Family Law Amendment Act 2023: What Changed for Parenting Orders

The Biggest Parenting Law Reform in Two Decades

The Family Law Amendment Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 6 November 2023 and took effect on 6 May 2024. It rewrote the parenting framework in Part VII of the Family Law Act 1975 — the provisions that govern every parenting dispute in every state and territory, including South Australia.

If you're separating now, these changes directly affect how your parenting arrangement will be assessed by a court, a mediator, or a registrar reviewing your consent orders.

What Was Abolished

The presumption of equal shared parental responsibility. Under the old law, courts started from a presumption that both parents should share responsibility for major long-term decisions unless family violence or abuse was proven. In practice, many parents (and some lawyers) conflated this with a right to 50/50 physical time — a misunderstanding that fuelled years of high-conflict litigation and sometimes left children in unsafe arrangements.

The amendment removed this presumption entirely. Courts now assess parental responsibility on a case-by-case basis without any baseline assumption.

The mandatory consideration of equal time. Previously, whenever the court ordered equal shared parental responsibility, it was then required to consider whether equal time (or "substantial and significant time") with each parent was reasonably practicable and in the child's best interests. This two-step pathway required the court to consider equal-time possibilities, but it did not create an automatic entitlement to a 50/50 split.

That mandatory step is gone. Courts can order any time arrangement that serves the child's best interests without first having to evaluate whether equal time would work.

What Replaced It

A streamlined set of best interests factors under Section 60CC. The old law listed "primary" and "additional" considerations across a sprawling, multi-tier framework. The reformed Section 60CC consolidates everything into six factors:

1. Safety of the child and their caregivers — protection from physical and psychological harm, family violence, abuse, neglect, and coercive control
2. Views of the child — weighted by age, maturity, and understanding
3. Developmental, psychological, emotional, and cultural needs of the child
4. Capacity of each parent to meet the child's needs
5. Benefit of maintaining meaningful relationships with both parents and significant people, where safe to do so
6. Any other relevant matters

The critical shift is that safety now sits unambiguously at the top. Under the old framework, courts sometimes balanced the child's safety against the benefit of maintaining a relationship with both parents. The reformed law gives safety priority — the relationship question is considered where doing so is safe.

What This Means in Practice

For parents negotiating informally or in mediation: The old equal-time pathway no longer carries legal weight. If you're drafting a parenting plan or preparing for FDR, build your proposal around what actually works for your child — their school, their activities, their developmental needs — rather than around a presumed entitlement to equal time.

For parents filing consent orders: Registrars now assess proposed orders against the six Section 60CC factors. If your consent orders propose arrangements that raise safety concerns or don't adequately address the child's developmental needs, the registrar may query them. The registrar's scrutiny has shifted from "is this roughly equal?" to "does this genuinely serve this child?"

For parents headed to court: The Rice and Asplund significant change test — which requires parents seeking to vary final parenting orders to demonstrate that circumstances have materially changed — is now codified in the legislation. This means your initial arrangement carries more weight than ever, because modifying it later requires clearing a formal legal bar.

The 2024 Reforms Added More

A second wave of changes under the Family Law Amendment Act 2024 commenced on 10 June 2025. These primarily affected financial and administrative aspects of separation:

• The four-step property settlement process was codified directly in the statute
• The duty of full and frank financial disclosure was elevated into the Act with penalties for non-compliance
• The "two-year rule" requiring marriage counselling for couples married less than two years was abolished
• A framework for companion animal disputes was introduced

While these changes are less directly relevant to parenting arrangements, they affect the broader separation process that parents are navigating alongside custody.

Applying the Reforms to Your Situation

The reforms don't mean one parent automatically gets more or less time. They mean the framework for making that decision has fundamentally changed. Arguments that worked under the old law — "I'm entitled to 50/50 because that's the presumption" — don't apply anymore. Arguments grounded in the child's specific needs, safety, and developmental reality carry more weight than they ever have.

The South Australia Child Custody & Parenting Plan Guide is built around the post-May 2024 legal framework, with worksheets that walk you through each of the six Section 60CC factors as they apply to your family's circumstances.

See more South Australia guides →