Chaos At The Crossroads

John Stapleton

Description

Chaos At The Crossroads tells the story of the long struggle for family law reform in Australia. It also tells the story of the formation of Dads On The Air. What began with a small group of disgruntled separated men in Western Sydney in 2000 has gone on to become the world's longest running and most famous radio program dedicated to issues around fatherhood, regularly interviewing national and international activists, advocates, academics and authors. Its archives now present a fascinating history of the men's and fatherhood movement of the early part of the millennium.

Dads On The Air was strategically placed to cover the push for family law reform in Australia. Despite the founder's intent that shared parenting be the norm for the so-called "helping" court aka The Family Court of Australia, and subsequent legislative attempts to impose shared parenting post separation as the most civilised outcome for separating couples, such was never to be. The Family Court rapidly became a law unto itself, imposing sole mother custody on separating families, despite all the documented harm of this style of custody order, denying fathers contact with their children on the flimsiest of excuses. Overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive and unaccountable, defying public norms of decency and probity, it soon became one of the country's most hated institutions. To this day it has remained remarkable resistant to reform and indifferent to the public odium it attracts.

Chaos At The Crossroads concludes: Successive governments from both left and right have failed to listen to their constituents and respond to their concerns. They have resorted to vested inquiries in the hands of the mandarins and publicly funded elites whose feigned attempts to listen to the views of ordinary people have then been heavily reinterpreted. They have delayed progress through the extensive manipulation of committees or other forms of alleged inquiry.These same governments, even when they were enacting legislative reforms, left their enforcement in the hands of institutions notoriously resistant to change. They allowed or encouraged fashionable ideology, institutional inertia and bureaucracy to triumph over common sense. Common decency was lost long ago.

"In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to reform outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family law and child support - and for the failure of governments to take seriously the experiences and voices of the men and women most directly affected by them. The country's failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself."

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Parentalité et Éducation des Enfants
• Family Law
• Droit et juridique
• Separation
• Law
• Divorce

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 03 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456600198
• Langue: English

Extrait

Chaos At The Crossroads
Family Law Reform in Australia
 
by John Stapleton
 
First Edition, Copyright 2010 John Stapleton
All rights reserved.
 
Published by Dads On The Air Books.
More information: www.dadsontheair.net
 
Published for the Internet by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0019-8
 
This book may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote excerpts in a review.
 
 
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE:IN THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER TWO: ORIGINS AND POLITICS
CHAPTER THREE: THE FIRST DAYS
CHAPTER FOUR: TALES FROM THE SUBMISSIONS
CHAPTER FIVE: THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE
CHAPTER SIX:THE FINAL DAYS OF ALASTAIR NICHOLSON
CHAPTER SEVEN:DESCENT INTO CHAOS
CHAPTER EIGHT:THE TWILIGHT ZONE
CHAPTER NINE:WORST CASE SCENARIO
CHAPTER TEN:THE SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS OF 2010
 
 
INTRODUCTION
In the middle of the year 2000 I received a phone call which would ultimately lead to the writing of this book. The caller, a former police officer called Rick Torning, wanted to know if I would be interested in contributing to a program at a community radio station in western Sydney called 2GLF. As one of a small group of separated blokes who had secured some air time on a community radio station, he wanted to cover family law, child support and fatherhood issues. They had heard, I’m not sure how, that I was both a journalist and a separated dad.
Subsequently I met up with the initial group of what was to evolve into Dads On The Air. From those original few, I remained directly involved with the program the longest, for about nine years. As such I am sometimes referred to as “the founder”, although that is not correct and there were several of us involved in those early days, including Richard Torning aka Uncle Buck and others who for professional reasons would now rather not be named.
Rick was a domestic violence expert with the NSW Police who mounted a number of complex legal cases attempting to demonstrate in the family law system’s lack of validity.
“Matt”, another former policemen, was at that time a contributor to the show, before he started complaining that every time he made an appearance his child support was increased and he could no longer afford to participate.
Like many other fathers who find working while paying what they perceive as draconian levels of child support pointless, “Matt” eventually gave up the job he loved and instead went to university. He has since graduated. Thanks to our family law and child support systems, there are a number of dads who have either gone back to tertiary education or pursued other dreams, such as to become a painter. Or who took the other path and are eking out their lives on welfare rather than spend them in servitude to what they saw as the system’s rapacious financial demands. They might have felt differently if they thought their money was genuinely benefitting their children.
These two men were particularly upset, as separated policemen tended to be. Former policemen, of which there were a disproportionate number within the atomised, disorganised and almost entirely unfunded father’s and family law reform movements in Australia, were perhaps more attune to the injustices and failures of the system they had spent their lives serving and which, when they needed it most, comprehensively failed them.
Matt, too, was heartbroken that a one-night stand resulted in a child he could not see. His own life had been turned upside down as a result and his own parents were upset at the lack of contact with their grandchild.
We shared much in common, that first small group, most of all disgust at the rampant anti-father bias and to our minds outright corruption in Australia’s family law system. We were similarly distressed at what had been so blithely done to our children, and the children of so many others, the attempted destruction of their relationship with their dads. I admired people who didn’t give up, who didn’t say sure, take my kids, act as if they didn’t need a father in their lives, leach me for every cent you can.
During those dark days more than half the fathers entering the Family Court saw their children barely once or twice a year. All too many never saw their children again. Those who did usually got the so-called daddy pack of contact every second weekend, although there was no evidence such an arrangement was in the best interests of children. The situation improved somewhat after the introduction of the Howard government’s modest reforms promoting shared parenting, but these reforms now look likely to be wound back.
While I perhaps somewhat obsessively dedicated many hundreds of hours to Dads On The Air over the years, I am not some kind of gender warrior. I worked in the mainstream media, on two of Australia’s leading broadsheets, for more than a quarter of the century. As a former general news reporter, a “humble hack on the highways of print” sometimes dismissively known as an ambulance chaser, I have written thousands upon thousands of stories on a dizzying range of topics. Family law was just one of the subjects that intrigued me over the years.
But as that first small band of disgruntled dads rapidly discovered once we began broadcasting, like no other subject family law was something that cut deep into the hearts and lives of many men. Family law represents an inexhaustible well of pain.
When we began we felt very much alone, our broadcasts putting us out on a limb. Not for long. As the years passed DOTA was joined by other voices, both within the Australian community and internationally. There were so many stories. Fathers everywhere, often having worked in thankless jobs in order to protect and provide for their children, and then kept busy at home for the same purpose, were outraged by the post-separation system they found themselves unwillingly trapped within. When we began in 2000 we had no idea we were part of a worldwide trend protesting the mistreatment of fathers in separated families.
At first we would say what we had to say nervously, thinking that at any time the Australian Federal Police would come knocking at our door and try to silence us. The Family Court had a history of prosecuting its critics. No other media outlet in Australia was routinely trying to expose the suspect practices and decision making of the Family Court and the Child Support Agency in the way we were. Our boldly expressed views on the dysfunction within the country’s family law, child support and child welfare systems, which once seemed so daring because they were so rarely heard, eventually came to appear decidedly mainstream.
From that initial telephone call evolved Dads On The Air, which by dint of pure perseverance is now the world’s longest running program dedicated to gender, family and fatherhood issues. It has gone on to attract a talented team of volunteers with journalistic, entertainment, legal, academic and internet experience. But back in 2000 we had no expertise, no experience in radio, and no resources. At that time we did not even have the ability to interview people on air. Convincing talent to travel out to western Sydney for an obscure radio show was difficult.
Technology had rapidly changed the father’s movement by enabling the almost instantaneous spread of information, news stories, research and developments worldwide. Once separated fathers had been socially isolated and largely withdrawn. Now they realised they were not alone, that their cases were far from unique. The internet facilitated the rapid “wising up” of separated fathers. In the previous five years there had been a rapid expansion of internet chat-lines and on-line communities which meant anyone struggling to understand court processes or to handle the emotional fall out of divorce or separation could benefit from other’s experience.  All they had to do was put out a simple request about forms or procedures and they would be deluged with advice. 
Dads On The Air was itself a prime example of the way revolutions in computer science were transforming social debate. The technology which made it possible for a small group in western Sydney to create a 90 minute weekly program that could be downloaded in Mongolia and attract the country’s and the world’s leading political, academic and social commentators on fathers issues simply hadn’t existed five years before.
The show played a pivotal role in the debate over family law reform in Australia during the first decade of the new millennium, acting as a conduit for groups and individuals whose voices were rarely if ever heard in the mainstream media.
The program today is very different to what it once was, including being more professional and hopefully considerably more entertaining.  While we continue to follow Australian family law, child support and fatherhood issues more closely than any other media outlet, we also pursue broader debates, from men’s health to early childhood development to parental alienation. As the years have passed, Dads On The Air has widened its focus to promote a positive view of men, boys, fathers and to explore social issues around gender and fatherhood.
While Dads On The Air has been accused by some of being a “men’s rights” group, something somehow evil while women’s rights groups are to be applauded, it is nothing of the kind. It is simply a media outlet focusing on dads’ issues, encouraging debate across a range of perspectives.
Australia’s unique network of more than 100 community radio stations, established by Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s, is one of the main reasons the show arose in Australia. Ironically it was also Whitlam who established the Family Court of Australia, following a similar trend towards secretive Marxist feminist style family courts in other Western countries.