Stay In Your Homes

"At the end of life, all those things that we thought were important don't seem very very important at all."
Meryl Streep, Evening.


"But time is always guilty. Someone must pay for
Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself."
W.H. Auden.


Stay In Your Homes: you'll only get in the way; is a poster on a wall in an alley down the road from here. It's the same alley that has a poster: Redfern, Gateway to Waterloo. Redfern is a gateway to nowhere and Waterloo is a depressed housing commission area who's most distinctive feature is the towering 1950s housing blocks known universally as the towers of despair or suicide towers. It was in one of these towers that they found the bloke who had been sitting dead at his kitchen table for more than six months. His neighbours never noticed; or assumed he was away. He stuck to himself.

At the press conference a junky and his girlfriend happily talked to all the cameras; he taught me how to play chess, he was a great bloke. Translation: I didn't rip him off much and he never noticed when I did. The ether is full of the mad this morning. An old man, bearded and unkempt, smelly, shouts: "Nobody ever showed me any respect, not from when I was little, nobody. Nobody. I'm getting my own back. I'm showing the lot of you."

I walk on past, hoping he won't focus on me; shortly afterwards to see an aboriginal woman clambering around on the top of the metal awning where she had climbed through the window from her first floor apartment. She's busily throwing things, including a whole lot of teddy bears, into the street. A council worker is below, cleaning them up into a pile as she throws them. "I don't want my teddy's anymore, I don't want my teddy's," she keeps shouting as she throws yet another into the street. Sooner or later, I guess, someone will call the Mental Health Crisis Team; and she'll find herself in a mental hospital; with no teddy's at all.

Yes well I could have done with the Mental Health Crisis Team myself yesterday; scared witless before giving the speech. Ten minutes before I went to bathroom; and all I could feel was these rising waves of panic blanking out my consciousness as the clock counted down to my greatest fear. I might be a journalist and a broadcaster, but that's all anonymous; behind a computer screen, behind a byline, behind a microphone. Standing up in front of people, stripped of cover and stripped of all the props that go into making one's role, is an entirely different matter. I always lived my life behind multiple screens, no one could get to me. But this was something else; standing up in front of a crowd, talking about something that concerned me. I was told I appeared completely calm, relaxed and knowledgeable; and I couldn't walk two feet afterwards without someone stopping me and telling me what a great speech it was.

Barry Williams, bought lock stock and barrell by the Howard government for a few measly quid and who, preening himself as a saviour and a great representative of his team, boasts constantly about how he's going to talk to this minister or that; the attorney general said this to me, Alby Schultz said that to me. It's disgusting to behold and it's no wonder the blokes have been so totally screwed. I think the father's groups have got a total of about two million over four years; chicken feed to the government. Apparently Barry kept shaking his head all through my speech, saying, you can't say that, you can't say that. But Warwick Marsh from the Fatherhood Fou8ndation, who gave up some of his time to make sure that I spoke at the conference and mounted a major campaign to get me there, told him it was very important to have dissentiong views. "Well, everyone's entitled to his view," Barry said dismissively after my speech, before he noticed that a number of people were on their feet applauding. And I couldn't get one foot afterwards without being congratulated, "like a lazer of truth", one bloke said. The boys, who did a great musical intro, reckoned it was a triumph. I just felt ravaged and disturbed, but I'm back in Sydney now. Thank God it's over.


THE BIGGER STORY:


Australia's leading radio program for fathers Dads On The Air has slammed the Howard government's family law reforms as an abject failure. They argue that by flirting with the separated dad vote, by raising the possibility that they could get their children back to distraught and already distressed separated men who don't see their children, the Howard government committed emotional abuse on a massive scale.

Addressing the Lone Father's Association conference at Parliament House in Canberra titled "The New Family Law Amendments: Are They the Turning Point?", the DOTA team said separated fathers were once staunch supporters of the Prime Minister John Howard and the Liberal National Party coalition, believing that they would reform those despised institutions, the Family Court and the Child Support Agency.

The loss of an estimated million votes from the victims of the government's failure to effectively reform family law and child support, including separated dads, grandparents and second wives, many of whom were traditional Labor voters drawn to Howard on the vote-changing issue of contact with their children, is one of the significant but largely unwritten causes underpinning Howard's current poor standing in the polls.

Dads On The Air, now the world's longest running fatherhood radio program, began in 2000 from community radio station 2GLF in western Sydney. It followed the Howard government's alleged reforms to family law and child support more closely than any other media outlet.

"To understand why an air of decay and deceit has adhered to a dying Howard government, you need look no further than the Howard government's treatment of separated dads and their families," the team said. "It is a case study of how this government has dealt with social issues, with the electorate; and yes, with their once staunch supporters. And why they are now on the nose from coast to coast.

"By flirting with the separated father vote and then discarding it, by holding in front of grieving and distressed men who have had their children arbitrarily ripped off them the possibility that they could get to see their kids again, by promising and promoting family law reform and then failing to deliver, John Howard and his government have committed emotional abuse on a massive scale."

The DOTA team said the Howard government's wishy washy "shared responsibility" bill was not strong enough to change the Family Court's entrenched single mother bias; and by ignoring all the latest sociological data detailing the importance of father's in children's lives, had failed a generation of parents and children.

"Instead of listening to the people, to the massive support for joint custody aka shared parenting as the norm post divorce, instead of listening to the strong support in the media for ending the rotten debacle of family law and remedying the harm being done to this country's children, the Howard government chose instead to listen to the elite "liberal" opinion of the so-called experts, who have always been ideologically opposed to fathers, believing they are unnecessary in the modern family. John Howard blew an historic opportunity to fix this problem once and for all."

For a full copy of the speech go to: www.dadsontheair.net