The June 2025 amendments put family violence expressly into the property provisions of the Family Law Act. That was Parliament writing down what the courts had already been doing. The courts had been dealing with the question for nearly thirty years, and the way it is argued in practice still comes from a 1997 case.

What you actually have to show

A Kennon claim is not a general submission that someone behaved badly. It is a specific argument with three limbs, and each one needs evidence.

  • A course of violent conduct by one party toward the other during the relationship, not a single incident.
  • A discernible impact on the person affected.
  • A link between that impact and their contributions, so that raising the children, running the home, or earning an income became substantially harder than it should have been.

The third limb is where most claims fail. People arrive with a history of abuse that is real and well documented, and no evidence connecting it to what they were able to contribute. The connection is the claim.

The corroboration problem

For years the practical objection to running a Kennon claim was proof. Family violence happens with no witnesses, and people commonly do not report it. If courts required independent corroboration, most claims were dead before they started.

How to give yourself a chance

Specificity is the whole game. An affidavit that says the relationship was abusive does almost nothing. An affidavit that says what happened, roughly when, what you could not do afterwards, and what that cost you, does the work.

  • Dates, or the best approximation you can honestly give, tied to something you can anchor them to.
  • The effect on your work: shifts missed, a job left, study abandoned, a promotion you did not take.
  • The effect at home: what care you were carrying alone, and what made it harder.
  • Anything contemporaneous, including messages, medical records, a diary, a text to a friend at the time.

Since June 2025 the argument no longer depends on the case law alone. Family violence is now an express factor in the Act itself, both in the assessment of contributions and in the assessment of current and future circumstances, and economic or financial abuse is expressly named as family violence.

One thing is genuinely unsettled. Parliament did not say whether the new provisions replace the Kennon guideline or sit alongside it, and there is no appellate decision yet on whether the significantly more arduous threshold survives. Anyone who tells you confidently which way that goes is guessing.

The money is smaller than people expect. On the research the Australian Law Reform Commission relied on, adjustments that were quantified averaged around seven per cent, and ten per cent was the most common figure. It is an adjustment, not a windfall.

One more thing worth saying plainly. A Kennon claim is not the reason to leave a relationship or the reason to stay in one. If you are not safe, the property settlement is not the first call to make.