Chaos At the Crossroads: In the Beginning
()
About this ebook
Read more from William John Stapleton
Bangkok Busted You Go to Jail for Sure Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Twilight Soi Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChaos At the Crossroads: State Created Pain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Final Days of Alastair Nicholson: Chief Justice Family Court of Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBangkok Busted: You Die for Sure: One Man's Despairing and Frightened Flight Back to Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNot for Publication Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChaos At the Crossroads: The Birth of Dads On the Air Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Chaos At the Crossroads
Related ebooks
Chaos At the Crossroads: The Birth of Dads On the Air Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChaos At The Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLove for Sale: A World History of Prostitution Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Born in Hope: The Early Years of the Family Court in Australia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrecarious childhood in post-independence Ireland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Sense of Balance Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnderstanding Australian Culture Through American Eyes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAdoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming Our Families—and America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGale Researcher Guide for: Gender in British North America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Myth of the Missing Black Father: The Persistence of Black Fatherhood in America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCulture as Embodiment: The Social Tuning of Behavior Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMen of Our Times (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Or Leading Patriots of the Day Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAgainst Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow Great a Crime: to Tell the Truth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTaming Alabama: Lawyers and Reformers, 1804-1929 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Sex Lives of Australians: A History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300 to 1800 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Quest: The California Youth Authority's Golden Years Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBecoming Visible Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Charleston Orphan House: Children's Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Legitimacy of Bastards: The Place of Illegitimate Children in Later Medieval England Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCrisis in the Classroom: Crisis in Education Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFamily-Centered Policies and Practices: International Implications Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrivate Life: Fragments, Memories, Friends Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Childhood & Death in Victorian England Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Men of Our Times or Leading Patriots of The Day Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDon't Go Back to Where You Came From Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Social Science For You
Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Men Explain Things to Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Close Encounters with Addiction Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Denial of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Oprah's Book Club Selection) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Reset: And the War for the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Human Condition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Chaos At the Crossroads
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Chaos At the Crossroads - William John Stapleton
Chaos at the Crossroads:
In the Beginning
Early in the millennium Australia was presented with an historic opportunity to address once and for all the public disquiet over issues concerning child welfare, custody and support payments. The routine stripping of children, income and assets from their fathers under the prevailing divorce regime arose from what had once seemed progressive policy decisions made in the 1970s.
Australia adopted with alacrity the same style of Marxist feminist Family Courts that had sprung up across the western world during the seventies, that decade of social ferment and change.
Fancying itself amongst the avant-garde on social justice issues, Australia embraced the Court's philosophy of protection and advancement of women.
But with the detangling of the horrific court battles and personal enmities created by fault based divorce, unfortunately, came an armada of ideologues, researchers
and academic sympathisers. In the fevered anti-male atmosphere invading the West’s university corridors at the time, the denigration of fathers as dangerous and unnecessary historical relics became routine.
The playing out of these policies in the modern era and the dysfunction of the institutions which have administered Australia’s family law system since the mid-1970s and its child support policies since the late 1980s were ripe for change when the socially conservative pro-family Prime Minister John Howard powered into office in 1996.
Family law reform was an issue whose time had come. In a rare confluence of opinion, the public, the media and numerous politicians all supported change.
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 evil twin the Child Support Agency, both creations of the country's Labor Party during its many years in power through the 1970s and 1980s.
Many constituents found it hard to believe that a conservative
pro-family figure like Howard could possibly condone some of the goings on in these institutions and must desire, like they did, to reform them. As a suburban solicitor promoting traditional family values, many assumed that the Prime Minister could not have personally condoned their extreme anti-father bias, their arbitrary decision making processes, or indeed what many saw as blatant corruption in the rigging of evidence and procedures to advantage the mother at the cost of truth.
Family law reform was an issue whose time had come. In a rare confluence of opinion, the public, the media and numerous politicians all supported change.
But politics is a juggling act of competing concerns; and for a while there was no better juggler in Australian political life than Howard. Juggling does not equal reform.
Established in 1975, in its early days the Family Court of Australia was widely perceived as a forward-looking, ground breaking institution.
But within a decade the Court was making headlines for all the wrong reasons, the focus of contention being its treatment of fathers.
The community radio program Dads On The Air, which played such an integral role in the fight for family law reform in Australia and became known internationally for the wide variety of academics, authors and lobbyists it interviewed, first began broadcasting in August, 2000. The timing coincided with a dramatic increase in the media and government’s focus on family law.
By then the Family Court and the associated industries and protective bureaucracies surrounding it, including the family law units of Legal Aid and the multi-million dollar family report writing business, were all attracting public disquiet.
Hampered by the secrecy provisions in family law, which have worked effectively to keep the general public ignorant of the worst excesses of the Family Court of Australia, its most farcical judgments and its repeated failure to take child protection issues seriously, Dads On The Air nonetheless did its best to expose the Court’s practices and its many dirty little secrets.
Malfeasance
, described by Dictionary Online as the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law; wrongdoing – used especially of an act in violation of a public trust or by the Oxford Dictionary as simply
wrongdoing, especially by a public official", was a word which entered the vocabulary of the volunteers on Dads On The Air.
The word became the simplest, most short hand way to describe the operation of both The Family Court of Australia and The Child Support Agency. It was first used on radio by then head of Dads Australia Rod Hardwick.
The rest of the volunteers for the community radio program soon followed suit. When involved with Dads On The Air he worked as a fireman after retiring from the police force.
The issues so lightly glossed over in much of the public and media debate represented a deep personal hurt that was disfiguring the country.
MPs across the country were being besieged with complaints about family law and child support; hour upon hour of their time eaten up by distressed parents whose disputes were exacerbated or made intractable by their interaction with government agencies.
Modern fathers had embraced with gusto the increased involvement and hands-on parenting of their children sparked by a feminist push to remake the family, remodel women's roles and share work burdens on the domestic front.
At the beginning of the millennium Australia’s shopping malls were full of kids crawling all over their fathers, holding hands, dribbling and drooling. The cheerfully harassed dads struggled to do the shopping while keeping their offspring in check. It was a very different scene to the traditional over-tired, over-stressed mother standing at checkout queues trying to pull their bored children into line.
Not to be at your child's birth was now the exception rather than the rule. The days of fathers opening up cigars and slugging down whisky with their mates while their wives bellowed their way through childbirth were largely a memory.
In the contemporary urban environment in which most Australians lived, with both parents working to pay large mortgages, shared parenting, although not labeled as such, was already the norm in many intact families.
Time and study motions showed that while both parents tended to maintain their traditional roles and divisions of labor, both mothers and fathers contributed approximately equal time to the functioning of the household – despite all the studies showing men were shirking their share of the dishes. Instead they were mowing the lawns, taking out the garbage, fixing fences and all the household activities the suburban male had long adopted as their domain.
But however devoted a father might be and however modern his approach, if his wife decided she wanted to divorce, those same fathers laughing in the sun with their children were rapidly transformed into the familiar sight of the lonely, sad and suicide prone separated dad. Most of those once happy fathers never thought such a fate could possibly await them. Such destinies were for losers who had done the wrong thing by their wives or children. There was little solidarity between men in intact families and separated men; or with gay men for that matter.
The social reality and the public discourse had long ago parted ways.
For most of the Family Court's 30-plus-year history separated fathers, disenchanted with their court cases and almost invariably playing a diminished role in their children’s day to day lives, had been invisible in the public debate.
The argument over Australia’s family law and child protection policies was a tipping point one. The mistreatment of fathers and their children by state institutions had, in terms of public anger, reached boiling point by the end of the twentieth century. The issue spilt over into public debate, was generating new lobby groups and began emerging from the shadows of midnight to dawn talkback radio into the mainstream media.
The policies, partly historic accident, were being fostered and maintained by the rigid gender politics of those in the highest reaches of the country's bureaucracy and judiciary.
The antecedents of contemporary family