By John Stapleton
Australia has the world’s highest electricity costs, highest housing costs, slowest and most expensive internet, most insane immigration system and consequently one of the most fractured societies on Earth. And is one of the most heavily taxed and over regulated communities.
And if not always technically true on every metric, you get the point. Australia is a basket case woven by the nation’s hapless political class.
The Albanese government has spent the past 18 months obsessing about a Referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, an extremely ill conceived project which deeply divided the nation and resulted in a crushing defeat for the government.
Not content with dividing the nation on the grounds of race, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his aging feminist cohorts in the Attorney General’s Department are determined to reignite the Gender Wars of the 1970s, making the lives of separated dads, and therefore their children, even worse than they already are.
Shockingly bad legislation, The Family Law Amendment Bill 2023, has whistled through both houses of Parliament, and takes Australian family law back to the very dark ages when many Australian fathers rarely if ever saw their children again.
The Marxist Feminist style of Family Courts which were birthed in the academic corridors of America’s universities in the 1970s spread rapidly across the Western world, and were adopted with alacrity by Australia’s legal fraternity, its phalanx of bureaucrats and legions of toady academics, all happy to suck up the money.
As family law commentator Bettina Arndt wrote: “Chances are most people reading this wouldn’t even know the Family Law bill had passed. Men across Australia wouldn’t have a clue that their rights as parents are now far more precarious, their chances of being a proper father after divorce severely reduced. The likelihood that fathers will end up as victims of false allegations is also much increased.”
The Family Court of Australia was founded in 1975, had a feminist judge as its founder, and is renowned for its extreme anti-male bias.
The Bill removed the objects section of the Act which stated that family court decisions should encourage the participation of both parents in their children’s lives. The aim of involving both parents was first introduced some 20 years ago by the conservatives after massive public backlash over the extremism of Australia’s family law, the well acknowledged fact that the highest rates of suicide in the country are directly related to mistreatment of fathers during family law and child support matters, and the desperate concerns not just of fathers but mothers, sisters, daughters, grandparents over the extreme damage the court system was inflicting on the nation’s children.
The Palace of Lies: The “Best of Interest of Children” Being the Biggest Lie of All
The Australian Attorney General’s Department has claimed their Family Law Amendment Bill 2023 as a “landmark” which “will ensure the best interests of children are at the centre of all parenting decisions”.
Critics around the country see that as little better than a lie.
“The best interests of the child” is one of the most dishonestly used phrases in Australia today.
It is a legal fiction which in the hands of lawyers can mean virtually anything, and in Australia’s antiquated family law system means sole mother custody, contempt for fathers and the perpetuation of the blizzard of false allegations which led to the Family Court of Australia routinely being called as “The Palace Of Lies”.
Australia, already known as the least democratic of Western democracies, saw only a very few politicians stand up in Parliament and question the passage of this anti-father anti-family legislation.
One of those was Senator Malcolm Roberts of Queensland, who said: “The Family Law Act has been called the slaughterhouse of the nation. It has been killing people in this country, killing families and killing kids, since 1975 when it was introduced by the Labor Party following UN policy. That is a fact. There have been 48 years of the slaughterhouse of the nation thanks to Lionel Murphy and the Labor Party. Now they are introducing bills to make it even more complex. They won’t allow scrutiny of that complexity. What are they hiding?
Instead of consulting properly in the first place, the government has chosen to put forward poor legislation and just ram it through. The Labor Party need to start doing what Anthony Albanese promised as opposition leader and start listening and consulting, not walking with their ears closed and ramming through legislation.
What they are hiding is a multibillion dollar gravy train for their mates, their fellow travellers, their academic bum chums and for the legal fraternity.
And the widespread societal wreckage their extremely sexist anti-male rhetoric causes.
In the video below Senators Malcolm Roberts, Pauline Hanson and Michaela Cash make mincemeat of the government’s proposals.
The government didn’t even front with the Attorney General Michael Dreyfus, who just like the Prime Minister was Missing in Action during this whole sorry affair. Instead a singularly uninformed and entirely unimpressive Assistant Education Minister Anthony Chisholm, bamboozled by the questions thrown at him and flanked by departmental bureaucrats providing the answers, could only result to that ultimate legal and bureaucratic lie, “The best Interest of the Child”.
Former Attorney General Michaela Cash said: “At the outset of this debate, I said that there are very few things in the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s portfolio that have a more direct impact on Australians than family law. Every year, thousands of Australians will find themselves going through the pain and sadness of separation, and, in a small proportion of those cases, disputes will be decided by a judge in Australia’s family law courts. As a nation, we should aim for a system that resolves those disputes as quickly and cleanly as possible. Regardless of the circumstances, if children are involved, we should at all times prioritise their best interests.
We do not agree with the solutions adopted in many places in this bill. It is not a bill that has been worked through over many years. It is not even a bill that has been subject to proper scrutiny. There are actually more schedules in the bill than there have been hours of committee inquiry. It is embarrassing. Even with the small amount of scrutiny that we have been able to give, it has become increasingly clear that the government consistently puts its ideological agenda over the best interest of Australian families.
“It is worth recapping, though, the very many areas where there was a better way forward in relation to the Family Law Amendment Bill. In its changes to the parenting framework, we have the absurd situation of the Attorney deciding to remove every piece of guidance from the objects and principles, and we went through that in detail. By removing those provisions, the government sends a disturbing message: the parenting framework is no longer intended to achieve outcomes like parents cooperating in the care of their children.
“On equal shared parental responsibility, we have talked through this tonight and I am not satisfied with the answers we have been given. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. It has only confirmed what so many have said: a political and ideological approach of a left-wing Labor government. We have the Attorney-General of Australia ignoring the recommendations arriving from the years of careful reviews, which acknowledged that the drafting could be improved—which, as I said, we agree with—but repeated that the principle of equal shared parental responsibility is sound.”
A Cash Cow for Lawyers
Billions of dollars have been spent ever since on the lucrative government funding industry of demonising men and lionising women. While other countries have moved on, the now ancient “all men are rapists” style of feminism remains alive and well in Australia, nurtured in the halls of power by cravenly weak politicians and pushed through by flotillas of taxpayer funded feminist lobby groups.
Senator Pauline Hanson, one of the few Australian politicians actually taking note of the dire impacts on her constituents of Australia’s utterly dysfunctional family law and child support systems said: “The demonisation of Australian men is unjustified and needs to stop. Men are already overrepresented in homelessness, in jobs with high risk to safety, as victims of violent crimes and, tragically, in suicides. Many of these studies are associated with unfair and unjust family law outcomes from a system biased against fathers. The removal of shared parental responsibility carries a strong risk of even more unjust outcomes.
There was clear evidence presented to the joint select committee that many mothers made unfounded or deliberately false allegations of violence against fathers. Ninety per cent of parents alleging child sexual abuse in contested hearings from 2012 until 2019 were mothers. In 90 per cent of these hearings, the judge found no risk of sexual harm to the child or children—90 per cent. In 25 per cent of these cases, the allegations were found to be deliberately misleading. In another 46 per cent of these cases, the allegations were mistaken. In 88 per cent of these cases, the allegations were not believed by the judge. In 62 per cent of these cases, the judge awarded shared parental responsibility or sole responsibility to the parent against whom the allegations were made. In 66 per cent of these cases, orders were made increasing parenting time with the parent against whom the allegations were made. This was confirmed by former Family Court judge Justice David Collier, who said allegations of child sexual abuse are being increasingly invented by mothers to stop fathers from seeing their children. He said:
“I’m satisfied that a number of people who have appeared before me have known that it is one of the ways of completely shutting husbands out of the child’s life. Families experiencing the system, both now and in the future, have my profound sympathies, because the chance of genuine reform has been squandered. You’re going to keep people going through the court system. Lawyers are going to make a lot of money out of this. I feel sorry for the children. You’re not considering the children at all. You’re a selfish bunch.”
Leading Campaigners for Fathers Bitterly Disappointed
Bettina Arndt
Bettina Arndt has been one of the most prolific campaigners for gender equality and equal rights for fathers in Australia, exposing the many injustices created by the government engendered climate of hysteria around domestic violence and sexual abuse. She writes regularly both for the mainstream press and on her Substack page.
Of the government’s changes she wrote: Proposed family law changes could see more strained custody battles, with dads likely to lose out.
It’s a brilliant ploy, which feminists have been systematically cementing in place. Soon their ship will come in.
Labor’s draconian new family law bill is about to sail through the Senate, with the Greens joining forces with Labor to enshrine women’s absolute power to use false allegations to destroy men’s relationships with their children.
Having long been internationally celebrated for protecting the right of children to care from both divorced parents, this new Act will mean Australia will return to the grim days of mostly sole mother custody.
This is the most significant social change in recent history, impacting millions of families across the country. Current estimates suggest there will be more than 300,000 family breakups involving children in the next decade.
It is just astonishing that this is all passing unchallenged, indeed almost unnoticed.
Australia has become one of the world leaders when it comes to men suffering false allegations.
A new YouGov survey, involving 9432 people across eight countries, found Australia was the worst country, after India, when people were asked if they had been falsely accused of abuse.
What’s going on here? The answer is simple. It’s the feminist capture of our family law system.
The YouGov survey showed false accusations in Australia are more likely to be made as part of a child custody dispute than anywhere else in the world – they are 41 per cent of such allegations in this country.
Sue Price: Men’s Rights
It’s a very sad day. The whole of the shared parenting concept has now been removed. We are back to the 1990s principles where mothers are considered to be the sole carers of children, with fathers playing just a visitor’s role, when allowed.
This is a backward step for Australia . We are possibly the only country in the world to reverse the shared parenting principles where it is considered vital for children to have the benefit of care and love of both their parents.
Australia was thought to be one of the most progressive countries in their understanding on the need for children to have good contact with both parents despite separation. Sadly this has now been thrown out as a result of the persistent attacks from women who fail to understand the importance of children having both parents in their lives.
Now the problem is going to be how long will it be before we can return the family law system back to some semblance of normality where both parents are considered essential to a child’s life and their overall well being?
In virtually all cases, the best interests of the child are best served by having both parents around.
The inquiry into this bill was headed by a woman married to another woman. I couldn’t care less what she does in her own life. But it seems quite obvious to me that she has no interest in understanding a father’s role in their children’s lives.
Warwick Marsh
The Labor Party Family Law Amendment Bill 2023, which passed in Parliament this Thursday, 19 October 2023, created a day of mourning for Australian children. The team at Dads4Kids believes this bill will in fact harm our children and is against their best interests and therefore unjust.
If you are a father with an intact family, you might well say, that is not my problem. I would answer you with the famous quote from civil rights campanero Martin Luther King, who said,
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Isaiah said these timeless words in 700 BC,
Injustice is everywhere; justice seems far away. Truth is chased out of court; honesty is shoved aside.” (CEV)
Simply put, we must make a stand for our nation’s children. We have to stand against the spread of fatherlessness, whether by state decree or wilful neglect.
There are over 870,000 children who will go to sleep tonight in Australia without their biological father in the home. Many of these children cry themselves to sleep, whilst others bury the pain through damaging addictions and/or behaviours. For many, the pain comes out in unexplained and damaging behaviours as they grow to adulthood.
Children have a biological birthright of equal access to their mother and their father in the event of separation. The bill passed last Thursday will deprive them further of that biological birthright.
Where was our Sodden Wreck of a Prime Minister?
Gormless, gutless, a sad mess of a Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has spent the past 18 months campaigning for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, caught up with the romanticism and emotionalism of aboriginal politics.
It failed totally; with all states and territories apart from the public servant ridden Australian Capital Territory, home of the nation’s capital Canberra.
Albanese frequently became misty eyed as he attended government various rallies and organised meetings with indigenous groups while ignoring the many indigenous parties that were opposed to his “Voice”. Australians being Australians there were plenty saying: “I’m voting NO because I want to see Albo cry again.”
The Voice of Separated Fathers was nowhere even heard. There were some 1700 submissions to the inquiry which presaged the passing of the Bill. There is no evidence that the government read any of them, certainly not the ones from fathers and fathers groups. In other words, another faux inquiry by a bureaucracy which has no intention of listening to the people who pay their wages.
Where was their voice? The voice of separated fathers, their children, and the many women also badly affected by Australia’s disastrous family law system, mothers, sisters, daughters. The voice of the most unfashionable elements in society, at least as far as the nation’s platoons of feminist bureaucrats, separated dads and their families?
So don’t they have separated dads in Albanese’s trendy inner western Sydney suburb of Marrickville?
All those separated dads who have no doubt visited his office over the years in a last ditch, desperate attempt to get help dealing with the two most dysfunctional and despised institutions in the country, the Family Court of Australia and the Child Support Agency. He apparently ignored them all. Or as he has shown throughout his dismal Prime Ministership, turned a deaf ear to the concerns of ordinary citizens.
Family law is a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the nation’s lawyers.
And Albanese, who has shown himself just as willing to cosy up to the Very Big End of Town as his loathed predecessor Scott Morrison, is more than happy to dish them up yet more billions at the expense of ordinary citizens.
Where exactly is he? Missing in Action when it comes to matters affecting the general public, Albanese is no doubt standing with the ubiquitous taxpayer funded beer in hand at yet another taxpayer funded function. A sodden mess. A sad and sodden mess who is destroying the country that has given him his spectacularly comfortable lifestyle.
One of those suck up bureaucrats flanking him should tell him straight: Mate, you’re destroying the country. And your chances of being re-elected are now somewhere near zero.
And speak to him like any Australian normally talks to another: “Mate, get yourself together. You’re destroying the country.”
Anthony Albanese’s absolute failure to reform Australia’s disastrous family law system is just one more plank in the destruction of his career.
