Contravention of Parenting Orders: What the Court Can Do

If your children’s co-parent has stopped following the parenting orders in place, the hardest part is not knowing whether anything will actually be done about it. Here is the honest answer.

A contravention is when someone bound by a parenting order fails to comply without a reasonable excuse. You can ask the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia to enforce the order. If it is proved, the court can order anything from make-up time with your child through to a fine, or imprisonment in the most serious cases.

Below I cover what actually counts as a contravention, what a reasonable excuse is (and is not), every penalty the court can order, what you have to prove, and the steps to file. If your child has not been returned to you at all, go straight to the recovery orders section, because that is a different and faster route.

The law sits in the Family Law Act 1975, and the enforcement powers for parenting orders are in Division 13A of Part VII. If this is already happening to you, the child custody lawyers on my team run these applications most weeks.

What counts as a contravention of a parenting order?

Three things have to line up. Most arguments about contravention are really arguments about one of them.

Is there a current order that binds them?

There has to be a parenting order in force, and the person you are contravening has to be bound by it. A court order made after a hearing counts. So do consent orders, because once the court seals an agreement it becomes an order like any other.

Did they actually fail to comply?

This is the element people mislabel. The question is not whether the other parent meant to upset you. It is whether they intentionally failed to do what the order required, or made no reasonable attempt to comply with it (Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, compliance and enforcement).

In practice that looks like not turning up to changeover, not returning the child at the end of their time, refusing to make the child available, blocking the phone or video contact the order provides for, or making a major decision alone when the order requires it to be made jointly.

Was there a reasonable excuse?

An order is only contravened where the person had no reasonable excuse. That defence is narrower than most people expect, so it gets its own section below.

Breach or contravention: is there a difference?

In plain terms, no. Both describe the same thing: someone not doing what a parenting order requires. “Breach” is the word almost everyone uses. “Contravention” is the word the Act and the court forms use, which is why the court form is called an Application – Contravention.

The distinction that does matter is a different one. A parenting plan or an informal agreement, however carefully written, is not a court order. It cannot be contravened and it cannot be enforced this way. If your arrangement only exists in a text thread or a signed plan, the first step is turning it into orders, not filing against a breach.

What counts as a reasonable excuse?

Start here, because it saves a lot of grief. It does not matter if you think your reasons are good. The order is still the order until a court changes it.

The circumstances the Act recognises are not a closed list, but two of them do almost all of the work. The person did not understand the obligations the order imposed on them, or they reasonably believed their actions were necessary to protect the health or safety of a person, and the contravention did not last any longer than was necessary (FCFCOA, Compliance with parenting or other child-related orders).

Read that second limb closely, because two parts of it do the work. The belief has to be reasonable, judged by the court and not by how strongly the parent felt at the time. And the withholding has to stop when the risk does. A safety concern in March does not excuse a refusal that is still running in September.

Now the one that catches parents out most often. A child saying they do not want to go is generally not, on its own, a reasonable excuse. The parent is still expected to take positive steps to make the child available, which means encouraging the child, getting them ready, and having them there at changeover. “I could not make her get in the car” is what decides a lot of contravention applications.

One more thing worth knowing before you file, or before you respond. The person claiming the reasonable excuse is the one who has to prove it.

Reference: the reasonable excuse grounds for parenting orders, s 70NAD of the Family Law Act 1975.

What the court can actually do

This is the question most pages on this topic leave unanswered. The court has a broad set of powers under Division 13A, and it chooses the response that fits the contravention and the child’s best interests. In practice that is usually the least disruptive one that works.

From least to most serious, where a contravention is established without a reasonable excuse, the court can:

• Order make-up time, so your child gets back the time they lost with you.
• Order the person to attend a post-separation parenting program.
• Vary or suspend the existing parenting order.
• Place the person on a good behaviour bond of up to 2 years.
• Impose a fine of up to 60 penalty units, which is up to $21,840 at the current penalty unit value of $364.
• Order imprisonment of up to 12 months for the most serious contraventions.
• Order costs, and compensation for reasonable expenses you have lost, such as the airfares for a holiday that never happened.

Be realistic about the top of that list. Imprisonment is rare and reserved for serious, repeated contraventions where nothing milder has worked. Make-up time, costs, and a variation of the order are the everyday outcomes. That is not a reason to accept being ignored, it is a reason to file early, while the pattern is short and the court’s options are still proportionate.

Reference: the orders available where a contravention is established without a reasonable excuse, s 70NBF of the Family Law Act 1975; the penalty unit value of $364 from 1 July 2026, s 4AA of the Crimes Act 1914.

Where contempt of court fits

You will see contempt mentioned on a lot of pages about this topic, usually as though it is the main consequence. It is not. Contempt is a separate and rarely used avenue for conduct that interferes with the administration of justice itself. The Division 13A sanctions above are the ordinary pathway for a parenting order that has not been followed.

How the court decides: what you have to prove

Contravention proceedings sit in an unusual place. They are family law proceedings, but they can end in a fine or a term of imprisonment, so the standard of proof shifts depending on what the court is considering.

You prove the contravention on the balance of probabilities, meaning more likely than not. But where the court turns its mind to imposing a fine or imprisonment, it applies the criminal standard, beyond reasonable doubt (FCFCOA, Compliance with parenting or other child-related orders).

Two practical consequences follow. Vague allegations do not survive the higher standard, and neither do assumptions about what the other parent was thinking. Dates, messages, and a clear record of what was meant to happen and what did happen are what carry an application.

Reference: the standard of proof in contravention proceedings, s 70NAE of the Family Law Act 1975.

How to apply for a contravention

One thing before the sequence, because it decides more of these applications than anything else. Your affidavit has to be facts and dates, not a list of grievances.

Be clear in your affidavit. You need to state facts. You can’t just provide a whole list of opinions as to why you think the child shouldn’t be where they are. You need to state things by way of date, preferably in a chronological order, because that’s what makes sense. All of the details matter, so make sure you list it out clearly.

Here is the sequence, tightened to the steps that matter.

1. Read the order again, word for word. You are enforcing what the order actually says, not what you both understood it to mean. If the order is silent on the thing being ignored, this may be a variation problem rather than a contravention.
2. Build the record. Every missed changeover, every late return, every refusal, with the date it happened, in the dated and factual form set out above.
3. Attend family dispute resolution, unless an exemption applies. In most parenting matters you need to attempt family dispute resolution and obtain a section 60I certificate before you can file. Exemptions include genuine urgency, family violence, and where the order was made in the last 12 months and there are reasonable grounds to believe the other parent has shown serious disregard for it (s 60I, Family Law Act 1975).
4. Get advice on which application you actually need. A contravention application enforces the order. If the arrangement itself has stopped working, an application to vary the order may be the better route, and sometimes you need both. The family court lawyers on my team work this out before anything is filed, because the wrong application costs months.
5. File the Application – Contravention with your affidavit, setting out each alleged contravention and the facts supporting it (FCFCOA filing information).
6. Serve the other party, so they have the documents and know the court date.
7. Attend the first court date. The other party either admits the contravention, or raises a reasonable excuse, and the court works out what has to be decided.
8. Prove it at the hearing, to the standard set out above, and the court then chooses from the powers in the section above.

If you have been served with a contravention application

If you are reading this from the other side, do not ignore the document. The first court date usually comes around quickly, and not turning up is the worst version of this.

An Application – Contravention alleges that you did not follow a specific part of a parenting order on specific dates. Work through it line by line and identify which allegations you accept and which you do not. If there was a genuine reason, particularly a safety concern, that is the thing to establish, with dates and evidence, because you carry the burden of proving it.

The court cannot fine or imprison you unless it is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt. That is a real protection, but it is not a reason to leave the response until the week of the hearing. Get advice early, while there is still time to gather what supports your version.

When your child is not returned: recovery and location orders

If the contravention is that your child has not come back to you, a contravention application is not always the fastest route, and it is worth understanding why.

A recovery order is an order requiring a child to be returned to a parent, to a person named in a parenting order, or to a person with parental responsibility. Where the court makes one, it can authorise or direct another person to find, recover, and deliver the child, and that is usually the police, whether federal or state. If you do not know where your child is, you can also ask for a location order, which requires a person to give the court the information they hold about where the child is (FCFCOA, recovery orders; ss 67Q and 67J of the Family Law Act 1975).

That last point matters, because it corrects an assumption that costs parents days they cannot get back:

A lot of people are of the belief that they can go to the police station and ask the police to recover their children for them. The police are not going to act unless they’ve received an order from the court, and that applies even if you do have parenting orders in place.

Having parenting orders is not the same as having something the police can act on. The order that moves the police is the recovery order, and you get one from the court. If that is where you are stuck right now, we set out the whole picture on whether police can enforce family court orders, including the one situation where they will act immediately.

A real outcome from our own files

A client I will call Michelle had full-time care of her daughter. The father had supervised time every second weekend, and after one of those weekends he did not bring the child back. He sent Michelle a text message telling her he intended to keep the child for good.

We helped her file an urgent recovery order application. The court heard the matter within 48 hours and granted the order.

The lesson in that matter is the one I give every parent in this position: move quickly. Delay does not just cost you time, it weakens the application itself. Once a child has been settled somewhere new for months, returning them means the court disrupting that child’s life a second time, and a court is understandably reluctant to do that. The same application that is straightforward in week one becomes a much harder argument in month six.

And a word of caution while you wait. Do not retaliate by withholding time yourself, and do not let the messages escalate. The record you build in those days is the record the court reads later.

If your orders are being ignored, or you have been served with an application and have no idea where you stand, book a free discovery call with me and my team. It takes ten minutes, there is no pressure, and you will come away knowing what your realistic options are and what to do this week. Call 1300 614 732.