Child Support Amendments – December 1998

Since the long-awaited, disappointing changes to child support were accepted by the Senate (December 1998) we have been inundated with queries, especially for the start dates.
Here they are, together with a brief summary of the changes.
CSA expects most of the items to come into affect on 1st July 1999, providing legislative procedures are completed on time.

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Men and Family Relationships Conference – June 9-11, 1998 Canberra

 Under the auspices of Prime Minister, John Howard’s “Partnerships against domestic violence” initiative, the Attorney General’s department convened a men’s forum to discuss relationship issues. The forum presented an opportunity to dispel the myth that men only have to resolve one problem …their supposed propensity for aggression and violence. Unfortunately, adherence to political correctness and

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MP Tony Smith’s impassioned plea to amend divisive child support legislation – 1998

Tony Smith MP 1998 – There is no area of the public service that is growing at a faster rate than the area of the Child Support Agency. It has produced more heartache, more conflict, severed more families, driven more people to suicide, provoked more people to despair, alienated more children from their parents, and provoked more anguish amongst grandparents, than any other area of public service.

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CSA legislation makes 2nd wives and children 2nd class citizens

Mr CAMPBELL (Kalgoorlie) (12.10 p.m.)–debating CSA legislattion …..That is exactly the problem because this legislation was compiled by intellectual pygmies. The legislation is a disaster. If people get up in this place and say they support the legislation, it is a complete cop-out. Nobody, in my view, should be able to avoid paying for the upkeep of their children. In my experience, the great bulk of people want to contribute to the upkeep of their children. But what this Child Support Legislation Amendment Bill 1998 does is divide families and it makes the wives and children of second families second-class citizens in Australia.

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Superannuation “Divorce a super rift”

You can tell it is an election year – Prime Minister John Howard was prominent in the media last weekend with his promise to legislate to allow women access to their husband�s superannuation upon divorce. I’m not sure where Mr Howard has been spending his time, but this “revelation” is 23 years late. The right

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Women can be as violent as men – Erin Pizzy

Erin Pizzey dared to say publicly that women can be as violent as men.
JUST recently a ‘battered’ woman (for that is how she saw herself) came to me for help. Her lover, who lived apart from her and her children, had beaten her up badly and she was forced to go to hospital.
He then took her back to her own house and stayed with her in order to look after her while her wounds healed.
‘You are not a battered woman,’ I said with a sigh. I define a battered woman as a woman who is a genuine victim of her partner’s violence. ‘You are a violence-prone woman, a victim of your own need for violence.’

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Rise of Australian Fathers’ Groups Worries Feminist “Scholars”

The rise of fathers’ rights groups in Australia is obviously causing great concern among feminist academics, prompting the production of a 50 page critique paper about the groups.
The paper, “Fathers’ Rights Groups in Australia and their Engagement with Issues in Family Law”, was written by by Miranda Kaye and Julia Tolmie, feminist lecturers at the Faculty of Law, Sydney University. It was published in the Australian Journal of Family Law in 1998.
Kaye and Tolmie interviewed father’s / men’s rights groups under false pretenses and supported their paper’s feminist conclusions with selective content from some submissions provided to government inquiries.
Kaye and Tolmie displayed their lack of impartiality in their paper’s lead-in paragraph by featuring one of the most objectionable statements every made by Alistair Nicholson, the Chief Justice of the Family Court. Nicholson publicly accused those who disagreed with his views on the practices of the Family Court, mostly men, of being “discontented litigants, sometimes obviously dysfunctional”.

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