Questions are often raised as to whether property brought into the marriage/relationship should be treated differently from property acquired during the marriage/relationship.
When assessing the contributions each party has made to the asset pool during the relationship, the court will normally consider following elements:
- financial contributions, including direct or indirect financial contributions made by or on behalf of a party to the acquisition, conservation or improvement of any property of the parties or either of them
- non-financial contributions, such as contributions as a homemaker or parent
How much weight the court will attribute to assets brought into a relationship by a party is not always easy to predict. In earlier cases, the Court established an "erosion principle", which means the initial contribution of property can be eroded by the offsetting contribution of the other party over a long period of marriage.
In Pierce, judges abandoned the language of 'erosion' and considered initial contributions in the light of the circumstances of the case, in particular "all the other relevant contributions of both parties" and "the use made by the parties of that contribution".
The court revisited the issue of initial contributions in a more recent case Dickons, where the Full Court approached the assessment holistically and by analysing the "nature, form, characteristics and origin of both the property and the contributions". Such approach still involves an examination of when the contributions were made and the use made of the contribution.
In Dickons, the Full Court also considered "the nature and form of the particular marriage", which requires a determination as to whether the marriage constituted "a practical union of both lives and property" or "a union where parties lived very separate domestic and financial lives".