"And now look at us. The work ethic has gone, family values have gone, courtesy has gone and common decency has gone. Crime, child abuse and yobbery have grown like Topsy. The culture is awash with obscenity...State benefits discourage people from looking after themselves and others. State schools and hospitals destroy the old mutual and charitable ideals which gave the working and middle classes control over institutions. The worst of it is the ludicrous liberal pretence that the traditional family doesn't matter...unhappy children...stagger from the state-sponsored emotional wreckage."
Nick Cohen
One of the worst things that has happened in Australia, and evident for all to see during this last family law reform charade, has been the pretense that the nuclear family does not matter, that it is an old fashioned construct which imprisons women and stifles children.
We can see the results of these trendy, so-called "progressive" theories daily in the crowded chaotic scenes in the suburban courts of this nation.
Few public intellectuals have drawn the dots. Historian John Hirst's excellent monolograph Kangaroo Court was one of the few exceptions. Certainly not our so-called opinion leaders; certainly not the academics happy to mop up funding for thousands upon thousands of women's issues; but have never had the gumption to speak out for true equality or to question the dominant paradigm, as they like to say.
Our likely future Prime Minister Kevin Rudd talks cosily of his family on the veranda in "Brissie", with the dogs, the cats, the children. But the special interests which have swarmed over Labour since the 1970s, since Whitlam's days, do not hold the family dear in anyway. The left wing of his party is firmly entrenched in the social policy areas; and like their forebears will no doubt do untold harm in the name of social justice.
You would think they would learn from history.
Just as those championing the Iraqi misadventure failed to learn from Vietnam, so too has the bureaucracy and the judiciary which have so openly defied the wishes of the general community in regards to family law reform and what the community regards as common deceny and sensible outcomes post-divorce have failed to learn from the past.
An unfortunately, our political class has let it happen.
Politicians, including our present Attorney General Phillip Ruddock and may and have repeatedly told the Parliament they favour shared or joint custody post-separation; and are tired of having their offices cluttered up with desperate, grief stricken fathers and their outraged relatives and friends.
They are sick of seeing the abuses perpetrated by the Family Court playing out amongst their own constituents and their own friends; powerless to do anything.
They are sick of making excuses not just for the disastrous orders that routlinely issue from the Family Court, but are sick of having to deal with the blatant anti-male bias of the family law units of Legal Aid and the utterly destructive bureaucratic insanities of the so-called Child Support Agency.
Even in the past fortnight we've seen yet more smug and disgusting announcements from the government that it will hunt down all those "rich" dads and make them pay - and pay - and pay. This is a despised bureaucracy at war with taxpayers; and if the Howard government had a single shred of integrity on the subject, it would have followed the Blair government's example and shut them down.
No such luck. Instead Howard has been prepared to perpetuate the lie that this agency is somehow acting in the "best interests of children"; which it patently is not. And let's not forget; this is the government that new perfectly well the Agency was not acting in the best interests of our kids and removed any legislative obligation for them to do so.
The Family "Court" is not a court in any normal sense of the word; and is regarded with complete contempt by lawyers practising in other jurisdictions. It is a Marxist feminist tribunal delivering a social outcome regardless of the individual circumstances; and the massive grief these required social outcomes; the creation of that social artiface the single mother; creates in parents, grandparents and chldren.
The Court, created by the Whitlam government without any public desire for it, has always been an impeccably, impossibly, left-wing. It's founding Chief Justice Elizabeth Evatt wrote and spoke about her concerns that lesbian mothers could be disadvantaged in the court; but never expressed a single solitary word of concern for fathers. Her successor, the wildly left-wing failed Labor candidate Alastair Nicholson, perhaps the most despised judges in Australian; was always ready to attack men and men's groups and champion the rights of women. With a budget of around $150 million a year; he created the court in his own image and was notorious for his luxurious life-style travelling to conferences around the world and his constant self-promotion as a great humanitarian. As for the fathers who were suffering and even dying back in Australia, he uttered no words of concern or support.
While their traditional working class supporters have been ravaged by the impacts of the Family Court and the Child Support Agency, there has been not one whisper of concern or discontent with the outrageous conduct of these institutions from the Labour Party itself.
While Howard's duplicitous two-faced double crossing of fathers has been shameful to behold, don't think for one minute Rudd will be any better.
An unholy alliance of elite opinion; of bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians and so-called "experts", with the complicity of the Liberal National Party coalition and full co-operation of the Labor Party, took the family law reform process hostage. Much of this was done under the guise of that great motherhood issue, domestic violence.
Instead of listening to the people, the schedulers of the public inquiry jammed it full of taxpayer funded advocates; all of whom were keen to paint men as violent partriarchal brutes and women as their hapless, defenceless victims in urgent need of protection by the state.
Indeed the Howard government was embarrassed by the support it originally got from men's groups and peddled rapidly away from them.
Costello declared to anyone who would listen that he wanted Australia to be the best country in the world for women. Not for men, not for children, not for the community as a whole, for women; and women alone. As if men were a mere appendage, here to service them.
And lets not forget the Violence Against Women: Australia Says No campaign.
This utterly dishonest campaign, costing tens of millions of dollars; hundreds of millions if you include all the associated programs, has reached into the country's loungerooms and into people's lives. No bloke in this country can even go to the urinals at the movies these days without finding themselves staring at a picture of some limpid male who, as many commentators have observed, looks like he'd rather kiss you than hit you.
This government knew perfectly well that there is no evidence from anywhere in the world that these types of campaigns decrease inter-personal violence.
They knew perfectly well that far from resolving a community issue the deliberate promotion of public hysteria over domestic violence was likely to increase the rate of false and peurile allegations or simply have the opposite to the intended effect. Governments have known ever since Nancy Reagan's Just Say No anti-drug campaign backfired and increased levels of usage in the community that they rarely work; arousing rather than dampening interest, defining margins towards which people are drawn and giving licence, in this case, for one gender to behave in any manner they like without consequence.
Equaltiy is equality. You don't get progress and you don't get social justice by advancing the interests of one gender over the other. When you do, all you get is backlash from the great unwashed who have been ignored. That, in the end, is what this country will face as a result of the perfidy of John Howard and his government.
THE STORY CONTINUES:
"Life settled back to normal. The following Monday, at 9.15. a.m., already running late, everything looked tawdry, the colours just plain wrong. The drum of the planes taxiing to their hangers came through the open windows. 'I could really do with a hand with the kids,' he said through the bedroom door. 'You can go back to bed for the rest of the day, for all I care.'
'Can't you deal with them for Christ's sake,' she moaned. 'I do everything else.'
'Oh, sure. Come on', he said, completely exasperated, 'it's not much to ask.'
'I'll get up in a minute,' she said, and he knew she wouldn't.
He pulled on the kids' pants, searched desperately for a pair of matching shoes, the clock ticking away. The news editor, balding head, white pressed shirt, had been on his back more than ever the past week. He herded Sammy and Henrietta into the car, went through the usual drama trying to find the car keys. There was another life, there had been another life, and it wasn't his any longer.
He found the keys and stamped down the hallway. 'Thanks for your help,' he shouted as he slammed the door. It was then he discovered he had a flat tyre. Unfortunately that had been his fabricated excuse for being late just the other day8. They'd never buy it, not twice in a row. A Thai Airways 747 was climbing into the sky a kilometre away. Family or no family, he wished he was on it."
THE BIGGER PICTURE:
ABC:
Lawyer Peter Russo says the information had already been raised during the bail hearing. (AAP: Dave Hunt)
Under pressure, Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews released advice on which he based his decision to revoke the visa of Dr Haneef, the man charged in relation to a terrorist act but subsequently released.
Mr Andrews says chat room conversations indicated Dr Haneef may have had some knowledge of attacks in London and Glasgow and that it was not until after he was told there were issues about his SIM card that he applied for leave from his job in Queensland to go to India.
But Dr Haneef's lawyers say that information is old news.
Speaking from India, lawyer Peter Russo has told SBS television those facts were already raised during his bail hearing.
"This information was canvassed in the bail application two and a half weeks ago," Mr Russo said.
"Mr Andrews has been going around saying that this is part of the secret information which the public weren't allowed to see, but it was out in the public arena two and a half weeks ago."
Mr Russo says the Indian doctor was asked about the chatroom conversation during a police interview and he is now calling on authorities to release that information to the public.
"Then they can make their own judgement calls, rather than release this inflamatory stuff that just, all it does is further tarnish Dr Haneef's reputation in the Australian community, because its not the full version of the event," he said.
