Private conciliation in family law

On 2 September 1997 the Commonwealth Attorney-General, Mr Daryl Williams QC released a discussion paper entitled: Delivery of Primary Dispute Resolution Services in Family Law. The paper discussed possible ways of improving the delivery of primary dispute resolution (called "PDR") services to families, and specifically to improve access to these services. This was the beginning of the privatisation and outsourcing of PDR, a process which is yet to be completed. This has presented many opportunities as well as challenges. There are definitely opportunities for community and private providers of PDR services to pick up where the Family Court's own PDR services have stopped. There is undoubtedly much regret that the Family Court's expertise in PDR may be diminished. However, there are challenges and problems which are yet to be realised let alone confronted, and some of these will be discussed in this article. For one thing, the community providers of PDR services will become engaged in competition with each other. Already, tendering for a slice of PDR has become the norm. At the heart of the privatisation and outsourcing proposal was the desire to make the delivery of PDR services, like other public services, "contestable". One wonders, however, whether the desire for service efficiency was, in fact, at least as important a motivation as was the desire to improve access to PDR services. Indeed, there was no evidence that there were serious problems about access to PDR in Australia.