DIVORCING parents who moved to Canberra so their former spouses could further their careers are finding it often difficult to move back home when they split up, family law experts have said.
Mums and dads frequently have to face the decision to leave their children behind in the ACT or abandon their own plans to return to homes in Melbourne, Sydney and other states.
Director of Consensus Family Lawyers in Canberra, Juliette Ford, said the courts were often called upon to determine whether applications to relocate with children should be allowed.
''I think this is more of an issue for Canberra than other areas because so many people come here for work,'' she said.
''And there is an evolving situation now where a lot of people are from Canberra and you have a kind of two-speed economy, where some people are brought up and dyed-in-the-wool Canberrans and the others come here for a different reason.
''Some people won't have their family support network here or a good job of their own and they want to go home - but the other parent also wants to be able to have shared care. So you can see it from both angles.''
The deputy chairman of the family law section of the Law Council of Australia, Rick O'Brien, said law reforms in 2006 had introduced the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility to Family Court decisions, making a big impact on splitting couples.
''It means that major long-term decisions about the children are supposed to be made jointly by the parents, which includes where the child will live,'' he said.
''It's a difficult issue, because it's almost impossible to compromise - either they move or they don't.
''It causes a lot of angst for people and it's difficult for the court.''
A Family Law Council report on relocation in 2006 stated that research had shown it was far more often women who wanted to leave Canberra with their children than men, whose applications were challenged in court.
The researchers looked at 46 relocation decisions made in the Canberra registry of the Family Court of Australia and the Perth registry of the Family Court of Western Australia over an 18-month period from July 1997 to December 1998.
Of those, 38 of the cases were decided by judges and of those, only two applications had been submitted by men, while the others were settled out of court.
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