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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.rytz.com.au/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

This is legal information, not legal advice. This page is reviewed against the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (Family Law) Rules 2021, and current case law on AustLII — but not by a practising family-law solicitor. For advice on your matter, see Free legal help in Australia — Legal Aid, Community Legal Centres, Justice Connect, Women’s Legal Services, and Aboriginal Legal Services offer free or low-cost help.
Section 79 of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) gives the court the power to make orders altering the interests of the parties in their property. It is the basis for every property settlement in matters that were marriages. (For de facto matters, see section 90SM, which mirrors s79.) The court applies a four-step process. From 10 June 2025, that four-step framework is codified in s79 itself (under amendments brought by the Family Law Amendment Act 2024 (Cth)) — pre-2025 it was case-law-derived. The substantive analysis still draws on the established case-law line (Stanford, Mallet, Pierce, and others). RYTZ’s Settlement Planner is structured around the same four steps so the analysis you build in the platform tracks the analysis the court will apply if the matter ever comes before it.
The 10 June 2025 amendments also added several new considerations the court must weigh — explicit family-violence/economic-abuse considerations, asset wastage and reckless financial behaviour, companion-animal arrangements, and stronger financial-disclosure obligations now built into the Act rather than the Court Rules. These are noted in the relevant steps below.

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Step I — Identify the asset pool

The first step is to identify what’s in the pool. This means cataloguing:
  • Assets — real property (the family home, investment properties), vehicles, household contents, businesses, intellectual property, art, jewellery, savings, investments, super.
  • Liabilities — mortgages, credit-card debts, personal loans, tax debts, business debts.
  • Financial resources — entitlements that aren’t directly accessible but represent value (e.g. inheritance expectations, beneficial interests in family trusts, future earnings from established practice).
Each item is given a value as at the date of trial (or the most recent agreed valuation date). Disputed items either go to expert valuation or to the court for determination. The pool is the starting point. Step II onward adjusts each party’s share of that pool.

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Step II — Assess contributions

The court considers what each party contributed to the relationship across four categories:

Financial

Money, income, assets brought into the relationship; income earned during; and any post-separation financial contributions.

Non-financial

Renovations, capital improvements, upkeep, “sweat equity” in property and businesses.

Parental

Care of children — primary and shared. Recognised as a substantial contribution under Pierce v Pierce [1999] FamCA 1314.

Homemaker

Household management, planning, cooking, organising. Equally weighted to financial contribution under Pierce.
The case-law line:
  • Mallet v Mallet (1984) 156 CLR 605 — rejected automatic equality as a starting point; held that homemaker and parental contributions must be recognised “in a substantial way”, not in token form. Each case is assessed on its individual facts.
  • Pierce v Pierce [1999] FamCA 1314 — non-financial + parental + homemaker contributions are weighted holistically with financial contributions, not subordinated.
  • Polonius & York [2010] FamCAFC 228 — significant initial contributions get discounted by the length of the relationship.
  • Bonnici v Bonnici [1992] FamCA 86 — initial contributions can erode over time as joint contributions accumulate.
  • Kowaliw v Kowaliw [1981] FamCA 70 — negative contributions (wastage, gambling) can be brought to account.
  • Singerson & Joans [2014] FamCAFC 238 — post-separation appreciation can be relevant where one party’s continued contributions drove it.
  • Kennon v Kennon [1997] FamCA 27 — family violence during the relationship can reduce the perpetrator’s contributions assessment.
The output of Step II is a percentage split based on contributions alone — for example, “65/35 in favour of User on contributions”. This is rarely the final answer; Step III usually adjusts.

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Step III — Future needs

The court applies the 16 factors in section 75(2) to determine whether and how to adjust the contributions split for future needs. The most-cited:
  • (a) Age + state of health of each party
  • (b) Income, property + financial resources of each party + capacity to earn
  • (c) Care of children of the relationship aged under 18
  • (d) Standard of living that is reasonable in all the circumstances
  • (e) A party’s responsibility to support any other person
  • (g) Effect of any proposed orders on the earning capacity of either party
  • (k) Length of the marriage + extent to which it has affected earning capacity
  • (n) Need to protect the position of a child
  • (o) Any other order made under the Act affecting either party
Adjustments for future needs are typically expressed as percentage points. A typical pattern: contributions assessed at 50/50, future-needs adjustment of +5–10% to the party with primary care of children, post-adjustment split of 55/45 or 60/40. The case-law line:
  • Williams v Williams [1985] FamCA 26 — disparity in earning capacity drives meaningful future-needs adjustment.
  • McCalman & McCalman [2016] FamCAFC 138 — section 75(2)(c) (care of children) is a substantial future-needs factor.

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Step IV — Just & equitable

The threshold question from Stanford v Stanford [2012] HCA 52: is it just and equitable for the court to alter the parties’ existing property interests at all? In most matters the answer is yes — separation usually means existing arrangements need to be unwound. But Stanford requires the court to actually consider this, not assume it. Where parties have always kept their finances separate, where there’s no need for any adjustment, the court can decline to make orders. If Stanford is satisfied, Step IV also asks whether the quantum of the proposed split (the result of Steps II and III) is just and equitable. Sometimes the court adjusts further at this stage to address an outcome that would otherwise be too harsh on one party.

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What the Settlement Planner produces

The Settlement Planner walks each step in turn:
  • Asset Pool tab — Step I. Add assets and liabilities, get a running total.
  • Contributions tab — Step II. Score each contribution category for each party with structured prompts.
  • Future Needs tab — Step III. Walks the s75(2) factors with prompts for the most relevant.
  • Just & Equitable tab — Step IV. Final analysis under Stanford with the AI Fairness Analyser providing a structured opinion.
  • My Offers tab — Tracks every offer made and rejected, comparing each to the analysed position.
The output is a defensible position you can take into negotiations, FDR, or court — anchored to the legislation and the case law, not your gut feel.

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What changed on 10 June 2025

The Family Law Amendment Act 2024 (Cth) made substantial property-side changes that came into force on 10 June 2025. The headline changes:
  • The four-step framework is now codified in s79. Pre-2025 it was case-law-based. Now it sits in the statute itself.
  • Family violence is an express property consideration. The court must consider how family violence — including economic and financial abuse, dowry abuse, controlling finances, preventing employment — has affected a party’s contributions and future needs. This builds on but goes beyond the older Kennon line.
  • Companion-animal provisions. A new framework asks the court to consider caregiving history, family-violence considerations and emotional bonds when deciding where pets go. The court can no longer make joint-ownership orders.
  • Enhanced financial-disclosure obligations. Disclosure obligations were lifted from the Family Law Rules into the Family Law Act itself, with stronger penalties and adverse cost orders for non-compliance.
  • Asset wastage and reckless financial behaviour. The court now expressly assesses reckless financial behaviour and coercive debt practices that affect settlement fairness (codifies the Kowaliw line and extends it).
  • Expanded ADR for property. Arbitration and Less Adversarial Trials now apply to property matters, not just parenting.
The Settlement Planner reflects the post-10-June-2025 framework throughout. Anything you read about Australian property settlement dated before mid-2025 is potentially out of date on these points.

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Important caveats

  • Specialist input recommended for complex matters. Business valuations, super splitting (especially defined-benefit and SMSF), trust structures, overseas assets — all benefit from specialist legal + accounting input. The Settlement Planner produces the structured framework; the substantive valuations and tax analysis often need a specialist.
  • The Settlement Planner is educational. It produces a defensible position grounded in the law, but it is not a substitute for legal advice in matters with significant complexity (substantial business interests, international property, contested family-violence allegations, child-protection involvement).

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Next

The Settlement Planner overview

What the workspace looks like and when to use each tab.

Landmark cases

Stanford, Mallet, Pierce, Polonius, Bonnici, Kowaliw — the case-law line that frames the s79 process.