and world-wide – where the Father’s abusive behaviour towards the Mother, the Court, the ICL, experts generally and Child Court Experts and practitioners is of extreme concern – long running litigation where Father has filed multiple contraventions against the Mother and sought substantive parenting Orders in circumstances where parents have previously had a shared-care arrangement - Orders for sole parental responsibility, child to live with the Mother and spend limited time with the Father – Mother’s Application for Father to be declared a vexatious litigant dismissed.
Legislation:
Family Law Act1975 (Cth), ss 60CC, 61DA, 102NA, 114, 117, Part VII
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Fifth Edition, 2002)
Macquarie Dictionary (Seventh Edition, 2017)
Division:
Division 2 Family Law
Number of paragraphs:
250
Date of last submission/s:
18 August 2022
Date of Hearing
25 & 26 May 2022
Place:
Canberra
Solicitor for the Applicant
Self-represented
Counsel for the Respondent
Ms R Curran
Solicitor for the Respondent
Farrar Gesini Dunn
Independent Children’s Lawyer
Mr Robinson
ORDERS
CAC 1658 of 2013
FEDERAL CIRCUIT AND FAMILY COURT OF AUSTRALIA (DIVISION 2)
BETWEEN:
MR MANUEL Applicant
AND:
MS PINNER Respondent
INDEPENDENT CHILDREN’S LAWYER
order made by:
JUDGE W J NEVILLE
DATE OF ORDER:
13 September 2022
THE COURT NOTES THAT:
A.Because of the Father’s hostile conduct towards the Court, Counsel for the Mother, the solicitor for the Mother and the present and…
Grounds of appeal
[14] The appellant contends that the primary judge erred in finding that the respondent had discharged the onus of establishing the matters required under the relevant provision.
[15] It was submitted that his Honour failed to give adequate weight to the evidence of the second witness, and that the findings of fact were not reasonably open on the material before the Court.
[16] The respondent, for its part, submits that no error is disclosed, and that the conclusions reached were well within the range of outcomes available to the primary judge.
Consideration
[17] It is convenient to deal first with the question of construction, as the resolution of that issue informs the remaining grounds advanced by the appellant.
[18] For the reasons that follow, we are of the view that the appeal should be allowed in part and the matter remitted for further determination.
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Details
AGLC
Manuel & Pinner (No 3) [2022] FedCFamC2F 1235
Case
[2022] FedCFamC2F 1235
Decision Date
CaseChat Overview and Summary
Manuel and Pinner (No 3) was a long-running and difficult family law case, which concerned the making of final Orders that were in the best interests of 12-year-old X. The Court had to consider Orders regarding, inter alia, parental responsibility, living arrangements, and time to be spent with each parent. The Father’s conduct during the trial and on a number of occasions at Court events leading up to it, deteriorated alarmingly. The Father used the Court process as his personal “soap-box” to grandstand for a range of “causes” he espoused, or prejudices he championed. He ranted and raved about a wide variety of things, albeit with usually common themes, sometimes with greater passion and understandable grief, starting with the separation of his own parents in New Zealand. His voluble, histrionic, regrettably sometimes puerile, and regularly offensive, protestations assisted him not a jot. For an obviously intelligent person, he railed against any and every slight, real or imagined, that stemmed (in his view) ultimately from what he described as (a) the completely broken family law system in the western world (frequently he voiced the view that the family law systems in the US, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia were all broken); (b) the failures in the family law system in Australia all stemmed from the original Family Law Act in 1975 (“the Act”); and (c) this failed system privileged women and prejudiced men. It was, he declared, a “gendered system.” The Father’s abusive behaviour towards the Mother, the Court, the ICL, experts generally and Child Court Experts and practitioners was of extreme concern. The Court found that the Father’s conduct had significantly prejudiced his case and that he had no insight into how his conduct impacted upon his son, X. The Court found that the Father’s conduct was not in X’s best interests and that the Father’s focus was always skewed, but deliberately and mindlessly so. The Court made Orders that were in X’s best interests, which included Orders for sole parental responsibility, X to live with the Mother and spend limited time with the Father. The Court dismissed the Mother’s Application for the Father to be declared a vexatious litigant. The Court made Orders for costs to be paid by the Father to the Mother in relation to the various proceedings.