Sherif and Sherif (No. 2)

The Family Court of Australia considered an application for consent orders filed by the father, Mr Sherif, concerning parenting arrangements for the parties' children. This application was made in circumstances where previous orders, made only months earlier on 5 April 2012, had granted the mother, Ms Sherif, sole parental responsibility for the children, ordered the children to live with her, and imposed significant restrictions on the father's contact and proximity to the mother and children. The father's new application proposed parenting arrangements that were fundamentally contradictory to the existing orders.

The primary legal issues before the Court were whether the proposed consent orders should be made, and in light of the contradictory nature of the application and the mother's denial of signing the relevant documents, whether any criminal offence had been committed by either party in relation to the purported consent. The Court was required to determine if there was genuine consent to the proposed parenting orders and to address the serious allegations of false declarations or representations made to the Court.

Justice Austin found that the father conceded he filed the application and associated documents, and that his own signatures on these documents were genuine. However, the father asserted that the signatures purporting to be the mother's were also hers, a claim denied by the mother's solicitor. Given the mother's denial of signing the documents and having any communication with the father since the previous hearing, the Court concluded that either the father or the mother had likely lied about the signatures, suggesting a potential criminal offence under the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) or the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW). Consequently, the Court dismissed the father's application for consent orders due to the lack of genuine consent and ordered the Registrar to forward relevant documents to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions for investigation.