Please contact your local MP and Senators and ask for a meeting as soon as possible.

2016 is an election year, so now is the last, best chance to get the issues of emotional child abuse and family court reform onto the radar before the election.

This is especially important following our recent Canberra meetings, and particularly if you live in a marginal seat (a closely contested electorate where MPs tend to listen much better to the key issues), but we want to reach every single politician too.

If you need additional help to do this, you’re welcome to contact us.

How to contact your local politicians

If you don’t know the name of the electorate you’re living in, visit http://apps.aec.gov.au/esearch/ and put in your suburb on the form.

If you don’t know your local MP or Senators, or how to contact them, click on this link http://www.aph.gov.au/…/Guidelines_for_Contacting_Senators_… and put in your electorate name. You’ll have one MP and two or more Senators who also represent your State/Territory. Please write (a similar letter) to each of them.

It’s best to write a brief letter or email and then phone the electorate office a few days later to set up a specific appointment date.

We suggest that you:

• Ask for a meeting in your electorate as soon as possible;

• Say that you would like to discuss an issue of huge importance to many Australians: what is happening to kids and their parents after separation;

• Say that you’d like to present some solutions to the current problems (you are welcome to attach, or to hand-deliver, a copy of our new policy document on proposed reforms that you can download from https://familylawreformcoalition.org);

• Maybe explain that tens of thousands of Aussie kids did not be see their loving parents or grandparents this Christmas because the other parent and/or Australia’s Family Courts are not allowing them to do so. This is hugely harmful for these children, and is contrary to one of the most internationally recognised Conventions in the world, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child;

• Avoid writing a lot about your own situation or case; at most, just a sentence or two that illustrates one or two of the problems.

Thank you.