The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Family Law Act, the single most intrusive 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 a cash cow for lawyers and the single most hated jurisdiction in the country.
Far from the caring, helpful court promoting joint custody and cooperation after separation, as its founders envisaged, the Family Court rapidly became a law unto itself, imposing sole custody on separating families despite all the documented harm of this style of custody order, while denying non-custodial parents contact with their children on the flimsiest of excuses.
Overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive, and unaccountable, defying public norms of decency and probity, the ideologically driven Family Court and its so-called evil sister the Child Support Agency have remained remarkably resistant to reform and indifferent to the public odium they attract.
Successive governments from both left and right have failed to listen to their constituents and respond to their concerns. They have resorted to vested inquiries in the hands of the mandarins and publicly funded elites whose feigned attempts to listen to the views of ordinary people are a stain on the Australian Public Service.
In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the failure to fix outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown. The country's failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself.
John Stapleton was born in Bangalow on the New South Wales north coast on 21 June 1952. The first money he ever made out of writing was in 1974 when he was co-winner of a short story competition held by what was then Australia's leading cultural celebration, the Adelaide Arts Festival.He graduated from Macquarie University in 1975 with a double major in philosophy and anthropology and did post-graduate work with the Sociology Department at Flinders University.As a freelance journalist in the 1970s and 1980s, while alternating between living in Sydney and London, his articles and fiction appeared in a wide range of magazines, newspapers and anthologies, including The Australian Financial Review and the now defunct Bulletin.After a period as a casual, John Stapleton worked on The Sydney Morning Herald as a staff news reporter between 1986 and 1994. The paper was then listed as one of theTop 20 newspapers in the world.He worked for the national newspaper The Australian from 1994 until the end of 2009. His books include: Thailand: Deadly Destination, Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost, Hideout in the Apocalypse, Dark Dark Policing, Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia and Australia Breaks Apart. As a news reporter, Stapleton encountered and wrote literally thousands of stories about everyone from street alcoholics to Australian Prime Ministers; from the staple flood, drought, fire and natural disasters of the Australian bush to scenes of urban dysfunction. In 2000 he became co-founder of the world's longest running radio program on father's issues, Dads on the Air, which he contributed to until 2010. He currently edits A Sense of Place Magazine. He is the proud father of two adult children.
