Newspaper Articles 2011
The Daily Telegraph, by Shelley Hadfield, October 08, 2011
A MOTHER has been ordered to repay child support to a man she claimed
was her son's father after he discovered he cannot conceive.
For nine years the man believed the child was his after what he says was
a "one-night stand". He told a court he believed the mother manipulated
the situation.
The woman was ordered to repay the $3730 he paid.
Frustrated Father Protests Parental Alienation by Shutdown of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
Sydney Morning Herald,by Glenda Kwek, May 13, 2011 - 12:24PM
A man describing himself as ex-military has been charged
following a daring protest that closed the Sydney Harbour Bridge
in both directions this morning.
The man, identified as
Michael Fox, was charged with obstructing
traffic, climbing or jumping from buildings or other structures,
and climbing on bridges, a police spokeswoman said.
He was refused bail to appear at Central Local Court today,
she said.
Father protestor on Parental Alienation - 'Get my kids and other kids help'
Major delays ... a man has been arrested after unfurling
these two banners on the Harbour Bridge. Photo: Screen
grab, Sky News
The NSW Premier, Barry O'Farrell, ordered an "urgent review"
of security at the bridge, calling the incident "a major
security breach".
"We need to learn lessons from it," he said.
"With the threat of terrorism still very real, my government
will ensure everything possible is done to protect the security
of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's the city's icon and I regard
any security breaches to be very serious."
The review would look at security patrols, CCTV, physical
protection barriers such as gates and fences and at criminal
charges and penalties, Mr O'Farrell said in a statement.
Read More …
The Age
Law change liable to upset fathers
The Age (Melbourne), By Katherine Murphy, 24 March 2011
The Gillard government will provoke the ire of fathers' groups today
with landmark changes to family law designed to protect children in
cases of domestic violence.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland will press ahead with legislation
winding back some of the shared parenting changes ushered in by the
Howard government.
The changes will make it easier for parents to produce evidence of
violence in cases where parents are in dispute over contact
arrangements. The legislation will include new legal definitions of
abuse and family violence.
Read More …
ABC, February 2, 2011, By Madonna King
The law is only one of the pillars of a system that just isn't working.
Laws, by and large, are great levellers: whether your annual salary is
$1 million or $30,000, drink driving, assault, murder and a statue book
of other crimes are all punishable.
In an irony evident this week, family law was shown to be very
different: it's almost impossible to make one law fit all, or to
prescribe the same legislative treatment to one family as the next.
And therein lies a serious problem for the Rudd Government with the
release of the review into family law changes introduced in 2006.
The review and its recommendations are at least as controversial as the
four-year-old law, finding that shared parenting laws had been
misinterpreted, and were never meant to give a 50-50 custody split to
each parent. Read More …
The Australian, 11 November 2010, By Chris Merritt and Patricia Karvelas
The Gillard government has unveiled radical changes to family law.
The changes would redefine domestic violence, place greater weight on
child safety and could weaken the Howard government's shared parenting laws.
The changes, which are directed at cases involving abusive parents,
elevate the safety of children to the top priority in custody disputes.
Whenever a court considers that this goal is in conflict with the right
of a child to have a relationship with both parents, it will be required to
give greater weight to child safety.
The change is contained in draft legislation released for discussion
yesterday by Attorney-General Robert McClelland.
Read More …
National Times, 08 March 2011
Talk about spoiling the party! Just as the 100th International
Women’s Day dawns over a perfumed world Aussie professor Kim Halford has
released a study on female violence.
Women wallop men just as much as men wallop women, says the prof who
claims domestic violence can often be blamed on the missus getting in a
pre-emptive whack first. That’s what he calls the “usual pattern”. She
hits him, he hits her, now you’ve got a punch-up.
Halford – he’s a Queensland clinical psychologist – doesn’t
paint a very rosy picture of marriage. Almost a quarter of the 379
couples (22 per cent) told him there had been “at least one act of
low-level violence in the year leading up to and including the wedding."
(Makes you wonder why gays want to join in the nuptial free-for-all and
indeed angry word-regurgitater Helen Razer sneers at the concept in a
current rant
). That “low-level
violence”, by the way, means slapping or shoving, rather than punching.
Interesting finding, this. In the comments to my
recent blog “Do men get a rough
deal?” there were all sorts of wild claims (well, they sounded wild)
about men being bashed by women. I mean, men are usually bigger and
stronger than women, aren’t they? Read More …