With special guests:
- “Matthew”
- “Dave” and
- “Steve”.
In the wake of an appalling tragedy where a four year old girl was allegedly thrown off a bridge by her father, we talk with three fathers about the stresses in their lives. It surprised no long term observers that shortly afterwards the father was found and then arrested in the environs of Melbourne’s Family Court.
While vigilantes have called for the man’s blood, others have called for compassion and understanding. Disgracefully, some feminist commentators have attempted to use the incident in their ideological campaign against the commonsense notion of shared parenting.
While making no direct comment on the case itself - the father has now been charged with murder - we do look at the insane levels of stress that fathers are put under by our reviled family law system.
The situation has been made worse by the previous conservative government’s failure to fully reform the jurisdiction. Their half-baked reforms requiring the Family Court to at least examine the concept of equal time parenting has not resulted in any significant reform of the court’s conduct. Many fathers are now expecting but not getting shared parenting after separation; many leave the court utterly heartbroken and with little contact with their children.
Fathers regularly lose everything: the assets they have worked all their lives to build, much of their income, much if not all of their social network and worst of all, their beloved children.
Dads On The Air estimates that more than 5,500 clients of the Child Support Agency have died since Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in late 2007. While not all of these deaths are suicides, too many of them are. Many of these heartbroken fathers die in abject and dismal circumstances. The failure of the government to even count these deaths, much less to take action to prevent them, is a national disgrace.