Journalist John Stapleton's New book "Family Law Reform."

IT REMAINS surprising that the ultra-woke extremist ideology which is synonymous with the Family Court of Australia evolved in the Land Down Under. For Australia, founded as a penal colony, has always been associated with anti-establishment sentiment.

My previous interview with John
https://rumble.com/v5e8bbg-john-stapleton-australian-journalist-what-happened-to-journalism.html

In the early 1900s one of the country’s most beloved poets, Henry Lawson, wrote:

The clever scoundrels are all outside, and the moneyless mugs in gaol –
Men do twelve months for a mad wife's lies or Life for a strumpet's tale.
If the people knew what the warders know, and felt as the prisoners feel –
If the people knew, they would storm their gaols as they stormed the old Bastille.

Henry Lawson, One Hundred and Three, 1908.

The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Family Law Act, the single most impactful and destructive piece of legislation to ever pass the Australian parliament.

In that time the Family Court has been the subject of dozens of government inquiries and attempts at reform on its road to becoming the single most hated jurisdiction in the country.

Far from the helping court its founders told the public they imagined, it has become an enduring symbol of good intentions gone wrong, of the initial idealism of the left turning into a totalitarian nightmare visited upon millions of Australian families, and an enduring example of ideological extremism, political opportunism and bureaucratic refusal to take seriously the voices of those they are meant to serve. Looked at across a broader reach, an aerial view so to speak, ultimately the history of the Family Law Act demonstrates how an ideology allowed to flourish in one sacrosanct arena has metastasised across institutions to damage an entire society.

We all think we begin this journey alone. Well, I most certainly did. Like a lot of people who assume that the Australian Family Court and Australian Child Support Agency are credible, reliable and ethical institutions. Good luck with that. Once you encounter these institutions, and the phalanxes of bureaucracies and politicians which protect them, prepare to have your illusions dashed.

No one can go through the expensive rigmarole of a Family Court trial and emerge with the slightest respect for the lawyers who profit from this foul system, or the politicians who have allowed this travesty of public administration to spread its poison down the generations.

The Child Support Agency is one of the primary drivers of unemployment in Australia. Like many other fathers who find working while paying what they rightly perceive as draconian levels of child support pointless, “Matt” eventually gave up the job he loved and instead went to university. He has since graduated and is now a barrister.

Thanks to our family law and child support systems, there are a number of dads who have either gone back to tertiary education or pursued other dreams, such as to become an artist. Or who took the other path and are eking out their lives on welfare rather than spend them in servitude to what they see as the systemʼs rapacious financial demands. They might have felt differently if they thought their money was genuinely benefiting their children, but the law does not require any demonstration that this is the case.

Indeed later research showed that children were financially better off and received more money from their separated fathers before the creation of the woeful Child Support Agency. The expensive scheme also failed in its objective of saving the taxpayer money, with cost estimates running between two and five times that of every dollar collected, depending on the year. But nothing stopped this stain on the Australian Public Service impacting and damaging millions of people’s lives, fathers, mothers and the children it pretended to benefit.

With the spread of communication technology, the Family Court's arbitrary and frequently cruel judgements were already the stuff of legends by the time we began broadcasting. One Indian immigrant was jailed for writing to his parents in English. The Court ignored his protestations that his father had two masters' degrees in English. The Court has also ordered litigants not to contact the United Nations with their concerns, not to publicise the injustices of their cases in any way and not to take their children to a doctor or raise welfare concerns.

During those dark days, which have now returned in force, indeed are worse than ever, more than half the fathers entering the Family Court of Australia emerged to find they saw their children barely once or twice a year. All too many never saw their children again. Those who did usually got the so-called daddy pack of contact every second weekend, although there is no evidence such an arrangement is in the best interests of children. None whatsoever, despite all the false claims by Family Court apologists that their sole working rationale is “the best interests of the child”.

Available on Amazon here
https://amzn.asia/d/4tQDbAd