Parenting orders are made for children who keep growing. An arrangement built for a five year old can be plainly wrong for a fourteen year old. So the law has to allow orders to change, while stopping one parent from relitigating the same dispute every year.

The compromise is a threshold question. Before a court will reconsider final parenting orders at all, it has to be satisfied that something significant has changed.

Where the rule came from

The rule is usually called the rule in Rice and Asplund, after a Full Court decision reported in 1979. For forty-five years it operated as judge-made law. Then, on 6 May 2024, it was written into the Family Law Act as section 65DAAA.

The wording of the new section was not identical to the old rule, and for most of a year nobody was certain whether Parliament had restated the rule or quietly loosened it. That question reached the Full Court in December 2024.

What counts as a significant change

There is no list in the Act, and that is deliberate. What is significant depends on the child and on what the existing orders assumed. The examples below are the ones I see most often, not a test.

  • A parent is relocating, for work or to be near family, and the current arrangement cannot survive the distance.
  • New safety concerns, including family violence, substance misuse, or a new person in the household.
  • The child's needs have shifted in a way the orders did not contemplate, such as a diagnosis or a change of school.
  • An older child's views have changed and are being expressed clearly and consistently.
  • One parent has stopped complying, or the orders have been overtaken by how the family actually lives.

The cheaper path first

If both parents agree, you do not need the threshold at all. Orders can be changed by consent, and a consent order application is a fraction of the cost and stress of a contested reconsideration.

Family dispute resolution comes before court in most parenting matters in any event. If you are thinking about changing orders, that is where the conversation starts, and often where it ends.

Where it does not end there, be honest with yourself about the threshold before you spend money on the application. A reconsideration that fails at the first hurdle still costs you the same filing fee, the same affidavit, and the same months.