Failed Family Court Reform Australia
By Bettina Arndt
It is the 50th anniversary of Australia’s Family Court. That’s hardly cause for celebration. Over the last half century, what was originally designed as a “helping court” became the frontline of feminism’s gender wars and thus one of the country’s most hated institutions.
This led to dozens of government inquiries and attempts at reform which were all utterly scuttled. A brilliant book has just been published marking this tragic history. Failure Family Law Reform Australia is a mighty doorstopper, a dense 600-page expose of the shameful obstruction of attempts at reform, as inquiry after inquiry explored what was going wrong with this callous, despised system.
In the end all this effort came to nothing, explains John Stapleton, the journalist responsible for this important contribution to our social history. He was one of the founders of Dads on the Air, a community radio program, which led to him spending over a decade telling the stories of a court which readily denied children contact with their fathers “on the flimsiest of excuses or most ludicrous accusations.”
Now, John concludes, the situation for fathers, children and society as a whole, is worse than ever. He points out that the Family Court of Australia “ostensibly protects women but actually destroys the lives of many mothers, grandmothers and daughters, just as it does their male counterparts.” He strongly asserts that the resulting personal anguish and social chaos have “poisoned the social fabric”.
“It does Australian society no good 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 who have allowed this malfeasance to flourish.”
Wow, the man shoots from hip! It’s a powerful combination – the passionate journalist’s searingly honest commentary and the incredible collection of revealing stories and extracts he has pulled together from the dozens of inquiries, the many hundreds of submissions, and the articles and news stories documenting the history of failed family law reform in this country.
Perhaps most important of all, he exposes the scurrilous role of the feminists’ domestic violence industry in weaponizing the family court system against men. He’s documented it all - their carefully manufactured statistics, their misrepresentation and distortions of both the official statistical data and decades of international research, their manipulation of lapdog politicians, their use of our corrupt media to spread their propaganda, and the eagerness of the Labor party “to play the violence card” to destroy children’s relationships with their fathers by piling on fresh incentives for false allegations.
John explains: “The violence card has been played and it won the game. A Royal Flush…. The liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats have won the day.”
All these controversial issues are spelt out by John in our fascinating recent video conversation which touches on many topics rarely given public attention. Please help me ensure this receives the wide audience it deserves. (The book is available from key booksellers as an e-book or paperback.)
When I filmed this chat last week, I was utterly exhausted having spent six days engrossed in the book, reading it day and night from when it was published on February 28. It did my head in. As I told him, this had all been such a big part of my own life. I started writing about family law back in the 1980s, churning out article after article ranting about what the court was doing to men as well as serving on a number of government family law inquiry committees.
In our video we talk about all of this and the weirdest thing, is despite this utterly grim content, the conversation with John includes some pretty funny moments. We share the same gallows humour – perhaps the only way of coping with this relentless misery and stories of cruelty and indifference towards fellow human beings.
John describes one day when he was working in The Australian’s office when a mate begged him to come to the Family Court located just a few minutes away, to watch the way a hostile judge was dealing with his case. The friend’s teenage son had attempted suicide, and the dad was desperate for contact to give the boy some support. The Judge wasn’t convinced that was the reason.
“You wanted to be there to watch, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Didn’t you?” accused the judge, pointing his finger at the horrified dad.
John was astonished at this disgraceful, bullying behaviour from an esteemed judge – all on record in court hearings. But there are thousands of such examples of equally nasty, unhinged behaviour, not only from the judiciary but also from family court counsellors, psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as children’s lawyers. The entire family court system is full of people with an extraordinary bias against men.
As John commented, whenever he tells a story about the horrific treatment of a dad in the court there’s always someone who’ll say, “That’s nothing. Wait until you hear what happened to me.” You quickly realise the depths of this swamp.
Like the story of the man who slit his wrists when he received 32 letters in one day from the Child Support Agency, the institution which John jokingly describes as the “evil sister” of the Family Court.
Or the extraordinary case of the magistrate who sent a mother to prison for 4 months – after the Family Court had had 22 hearings over her denial of access to the children. The Family Court promptly swung into action, arranged an appeal which not only immediately let the mother out of prison but reduced the father’s access to the children to 6 hours a week.
The man many hold responsible for creating this climate was Chief Justice Alistair Nicholson. During his 16 years as head of the Court he repeatedly made negative comments about men’s groups and dismissed out of hand one of the greatest grievances expressed by fathers against the court – the failure to enforce its own orders in regards to access to children. Many of these men had paid large sums of money to obtain orders which could be ignored with impunity.
Nicholson suggested it was the fathers’ fault they could not get the mothers to follow the orders, declaring, “I think there is very much a power facto which comes into this. And I think the loss of that power that stems from the breakdown of the marriage is something that some men just cannot cope with. They in fact expected to control their wives, they expected to control their children… The ones that I've observed, anyhow, that seem to have the greatest problem, are the ones who are in access situations where they are, for one reason or other, unable to get their former partner or the children to comply with the access orders that have been made. And they then come to the court and expect the court to solve the problem for them. And the court can't always solve that problem for them.”
Nicholson once dismissed accusations that the judiciary was anti-male by referencing the two-thirds of the judges who were male. “Why would a male dominated judiciary be biased against men?” he asked. John Stapleton came up with a list of reasons: “Money. Ideology. Institutional capture. Status. Power. Applause.”
Hmmm. I’d add gutlessness, fear of being targeted by our feminist-dominated media, or simply going against the crowd. And then there's empathy, or rather, excessive chivalry—the instinctive impulse to protect women, even if it means selling out men.
There were real revelations, even for an old hand like me, in John Stapleton’s powerful scholarship. I was intrigued by the suggestion that the destruction of former Attorney General Christian Porter by a bizarre historic rape allegation could have been payback for Porter’s move to merge the Family Court with the Federal Court, which destroyed the whole cosy fiefdom. John thoroughly exposes the scurrilous role played by feminist journalist Louise Milligan in the whole sorry saga.
Again, and again, female journalists pop up in this long history, manipulating our media to take men down and push the ‘dangerous dads’ line that has led the court to its current state of infamy. Now these women are firmly in charge, working as editors of all our major mainstream publications, and key personnel in all areas of broadcasting.
Yet John’s wonderful tome exposes many other villains. Like the former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward, known for repeatedly insulting fathers, who used her government position to campaign against joint custody. She once argued that fathers couldn’t expect 50/50 custody of children when they need an autocue to remember their names.
But there are also glorious heroes featured in this book. Like Richard Cruikshank, director of a property investment research firm, who was incensed by the conduct of the Child Support Agency and the government coverup of its negative impacts. In 2002 he paid for research on the financial impact of child support and found the Child Support Agency had cost the Australian taxpayer $28 billion dollars since its inception in 1989 – that is $2700 for every taxpayer – when welfare payments and lost tax income was calculated. With the direct cost of child support welfare payments then in the order of $1.74 billion per year, he estimated the scheme would cost the community a further $40 billion over the next decade. Sadly no one has updated this research to confirm this forecast.
As for the clawback, the spurious claim that by squeezing dads for money the government saved on welfare funding, Cruickshank calculated that for every dollar transferred between parents it cost $2.80.
I was very pleased to see John’s book document Senator Pauline Hanson’s ferocious battle to get false allegations included in the terms of reference for one of the more recent parliamentary inquiries. Her party, One Nation, then held the balance of power and Pauline flexed her muscle to insist this vital issue was on the agenda. The feathers really flew after Pauline faced the media talking about the huge numbers of parents using domestic violence accusations to stop the other parent from seeing their children, using her own son’s story to illustrate the carnage that follows.
The press tore her apart, wheeling out everyone from former Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant to DV campaign Rosie Batty, all claiming false allegations didn’t happen and the inquiry wasn’t necessary… but it went ahead. We actually made a mighty effort to help men put in submissions to this one, with a team of skilled volunteers helping blokes tell their stories. And even though the final report included some sensible recommendations about action over false allegations and alternate approaches to children’s cases, the wimpish Morrison government decided to bury it. And then came Albanese who, without any mandate whatsoever, last year removed almost every mention of children’s relationship with fathers.
So, it goes on, with every year bringing fresh legislation or new policies making life tougher for so many separating families – whilst the lawyers line their pockets. The role of the legal profession in this whole mess deserves special mention, with so many encouraging antagonism between separating couples and sometimes even suggesting the use of false allegations, and using their power and influence to stack committees and tilt inquiries to ensure women are given every possible advantage including free legal aid, whilst driving men to the wall.
It is vitally important that the story of the corruption and decline of this vital institution is on the public record and John Stapleton has done our society a major service in making this available. He sums up the reason this really matters:
“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.”
This needs to be on Audible.
I have no doubt that John Stapleton’s book represents an excellent work of research & authorship on the travesty that is the bloodsucking Family Law industry in Australia – including the parasitical ‘journalist’ operatives who have made it their life ambition to hate fathers and destroy men. However, there is an ‘elephant in the room’ about this book.
The price for the paperback edition of John’s book on Amazon is more than AUD$87, and the Kindle edition more than AUD$31. I don’t care how long the book is, but these prices are excessive in the extreme and they will probably ensure the book’s failure in the marketplace. This problem can be rectified - and needs to be.
The practice of grossly overpricing books is a not uncommon occurrence in the ‘academic’ publisher ‘non-fiction’ market. Most academic authors are completely naïve about the psychology of how and why decisions to buy books are made by potential customers, and after labouring mightily to produce a learned work, they fall into the trap of simply handing their life’s work over to a publisher who through incompetence proceeds to render the work unsellable by overpricing. The ‘academic’ book publication industry often sees its market as mainly public libraries – not the mass of the population – and so a book that should potentially gain a reasonably big market ends up selling only a few hundred copies.
Non-fiction books such as John Stapleton’s have the most chance of successfully achieving the sales necessary to reach economic takeoff speed by activating a ‘word-of-mouth’ referral process amongst a core of people who have bought an initial copy. The window of opportunity for kickstarting that process occurs during the book launch period – which is right now for Stapleton’s book. If the product is prohibitively priced - as is the current case - then insufficient initial sales will occur to create the critical mass necessary to trigger the word-of-mouth chain reaction. That initial window of opportunity will then slam shut - and usually will not reopen. Great disappointment follows. I have seen distressed academics who just cannot understand why the fruit of their precious labour is just not selling, and the answer lies with the marketing incompetence and lack of savvy of the publisher.
These days, many astute authors take direct control of the publishing process for their books by contracting out editing & other functions, and then self publish direct to Kindle. The result is often a river of gold direct to the author, completing bypassing the traditional publishing houses - and although they hate it - publishers then sometimes come cap-in-hand to the author to buy the rights to publish the hard copy.
The distribution costs for an electronic book such as Kindle are tiny – after all, the book buyer is only getting is a bunch of electrons. Nothing can justify a price of over $31 for the Kindle edition of John’s book. As I said, the prices set for the book may have doomed his otherwise worthy publication to marketplace failure, or at least very much lower sales than it deserves. I hope I have made my point.