BETWEEN MASTER AND MATTRESS

There’s an important and dramatic law change this week that is a classic case of make sure you think it through and get it right before you take the plunge.

It’s a law change that on the surface sounds great. Sounds fair an equitable. But it could open a bigger can of worms than you’d find in Rex Hunt’s tackle box.

It’s to do with de facto relationships and same sex unions and is designed to give financial security and some legal standing to people whom the legal system has unfairly treated as invisible in the past.

The new law, effective March 1 was passed by the Senate last November. It is called The Family Law Amendment (De Facto Financial Matters and Other Measures).

Its main laudable aim is to remove same sex discrimination from the Family Court system. And to give de facto wives more financial security. If you live together in a domestic situation for more than two years.

But it has been dubbed the ‘Mistress Law’ because of its possible far-reaching side effects. It raises the possibility of a long-term mistress putting her hand up for a share of the estate when her lover dies. Or leaves her. Vying with the legal wife and kids for a slice of the pie.

Even if the wife didn’t know a mistress existed.

The Attorney-General Robert McLelland says the law contains enough protections. A couple must be living together on a genuine domestic basis.

‘With limited exceptions that cohabitation must exist for two years. If a couple doesn’t live together, don’t have children, are not publicly known to be a couple, and don’t share financial resources, it is highly unlikely they would be covered by these laws.’

Sydney University Law professor Patrick Parkinson disagrees. He claims the law says you can be in two relationships simultaneously.

He says ‘Take a situation where a wealthy man has a wife at home and another relationship he keeps in an apartment at Potts Point where he spends a few nights a week telling his wife he’s away on business. There is a high probability the court will see this as a de facto relationship.’

Cases like the late Kerry Packer and billionaire Richard Pratt spring to mind. Packer made a financial settlement on his long-term mistress before he died. But what if she thought she was entitled to more?

What if a mistress could prove the man spent more nights at her place than at his marital home?

I’m sure there are some very worried men behind high, no longer impenetrable walls in Toorak and Vaucluse. Even though many people would argue that a woman having an affair with a married man knows the unspoken rules as ‘the other woman’ and should have no legal standing.

With the new law perhaps the old, cruel, definition of mistress will no longer apply.  A mistress: something between master and mattress.

Monday, March 2, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009