This year is the 50th anniversary of Australia’s Family Court. That’s hardly cause for celebration. Over the last half century, what was originally designed as a ‘helping court’ became the frontline of feminism’s gender wars and thus one of the country’s most hated institutions.
This led to dozens of Government inquiries and attempts at reform which were all utterly scuttled. An excellent new book – Failure: Family Law Reform Australia – is a 600-page exposé of this shameful history of obstruction.
The author, John Stapleton, was one of the founders of Dads on the Air, a community radio programme where he spent over a decade exposing stories of a court which denied children contact with their fathers “on the flimsiest of excuses or most ludicrous accusations”.
Now, Stapleton concludes, the situation for fathers, children and society as a whole is worse than ever. He points out that the Family Court of Australia “ostensibly protects women but actually destroys the lives of many mothers, grandmothers and daughters, just as it does their male counterparts”. He strongly asserts that the resulting personal anguish and social chaos have “poisoned the social fabric”.
It does Australian society no good to have such a large body of impoverished and disenfranchised men; devastated by the loss of their children, their assets and in all too many cases, their social status and standing in the broader community. No one can go near this jurisdiction and retain a modicum of respect for lawyers, or for the politicians from both sides of the aisle who have allowed this malfeasance to flourish.
It’s a powerful combination – the passionate journalist’s searing commentary and the vast collection of revealing stories he has pulled together from dozens of inquiries, submission, and articles documenting this important social history.
Perhaps most important of all, he exposes the scurrilous role of the feminists’ domestic violence industry in weaponising the family court system against men. He’s documented it all – their manufactured statistics, their misrepresentation of official statistical data and decades of international research, their manipulation of lapdog politicians, their use of our corrupt media. And the eagerness of Left-wing political parties, most particularly the Labour Party currently in power, “to play the violence card”, destroying children’s relationships with their fathers by piling on fresh incentives for false allegations.
Stapleton explains: “The violence card has been played and it won the game. A Royal Flush. … The liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats have won the day.”
A YouGov survey in 2023, involving 9,432 people across eight countries, found Australia came out as the second-worst country, after India, when people were asked if they had been falsely accused of abuse. The survey showed false accusations in Australia are more likely to be made as part of a child custody dispute than anywhere else in the world.
And Australia’s children are the losers. Over one million Australian children are currently living without their fathers. The family court system is widely acknowledged as a key factor contributing to this dire situation.
One telling example. Stapleton mentions the day a mate begged him to come to the Family Court to watch how a hostile judge was dealing with his case. The friend’s teenage son had attempted suicide, and the dad was desperate for contact to give the boy some support. The judge wasn’t convinced that was the reason.
“You wanted to be there to watch, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Didn’t you?” accused the judge, pointing his finger at the horrified dad.
Stapleton was astonished at this disgraceful, bullying behaviour. But such treatment of men is commonplace, not only from the judiciary but also from family court counsellors, psychiatrists and psychologists. The entire family court system is full of people with a bias against men.
As Stapleton comments, whenever he tells a story about the horrific treatment of a dad in the court there’s always someone who’ll say, “That’s nothing. Wait until you hear what happened to me.” You quickly realise the depths of this swamp.
There’s the story of the man who slit his wrists when he received 32 letters in one day from the Child Support Agency, the institution which John jokingly describes as the “evil sister” of the Family Court.
Or the case of the magistrate who sent a mother to prison for four months – after 22 Family Court hearings over her denial of access to the children. The Family Court promptly arranged an appeal which not only immediately let the mother out of prison but reduced the father’s access to the children to six hours a week.
Stapleton’s book features heroes. Like Richard Cruikshank, Director of a property investment research firm, who, incensed by the conduct of the Child Support Agency, paid for research which demolished the claim that by squeezing dads for money the Government saved on welfare funding. Cruickshank calculated that for every dollar transferred between parents it cost $2.80 in public money.
Then there was Senator Pauline Hanson’s ferocious battle to get false allegations included in the terms of reference for one of the more recent Parliamentary inquiries. The press tore her apart, wheeling out Family Court judges and renowned domestic violence activists to claim false allegations didn’t happen and the inquiry wasn’t necessary. The inquiry went ahead but the report was buried.
Yet there are many more villains. Like the current Labour Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who, without any mandate whatsoever, last year removed almost every mention of children’s relationship with fathers from the Family Law Act.
It is vitally important that the story of the corruption and decline of this vital institution is on the public record and John Stapleton has done our society a major service in making this available. He sums up the reason this really matters:
In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to fix outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown. The country’s failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself.
As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt started her career talking about sex on television and teaching doctors and other professionals about sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current, even more socially unacceptable passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men with the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that see women only as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key Government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack. This is an edited version of her recent Substack post.
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Whenever the question comes up whose interests the political and legal system serves, it is worth considering that there are four supporting pillars of stable, cohesive, strong societies: the family, private property, the nation state and religion.
Looking at what has been going on in the last 50 years at least, we can see how consistently every one of these pillars have been eroded:
The family: by promoting divorce, feminism, LGBTQ, transgenderism,
Private property / wealth: by punitive taxation, the benefit system and increasingly by net zero,
The nation state: via mass immigration,
Religion: by Islamification (it’s not that they like Islam so much but they hate Christianity).
If you doubt that this is happening, ask yourself: can you think of a single example in the last 50 years when a new law or policy was introduced to strengthen the family, property rights, the nation state or the traditional Christian churches?
Family courts are simply part of this system. The bias against men is there to create a sense of grievance and resentment.
This article is timely, considering the news today, and even discussion in Parliament, about the Netflix series “Adolescence”, based on a true story of a horrible young rapist and criminal. The truly evil, shocking thing was pointed out by Dan Wooton on his Outspoken channel: the series features a very young white boy, and the media and politicians are using it to blame WHITE WORKING CLASS BOYS, but the true story is about an ETHNIC AFRICAN CRIMINAL, pictured at 1:51 minutes into the video:
“Changed ethnicity of main character” Netflix slammed over “anti-white racism” in drama Adolescence – YouTube
Bettina Arndt reads like a true heroine, for highlighting a tragic aspect of a wider theme written about thirty years ago by fellow-Australian, Steve Biddulph…
https://twicefire.com/ritesofpassage/manhood/
“…Biddulph makes use of the metaphor of the ‘River of Masculinity’. The river here represents the handing on of wisdom from men to boys; the preparation that boys go through to join society as adults.
It represents the rites of passage, initiations, apprenticing and skill-sharing that tribes, or villages would go through to prepare male youth for sustaining the community. It flows like a river, from generation to generation, over the millennia.”
Pretty obvious, really – youths (and youthesses) need honourable men in order to learn what to aspire to.
Bettina does wonderful work. False abuse case are absolutely tragic. I hope we can make some progress in rectifiying this.
The British Family Court is just as bad and something that Stalin would be proud of. The late great Christopher Booker often wrote of how it operated and it was shocking at how secretive it is.