With Warwick Marsh
John Stapleton is the author of Chaos at the Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia and was a cofounder of the world’s longest running radio program dedicated to fatherhood issues, Dads On The Air.
Of all the many things that the Albanese Labor Government did not bother to tell the Australian public prior to last year’s election was that they intended to take Australia’s utterly dysfunctional family law system back to the dark ages when most fathers entering the Family Court rarely if ever saw their children again.
An obsession of the Palaeolithic feminists of the Attorney General’s Department specifically, and the entire Canberra femocracy in general, has been their war on the traditional role of fathers as providers and protectors, and perpetrating this through the auspices of the Family Court.
Weaned on an “all men are bastards” style of feminism from the 1970s and 1980s, the perpetrators of this dogma haven’t had a new idea in decades. Their ideological war on the patriarchy lives on into the 2020s. Unfortunately for the nation, it has real life consequences.
Virtually every separated father in the country knows the horror of the nation’s drastically anti-male family law and child support systems.
It does Australian society no good to to have such a large body of impoverished and disenfranchised men; devastated by the loss of their children, their assets, and in all too many cases their social status and standing in the broader community. No one can go near this jurisdiction and retain a modicum of respect for lawyers, or for the politicians from both sides of the aisle which have allowed this malfeasance to flourish.
The Australian government is now holding a public inquiry into their proposed amendments to family law, ironically an inquiry about which 99 percent of the public know nothing about.
Stapleton concludes: “Successive governments from both left and right have failed to listen to their constituents and respond to their concerns. Even when enacting legislative reforms, these same governments left their enforcement in the hands of institutions notoriously resistant to change. They allowed or encouraged fashionable ideology, institutional inertia and bureaucracy to triumph over common sense. Common decency was lost long ago.
“In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to reform outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown – and for the failure of governments to take seriously the voices of the men and women most directly affected by them. The country’s failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself.”
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