In any consideration or depiction of divorce, be it in real life, or in the movies, the normal scenario is that the mother always gets custody of the children, however, that is not necessarily true in every case.
This is particularly true in Australia from a legal perspective, because following an amendment to the Family Law Act in 2006, there is no such thing as mother’s rights, nor for that matter, do father’s rights exist.
There is one very simple, and laudable, reason for this to be so, and that is that in Australian law, the highest priority is making sure that the rights of the children are promoted and protected, rather than the rights of the mother and father of those children.
For the above reason, when it comes to divorce and consideration of what is the best interests of the children of that marriage, the default position is that the parents have shared responsibility for their children. The legal terminology is ‘Equal Shared Parental Responsibility‘.