Michmutters

Cassandra Kalpaxis, a lawyer specializing in collaborative divorce, said the rise in divorce coaching was a sign that people want to do things differently and aspire to what Gwyneth Paltrow called “conscious uncoupling” back in 2014.

While Kalpaxis said some coaches do “amazing work”, she “holds concerns about people emerging in the industry who don’t have the necessary qualifications” or who can’t work collaboratively with other professionals.

Kalpaxis runs regular “Detox Your Divorce” retreats for women, though in her legal practice she sees both male and female clients. The retreats include yoga, pilates and sessions on nutrition, sleep and personal finance.

Relationships Australia NSW chief executive Elisabeth Shaw said the rise of coaching was not surprising, given the ramifications of a poor separation.

“In a commercial environment, that could look like a business opportunity,” she said.

Shaw said the plus side of life coaching and counseling being unregulated was that it made it easy for people with aptitude and life experience to mentor others. The downside was that there was no guarantee of quality and in the case of divorce and separation, the clients were vulnerable. Shaw encouraged prospective clients to ask about qualifications.

Mitchell’s divorce coach Carla Da Costa, based in Perth but with online clients around Australia, was certified through the Beautiful You Coaching Academy, which she says is large and well established.

But Da Costa said her main qualification is lived experience, which means she intimately understands the “grief, fear and shame” involved in separation.

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“When I went through my own divorce in 2016, there was nothing like this, so I had to find my own way through this kind of emotional process,” Da Costa said. “I’ve accidentally become the coach I needed five years ago.”

Da Costa said she would refer to psychologists or counselors when clients were trapped in pain and grief, and to lawyers or mediators when they were seeking very practical advice.

Similarly, Melbourne-based Tamir Berkman, who makes himself the Divorce Cowboy, said he became a coach after his own separation.

“Lived experience is becoming more and more of a qualification – even in psychologist circles, the awareness of lived experience is really growing,” Berkman said.

“What I hear from my clients in the field is that men aren’t interested in qualifications – some of them are telling me ‘hey, I’ve got a psychologist, but they’ve been married for 45 years, so they don’ I don’t know where I’m coming from’.”

Berkman is training in equine-assisted learning but is not yet qualified. Meanwhile, he offers what he calls a “walk and talk” that gets men out in the paddock with the horses without calling it therapy. However, most of his business is online over Zoom.

Berkman said he was alarmed by the suicide rates for men, many of whom had experienced family separation. Official statistics show 8.6 people die by suicide every day, and 75 per cent of them are men.

This is a concern shared by charity Parents Beyond Breakup, which is seeking funding to make its suicide helplines operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Over the two years from July 2020 to July 2022, the combined number of calls to the charity’s Dads in Distress or Mums in Distress helplines and attendances at peer support groups increased by 110 per cent.

Parents Beyond Breakup chief executive Gillian Hunt said parents going through separation could lose daily access to their children, their social networks, their reputation and ‘purpose’ as a parent, access to their family home, and become financially distressed.

“Each one of these factors alone is a pre-cursor to a potential suicide, yet family breakdown with children is the one life event in which all occur together, sometimes unexpectedly, and there is precious little, if any, support for many of them ,” she said.

Hunt said 85 per cent of clients were men because mothers were more commonly awarded custody in court. Another 10 per cent were women – who often carried additional shame and stigma for not being awarded custody – and 5 per cent were grandparents.

Parents Beyond Breakup (Monday to Saturday 8.30am-5pm): 1300 853 437; Lifeline (24 hours): 13 11 14

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This would build on the work done in the interim free-trade deal with India whereby architects, engineers and accountants will be recognized in each other’s countries.

In an interview with The Sun-Herald and The Sunday AgeO’Connor said “we do have to be more sophisticated in measuring people’s competencies” from overseas.

O’Connor said while it was reasonable to ensure skilled migrants had the necessary training and knowledge to undertake their jobs in Australia, “I’m sure we could get better at that”.

He said this could include “bridging training” for migrants so that they can more quickly begin work in their field of expertise.

“I think maybe there’s some work to be done about assessing competencies and reviewing whether the current set of assumptions… are really fair to those people who are seeking application,” O’Connor said.

But he insisted standards would not be dropped, highlighting aged care as an area where “we need to be serious about the integrity of people’s capabilities”.

“This is not making widgets,” he said. “When we’re talking about jobs that will be looking after people in care, we have to be extra careful, frankly.”

O’Connor said a lot of the jobs shortages across the nation had been brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, but argued they were also caused by the previous government’s lack of investment in skills and training and its refusal to give JobSeeker and JobKeeper to temporary visa holders.

“Everywhere we look there are shortages: the traditional trades, advanced manufacturing, retail, tourism, the tech industry, aged care, doctors, nurses,” he said.

“There isn’t a sector or professional trade where you could say that we’ve got an optimal supply. It’s quite remarkable where we find ourselves.”

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Despite the “big job” ahead, O’Connor said he was optimistic about getting something done because there was a “resolve” from unions, employer groups and the Labor government to address the crisis.

O’Connor said the solution was not a “binary choice” between skilled migration and training the local workforce because both were needed.

He said Labor would do more to train the local workforce and crack down on the exploitation of foreign workers.

“So we’re not going to leave people behind. But of course, we understand that skilled migration plays its part and will always play its part – and right now, there are acute shortages,” he said.

O’Connor also highlighted more support for energy and climate jobs, getting women into male-dominated industries and vice versa and reversing the decline in apprenticeship completion rates.

ACTU president Michele O’Neil did not rule out the peak union body supporting an increase in skilled migration, but said any rise should include an independent verification of the claimed shortages and evidence of qualifications to ensure Australian standards are upheld.

“Too many employers claim skill shortages when what’s really going on is a shortage of jobs with fair pay and conditions,” she said.

“They look first to bringing in visa workers instead of providing skills and training to workers in Australia.”

“With Peter Dutton’s Liberals sliding into far-right irrelevance and Labor now a centre-right party of tax cuts for the wealthy, the Greens welcome the opportunity to attend this important summit and gain community support for our plans to make workers’ lives better, funded by stopping stage three tax cuts,” Bandt said.

“Australia is in a full-blown inequality crisis, with low wages and incomes and the cost of living rising, and the government must intervene to fix it.”

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