Last week, a television crew from the Japanese public broadcaster came to Sydney to interview family law specialist Justin Dowd, former president of the New South Wales (NSW) Law Society. Japan is considering moving away from mum-custody towards “joint parental authority”,—which recognizes that it’s in the children’s best interests to have both mum and dad remain involved in their care.
The Japanese crew came to Australia because they acknowledged this country as one of the world leaders in encouraging separated parents to share decisions about raising their kids.
Where’s the mandate for this unheralded political act which will undermine the welfare of children, ramp up hostility between parents, and swell the coffers of lawyers who will benefit from the appalling fallout?
The problem? “The woman has had all the power, the man almost none.”
In the judge’s view, children missed vital contact with both parents due to decisions to award sole custody to the primary carer.
Erasing Dads, Costing Children’s Rights
The Howard reforms very effectively eroded that power, and ever since, feminists have worked feverishly to get it back—regardless of the cost to children.Now comes their reward for marshalling the women’s vote to help Labor regain government.
- Ensuring children benefit from meaningful involvement with both parents.
- Children’s right to know and be cared for by both parents.
- Children have the right to spend regular time with parents and other significant people like grandparents.
- Parents jointly sharing duties and responsibilities for the kids’ care and development.
The AFR headline said it all: “Time’s up for ‘equal rights’ in court custody battles.”
“Under the guise of simplification, it actually involves radical change and radical reversal,” Parkinson says, pointing out that the government is misleading the public in claiming support from various public inquiries for this move.
Labor’s Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, is proposing not only to remove “equal shared parental responsibility” from the act but the requirement that courts consider equal time or substantial/significant time as a possible parenting option.
Now the first consideration of family law will be promoting safety for the child or carers. That’s hardly a surprise. Feminists have been using the violence card to undermine fathers’ contact with their children since the 2006 laws were first introduced, with constant claims about violent dads putting children at risk.
“Any reform of the law needs to be more sophisticated and nuanced than to be premised on the assumption that almost all perpetrators are male and almost all victims are female,” argues Parkinson, yet this is precisely the main thrust of Labor’s proposed new family law.
It’s another superb victory for the feminists, one more achievement for their mighty domestic violence juggernaut, which already works a treat stacking the family law system to favour women.
We Need to Stand Up
Labor’s latest move didn’t surprise me—they have form. I watched in horror when Labor regained power in 2007 and immediately appointed a fierce critic of shared custody, psychologist Jennifer McIntosh, to study overnight care by dads of infants and toddlers.Phillip Ruddock, the Attorney General who implemented the Howard government reforms, pointed out at the time that Labor has always been keen to wind back efforts to promote divorced dads’ involvement with children.
“They’ve long been captured by the female lobby determined to retain sole control over their children.”
Ordinary Australians must stand up and prevent this attack on children’s right to be cared for by both parents. We need to convince the politicians currently basking in feminist accolades that we are not letting them slip this one through.
We can’t afford to sit back and let them get away with unwinding the legal framework that did so much to improve the lives of fathers and their children.