Divorce Australian Style

Abstract

A recent administrative decision having seriously disrupted the database from which divorce trends and patterns in Australia can be monitored, the time is opportune to take stock of the country's divorce experience. This is done by examining marriage duration-specific proportions divorcing and cumulative rates of divorce calculated for annual synthetic and real first marriage, remarriage and total marriage cohorts. The response to the advent of ‘no-fault’ divorce in 1976 is demonstrated, and the subsequent emergence of new equilibria in cross-sectional levels of divorce to given marriage durations which seem to render them good predictors of the eventual experience of contemporary marriage cohorts is traced. While remarriages following divorce always have been more dissolution-prone than first marriages, the latter are shown to have dramatically narrowed the gap following the re-evaluation of normative sanctions against divorce which both led to and was stimulated by ‘no-fault’ legislation. Reasons for the much higher divorce rates in Australia in the last two decades are discussed, as is the failure of the adoption of objectively sounder mate selection and marriage timing practices since the early 1970s to more noticeably impact on divorce rates.