Former Western Australia Labor premier Peter Dowding has hit out at Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott's plan to make divorce harder, saying Mr Abbott wants to retreat to "blame game" divorce.
Under Mr Abbott's marriage plan, heterosexual couples can sign up to a fault-based model, like the former Matrimonial Causes Act
The act, dropped in 1975, required aggrieved spouses to prove offences like adultery, habitual drunkenness or cruelty to be granted a divorce.
The Opposition families spokesman is touting the return to fault-based divorce as a way to shore up traditional values, but Mr Dowding, a barrister and family law specialist, sees plenty of flaws with Mr Abbott's idea.
"The point about Tony Abbott's argument is that he wants to retreat to a blame game so you can actually blame someone in a divorce situation," Mr Dowding told ABC News Online.
"It's completely ludicrous to talk about making divorce harder at a time when people can separate easily. If you can separate easily, the question of making divorce harder or less hard is irrelevant.
"It's like Alice in Wonderland. It's like stepping through a looking glass into la-la land where Tony Abbott happily sits with his morality judging people while no-one's life gets harder or easier."
Mr Dowding, who stepped down as WA premier in 1990, says making divorce harder will just keep people in meaningless marriages.
"People are going to separate and if they do separate and they can't get a divorce, they live apart from their spouse, never being able to remarry, but able to enter into de facto relationships, which have the same legal relationship as marriage, so all it does is demean the institution of marriage," he said.
Abbott's plans
Mr Abbott's plan would see heterosexual couples offered an alternative to the current law allowing divorce after a 12-month separation.
"The point I make in the book is that a society that is moving towards some kind of recognition of gay unions, for instance, is surely capable of providing additional recognition to what might be thought of as traditional marriage," Mr Abbott told Fairfax newspapers.
"Something akin to a Matrimonial Causes Act marriage ought to be an option for people who would like it.
"Even though [marriage] is probably the most important commitment that any human being can make, in fact there are many, many contracts which are harder to enter and harder to get out of than this one."
'Right-wing Catholics'
But Mr Dowding does not think there is any room for Mr Abbott's argument in Australian politics.
"I don't like people who are right-wing judgemental Catholics trying to bring their religious politics into Australian life," he said.
"We're not a bunch of Americans. We don't go round with our politicians pretending to be deeply religious and demanding that everyone else be while they go around committing adultery on the side, as they do in America.
"And we don't want to be in a position where people with right-wing and intolerant attitudes, like Tony Abbott, control what people believe.
"If people separate because they're unhappy with each other and live their lives apart, is he suggesting we want to go back to the 1960s and before when private investigators jump through windows and photograph people in bed?
"What's that going to achieve? Say you've been separated for five years from your wife or husband and you choose not to remarry and you have another relationship, you expect a private eye to come and [take a] photograph. I mean, how ludicrous is that?"
Mr Dowding says plenty of changes need to be made to the current Family Law Act, but the divorce itself is almost irrelevant.
"The biggest difficulty that people who are in relationships and separate have is to sort out what are the arrangements for the children and what are the arrangements for maintenance, and what are the arrangements for the property," he said.
"They're the difficult things about which people fight. The actual divorce itself is almost an irrelevancy.
"It comes about when people have been separated and their marriage is broken down.
"You can't hold people to failed marriages. So the idea of having a divorce based on something other than a failed marriage is just ludicrous."
Opposition finance spokeswoman Helen Coonan was cool on Mr Abbott's idea to bring back fault-based divorce when she spoke to the ABC yesterday.
Senator Coonan, who used to practise family law, says she needs convincing.
"The no-fault divorce, as a principle, seems to have worked reasonably well since 1975," she told AM.
"So I'll be just interested to see what he says is the problem with the way in which the divorce law is working."
