Chaos at the Crossroads: Family Law Reform in Australia

There has been almost no public input into the shared parenting rollback. The public submission period for the Family Violence Bill runs across Christmas and ends at the height of the holiday season. The Bill is the result of blatant manipulation of the public inquiry process. The plank of reports being used to justify the changes, commissioned by the Attorney-General's department after it became clear the AIFS intended to be neutral, almost all fall under the category of feminist advocacy research. One expensive two volume report took their sample from women's services, a naturally self selecting group of disaffected. The appointment of former Family Court judge Richard Chisholm, whose hostility to shared parenting was already 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, appears determined to press on with its lunacy.

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 and greatly expanded definitions of domestic violence being placed into the Family Law Act.

There can be only one result from defining domestic or "family" violence so broadly as to include much normal human behaviour, in such a gendered way and couched in such a manner as to target only men as perpetrators - and that is a return to the days when many fathers entering the Family Court of Australia rarely or never saw their children again. 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. Even when enacting legislative reforms, these same governments 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"In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to reform outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown - and for the failure of governments to take seriously the voices of the men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."