Relationship property law turned 50 this week. It’s no longer fit for purpose
Sunday, 5 July 2026
Sarah Sparks is a communications consultant, and works with wāhine toa across Aotearoa.
OPINION: Never in my wildest dreams when I got married on a super yacht did I imagine standing years later in Courtroom One praying for a stay of bankruptcy applied for by my former husband.
Thirteen years married and a mother of three, I had gone from a life of privilege to pōhara. I wasn't thinking about legal principles or precedent. I was focussed on how I would put food on the table.
This week the Property (Relationships) Act turned 50. A milestone, but it demands honest reflection. Because behind every relationship property CIV number is a whole whakapapa that’s experienced avoidable pain.
After a decade navigating District Court, Family Court, High Court and Court of Appeal, first with lawyers and then for eight years as a lay litigant, I have a unique perspective on how the act works when theory collides with reality.
Imagine cross examining your own ex-husband while learning court rules, family law, relationship property law, trust law, insolvency law and freezing orders from scratch – all while staying a functioning parent, and keeping the rent paid because no employer tolerates a staff member who spends half their week researching, writing, filing, photocopying, and binding affidavits.
At one stage in my matters 21 applications were live on foot in Family Court, High Court, the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. Over the course of time, I fended off more than 20 lawyers, including King's Counsel and several major law firms.
What unfolded was not a single case but a protracted legal rupture that festered for more than a decade, tearing through our entire whānau root system. The emotional, relational, physical and financial cost was incalculable. It will take a generation to repair.
I stopped being just a litigant. I studied the system. I lecture to law students sharing war stories. Made submissions to the Law Commission and the Ministry of Justice, trying to understand why it had failed so badly and how to fix it.
Every family lawyer I spoke with had experienced similar stories of agony. The law itself wasn't the whole problem; the process was to blame too.
The experience taught me harsh lessons about the Westminster system; the pain of being delayed, deferred or denied justice year after year.
It’s been disappointing to watch five successive justice ministers not prioritise substantive reform in this area. Instead, attention has gone to gang patch removal and move on orders, while the structural issues in relationship property law remain untouched, to the detriment of a substantial part of our society.
More than 430,000 New Zealand marriages have ended in divorce since the act became law, before counting de facto separations. Hundreds of thousands are now experiencing a law designed for another era within a system that needs evolving.
The law in the 70s was designed for a world of simply dividing the family home, car and superannuation. Now it is being applied to a landscape of layered trusts, corporate structures, and deliberately complex ownership chains.
The rules have not kept pace with the reality they are supposed to govern. Number one is placing children’s interest first and each party sharing equally in the fruits of the marriage.
Not trusts being used as a shield to blindside the other. Or the wealthier partner bleeding the other dry of time, money, allies and options. Women come off second best usually.
What would I reform? Start structurally.
Give litigants a choice. Most relationship property cases are funnelled through the choked Family Court, even when they are fundamentally complex commercial disputes involving trusts, companies, and investment structures. The Law Commission has already said this must change. Litigants should be able to commence proceedings in either the Family Court or the High Court.
The current system incentivises narrative overload; voluminous loquacious affidavits, competing versions of events, and getting bogged down in the quagmire of interlocutory fighting over discovery. We need procedural simplicity.
Make disclosure mandatory for the party controlling the trusts, companies, property-holding entities, asset registers, and income streams generated from relationship property – as a statutory duty, not a negotiated process. Without that, “discovery” becomes a tactical weapon rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.
Delay is not an accident in the current system. It is structurally enabled. A reformed model would impose enforceable strict timelines. No nonsense. No excuses. No exceptions.
Where there’s credible risk that assets are being moved, restructured or dissipated, courts should have a low threshold for intervention. Freezing orders need to be easier and earlier. If the property is in dispute, it should be preserved. Full stop.
A large proportion of litigation cost is consumed by tactical interlocutory applications. Limit it with cost consequences for unnecessary escalation. Look at the progress Australian family law has made too.
Then there’s “collaborative resolution,” available since 2018, where both parties, supported by specially trained lawyers with the right attitude, commit from the outset to resolve matters without going to court.
Both parties sign an agreement not to litigate. If either chooses to exit the process, both lawyers must withdraw. What follows is not a battlefield of affidavits, but a series of structured, confidential, problem-solving meetings.
The difference is profound. The process removes the performative escalation of litigation and allows solutions the court can’t always reach particularly in complex property structures, trusts, and cross-border arrangements. It’s faster, cheaper, and far less corrosive.
If we’re serious about reforming the act for the next 50 years, we must rethink the architecture of resolution itself. Because the question isn’t only how property is divided at the end of a relationship. It’s how much carnage is caused by the process of getting there.
What do you think? Email sundayletters@stuff.co.nz. Please include your full name and address.