It’s a Family’s Despair

The creation of the Family Court of Australia in 1975 marked a major turning point in Australian history because it was the nation’s first fully secular institution. It wasn’t just designed to oversee the civil separation of wives from their husbands, but also the separation of the nation from its Christian, family-focused heritage.

Back in the groovy, liberal 1970s, this was seen by both sides of politics as a positive, even inevitable development. The court would cast a modern, more humane light over what had come to seem like the oldest, squarest and most oppressive institution in town, marriage.

It promised to reach enlightened decisions in deeply personal and emotional matters by employing counsellors as well as legal staff. It would be, as one observer called it at the time, a “caring court”.

So on its 50th birthday, we should now be able to look back on the court’s reign and rejoice in its stellar record of wrongs righted and lives improved, right? Um, right?

John Stapleton, an old colleague of mine from The Australian, has marked the court’s half-ton with Failure: Family Law Reform Australia, which (and forgive me if you saw this coming) chronicles an absolutely horrifying litany of vindictiveness, secrecy, legal contradictions, hypocrisy and cruelty, which it embraced almost from the start, the consequences of which are too deeply embedded in our society and enormous to calculate.

Stapleton simply says the passing of the Family Law Act was the “single most impactful and destructive piece of legislation to ever pass the Australian parliament”. Not only that, but the court’s guiding principle, “the best interests of the child”, upon which all its decisions are meant to be made, is the “most dishonestly used phrase in Australia today”.

Rather than the best interests of the child, the court was more intensely focused on pursuing the worst interests of the father.

This was the judicial arm of the Marxist-feminism that had gained dominance in universities in the 1960s. But unlike the academics espousing theories in university lecture theatres in relative isolation, the doyens of the Family Court were granted enormous power to enforce the new regime on generations of unsuspecting men.

Stapleton describes in depressing detail how thoroughly the court has ruined countless men’s lives. Cases like Desi Cochrane, a disabled pensioner jailed for inability to pay exorbitant child support, and others barred from contacting their children for trivial or fabricated reasons—such as sending a birthday card or carrying a child on their shoulders. The court’s reliance on untested allegations, particularly of domestic violence, has often resulted in fathers losing custody, assets, and dignity, with little recourse, even when they’ve categorically proved the allegations made against them are lies. Unemployment and suicide have often ensued.

I highly recommend buying the book if you wish to immerse yourself in the banality of evil, and the deafness of authorities, politicians and the media to the plight of the poor bastards who found themselves at the mercy of this malign, feminist autocracy.

However, if you don’t have the stomach for such sadism, and frankly I don’t blame you if you don’t, a wider aspect of this story is still worth contemplating: if the court is our first thoroughly secular institution, and it has failed this badly, then is secularism such a good idea?

Stapleton’s book unconsciously chronicles the replacement of one set of values – based on the primacy of the family within Christian rules – with… well, nobody is really sure what the new regime represents. But its power is indisputable. Where Christianity sought to guide, the state seeks to control and destroy.

Has the process of redefining our traditions and secularising our institutions, which began with the introduction of the Family Court, made us a happier, more stable society?

Of course, not a single politician in the nation other than Lyle Shelton (who is running as a Family First candidate for the Senate in New South Wales) and a handful of others are even asking this question. Instead, state and federal politicians across the nation are now racing to introduce “coercive control” legislation, if they haven’t passed them already.

These laws redefine the normal tensions within a marriage as potentially criminal, increasing the opportunities for liars to profit from the ruination of a former spouse’s life, as the Family Court began doing 50 years ago.

While Australia heads in one direction, other nations head in the other. The governments in Poland and Hungary, for example, are encouraging married couples to have large families by offering enormous tax breaks for each extra child they have. In Hungary, a woman with four children pays no income tax for the rest of her life, as long as she remains married.

It’s weird to look back on the seemingly innocent 1970s – the decade of ABBA, flared jeans and fondue dinner parties – as the period when our most basic social unit began to come apart, with the most awful consequences. Then again, maybe it’s not. Culture became ephemeral in the 1970s. It shouldn’t be surprising that our values did too.