Suburban Heroes

With special guests:

• Allan Turner, Chief Executive of the Zaidee Rainbow Foundation, urging all families to sign up for organ transplants.
• John Ashfield, author of a number of books including Matters For Men, The Nature of Men and Looking After Your Family and
• Harry Hill, author of a new book He Was My Father.

As well our researcher Greg Andresen will be calling in from the UK, where he has been interviewing a number of leading figures in the fatherhood movement and a fortnightly new segment, Research Central with Tom Mok will kick off with a look at a new paper De-constructing the Essential Father.

It’s hard to keep a dry eye when listening to the remarkable story of devoted father Allan Turner, who’s daughter Zaidee Rose Alexander Turner, aged 7 years and 22 days, died suddenly as the result of a burst blood vessel in her brain on 2nd December 2004 at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Zaidee was the only child under the age of 16 years who donated her Organs and Tissues in Victoria in 2004. Zaidee’s untimely and unexpected death saved the lives of several other children.

Zaidee’s deeply distressed and saddened family turned this worst possible disasters into a positive by establishing the Zaidee’s Rainbow Foundation, encouraging other families to register for organ donation.

“Currently around 20 to 30 children die every year on the transplant waiting list because they don’t get a chance to have a transplant as Australia have far too few donors.” Allan Turner says. “For adults, even more die waiting. Parent’s of families, sisters, brothers, cousins and next door neighbours are all waiting for that magic phone call, to say they have found a suitable donor.”

Zaidee’s Rainbow Shoelaces are a symbol to create national awareness for this subject and also for the public to reflect their support and wear. Laces are being sold for just $2 a pair nationally in all The Athlete’s Foot retail stores and Middys Electrical outlets.

For more information:

www.zaidee.org

South Australian author and psychotherapist Dr John Ashfield has written extensively about men’s issues.

More information and to order his books online go to:

http://www.peacockpublications.com.au/new_releases.html

His latest book Matters for Men offers accurate and practical information on many of the common physical and emotional problems that men will experience in their lives. It is a valuable volume for all not just for men themselves, but for the families who care about them, and the professionals who work with them. It deserves to be on a bookshelf in every office, clinic and home in Australia, to further our understanding of the health risks for men, and more importantly, what to do about them.

His book Taking Care of Yourself and Your Family is a unique collection of self-help resources for some of the most common difficulties that people struggle with. It is simply written and arranged in a way to make topics of interest easy to find and read. An excellent resource for health and human service professionals to use for working with patients and clients.

His book The Making of a Man: Reclaiming Masculinity and Manhood in the light of Reason attempts to make sense of the issues of gender, masculinity and manhood, which have for decades been bedevilled by rigid gender ideology.

This book bravely departs from the status quo and proposes a refreshingly different view. Drawing from a number of major authors and different disciplines it crafts key findings into a compelling and coherent alternative perspective, complete with new definitions and suggestions for further enquiry. Though offering a basic critique of anti-male feminism, it abstains from reactionism, and instead advocates a common standard of equity and respectful dialogue for both genders. The book challenges the moral legitimacy of attempts at social engineering and ‘welfare’ efforts that are not informed by the best available knowledge about what we are, how we think and feel, and why we behave in certain sex-specific ways.

We’re ending this week’s show with a bit of classic Australiana, albeit still alive. Harry Hill is in his 80s, but don’t tell him that. This inspirational man is a walking encyclopedia on the folk history of Australia’s alpine areas. His latest book, He Was My Father, records in vivid detail his memories of the region in the poverty stricken 1930s, when sometimes all they had to eat in the area’s freezing huts was pumpkin and pumpkin skins.

Harry Hill is a retired teacher living in Tumut, near the Snowy Mountains. Through careful research he has written the life story of his father Henry (Clem) and has illustrated it with many photographs and documents.

Clem Hill was born on his father’s original selection on Brungle Creek, Tumut Shire, in 1887 and had a hard, but fulfilling, life working as a labourer and stockman. He enlisted in the 36th Battalion of the AIF in February 1916. After training in Australia and England he fought in France and Belgium and was severely wounded at the Battle of Passchendaele. He was repatriated to Australian and, while recuperating in hospital, met Lottie Low, an Army nurse, whom he married in 1922.

He worked as a labourer and built a house in Concord, Sydney, but lost everything in the Great Depression. The family moved back to Brungle Creek and later to Tumut where Clem conducted the summer ice run.

Clem had a reputation as a marksman, having been a sniper in the war, and he knew how to trap possums and rabbits. He sold the skins and fed his family on rabbit meat in those hard times. He had many skills as a bushman, including robbing wild bees’ hives, fencing, controlling rabbit buildups and killing snakes. He tried to teach these skills to his two sons. He worked as a labourer, stockman and shearer and knew how to handle livestock. He died suddenly after a hard day’s shearing, aged 51.

Harry Hill paints a vivid picture of life in rural Australia from before World War I, through the Great Depression, to his father’s death in 1938.

And next week we’ll bringing you all the news and interviews from the Lone Fathers Conference in Canberra, put together by the grandfather of the Australian fatherhood movement Barry Williams.

DOTA has been asked to speak at the conference.

Here’s a little taste of our views:

“And now look at us. The work ethic has gone, family values have gone, courtesy has gone and common decency has gone. Crime, child abuse and yobbery have grown like Topsy. The culture is awash with obscenity…State benefits discourage people from looking after themselves and others. State schools and hospitals destroy the old mutual and charitable ideals which gave the working and middle classes control over institutions. The worst of it is the ludicrous liberal pretence that the traditional family doesn’t matter…unhappy children…stagger from the state-sponsored emotional wreckage.”

Nick Cohen

One of the worst things that has happened in Australia, and evident for all to see during this last family law reform charade, has been the pretense that the nuclear family does not matter, that it is an old fashioned construct which imprisons women and stifles children.

We can see the results of these trendy, so-called “progressive” theories daily in the crowded, chaotic scenes in the suburban courts of this nation.

Few public intellectuals have drawn the dots. Historian John Hirst’s excellent monograph Kangaroo Court was one of the few exceptions. Certainly not our so-called opinion leaders; certainly not the academics happy to mop up funding for thousands upon thousands of women’s issues; but have never had the gumption to speak out for true equality or to question the dominant paradigm, as they like to say.

Our likely future Prime Minister Kevin Rudd talks cosily of his family on the veranda in “Brissie”, with the dogs, the cats, the children. But the special interests which have swarmed over Labour since the 1970s, since Whitlam’s days, do not hold the family dear in anyway. The left wing of his party is firmly entrenched in the social policy areas; and like their forebears will no doubt do untold harm in the name of social justice.

You would think they would learn from history.

Just as those championing the Iraqi misadventure failed to learn from Vietnam, so too has the bureaucracy and the judiciary which have so openly defied the wishes of the general community in regards to family law reform and what the community regards as common decency and sensible outcomes post-divorce have failed to learn from the past.

An unfortunately, our political class has let it happen.

Politicians, including our present Attorney General Phillip Ruddock and may and have repeatedly told the Parliament they favour shared or joint custody post-separation; and are tired of having their offices cluttered up with desperate, grief stricken fathers and their outraged relatives and friends.

They are sick of seeing the abuses perpetrated by the Family Court playing out amongst their own constituents and their own friends; powerless to do anything.

They are sick of making excuses not just for the disastrous orders that routinely issue from the Family Court, but are sick of having to deal with the blatant anti-male bias of the family law units of Legal Aid and the utterly destructive bureaucratic insanities of the so-called Child Support Agency.

Even in the past fortnight we’ve seen yet more smug and disgusting announcements from the government that it will hunt down all those “rich” dads and make them pay - and pay - and pay. This is a despised bureaucracy at war with taxpayers; and if the Howard government had a single shred of integrity on the subject, it would have followed the Blair government’s example and shut them down.

No such luck. Instead Howard has been prepared to perpetuate the lie that this agency is somehow acting in the “best interests of children”; which it patently is not. And let’s not forget; this is the government that new perfectly well the Agency was not acting in the best interests of our kids and removed any legislative obligation for them to do so.

The Family “Court” is not a court in any normal sense of the word; and is regarded with complete contempt by lawyers practising in other jurisdictions. It is a Marxist feminist tribunal delivering a social outcome regardless of the individual circumstances; and the massive grief these required social outcomes; the creation of that social artifice the single mother; creates in parents, grandparents and children, is ignored.

The Court, created by the Whitlam government without any public desire for it, has always been an impeccably, impossibly, left-wing.

It’s founding Chief Justice Elizabeth Evatt wrote and spoke about her concerns that lesbian mothers could be disadvantaged in the court; but never expressed a single solitary word of concern for fathers. Her successor, the failed Labor candidate Alastair Nicholson, perhaps the most despised judge in Australian judicial history; was always ready to attack men and men’s groups and champion the rights of women.

With a budget of around $150 million a year; he created the court in his own image and was notorious for his luxurious life-style travelling to conferences around the world and the constant promotion of himself as a great humanitarian. As for the fathers who were suffering and even dying back in Australia, he uttered no words of concern or support.

While their traditional working class supporters have been ravaged by the impacts of the Family Court and the Child Support Agency, there has been not one whisper of concern or discontent with the outrageous conduct of these institutions from the Labour Party itself.

While Howard’s duplicitous two-faced double crossing of fathers has been shameful to behold, don’t think for one minute Rudd will be any better.

An unholy alliance of elite opinion; of bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians and so-called “experts”, with the complicity of the Liberal National Party coalition and full co-operation of the Labor Party, took the family law reform process hostage. Much of this was done under the guise of that great motherhood issue, domestic violence.

Instead of listening to the people, the schedulers of the public inquiry jammed it full of taxpayer funded advocates; all of whom were keen to paint men as violent patriarchal brutes and women as their hapless, defenceless victims in urgent need of protection by the state.

Indeed the Howard government was embarrassed by the support it originally got from men’s groups and peddled rapidly away from them.

Costello declared to anyone who would listen that he wanted Australia to be the best country in the world for women. Not for men, not for children, not for the community as a whole, for women; and women alone. As if men were a mere appendage, here to service them.

And lets not forget the Violence Against Women: Australia Says No campaign, which came out at exactly the same time as the Howard government’s so-called family law reforms and has had the predicted effect of dramatically increasing use of domestic violence allegations during custody disputes.

This utterly dishonest campaign, costing tens of millions of dollars; hundreds of millions if you include all the associated programs, has reached into the country’s lounge rooms and into people’s lives. No bloke in this country can even go to the urinals at the movies these days without finding themselves staring at a picture of some limpid male who, as many commentators have observed, looks like he’d rather kiss you than hit you.

This government knew perfectly well that there was no evidence from anywhere in the world that these types of campaigns decreased inter-personal violence.

They knew perfectly well that far from resolving a community issue the deliberate promotion of public hysteria over domestic violence was likely to increase the rate of false and puerile allegations or simply have the opposite to the intended effect. Governments have known ever since Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No anti-drug campaign backfired and increased levels of usage in the community that they rarely work; arousing rather than dampening interest, defining margins towards which people are drawn and giving licence, in this case, for one gender to behave in any manner they like without consequence.

At the taxpayer’s great expense, the Howard government has learnt the lesson of just how easy it is for public campaigns to backfire with news in the past week that its ridiculous campaign “Know Where You Stand” on the Orwellian named “Work Choices” legislation has had the exact opposite to its intended effect.

Know where you stand? Bent over and ready.

Equality is equality. You don’t get progress and you don’t get social justice by advancing the interests of one gender over the other. When you do, all you get is backlash from the great unwashed, who have been ignored. That, in the end, is what this country will face as a result of the perfidy of John Howard and his government.

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