Chaos At The Crossroads

With special guest:

• John Stapleton.

Joining us this week is well known and respected Australian Journalist, Author and co-founder of Dads On The Air, John Stapleton, who will launch his new book, ‘Chaos At The Crossroads’, which tells the story of the long struggle for family law reform in Australia. It also tells the interesting story of the formation of Dads On The Air.

There is no doubt this book will be much sought after by future historians, as it provides an important account of the anguish and despair suffered by so many thousands of Australian families, made possible due to atrocious Family Law Legislation, during an extremely dark period in our history. It also documents the work of those who stood up to the anti Men, Father and Family lobby, many of whom have devoted thousands of hours of their own time, to alert the wider community to the destructive excesses of the prevailing multi- billion dollar Family Justice Industry.  

John wrote for a variety of Australian publications including The Bulletin and The Financial Review before joining the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald in the mid 1980s. He spent the last 15 years of his journalistic career, until 2009, working as a general news reporter on The Australian. He is the proud father of two teenage children. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Men Love Sex and Australian Politics.

In 2000 he joined a small group of separated dads at 2GLF in western Sydney and helped to found Dads On The Air, now the world?s longest running fathers radio program. Over the next nine years he spent many hundreds of hours keeping the then struggling program alive. He is currently living in Bangkok. The shown continues to prosper without him. On a visit to Sydney in October 2010 he participated in Dads On The Air?s tenth anniversary program, which featured some of its original members and most enduring supporters.

About ‘CHAOS AT THE CROSSROADS’:  

“An early draft of Chaos At The Crossroads went up at the old Dads On The Air website in 2004, when the environment for family law reform was entirely different to what it is today. Six years after that first rough draft, the first edition of the evolving story of family law reform in Australia is complete and becomes available for purchase as an e-book this week. It is a case study in community activism, institutional resistance to change, political chicanery and the damage that can be done by allowing ideology to dominate public policy.

Chaos At The Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia will be available at all major e-book retailers including Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon.com, Sony’s Reader Store, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Borders Books, and Diesel eBook Store, which combined cover 98 per cent of the eBook market.  

The book unabashedly looks at the issues of family law from a father’s perspective. Without the hundreds of millions of dollars that are poured into supporting women’s causes of all kinds, including advocacy groups and grants to university researchers, father’s voices are often invisible in the public debate. We try to redress the balance a little in our own humble way.

Chaos At The Crossroads is the first manuscript to be published by Dads On The Air Books. In the future we hope to encourage other authors to come into the stable. For fathers there can be all too many stories to tell; and we would ultimately hope to support a wide variety of work, from exposes of the divorce industry to memoirs of fathers and the roles they have played, picturesque, piquant, sad, appalling, wonderful; as well as to disseminate academic texts and journalese, fact and fiction.

Chaos tells the story of the long and frustrating struggle for family law reform in Australia, not just by separated fathers, their supporters and their lobby groups, but by grandparents and other family members cut out of children’s lives by the sole-custody model purveyed by the court, second wives, children of divorce, non-custodial mothers and those with a concern for social justice and the poor personal outcomes for fathers and children alike post-separation, or for the unfashionable issue of the consequences of state-created fatherlessness and the community disfigurement that results.

Chaos At The Crossroads 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, regularly interviewing national and international activists, advocates, academics and authors. As that first small band of 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. Its archives now present a fascinating history of the men’s and fatherhood movement of the early part of the millennium. The list of guests is exhaustive, including some of the world’s best known commentators on father’s issues such as Stephen Baskerville, author of Taken Into Custody, Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power, Steve Biddulph, whose books include The New Man and Raising Boys, founder of the first women’s refuge Erin Pizzey, the founder of Fathers 4 Justice Matt O’Conner and author of Family Court Hell Mark Harris, to name just a very few.  

When Dads On The Air began in 2000 we had no idea we were part of a worldwide trend protesting the mistreatment of fathers in separated families. Fathers 4 Justice in Britain were yet to climb Buckingham Palace, block bridges across Britain or invade parliament house spreading purple powder. 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. In Australia the history of Dads On The Air has closely paralleled the history of groups such as Dads In Distress, which was formed in the same year, the Non-Custodial Parents (Equal Parenting) Party, the Shared Parenting Council of Australia and the Fatherhood Foundation. We also provided a fresh outlet for older groups such as Lone Fathers and Men’s Rights.

Dads On The Air would not exist if family law was not rampantly biased against fathers and if we had not all, as individuals, felt a deep hurt and profound distress over our experiences with the Family Court of Australia. Subsequently our personal experiences and the experiences of so many others with Australia?s mal-administered Child Support Agency rubbed salt into the wounds. 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.

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. For instance, we were severely critical of the outlandish  bias and poor quality of the “family reports” the court relied upon as “evidence” read “justification”. The systemic abuse of psychiatric evidence within the court is at the heart of its discredited practices. It is self-evident that the court uses those psychiatrists and family report writers, the evidentiary basis of Australian family law, which comply with its agenda.

The Court, which we often referred to rather aptly as The Palace Of Lies, had a long history of attempting to silence its critics and our fears were not unfounded. One man who suggested in a letter that the court belonged on a garbage tip found himself being arrested by three Federal Police. Since the advent of the Internet charges of it being “criminal” and “corrupt” fly routinely across the net. When we began there had been a number of cases of the court trying to prosecute men on the arcane charge of  “scandalising the court”. The court’s judges, in particular its former Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson, was always critical of father’s groups, describing them as “sinister” and the men involved, rather than pining for their children, were simply missing the power they once held over their wives and kids. During the long battle for family law reform some activists found themselves with judgements which were little more than lengthy character assassinations. When it came to freedom of expression and freedom of association, the Court did not believe these fundamental aspects of a modern democracy applied to fathers.

It’s arbitrary and cruel judgements became the stuff of legends. One Indian immigrant was jailed for writing to his parents in English. The court ignored his protestations that his father had two masters degrees in English. The court has also ordered litigants not to contact the United Nations with their concerns, not to publicise the injustices of their cases in any way, not to take their children to a doctor and not to raise concerns about the welfare. One father was ordered not to contact his children after it was alleged he carried his daughter around on his shoulders, in a crowded park, in a suggestive manner. When it came to sexual abuse allegations, no evidence was required. All that was needed was for the judge to have “lingering doubt”. Another father who expressed a desire to see his adolescent son after the boy’s suicide attempt was ridiculed from the bench. And yet another was jailed for sending his child a birthday card. The outlandish stories just went on and on.

Similar stories of damaged lives circled the Child Support Agency. A father who was losing 80 per cent of his income in tax and child support died with a letter from the Agency in his hand. The Agency claimed to be treating him fairly. Another man took more than two weeks to die when he swallowed poison after a call from an Agency officer. The CSA refused to attend the inquest despite a request from the Magistrate, claiming privacy legislation. A disabled man was jailed for failing to keep up with his payments; at a time when his children had already left home.

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. 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.

Dads On The Air was strategically placed to cover the push for family law reform in Australia. For a period many of the country’s leading politicians queued to come on the show; most wanting to demonstrate their support for shared parenting and for fathers. This courtesy and openness has not been matched by the present Labor government, unwilling or unable to defend the institutions their party created so many years ago before a critical audience.  

Despite Lionel Murphy’s vision when he brought in no-fault divorce in the Family Law Act in 1975 of creating a helping and caring court which promoted shared parenting and cooperation between parents after divorce such was never to be the case. Subsequent legislative attempts to impose shared parenting post separation as the most civilised outcome for separating couples were not successful. Almost from the minute the Family Court opened its doors it became a law unto itself, imposing sole mother custody on separating families, despite all the documented harm of this style of custody order. It denied fathers contact with their children on the flimsiest of excuses or on the basis of the most ludicrous and unsubstantiated accusations. Overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive and unaccountable, defying community norms of morality, decency and propriety, it soon became one of the country’s most hated institutions.  

An early draft of Chaos At The Crossroads went up online in 2004. The book outlines the controversial history of the Family Court, the lavish lifestyles of its hierarchy, the bureaucratic insanities of its complex processes and the precedents and inquiries, all pointing to substantial problems, which led up to the Howard government’s 2003 parliamentary inquiry. That inquiry, which held pubic hearings around the nation, exposed for anyone who cared to look the massive dysfunction of Australia’s family law and child support systems and the distress they were causing in the community.

Despite the blizzard of women’s groups and domestic violence advocates that stacked the committee, the public hearings demonstrated in an undeniable way the great suffering caused by the court’s rulings to fathers, grandparents, second wives, non-custodial mothers and of course to children. It also exposed the great divide between the mandarins and the general populace, with the industry’s mandarins and its beneficiaries continuing to blindly insist they were acting in the best interests of children. It was nothing short of a lie.  

The inquiry was given added piquancy by the fact it was the final days of that aging lion of the left Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson. He had dominated family law in Australia for more than half of the Court’s life. His endless pronouncements on social issues and his apparent self image as a crusader for the oppressed, pushed the boundaries of the judicial role but provided ample copy for journalists. A champion of women’s causes and a spirited supporter of the domestic violence industry, he was regarded as being utterly indifferent or dismissive of the concerns of fathers. The various dads lobby groups labeled him as Public Enemy Number One.  

The original 2003 announcement from the Prime Minister that the government would examine the idea of a rebuttable presumption of joint custody provoked a wave of positive media coverage and public debate matched by excitement from the various fathers groups and private hope within the community. Chaos At The Crossroads explores the inquiry in detail, believing that while bureaucrats did their best to fudge the truth, its transcripts and inquiries provided an undeniable weight of evidence demonstrating the need for change. The resulting report of the 2003 parliamentary inquiry, the poorly written, intellectually sloppy and ridiculously named Every Picture Tells A Story, caused many problems. It was condemned by fatherhood activists as a betrayal of the nation’s separated parents and of the many emotional people who had appeared before the inquiry, some in tears. Dads On The Air described the report as just like a Family Court judgement, it bore no relationship to the evidence and no relationship to reality.  

Chaos also details the 2004 finale of Alastair Nicholson, who retired in controversial circumstances. The left fell over itself to praise him while his many critics cheered. Nicholson or not, the Howard government dithered for years over the issue of family law reform, destroying the momentum for change and the support it had initially attracted from so many of the public. Embarrassed by the accusations it was somehow hostage to the unfunded men’s groups the Liberals fell over themselves to demonstrate its friendliness to women’s issues. It would not be until 2006, after seemingly endless and faltering consultations, committees and calls for submissions that the Howard government finally passed what DOTA considered to be sadly watered down and patently sexist amendments promoting “shared parental responsibility”.  

Yet despite Dads On The Air’s sometimes strident criticism that the laws did not go far enough, were too easily overturned and too easily ignored by the court, the lengthy public debate engendered a significant cultural shift and a change in expectations which at least saw some children spending more time with their dads after separation.  

Chaos At The Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia, covers the decade from 2000. Come 2010, and the Labor government had neither the guts nor the integrity to mention family law during the campaign leading up to the August election. Fearful of losing votes, they did not acknowledge they were winding back the popular shared parenting laws as rapidly as they could. This was being done under the guise of their Family Violence Bill and the pretense they were protecting women and children from violence. The government was cheered on by shared parenting’s greatest opponents and the Family Court’s greatest apologists, former Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson and former Justice Richard Chisholm - flanked by a bevy of publicly funded pack mentality academics, bureaucrats, empire builders, domestic violence advocates and others with an undisguised enmity towards fathers.  

After more than 20 years of ferment, community agitation, government inquiry, thousands of submissions and countless stories of suffering and distress, family law is heading straight back from whence it came, to those dark days when too many fathers entering the court never saw their children again. To this day the Family Court has remained remarkable resistant to reform, indifferent to the suffering of the clients enduring its processes, dismissive of the public odium it attracts and all too willing to denigrate fathers.  

As for the “evil sister”, the wretched tyranny of the Child Support Agency continues apace, a disgrace to the public service and the history of public policy in Australia. The Howard governments attempts to reform the Agency failed. The government continues to ignore one of the only recommendations from any of its inquiries that might actually have made a real difference – an examination of the Agency’s social consequences. It also ignores the repeated calls to reveal the exact statistics on the death toll amongst its clients, a group particularly prone to early death and ill health. Already impacted by the brutishness of the divorce regime, the physical and emotional health of fathers is further damaged by the endless financial harassment, bizarre accounting methods, incompetent administration, farcical, impossible to appeal and biased if not blatantly dishonest decision making, offensive propagandising against fathers and open hostility to non-custodial parents that has characterised the Agency since its inception. Despite findings by one government inquiry the Agency was directly involved in criminal activity - by ignoring its legal responsibilities to keep proper records and by actively promoting or protecting the deceit of custodial parents at a direct cost to the payer - no investigation of these activities has ever been undertaken.   

While a significant number of enlightened men and women in the community have come to realise that shared parenting and amicable divorces benefit everyone involved, including parents, children and extended families, allowing the parties to get on with their lives and careers without spending years on welfare while locked in bitter, protracted and damaging feuds. They realise that old fashioned gender wars and the hysterical promotion of victimhood are of no lasting benefit to the participants. That shared parenting is the obvious way out of the morass of individual pain, social consequence and gendered roles created by sole-mother custody and the marginalisation of fathers.  

In Australia the public submission period for the latest amendments to the much amended Family Law Act, the Family Violence Bill runs across Christmas and ends smack bang in the middle of the holiday season. The Bill is the result of some of the worst, certainly the most blatant manipulation of the public inquiry process seen in Australia’s recent history, The plank of reports, almost universally falling under the category of feminist advocacy research, the government is relying on it to justify its actions and makes no attempt at neutrality. The appointment of former Family Court judge Richard Chisholm, whose hostility to shared parenting was well known, to produce one of the many reports was simply shameful.  

Yet the Labor Government led by Julia Gillard and ably assisted by Attorney-General Robert McClelland appear determined to press on with its lunacy in not just pandering to but leading the way for the worst excesses of the victim industry. It has ignored the Institute of Family Studies finding that there is no evidence the shared parenting legislation has created additional conflict between separating couples and that on the whole the new laws have been welcomed and are widely supported.  

Show me a person who has not been guilty of emotional and financial manipulation and I’ll show you Christ on earth, but this is just one of the new definitions of domestic violence being placed into family law. There can be only one result from defining domestic or “family” violence so broadly, in such a gendered way and couched in such a manner as to target only men as perpetrators and include much unremarkable human behaviour - a return to the days when many fathers entering the Family Court of Australia were denied any or given only minimal contact with their children on entirely spurious grounds. The resultant personal pain created a large body of disaffected men as well as grandparents and other extended family members, did the community as a whole great harm, brought the judiciary into disrepute and impacted badly on the children involved.  

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 seen them 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.”

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