Chaos At The Crossroads

It looks like I'm being offered money to finish the book I started Chaos at the Crossroads on family law reform in Australia. I've always wanted to finish it but just never had the resources. I started it a couple of years ago and most of it was finished in the early hours belting it out on the typewriter till 4am, a lonely and obsessive pursuit. Finally my fingers just gave out, it was too much to ask from one person after finishing a general reporting shift; and I put what I had done up on line and left it at that; never getting back to it.

I've just converted it all into a google document - google docs and spreadsheets is a wonderful piece of technology, typical google wizardry, easy to use and incredibly clever - and am rewriting the introduction right this minute.

I'm struggling with it and thought I'd give it a go here; where I feel more free to write just about anything.

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The Howard Liberal Government was presented, early in the millenium, with an historic opportunity to fix once and for all the rotten mess that was child welfare and child custody in Australia. The routine stripping of children from their fathers and the creation of single mother households that characterised separation rose from policy decisions made as long ago as the 1970s. It represnted a well of pain that was disfiguring the country. MPs across the country were besieged with complaints about family law and child support; hour upon hour of their time was being eaten up by distressed parents with intractible problems made worse by their interactions with state agencies.

Modern fathers had embraced with gusto the increased involvement with and hands-on parenting of their children sparked by a feminist push to remake the family and remodel women's roles. The traditional nuclear family was painted by feminist academics and their bureaucrat foot soldiers as a patriarchal prison from which women must ecape. In a modern urban environment, where both parents often worked in order to pay massive mortgages, shared parenting was already the norm in many intact families. Not to be at a child's birth was now the exception rather than the rule. The cigars and slugs of whisky down the pub while the woman screamed her way through childbirth were now a distant memory. The shopping centres of the era were full of kids crawling over their fathers, of holidng hands, dribbling and drooling, whle the cheerfully harassed dads struggled to do the shopping.

But in one moment these same fathers laughing in the sun with their children at their local shopping mall could be transformed into the now familiar sight of the lonely, said and suicide prone separated dad.

The mistreatment of fathers and their chidlren by state institutions was fostered by the gender politics of those in the highest reaches of the country's bureaucracy and judiciary. These injustices were protected by a bi-partisan veil drawn across the entire arena. Both major political groupings in Australia, the "conservative" Liberal National Party coalition and the Labor Party, knew their was little to be gained by bashing each other over the head with the issue, and much to be risked in openly attacking the courts.

The mistreatment of fathers and their children led by extention to the mistreatment of their new partners and often enough of her chldren, along with the child's grandparents and extended families. In the meantime the mistreatment of non-custodial mothers was swept under the carpet, an embarrassment to women's lobby groups focussed on working for single mothers, elevating their victimhood status to the front of those queuing for the welfare dollar.

The ideologically driven state and taxpayer funded creation of the single mother household spawned in the 1960s as the normal family pattern post-separation had created a massive multi-billion dollar industry. Enormous slabs of the country's $80 billion welfare tab were taken up catering for their welfare; with a slew of benefits flowing on from obtaining custody of children. These included family and child payments, child support, rental assistance, and reduced medicine and transport costs. Any attempt to reform family law was a threat to this empire.

But by the early part of the millenium, public debate had shifted and the suffering of separated families came on to the political radar. With public and media support, the government was in a position to alter for the better the destiny of the country's one million children from separated families, The familiar sight of bitter couples at war with each other, burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own and taxpayers money in a bitter fight over the custody of their children, could have been relegated to history.

The Prime Minister of Australia John Winston Howard set the hares running in mid-June of 2003 when he told Australia’s coalition Members of Parliament, and thereby the country, that it might well be worth re-looking at joint-custody.

This was an issue who's time had come. In a rare confluence of opinion, the public, the media and politicians all supported change. The mind-boggling bureaucracy of the Child Support Agency and its staff's overt hostility towards separated fathers rubbed salt into the wounds from dysfunctional Family Court cases. In the padded surrounds and heavy security of their plush offices judges continued to make judgements "in the best interests of children" while out in the real world politicians, counsellors and ambulance officers were left to pick up the mess.

Howard, always one to sniff the political wind, knew that a large number of voters were looking to him to fix the lunacy of Australia's Family Court and its Child Support Agency, both creations of the country's left-wing Labor Party during its many years in power through the 70s and 80s. It was a storm which had been brewing since the creation of the Family Court of Australia in 1975 and the Child Support Agency in 1989. As a suburban solicitor promoting traditional family values, many assumed that he could not have personally condoned the extreme anti-father bias of these institutions, their arbitrary decision making processes, or indeed what many saw as blatant corruption in the rigging of evidence and procedures advantaging the mother at virtually any cost. While separated fathers were routinely painted as violent to their partners and indifferent to the welfare of their children violent, abusive, drunken and drug addicted mothers routinely gained custody in the Family Court of Australia.