The recent minimal changes to child support legislation announced by Senator Jocelyn Newman on 30th September 1997, were put to Parliament for a 2nd reading on Thursday, 14th May 1998. Many politicians from both sides of the House, feel the changes have not gone far enough and have privately expressed their disappointment the amendments will
The Prime Minister, John Howard said during a Cairns radio interview that the Government MIGHT consider new measures for the child support scheme in next month’s budget . “Fathers force PM to review child support”.
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.
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.
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
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.’
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”.
There is a constant and persistent view pursued by people who are often discontented litigants sometimes obviously dysfunctional, that the court is in some sense designed by anti-family groups to destroy the institution of the family in society… An unfortunate concomitant of this approach is that some people and some politicians with limited knowledge of the issues involved, tend to latch on to such dysfunctional persons for apparent political gain. This has the further unfortunate effect of empowering such persons to feel that their behaviour is not only acceptable but is the subject of sympathy and approval by politicians and government. It is all too often the experience of this court that its most persistent critics have behaved in a way which cannot stand up to public scrutiny, particularly in relation to issues of violence against women and children. Such persons, who often espouse the rights of fathers, do very little for their cause
Narrator:
The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so rare it could be ignored. Today the victims tell a different story.
Warning: This programme contains explicit descriptions of attacks and the emotional and physical damage they have caused, which some viewers/readers may find distressing. Narrator: The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so rare it could be ignored. Today the victims tell a different story. Woman: You knew when my mum
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