More For The Record
*
Shellharbour, NSW, Australia.
An impalpable censorship is eliminating all intellectual and artistic vitality in Western society with a vengeance; persistent recourse to euphemism and circumlocution is corrupting and debasing language; and the coercive atmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this censorship is inhibiting the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood of democratic institutions, and ultimately of man's own social and spiritual life. Thoreau warned us to 'beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' What would he have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?
It is axiomatic that those least alarmed by the erosion of society's moral and intellectual life have none themselves. It is easy to understand the crude appeal of political correctness to liberal yahoos of the New Left (closet fascists posing as 60's liberals): it provides them with a ready store of social causes that require no thought and confers instant moral authority on all those who profess to champion them; less obvious is its attraction to the intelligentsia. The cynical tactics of manipulation and intimidation are a throwback to the police state; the childlike faith in the efficacy of social engineering hopelessly naïve; the unctuous solicitude for downtrodden minorities and clammy compassion for the unfortunate are an affront to human dignity. What self-respecting liberal could be taken in by such fatuous posturing and moral exhibitionism? What is Pat Schroeder doing telling Lockheed how to build jet fighters? Why have hard-nosed journalists developed a sudden Pollyanna fixation? And why are distinguished publications, famed for their aggressive editorial independence, appeasing self-anointed victims' groups and groveling before sanctimonious minorities?
Wm. B. Fankboner
An unpublished story from several years ago found while cleaning up.
For a while I wrote obsessively around this whole area. The lace curtain is alive and well in Australia, that's for sure. I burnt myself out battering my head against a brick wall; and now I do what I can, primarily on radio, and then move on. There are so many outrages. You need to cmopartmentalise your life to survive.
Men and the Media
The Sunday Tasmanian has nowhere near the clout or the distribution of
mainland papers like The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the east
coast Sunday papers or The Australian.
Yet it is the only newspaper in the country which has reported that
the male suicide rate in Australia is now at its highest since the
Depression.
The paper puffed the story on its front page last October under the
headline ``If Men Were Whales'' and a full front page picture of a
group of men marooned on a sand bank.
It began: ``More than 40 Australian men commit suicide each week. If
men were whales, this would cause community outcry and public
mourning.''
The accompanying inside story, the best compilation of male suicide
statistics published in Australia so far, showed that more men
suicided in the last decade than died in World War II, and the male
suicide rate in a single year is four times that of the total number
killed in the Vietnam conflict.
The entire mainland press was creamed on what is a fundamentally
important social story.
Why? It's not a lack of interest.
Reporter Simon Bevilacqua says: ``We had an amazing amount of feedback
from people working in the industry, like nothing else, from left,
right and centre, from the federal government to people in the
industry. There were a lot of people pleased the issue was raised.''
Managing Director of media monitors Rehame Australia Peter Maher said
there was a distinct increase in the reporting of men's issues and the
Family Court throughout 2000. He said ``huggy stories'' about men
wanting to spend more time with their children ran all year with
coverage of family law reform peaking in December after the
introduction of new jailing provisions into the family law.
The government's big push for men in the last year was the Men and
Relationships Conference, organised by the Office of the Status of
Women.
Not one newspaper in the country seemed to think it odd that hundreds
of thousands of dollars of public funds was spent flying 300 public
servants and domestic violence experts from around the country to a
very comfortable hotel in Sydney for a two-day male bashing exercise
of the ``all men are violent'' type. Not one newspaper raised the
point that numerous reputable domestic violence studies show both men
and women are equally guilty of domestic violence. , or that the
Office of the Status of Women had been previously caught out making
exaggerated claims about domestic violence.
Nor did anyone seem to think it odd that there had been no invitations
to a men's conference issued to anyone from the broad spectrum of
men's groups to speak and which clearly failed to address any issues
that actually concern men.
Indeed Adele Horin of the Sydney Morning Herald, told a million or so
readers: ``Hardly a single `angry dad' could be sighted at the Men and
Relationships conference the Federal Government put on in Sydney this
week. It was a civilised, hand-picked gathering. New Age men. New Age
women. About 300 in all hopping from workshops on domestic violence,
to workshops on men's post-separation services. It was a festival of
enlightenment....those incendiary words `Family Court' and `child
support' were barely uttered.''
Why should the disenfranchisement of men's concerns be such a source
of delight? In reality this was a ``festival of enlightment'' most men
would have preferred these people held on their own time and at their
own expense.
The Coalition's major effort to review the troubled family law domain
has also ignored half of the population.
The Family Pathways Advisory Group, chaired by a former head of the
NSW Dept of Community Services and consisting almost entirely of
feminist advocacy groups, feminist academics or industry insiders, has
not a single representative of men's groups.
That any findings by such an unrepresentative group will lack
legitimacy does not appear to bother the government a jot. Their
answer to criticisms of the make-up of the group has been that the
Attorney General has confidence in its members. He might. Half the
population doesn't.
No newspaper has commented on this.
In haste the Federal Coalition Government, which paints itself as
standing for family values and probity in public life, has just passed
legislation jailing parents who defy Family Court orders.
Both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, without speaking to
those involved, incorrectly reported that men's groups supported the
legislation. In fact jailing is opposed by most men's and women's
groups, neither of whom were consulted. Men's groups in particular are
opposed, seeing the jailing of former wives as inappropriate and
fearing the laws will be mostly used to jail fathers.
There have been a number of appalling stories in the international
media over the past year on the consequences of these types of laws: a
man in the US jailed for three months for ringing his daughter on
Monday and not Sunday suicided within hours of being released; a bus
conductor in Britain was jailed for waving at his children out the
window of a bus.
In Australia an Indian man was jailed for writing to his parents in
English, not Hindi. The Family Court was not satisfied he was
attempting to comply with their orders. His efforts to point out that
his father had two masters degrees in English fell on deaf ears.
The story received extensive coverage in the ethnic press, but not a
word in the mainstream.
The Family Court has ordered outraged litigants not to contact the
United Nations over their concerns about the court's conduct.
It all began a long time ago. Most of those now in senior positions
within the media and in government were in or around universities in
the 1970s. Many have not altered their views much since then. It was
at a time when Germaine Greer and The Female Eunich was at the cutting
edge of social commentary, when Shulamith Firestone's The Dialects of
Sex was course reading in Philosophy I, 2 and 3; when women's courses
were just beginning.
It was a time when family courts were being founded throughout the
western world.
What was once the cutting edge, widely supported by many men, became
in its playing out in family courts, social welfare departments,
domestic violence shelters and all the hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of supporting bureaucries, a shock to many of its original male
supporters.
Fathers have been consistently demonised for more than 20 yearswith
relentless anti-male propaganda which has in classic Marxist language
painting the family as patriarchal nests of violence and abuse.
Studies which have consistently shown children to be better off in all
ways in intact families or with their fathers have been studiously
ignored.
In the universities where it all began, the bias against men both in
terms of courses and behaviour continues. At the University of NSW a
men's issue of Tharunka was squashed by the Guild Council last year.
It condemned ``any proposal to produce a men's edition or white
heterosexual male edition of Tharunka. Accordingly, Guild Council
directs the media directors/Tharunka editors not to produce any such
editions or publish material which contravenes general guild policy or
anti-discrimination legislation or which undermines the purpose of
women's, lesbian/gay, indigenous or ethnic students departments.'' At
the same time the Guild passed a proposal for a women's only edition.
A string of stories from American campusses now attracting media
attention make Helen Garner's The First Stone look like a picnic.
There has been scathing worldwide media attention focussing on family
courts throughout the past year. The Observer newspaper in London just
completed a three month expose into the British Family Court,
concluding that custody evaluation procedures were utterly flawed.
They found ``a shocking culture producing routine misery on a vast
scale for both children and parents''. The paper continued: ``We have
found wide ranging inadequacies in the legal system, ill-trained
professionals, badly prepared judges and decision making which is
often a lottery.''
No such investigation has ever been conducted in this country.
For many years and to this day the blurring, if not total lack of
separation, between women's affairs rounds and social affairs rounds
on newspapers, radio and television has meant that the concerns of
womens groups are put forward as newsworthy while the concerns of men
and fathers are simply ignored. Many of these reporters are women. As
American author of The Myth of Male Power Warren Farrell, who has
written extensively the media's silence on men's issues and what he
calls ``the lace curtain'' says, gender issues are regularly covered
by feminists whose gender reinforces their political
ideology...feminism achieved power informally, by becoming the one
party system of gender politics: creating a new arena of study,
defining the terms, generating the data and becoming the only
acceptable source of interpretation.''
In many of the opinion pages of Australian newspapers the words of the
Women's Electoral Lobby or other sympathisers are paraded as the
cutting edge of social commentary. The opposite view is virtually
never put.
The so-called ``sinister men's groups'', to quote the Chief Justice of
the Family Court, in reality nothing more than groups of people who
want to see more of their kids, have long complained of the media bias
against them.
Lone Fathers, Dads, Fathers Against Family Equity, Men's Rights and
many other smaller groups have all struggled to get their views across
against what they perceived as overwhelming odds. Outfunded more than
1000:1, they are no match for the public relations expertise of the
womens groups. The media rarely bothers to consult them in any issues
affecting families or single parents.
Over the years many family law reform campaigners have viewed the wall
of silence arrayed against them as some kind of leftist conspiracy.
Indeed, as professional surveys have shown, journalists tend to be
left leaning partly by the nature of their work and the impulses which
drove them to it. Like most people, they tend to want to leave the
world a better place, and for some this has meant making a strike for
the disadvantaged.
Women's groups have managed to define themselves as victims and to
draft the entire debate of divorce and the position of single mothers
into a left/right, progressive/conservative dichotomy. They have
commandeered the much abused phrase ``the best interests of
children''. The concerns of men and fathers have been dismissed in
some bracket where according to them lie the rabid One Nation voting
gun toting four wheel driving ``send them back to kitchen'' maniacs.
But in the new millenium, when most men support their wives in their
career choices, it is by no means clear that separated mothers are
more disadvantaged than separated fathers.
The media has never seriously tackled the most draconian censorship in
the country, Clause 121 of the Family Law Act, which prohibits the
identification of parties to a Family Court case. It makes coverage of
family law issues almost impossible for television. People expressing
their views on radio have taken to court purely on voice recognition.
The secrecy laws have effectively shielded the Court and its decision
making from any detailed public scrutiny. This protection spills over
into the operations of children's courts, welfare departments such as
DOCS in NSW and Human Services in Victoria as well as the family law
units of Legal Aid.
No investigative journalist has ever questioned why if we are in fact
in the midst of an epidemic of child sexual abuse as indicated by the
number of ``substantiations'' by welfare officers, why there are so
few convictions.
The legislation means that the agencies that intrude most into the
private lives of individuals have evolved in secrecy. These agencies
impact on the lives of millions of Australian adults and children, and
will impact on them for generations to come. And yet no one questions
or exposes the behaviour of lawyers in any of these jurisdictions,
their agendas or their use of psychiatric evidence. It's just not
politically correct to do so.
Imagine, for fun, how PM John Howard would appear in a family report
by a Family Court counsellor on a mission from the Goddess!
Journalists also rarely question the conduct of the protecting
bureaucracies and heftily funded academics circling family law. The
dictums of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, founded under
the same legislation as the Family Court, are repeated as fact.
Academics know better than anyone which side their grants are buttered
on. The Institute has spent far more money on studies of social
capital, an academic discourse devoted almost entirely to attempting
to define itself, than it ever has in investigating the position of
fathers after divorce. It has never properly investigated the high
suicide rates of fathers and the linkages to family law.
But there are signs of change.
Significantly, The Australian has run a number of stories and
editorials critical of the Family Court. These were written by then
High Court writer Bernard Lane. Lane relied closely on Australia Law
Reform Commission's reports, whch found overwhelming disquiet with the
court and its processes, as well as the questioning of senate
committee member and former barrister Senator Mason, who asked a
string of parliamentary questions on the travel budgets of senior
judges and delays in the court. The court refused to answer a number
of the questions.
But while the Family Court remains something of a sacred cow for most
of the media, the same is not true of the Child Support Agency, which
has received more hostile or mixed coverage over the past year than
ever before.
The exception was The Daily Telegraph, which ran a series kicking off
with a screaming headline ``Child Cheaters'' and a photograph of a
father with a Porsche evading child support. It would have been just
as easy to find a woman living high on the hog on income from the
government, the ex, the latest rich boyfriend and her own business,
but that was not to be. But even the Tele felt obliged to run a range
of views in its followup stories and extracts of letters.
The Canberra Times has broken a string of excellent stories on child
support in the past few months; including running on its front page
twice in the same week a story on the inquest into a 28 year old man
with three children who suicided with a CSA letter in his hand. He was
losing 80 per cent of his pay in tax and child support. The Agency
claimed it was treating him fairly.
The Brisbane Courier Mail has just run a three part series on child
support throwing up a range of moving stories. The Adelaide Advertiser
has also just run an excellent piece called Fathers Fighting Back.
With the government having just thrown jailing into the present toxic
mix of family breakdown, media interest is unlikely to die off.
The day when we have a National Council for Single Fathers as well as
one for mothers, the day when shared parenting is the norm after
separation, when destructive custody battles are a thing of the past
and family courts are a long forgotten institution, is the day when we
will be able to say we have truly made progress towards equality in
all areas.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Here's the results of a Google search on Kevin Rudd on 31 March 7.04 am:
My my how rapidly everything in this country, politically at least, has changed:
Rudd takes day of rest
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 4 hours ago
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will curb his hectic schedule on the third day of his overseas trip. Mr Rudd and his wife Therese Rein will head to mass at an ...
Kevin Rudd wants Australia to join UN Security Council Melbourne Herald Sun
Rudd seeks seat at UN top table The Age
Rudd Says Australia Seeks Seat on UN Security Council in 2013 Bloomberg
Sydney Morning Herald - ABC Online
all 347 news articles »
Brisbane Times
Rudd targets UN council seat
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 6 hours ago
Kevin Rudd and Ban Ki-moon at the UN in New York. KEVIN RUDD has repudiated the foreign policy style of the Howard government by announcing Australia will ...
Libs take credit for Rudd's US welcome Melbourne Herald Sun
Rudd owes US popularity to Coalition: Opposition ABC Online
Japanese snub denied as Nelson takes aim The Age
Scopical - Radio Australia
all 184 news articles »
Sydney Morning Herald
Rudd continues to wow the US
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 16 hours ago
Kevin Rudd continues to wow the crowds as he dashes from Washington to New York on day two of his visit to the United States. ...
Rudd-Bush warmth good, says Coalition NEWS.com.au
We're pulling out, Rudd tells Bush New Zealand Herald
Bush says Rudd's plan to withdraw from Iraq mirrors his own Sydney Morning Herald
The Age - Courier Mail
all 866 news articles »
Reuters South Africa
Rudd pursues global role
The Australian, Australia - 5 hours ago
KEVIN Rudd wants a bigger role in global affairs, yesterday launching a push to secure Australia a seat on the UN Security Council and promoting stronger ...
Rudd says Australia can withstand markets turmoil Reuters India
Australian traders to set up in New York Melbourne Herald Sun
Rudd defends length of overseas tour ABC Online
NEWS.com.au - The Age
all 40 news articles »
Rudd prepares to meet UN chief
ABC Online, Australia - 22 hours ago
By political correspondent Louise Yaxley Prime Minister Kevin Rudd waves as he boards a Governement jet as he departs from Sydney on his first major ...
Rudd touches down in Washington The Age
all 49 news articles »
Rudd announces US share broking scheme
ABC Online, Australia - 14 hours ago
Mr Rudd says the move will improve the profile of the Australian stockmarkets in the US. (file photo) (AFP: Adek Berry) Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ...
PM arrives in NYC LIVENEWS.com.au
all 4 news articles »
Rudd Says Australia's Economic Outlook Is `Sound, Strong'
Bloomberg - 14 hours ago
By Gemma Daley March 29 (Bloomberg) -- Australia's economic outlook is ``sound, strong and good,'' Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said after meeting US Treasury ...
Rudd's vow, but cost of computers to hit states Sydney Morning Herald
all 2 news articles »
Frenetic, yes, but when will we have a courageous decision, Prime ...
The Age, Australia - 7 hours ago
Despite the frenetic activity, we've yet to see one truly controversial, unpopular decision from Kevin Rudd. By now it's clear the Rudd Government is ...
Rudd must halt new coal plants: expert The Age
PM urged to veto new coal-fired generators The Age
all 46 news articles »
AGAINST a search for John Howard:
Unilateralism cast aside, unilaterally
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 7 hours ago
Less than six months ago John Howard and Brendan Nelson were warning that Labor's Iraq policy would be the end of the free world as we knew it because it ...
Rudd-Bush warmth good, says Coalition NEWS.com.au
US reception shows anything's possible - Libs NEWS.com.au
Shake on it, dude: honest Kev finds a new pal The Age
Melbourne Herald Sun - NEWS.com.au
all 866 news articles »
Sydney Morning Herald
Kevin Rudd wants Australia to join UN Security Council
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 5 hours ago
... a proposal to Cabinet in 2004 suggesting Australia could pursue a seat on the body but failed to receive the support of then prime minister John Howard. ...
Australia seeks seat on Security Council The Age
Rudd Says Australia Seeks Seat on UN Security Council in 2013 Bloomberg
Australia to seek UN Security Council seat in 2013: PM AFP
all 347 news articles »
Sydney Morning Herald
water deal Howard failed to steer past the states
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 26 Mar 2008
Kevin Rudd (C), SA Premier Mike Rann (L) and Victorian Premier John Brumby (R) at the COAG meeting. FOR the past 15 months John Howard's plan for the future ...
John Howard's industrial relations laws dead and buried
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 27 Mar 2008
THE Federal Opposition was clinging to John Howard's IR legacy yesterday as Australian Workplace Agreements were officially buried. ...
Sawyer swamps rivals
The Australian, Australia - 5 hours ago
The sleek team of Paul Keating's era favoured nifty Zegna suits, while John Howard's flack, Tony O'Leary, developed a studied and crumpled look that kept ...
Qld Libs to vote on coalition merger
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 29 Mar 2008
A proposal to merge the Liberals and Nationals was placed back on the table after former prime minister John Howard - who vetoed the last merger attempt two ...
Shellharbour, NSW, Australia.
Shellharbour, NSW, Australia.
An impalpable censorship is eliminating all intellectual and artistic vitality in Western society with a vengeance; persistent recourse to euphemism and circumlocution is corrupting and debasing language; and the coercive atmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this censorship is inhibiting the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood of democratic institutions, and ultimately of man's own social and spiritual life. Thoreau warned us to 'beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' What would he have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?
It is axiomatic that those least alarmed by the erosion of society's moral and intellectual life have none themselves. It is easy to understand the crude appeal of political correctness to liberal yahoos of the New Left (closet fascists posing as 60's liberals): it provides them with a ready store of social causes that require no thought and confers instant moral authority on all those who profess to champion them; less obvious is its attraction to the intelligentsia. The cynical tactics of manipulation and intimidation are a throwback to the police state; the childlike faith in the efficacy of social engineering hopelessly naïve; the unctuous solicitude for downtrodden minorities and clammy compassion for the unfortunate are an affront to human dignity. What self-respecting liberal could be taken in by such fatuous posturing and moral exhibitionism? What is Pat Schroeder doing telling Lockheed how to build jet fighters? Why have hard-nosed journalists developed a sudden Pollyanna fixation? And why are distinguished publications, famed for their aggressive editorial independence, appeasing self-anointed victims' groups and groveling before sanctimonious minorities?
Wm. B. Fankboner
An unpublished story from several years ago found while cleaning up.
For a while I wrote obsessively around this whole area. The lace curtain is alive and well in Australia, that's for sure. I burnt myself out battering my head against a brick wall; and now I do what I can, primarily on radio, and then move on. There are so many outrages. You need to cmopartmentalise your life to survive.
Men and the Media
The Sunday Tasmanian has nowhere near the clout or the distribution of
mainland papers like The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the east
coast Sunday papers or The Australian.
Yet it is the only newspaper in the country which has reported that
the male suicide rate in Australia is now at its highest since the
Depression.
The paper puffed the story on its front page last October under the
headline ``If Men Were Whales'' and a full front page picture of a
group of men marooned on a sand bank.
It began: ``More than 40 Australian men commit suicide each week. If
men were whales, this would cause community outcry and public
mourning.''
The accompanying inside story, the best compilation of male suicide
statistics published in Australia so far, showed that more men
suicided in the last decade than died in World War II, and the male
suicide rate in a single year is four times that of the total number
killed in the Vietnam conflict.
The entire mainland press was creamed on what is a fundamentally
important social story.
Why? It's not a lack of interest.
Reporter Simon Bevilacqua says: ``We had an amazing amount of feedback
from people working in the industry, like nothing else, from left,
right and centre, from the federal government to people in the
industry. There were a lot of people pleased the issue was raised.''
Managing Director of media monitors Rehame Australia Peter Maher said
there was a distinct increase in the reporting of men's issues and the
Family Court throughout 2000. He said ``huggy stories'' about men
wanting to spend more time with their children ran all year with
coverage of family law reform peaking in December after the
introduction of new jailing provisions into the family law.
The government's big push for men in the last year was the Men and
Relationships Conference, organised by the Office of the Status of
Women.
Not one newspaper in the country seemed to think it odd that hundreds
of thousands of dollars of public funds was spent flying 300 public
servants and domestic violence experts from around the country to a
very comfortable hotel in Sydney for a two-day male bashing exercise
of the ``all men are violent'' type. Not one newspaper raised the
point that numerous reputable domestic violence studies show both men
and women are equally guilty of domestic violence. , or that the
Office of the Status of Women had been previously caught out making
exaggerated claims about domestic violence.
Nor did anyone seem to think it odd that there had been no invitations
to a men's conference issued to anyone from the broad spectrum of
men's groups to speak and which clearly failed to address any issues
that actually concern men.
Indeed Adele Horin of the Sydney Morning Herald, told a million or so
readers: ``Hardly a single `angry dad' could be sighted at the Men and
Relationships conference the Federal Government put on in Sydney this
week. It was a civilised, hand-picked gathering. New Age men. New Age
women. About 300 in all hopping from workshops on domestic violence,
to workshops on men's post-separation services. It was a festival of
enlightenment....those incendiary words `Family Court' and `child
support' were barely uttered.''
Why should the disenfranchisement of men's concerns be such a source
of delight? In reality this was a ``festival of enlightment'' most men
would have preferred these people held on their own time and at their
own expense.
The Coalition's major effort to review the troubled family law domain
has also ignored half of the population.
The Family Pathways Advisory Group, chaired by a former head of the
NSW Dept of Community Services and consisting almost entirely of
feminist advocacy groups, feminist academics or industry insiders, has
not a single representative of men's groups.
That any findings by such an unrepresentative group will lack
legitimacy does not appear to bother the government a jot. Their
answer to criticisms of the make-up of the group has been that the
Attorney General has confidence in its members. He might. Half the
population doesn't.
No newspaper has commented on this.
In haste the Federal Coalition Government, which paints itself as
standing for family values and probity in public life, has just passed
legislation jailing parents who defy Family Court orders.
Both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, without speaking to
those involved, incorrectly reported that men's groups supported the
legislation. In fact jailing is opposed by most men's and women's
groups, neither of whom were consulted. Men's groups in particular are
opposed, seeing the jailing of former wives as inappropriate and
fearing the laws will be mostly used to jail fathers.
There have been a number of appalling stories in the international
media over the past year on the consequences of these types of laws: a
man in the US jailed for three months for ringing his daughter on
Monday and not Sunday suicided within hours of being released; a bus
conductor in Britain was jailed for waving at his children out the
window of a bus.
In Australia an Indian man was jailed for writing to his parents in
English, not Hindi. The Family Court was not satisfied he was
attempting to comply with their orders. His efforts to point out that
his father had two masters degrees in English fell on deaf ears.
The story received extensive coverage in the ethnic press, but not a
word in the mainstream.
The Family Court has ordered outraged litigants not to contact the
United Nations over their concerns about the court's conduct.
It all began a long time ago. Most of those now in senior positions
within the media and in government were in or around universities in
the 1970s. Many have not altered their views much since then. It was
at a time when Germaine Greer and The Female Eunich was at the cutting
edge of social commentary, when Shulamith Firestone's The Dialects of
Sex was course reading in Philosophy I, 2 and 3; when women's courses
were just beginning.
It was a time when family courts were being founded throughout the
western world.
What was once the cutting edge, widely supported by many men, became
in its playing out in family courts, social welfare departments,
domestic violence shelters and all the hundreds of millions of dollars
worth of supporting bureaucries, a shock to many of its original male
supporters.
Fathers have been consistently demonised for more than 20 yearswith
relentless anti-male propaganda which has in classic Marxist language
painting the family as patriarchal nests of violence and abuse.
Studies which have consistently shown children to be better off in all
ways in intact families or with their fathers have been studiously
ignored.
In the universities where it all began, the bias against men both in
terms of courses and behaviour continues. At the University of NSW a
men's issue of Tharunka was squashed by the Guild Council last year.
It condemned ``any proposal to produce a men's edition or white
heterosexual male edition of Tharunka. Accordingly, Guild Council
directs the media directors/Tharunka editors not to produce any such
editions or publish material which contravenes general guild policy or
anti-discrimination legislation or which undermines the purpose of
women's, lesbian/gay, indigenous or ethnic students departments.'' At
the same time the Guild passed a proposal for a women's only edition.
A string of stories from American campusses now attracting media
attention make Helen Garner's The First Stone look like a picnic.
There has been scathing worldwide media attention focussing on family
courts throughout the past year. The Observer newspaper in London just
completed a three month expose into the British Family Court,
concluding that custody evaluation procedures were utterly flawed.
They found ``a shocking culture producing routine misery on a vast
scale for both children and parents''. The paper continued: ``We have
found wide ranging inadequacies in the legal system, ill-trained
professionals, badly prepared judges and decision making which is
often a lottery.''
No such investigation has ever been conducted in this country.
For many years and to this day the blurring, if not total lack of
separation, between women's affairs rounds and social affairs rounds
on newspapers, radio and television has meant that the concerns of
womens groups are put forward as newsworthy while the concerns of men
and fathers are simply ignored. Many of these reporters are women. As
American author of The Myth of Male Power Warren Farrell, who has
written extensively the media's silence on men's issues and what he
calls ``the lace curtain'' says, gender issues are regularly covered
by feminists whose gender reinforces their political
ideology...feminism achieved power informally, by becoming the one
party system of gender politics: creating a new arena of study,
defining the terms, generating the data and becoming the only
acceptable source of interpretation.''
In many of the opinion pages of Australian newspapers the words of the
Women's Electoral Lobby or other sympathisers are paraded as the
cutting edge of social commentary. The opposite view is virtually
never put.
The so-called ``sinister men's groups'', to quote the Chief Justice of
the Family Court, in reality nothing more than groups of people who
want to see more of their kids, have long complained of the media bias
against them.
Lone Fathers, Dads, Fathers Against Family Equity, Men's Rights and
many other smaller groups have all struggled to get their views across
against what they perceived as overwhelming odds. Outfunded more than
1000:1, they are no match for the public relations expertise of the
womens groups. The media rarely bothers to consult them in any issues
affecting families or single parents.
Over the years many family law reform campaigners have viewed the wall
of silence arrayed against them as some kind of leftist conspiracy.
Indeed, as professional surveys have shown, journalists tend to be
left leaning partly by the nature of their work and the impulses which
drove them to it. Like most people, they tend to want to leave the
world a better place, and for some this has meant making a strike for
the disadvantaged.
Women's groups have managed to define themselves as victims and to
draft the entire debate of divorce and the position of single mothers
into a left/right, progressive/conservative dichotomy. They have
commandeered the much abused phrase ``the best interests of
children''. The concerns of men and fathers have been dismissed in
some bracket where according to them lie the rabid One Nation voting
gun toting four wheel driving ``send them back to kitchen'' maniacs.
But in the new millenium, when most men support their wives in their
career choices, it is by no means clear that separated mothers are
more disadvantaged than separated fathers.
The media has never seriously tackled the most draconian censorship in
the country, Clause 121 of the Family Law Act, which prohibits the
identification of parties to a Family Court case. It makes coverage of
family law issues almost impossible for television. People expressing
their views on radio have taken to court purely on voice recognition.
The secrecy laws have effectively shielded the Court and its decision
making from any detailed public scrutiny. This protection spills over
into the operations of children's courts, welfare departments such as
DOCS in NSW and Human Services in Victoria as well as the family law
units of Legal Aid.
No investigative journalist has ever questioned why if we are in fact
in the midst of an epidemic of child sexual abuse as indicated by the
number of ``substantiations'' by welfare officers, why there are so
few convictions.
The legislation means that the agencies that intrude most into the
private lives of individuals have evolved in secrecy. These agencies
impact on the lives of millions of Australian adults and children, and
will impact on them for generations to come. And yet no one questions
or exposes the behaviour of lawyers in any of these jurisdictions,
their agendas or their use of psychiatric evidence. It's just not
politically correct to do so.
Imagine, for fun, how PM John Howard would appear in a family report
by a Family Court counsellor on a mission from the Goddess!
Journalists also rarely question the conduct of the protecting
bureaucracies and heftily funded academics circling family law. The
dictums of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, founded under
the same legislation as the Family Court, are repeated as fact.
Academics know better than anyone which side their grants are buttered
on. The Institute has spent far more money on studies of social
capital, an academic discourse devoted almost entirely to attempting
to define itself, than it ever has in investigating the position of
fathers after divorce. It has never properly investigated the high
suicide rates of fathers and the linkages to family law.
But there are signs of change.
Significantly, The Australian has run a number of stories and
editorials critical of the Family Court. These were written by then
High Court writer Bernard Lane. Lane relied closely on Australia Law
Reform Commission's reports, whch found overwhelming disquiet with the
court and its processes, as well as the questioning of senate
committee member and former barrister Senator Mason, who asked a
string of parliamentary questions on the travel budgets of senior
judges and delays in the court. The court refused to answer a number
of the questions.
But while the Family Court remains something of a sacred cow for most
of the media, the same is not true of the Child Support Agency, which
has received more hostile or mixed coverage over the past year than
ever before.
The exception was The Daily Telegraph, which ran a series kicking off
with a screaming headline ``Child Cheaters'' and a photograph of a
father with a Porsche evading child support. It would have been just
as easy to find a woman living high on the hog on income from the
government, the ex, the latest rich boyfriend and her own business,
but that was not to be. But even the Tele felt obliged to run a range
of views in its followup stories and extracts of letters.
The Canberra Times has broken a string of excellent stories on child
support in the past few months; including running on its front page
twice in the same week a story on the inquest into a 28 year old man
with three children who suicided with a CSA letter in his hand. He was
losing 80 per cent of his pay in tax and child support. The Agency
claimed it was treating him fairly.
The Brisbane Courier Mail has just run a three part series on child
support throwing up a range of moving stories. The Adelaide Advertiser
has also just run an excellent piece called Fathers Fighting Back.
With the government having just thrown jailing into the present toxic
mix of family breakdown, media interest is unlikely to die off.
The day when we have a National Council for Single Fathers as well as
one for mothers, the day when shared parenting is the norm after
separation, when destructive custody battles are a thing of the past
and family courts are a long forgotten institution, is the day when we
will be able to say we have truly made progress towards equality in
all areas.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Here's the results of a Google search on Kevin Rudd on 31 March 7.04 am:
My my how rapidly everything in this country, politically at least, has changed:
Rudd takes day of rest
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 4 hours ago
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will curb his hectic schedule on the third day of his overseas trip. Mr Rudd and his wife Therese Rein will head to mass at an ...
Kevin Rudd wants Australia to join UN Security Council Melbourne Herald Sun
Rudd seeks seat at UN top table The Age
Rudd Says Australia Seeks Seat on UN Security Council in 2013 Bloomberg
Sydney Morning Herald - ABC Online
all 347 news articles »
Brisbane Times
Rudd targets UN council seat
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 6 hours ago
Kevin Rudd and Ban Ki-moon at the UN in New York. KEVIN RUDD has repudiated the foreign policy style of the Howard government by announcing Australia will ...
Libs take credit for Rudd's US welcome Melbourne Herald Sun
Rudd owes US popularity to Coalition: Opposition ABC Online
Japanese snub denied as Nelson takes aim The Age
Scopical - Radio Australia
all 184 news articles »
Sydney Morning Herald
Rudd continues to wow the US
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 16 hours ago
Kevin Rudd continues to wow the crowds as he dashes from Washington to New York on day two of his visit to the United States. ...
Rudd-Bush warmth good, says Coalition NEWS.com.au
We're pulling out, Rudd tells Bush New Zealand Herald
Bush says Rudd's plan to withdraw from Iraq mirrors his own Sydney Morning Herald
The Age - Courier Mail
all 866 news articles »
Reuters South Africa
Rudd pursues global role
The Australian, Australia - 5 hours ago
KEVIN Rudd wants a bigger role in global affairs, yesterday launching a push to secure Australia a seat on the UN Security Council and promoting stronger ...
Rudd says Australia can withstand markets turmoil Reuters India
Australian traders to set up in New York Melbourne Herald Sun
Rudd defends length of overseas tour ABC Online
NEWS.com.au - The Age
all 40 news articles »
Rudd prepares to meet UN chief
ABC Online, Australia - 22 hours ago
By political correspondent Louise Yaxley Prime Minister Kevin Rudd waves as he boards a Governement jet as he departs from Sydney on his first major ...
Rudd touches down in Washington The Age
all 49 news articles »
Rudd announces US share broking scheme
ABC Online, Australia - 14 hours ago
Mr Rudd says the move will improve the profile of the Australian stockmarkets in the US. (file photo) (AFP: Adek Berry) Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ...
PM arrives in NYC LIVENEWS.com.au
all 4 news articles »
Rudd Says Australia's Economic Outlook Is `Sound, Strong'
Bloomberg - 14 hours ago
By Gemma Daley March 29 (Bloomberg) -- Australia's economic outlook is ``sound, strong and good,'' Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said after meeting US Treasury ...
Rudd's vow, but cost of computers to hit states Sydney Morning Herald
all 2 news articles »
Frenetic, yes, but when will we have a courageous decision, Prime ...
The Age, Australia - 7 hours ago
Despite the frenetic activity, we've yet to see one truly controversial, unpopular decision from Kevin Rudd. By now it's clear the Rudd Government is ...
Rudd must halt new coal plants: expert The Age
PM urged to veto new coal-fired generators The Age
all 46 news articles »
AGAINST a search for John Howard:
Unilateralism cast aside, unilaterally
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 7 hours ago
Less than six months ago John Howard and Brendan Nelson were warning that Labor's Iraq policy would be the end of the free world as we knew it because it ...
Rudd-Bush warmth good, says Coalition NEWS.com.au
US reception shows anything's possible - Libs NEWS.com.au
Shake on it, dude: honest Kev finds a new pal The Age
Melbourne Herald Sun - NEWS.com.au
all 866 news articles »
Sydney Morning Herald
Kevin Rudd wants Australia to join UN Security Council
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 5 hours ago
... a proposal to Cabinet in 2004 suggesting Australia could pursue a seat on the body but failed to receive the support of then prime minister John Howard. ...
Australia seeks seat on Security Council The Age
Rudd Says Australia Seeks Seat on UN Security Council in 2013 Bloomberg
Australia to seek UN Security Council seat in 2013: PM AFP
all 347 news articles »
Sydney Morning Herald
water deal Howard failed to steer past the states
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 26 Mar 2008
Kevin Rudd (C), SA Premier Mike Rann (L) and Victorian Premier John Brumby (R) at the COAG meeting. FOR the past 15 months John Howard's plan for the future ...
John Howard's industrial relations laws dead and buried
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - 27 Mar 2008
THE Federal Opposition was clinging to John Howard's IR legacy yesterday as Australian Workplace Agreements were officially buried. ...
Sawyer swamps rivals
The Australian, Australia - 5 hours ago
The sleek team of Paul Keating's era favoured nifty Zegna suits, while John Howard's flack, Tony O'Leary, developed a studied and crumpled look that kept ...
Qld Libs to vote on coalition merger
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - 29 Mar 2008
A proposal to merge the Liberals and Nationals was placed back on the table after former prime minister John Howard - who vetoed the last merger attempt two ...
Shellharbour, NSW, Australia.
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