A decades-long crisis: the battle to fix Australia’s ‘broken’ family law system

Amid a two-year scuffle to reform Australia’s family law system, which is buckling under so much work that some judges are dealing with more than 600 cases, the parade of desperate and troubled people through its courts crawls on.

In New South Wales, a young girl who pulled apart a live lizard in childcare says she has been sexually abused by her father and grandfather; in Queensland, an overworked judge takes seven years to hand down a decision; Aboriginal children removed by authorities from the victims of family violence in Western Australia are having reunification delayed because a family court dealing with a backlog of cases will not sit in the region for months.