My new book, Failure: Family Law Reform Australia, was published on 28 February 2025.
It is now available on some platforms and will become more broadly available in the coming weeks.
A Rigorous Critique of Family Law
Failure: Family Law Reform Australia was published on the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Family Law Act, the single most intrusive and destructive piece of legislation to ever pass the Australian parliament.
In that time the Family Court has been the subject of dozens of government inquiries and attempts at reform on its road to becoming a cash cow for lawyers and the most hated jurisdiction in the country.
Far from the caring, helpful court promoting joint custody and cooperation after separation, as its founders envisaged, the Family Court rapidly became a law unto itself, imposing sole custody on separating families despite all the documented harm of this style of custody order, while denying non-custodial parents contact with their children on the flimsiest of excuses.
Overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive, and unaccountable, defying public norms of decency and probity, the ideologically driven Family Court and its so-called evil sister, the Child Support Agency, have remained remarkably resistant to reform and indifferent to the public odium they attract.
Successive governments from both left and right have failed to listen to their constituents and respond to their concerns. They have resorted to vested inquiries in the hands of the mandarins and publicly funded elites whose feigned attempts to listen to the views of ordinary people are a stain on the Australian Public Service.
In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to fix outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown. The country’s failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself.
Interview Podcast with Author John Stapleton
The Café Locked Out interview with author John Stapleton discusses his new book Failure: Family Law Reform Australia. Watch it here!
Positive Reviews
The book has been very favourably received so far. One five-star review on Amazon reads:
A brilliant book on Australia’s most harmful court.
This is essential reading for all Australians.
Most are unaware that the Family Court is the most harmful institution in our society. It features behind most domestic violence, fatal family tragedies, the cause of 1.1 million Australian children living with fatherlessness, the epidemic of single mothers and women growing old into poverty, and male suicide rates; it strips billions of dollars from our most vulnerable struggling families and causes intergenerational harm. And it does not achieve anything like what it was intended to achieve.
In 2019, the Australian Federal Government convened the Senate Inquiry into Family Law to determine if the Family Court was “fit for purpose.” It concluded that it was not, but instead of implementing the Senate-recommended reforms in 2023, Federal Labor made the Court far worse and far more harmful.
The court needs to go and a non-adversarial, non-lawyer-managed institution set up in its place. You may think it is not relevant to you, but no family is immune to the court’s harm. All men can lose everything in this court, and the court’s harm reverberates throughout society.
I know, because I was a Family Lawyer.
Professor Augusto Zimmermann, Former Law Reform Commissioner, Western Australia writes:
I strongly recommend this book, which compellingly demonstrates that the family law system allows false accusations to destroy innocent people and alienate good parents from their children. John Stapleton must be congratulated for providing compelling evidence that the Australian family law system requires a complete overhaul.
G. Lawrence DeMarco, Executive Manager, International Council for Men and Boys says:
Family law reform is urgently needed to address systemic issues. Failure: Family Law Reform Australia, highlights this with a compelling narrative, exposing the need for reform through powerful examples of real-life injustices.
And finally, Warwick Marsh, co-founder of Dads4Kids writes:
Failure Family Law Reform Australia is a brilliant, comprehensive book that highlights the havoc the family law and child support systems have inflicted on the families and the children of our nation.
Failure: Family Law Reform Australia Now Available
The recommended retail price is $59.99, but the pricing varies wildly across the various platforms.
Here’s links to a few of the outlets:
$54.50
$31.99
KINDLE $31.99
PRINT $89.08
PAPERBACK $US39.99
KINDLE $US20.25
PAPERBACK $39.99
EBOOK $19.99
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Republished with thanks to A Sense of Place.