The Hon Justice Will Alstergren AO, Chief Justice of the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, has sat down for an extended interview with the Financial Review where he discusses the court generally, family law, family violence, migration law and his bobsledding career – The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia is now the largest in the nation, with about 125 judges spread over 17 locations. About 90 per cent of its work is family law, but it also does migration and general federal law cases. Alstergren has been credited with getting the family law part back on track after years of dysfunction and chronic delay, and says the same needs to happen with migration law. Nine extra judges started in August. It’s clear that after seven years as head of the Court, he still enjoys the job. He started in 2017 and a year later he added Family Court chief justice to his duties before overseeing a merger of both courts in 2021. At the time, he was a commercial silk and president of the Australian Bar Association. He had done his articles with a family law firm but hadn’t done much in the area since – and family matters made up 80 per cent of the court’s work. “I think he wanted someone to come in from outside and help fix up a system which was really, on anybody’s view, under-resourced and broken. I’d run other things before. If you are there to do a job you get on with it.” An audit in 2018 found there was a backlog of 12,000 family law cases yet to get a hearing date in both courts. “You had two different courts doing the same kind of work – one [the Family Court] doing more complicated [cases]. There was an enormous amount of duplication – a lot of inefficiencies. They’d tried to harmonise the rules over a 20-year period and could never do it.” Now the time from filing to finalisation is six-and-a-half months, down from nine-and-a-half months in 2021. The average docket size for circuit court judges has fallen from 330 cases in 2021 to 80. One gets the impression the migration law system will be harder to fix. “About 25 per cent of our migration cases get appealed, so it’s a massive backlog. Only 2 per cent of family law cases get appealed. “When you have such a high appeal rate, it just means that a lot of cases will take a long time to go through the system.” He is also pleased the migration division of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has been expanded and that the Federal Court will soon get an extra four judges to handle appeals.
Noah Nishihara
3mo
Insightful!
#HowDareShe
3moCan’t read it. He truly has no idea. It’s quite telling just the part you copied he speaks of family court as a business and he’s the CEO. It’s not. It’s meant to be a place of justice and safety but instead it’s a profit driven business preying on our most vulnerable. It’s very, very telling that the chief justice doesn’t recognise the torture or human suffering happening under his leadership. Victim survivors of family court abuse deserve just better. It’s time Will Alstergren was stood down and an impartial person if integrity, ethics and empathy replace him. He is not doing the job tax payers pay him to do.